Hundreds of companies, newbies and veteran airlines alike, are working on such vehicles—also known as air taxis or EVTOL (short for Electric Vertical Take Off and Landing). Five such startups have gone public in the last 12 months. They are trying to shape a near future in which taking a flying taxi is a financially viable alternative to taking a terrestrial taxi.
The biggest obstacle to that sci-fi vision, however, is down-to-earth: Flying-car companies haven’t figured out how to site, permit, and build enough space for their vehicles to land and take off. Practical business model for building and operating sky taxis.
This problem could have huge implications for the budding flying-car industry, and for any hope that we’ll have air travel any time soon. Early entrants to the industry such as Joby Aviation, Lilium, Visc, Airbus and Archer Aviation focused on the challenges of designing and building working flying cars, and having them certified safe by the Federal Aviation Administration. Those challenges are considerable. Setting aside the cost of designing a prototype flying car in the first place, the process of submitting those designs to the FAA, testing them to verify that they meet the agency’s specifications, and years of modifying them And the cost estimated by analysts is up to $1 billion all by itself.
To date, most early investors in these companies have behaved as if solving those challenges is 90% of the work needed to make flying cars commercially viable, says Todd Peterson, an advisor at Palo Alto, Calif.-based Lacuna Technologies. It creates software for cities to help them manage their transportation networks.
Once the vehicles are ready to take flight it ignores a range of other issues: where they will land and take off, how they will be integrated into existing air-traffic control systems, and whether the public will be in large numbers. Will accept new and relatively large planes flying over their homes. Mr Peterson says all regulation and sorting out ground infrastructure is “the other 90%” of the problem of getting flying cars to work.
Mihir Rimjha is a senior aviation consultant at HMMH, a firm that helps governments and businesses with transportation planning. They have studied what are called “vertiports” – like heliports, but for EVTOL, in depth, in work commissioned by NASA. He says building a network of rooftop vertiports on buildings and parking decks in American cities will be key to making flying taxi services and even privately owned flying cars a viable means of transportation. And, he says, companies are not realistic about the constraints involved.
For starters, the problem is how many suitable Vertiport sites exist in major US cities. Here are some factors that influence that equation: noise, lack of airspace that isn’t already claimed by airports in cities like New York, and the need to remodel existing structures to accommodate flying vehicles. can be accommodated and also provide massive explosions to them. of electricity for charging.
Putting them aside, everywhere where a vertical-take-off-and-landing vehicle is intended to land should be relatively free of surrounding structures—not only today, but indefinitely, Mr. Peterson says. This requirement is described in the FAA’s regulations on helicopter landing pads, which most in the industry believe will be the model for the rules governing vertiports. This in turn means that obtaining FAA permission for a landing pad for a flying car is required to trace all “glide paths” that such vehicle may use upon arrival at the landing location, Should it suffer mechanical failure.
For example, preserving such glide paths could mean that property owners adjacent to the Vertiport may never be allowed to build anything more than the Vertiport – a particularly difficult and potentially controversial one. The issue is if cities are to host multiple such vertiports.
A history of New York City with a helipad can prove to be instructive. Getting approval from the FAA for a private landing pad is challenging, and residents generally oppose them—as they did during Amazon’s attempt to make it headquartered in Long Island City. Since an accident on the roof of the Pan Am building in 1977 that killed five people, the rooftop helipad in the city has had a cooling effect.
Joby and Archer, both of which went public last year, have said they aim to gain Vertiport Access by partnering with SoftBank-funded Reef Technologies, which manages parking lots and multistory parking decks across the US. Joby said last year that its collaboration would give it access. “An unparalleled range of rooftop locations in all major metropolitan areas in the US, as well as a mechanism for the acquisition and development of new Skyport sites.”
A Joby spokesman said the company is “initially focusing on existing aviation infrastructure and convertible assets,” such as the aforementioned parking garage.
Archer declined to comment on his Vertiport plans.
Eric Corona, head of product development at Visk, says his company believes it can sell more than enough of its autonomous vehicles to users of existing heliport and airport infrastructure to make it a viable business. Is. Eventually, Vertiport developers such as Skyports—a partner of Visk—will be able to build Vertiport where there’s demand.
Further in the future, flying cars may have their own dedicated highways in the sky, he adds.
