Aerial aid or flight of fancy?
Helicopters, planes, cars could blend into BlackFly to form traffic-free world
It was sleek, cone-shaped, a little confusing — like something Hollywood would give a sci-fi villain for a quick getaway.
It wasn’t a helicopter. And it wasn’t an airplane. It was a cross between the two, with a curved hull, two small wings and eight spinning rotors lined up across its nose and tail.
At the touch of a button on a computer screen under a nearby tent, it stirred to life, rising up from a grassy slope on a ranch in central California and speeding toward some grazing cattle, who did not react in the slightest.
“It may look like a strange beast, but it will change the way transportation happens,” said Marcus Leng, the Canadian inventor who designed this aircraft, which he named BlackFly.
BlackFly is what is often called a flying car. Engineers and entrepreneurs like Leng have spent more than a decade nurturing this new breed of aircraft, electric vehicles that can take off and land without a runway.
They believe these vehicles will be cheaper and safer than helicopters, providing practically anyone with the means of speeding above crowded streets.
“Our dream is to free the world from traffic,” said Sebastian Thrun, another engineer at the heart of this movement.
That dream, most experts agree, is a long way from reality. But the idea is gathering steam. Dozens of companies are now building these aircraft, and three recently agreed to go public in deals that value them as high as $6 billion. For years, people like Leng and Thrun have kept their prototypes hidden from the rest of the world, but they are now beginning to lift the curtain.
Leng’s company, Opener, is building a single-person aircraft for use in rural areas — essentially a private flying car for the rich — that could start selling this year. Others are building larger vehicles they hope to deploy as city air taxis as soon as 2024. Some are designing vehicles that can fly without a pilot.
One of the air taxi companies, Kitty Hawk, is run by Thrun, the Stanford University computer science professor who founded Google’s self-driving car project.
BlackFly is classified by the government as an experimental “ultralight” vehicle, so it does not need regulatory approval before being sold. But an ultralight also cannot be flown over cities or other bustling areas.
BlackFly could initially cost $150,000 or more. And its combination of battery life and mileage — about 25 miles — is not yet as powerful as most anyone’s daily commute requires.
But Leng believes this technology will improve, prices will drop to “the cost of an SUV” and the world will ultimately embrace the idea of electric urban flight.
Others in the field are skeptical. They estimate it will be years — or even decades — before regulators will allow just anyone to fly such a vehicle over cities.
There are regulatory hurdles and other practical matters. These planes will need landing pads, and they could have trouble navigating dense urban areas, thanks to power lines and other low-flying aircraft.
There is also the noise factor, a crucial selling point over loud combustion engine helicopters. Sitting a few hundred feet from the vehicle, Thrun boasted about how quiet the aircraft was, but when it took off, he had no choice but to stop talking. He could not be heard over the whir of the rotors.