Flying cars take off

It’s hard to decide whether flying taxis are arriving very late or extremely early. On the one hand, the promise of airborne cabs zipping between skyscrapers has been a science fiction staple for decades. On the other, it wasn’t long ago that air taxis were filed in the ‘we’ll see’ folder of future technology, alongside hoverboards and hotels on the Moon.

But after years of wishful thinking, it’s suddenly happening. Investment in advanced aerial mobility (as the sector is known) has more than tripled in the last year, and analysts at Morgan Stanley expect the global air taxi market to be worth £2.7tr by 2050.

Early or late, the future is en-route and will be coming in to land sooner than the majority of people realise. A number of companies around the world are currently preparing eVTOL vehicles (electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles), which could revolutionise the way we get around big cities.

Quiet, comfortable and carbon-free, eVTOLs promise to rise above congested roads, easing urban transport issues while getting passengers to their destinations in record time. Meanwhile, regulators on the ground are working hard to prepare the rules and infrastructure required to make this new form of transport feasible. Many developers believe their vehicles will be safety certified and cleared for take off by 2025, if not sooner. Boeing, Airbus and Hyundai are some of the familiar names building air taxis. Another is Joby, which bought Uber Elevate, the ride-sharing giant’s foray into eVTOLs, in December 2020. Meanwhile, British firm Vertical claims to have the highest number of conditional pre-orders with the likes of Virgin Atlantic and American Airlines among the investors lining up for its VA-X4 vehicle.

“It’s going to be a quiet and pleasant, fast and efficient way of getting around,” says Andrew Macmillan, director of infrastructure at Vertical. “[The VA-X4] allows you to travel 100-plus miles [160km] at 200mph [322km/h]. It takes off vertically and then transitions to fly horizontally, giving you that range.”

The VA-X4 will carry four passengers and a pilot. In the rear, two pairs of people will sit facing each other like in the back of a London taxi. As a fare-payer, you can look out of the windows and chat with your fellow flyers without the need for ear protection or microphones. That’s because, like the majority of eVTOLS, the VA-X4 flies using quiet electric rotors that, per journey, produce less carbon than a Tesla travelling the same distance on the roads below.

Air taxis are not exactly the flying cars promised by The Jetsons, Blade Runner and Back To The Future, however. Rather, it’s electrified air travel scaled down to black cab proportions. It’s Uber for the skies. Think helicopters without the emissions or the reliance on one main rotor.

“Helicopters are amazing machines, but they’re quite noisy, they’re very expensive and they’re quite dangerous as well,” Macmillan says. “One of the reasons the VA-X4 is safe is that you’ve got eight rotors, all electric powered, and each of them has a separate motor. If you lose one, you don’t lose the vehicle.”

If eVTOLs are revolutionary in what they might do for urban transport, they’re more evolutionary in terms of the underlying technology. Electric propulsion, super-efficient batteries and lightweight composites underpin air taxi design and all of it comes from technologies being developed in tandem sectors.

“I think we’ve been able to reap some of the benefits of what’s been happening on the surface side of electric propulsion,” says Clint Harper, urban air mobility fellow at Urban Movement Labs, a non-profit designed to help facilitate future transport solutions in Los Angeles. “The overall design of the aircraft, how they fly, how they stay in the air, you know, we’re building off lessons that have been learnt over the last century of air travel.”

Science Focus