Jeremy Ford, head of property strategy at the Reef, says that many US cities already have heliports, but it is still a “very early innings” for his company and the flying-car companies in terms of finding out what exactly How will the Vertiports be created, and where will they be placed?
Ricky Sandhu is at the forefront of trying to solve the Vertiport problem, and says his skeptical analysis of what lies ahead for the flying car industry is “absolutely accurate and completely over the money.”
He is the founder and CEO of Urban-Air Port, which recently opened the world’s first operational urban vertiport, called Air One, in a parking lot near a train station in Coventry, England. Mr. Sandhu is an architect who has led design teams on major infrastructure projects. In 2017, while consulting on Airbus’ flying-car efforts, he had a lightbulb moment: For this new mode of transportation to really take off, someone had to ask landlords, local air-traffic controllers, national governments and city officials. There was a need to work with zoning boards. Allowing vehicles to touch the ground.
Air One has hosted around 10 drone flights a day for the past few weeks. Despite close collaboration with local and national air-traffic controllers and the city of Coventry, which is funding Vertiport, Air One has teething problems, says Mr. Sandhu. Recently, for example, a large cargo drone was supposed to take off from Air One and land on the roof of a parking deck elsewhere in the city. But the builders of an office tower under development near the flight path raised security objections, so the drone could only take off, fly in a circle and land again.
“Without proper infrastructure, investment in EVTOL is at risk,” says Mr. Sandhu.
Infrastructure challenges have prompted Air, an Israeli startup, to take a different strategy: building flying cars that will be owned by individuals and can hop among privately owned vertiports. CEO Rani Platt says Air intends to operate by requiring the high level of FAA certification required for passenger-carrying aircraft and selling its flying cars directly to people who will pilot them themselves. He added that some of the company’s customers are already planning Vertiport connected to their homes.
Stock market investors are showing skepticism about flying car companies. The valuation of five flying-car companies that have gone public through SPAC (Vertical, Joby, Archer, Lilium and Eve) in the past year, along with a move to a general sell-off of shares in tech companies that have yet to show a profit have happened. It has declined significantly since reaching its peak in early April. Joby alone has lost about $2.4 billion in value, or 35% of its value at its peak on March 31.
Skeptics point to other reasons for caution. Dr. Rimjha co-authored a report published last year that found that almost none of the assumptions made by recently gone public air-taxi companies sound realistic: not their cost-per-vehicle figures, Or their assumptions about cost per mile. Operate these vehicles, or the time taken to convert these vehicles into a commercial service.
When it went public, Joby estimated that each vehicle would cost $1.3 million to build. Antonio Trani, a professor of engineering at Virginia Tech and co-authors, Dr. Rimza, estimate, based on decades of appraisal aircraft, that after Joby’s vehicle is certified by the FAA, the true price would be between $2 million and $3 million. Will be in between Joby also predicts that the operating cost of its vehicles will be 86 cents per passenger mile. Dr. Trani thinks the actual figure will be between $3 and $4 per passenger mile.
The analysis also found that companies will not be able to travel to places where people want to travel. Taking into account all of those things in America’s cities where flying cars may be in greatest demand, such as dense urban cores, “we can’t really find much room to vertiport even on roofs,” says Dr Rimzha. it is said.
As for future detours, “allowing is a real issue,” says former FAA administrator Mike Whitaker, who is now chief commercial officer at Supernal, a subsidiary of Hyundai that is working on its own flying car. has been It is possible that cities will be forced to detour into more outlying and low-lying areas – abandoned shopping malls may be the norm – and access to such facilities will lead to more real estate development around such properties, he said. It can happen, he added.
Dr. Rimjha says that for travelers or even just wealthy people who want to get out of the city, any such trip would take time—and based on historical evidence, it would have a major impact that they How much do you use such services?
This could force air-taxi companies to rethink their business models, perhaps to focus on smaller markets, such as replacing part of the world’s existing helicopter fleet.
In the short term, these forces mean that “regional air mobility” – flights between cities and towns – is a more potential application for EVTOL than flights within cities, said Robin Riedel, co-leader of the McKinsey Center for Future Mobility and says a friend. in consulting firm.
All the time and effort required to build the infrastructure for flying cars could also mean that companies that play a long game may eventually be successful. If stock prices fall and the investment force in the flying-car industry lacks consolidation, it could mean that legacy aerospace companies, if not disruptive, could someday build the future of our Jetsons.