Future: Urban Air Mobility
 

"Wisk and the City of Sugar Land, Texas, Partner to Bring Autonomous Air Taxis to the Greater Houston Region"

https://wisk.aero/news/press-release/wisk-sugar-land/



"The US' first electric 'air taxi' was just delivered to the Air Force — meet Joby's eVTOL"

https://www.businessinsider.com/first-electric-air-taxi-delivered-to-us-joby-evtol-2023-10

Heading toward mid-century!

Disruption!

Opportunities abound!

Air taxis are going to have pretty limited use for quite a while. I've been following the development of a lot of these companies and have a friend who is chief pilot for one of the top two major players.

The majority of the advanced air mobility (AAM) taxis are going to start off with pilots. Most of the companies have stated they want to start off by taking you from a suburban area (local airports to begin with, later "vertiports") to your metropolitan airport - JFK, LAX, DFW, etc. That means they will have to be certified to fly in all kinds of weather. Uber gets you to the airport in all kinds of crap weather, to succeed they will have to do the same.

Most of these AAMs are years away from getting certified to fly in nice weather, flying in instrument meteorological conditions (IMC), or "the soup" is even further away. Icing conditions (your flight is leaving O'Hare in January) is barely on the table.

You will one day drive to your "vertiport" to catch your flight to JFK. Where will these be built? How long will approval take? They will utilize "freeways in the sky". People hate airplanes over their neighborhoods now, soon they'll have an air transportation corridor over their communities?

Lastly - for the autonomous AAMs, I don't know who in their right mind is going to climb into a pilotless drone. One or two highly publicized crashes could kill the whole thing.

Another thing I've noticed about all these designs is they talk about carrying 4-6 passengers. I haven't seen any specs about the craploads of baggage people take with them to the airport.

Edit: Something else came to mind...

You have to drive to the Vertiport to catch your air taxi to LAX. If I have to pay for parking while my car sits at the Vertiport I may as well pay for parking at LAX/JFK. If I choose to keep my car at home in the garage and catch an Uber to the Vertiport, now I'm paying twice for Uber ground and Uber air.

Most countries can't even make road EV mobility work so not holding my breathe for EVTOL mobility any time soon

Interesting opening post, thanks for starting the conversation.

It will be an interesting set of problems to work out. What altitude will the fly at? Just 3,000 feet above the ground should be fine for most commuter flights. The Vertiports will need decent size parking lots. Lots of people will want to use a service that can take them from the suburbs to downtown areas, and avoid all the traffic. But any thunderstorm will have to be flown around, snow and ice will not likely be something the can handle.

I just wonder how much the insurance will cost for them too fly over metro areas. Imagine one of those crashing into a neighborhood or commercial building.

Recall the 1977 helicopter accident on the roof the Pan Am building in Manhattan that killed five people. That pretty much ended scheduled helicopter traffic into the city (other than the Pier 6 heliport on the East River).

My company has been asked a number of times to help some of the UAM folks to design a ducted fan propulsion system for their air vehicles.

Our designs are quieter, more efficient and safer than open or even shrouded rotor blades.

We won't do it because of the certification issues and liability exposure.

I have been involved with Unmanned Systems since 2002 so I am very familiar with the UAM concept for both passengers and cargo. I have no issues with the reliability, functionality and safety of UAS I just don't think we will see unmanned UAM vehicles for quite some time.

I could go into chapter and verse but I won't.:cool:

We did a concept analysis for UAS cargo vehicles, fixed wing, to service under used small airports (essentially getting mail, packages, etc. off the road and into the air) and it made complete sense but that is not what we do.

We also did a ducted fan design for Honda - essentially a flying motorcycle, but the lawyers, who, like the engineers, liked the design, said NFW.