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The Future of Self-flying Taxi Services is in Full Flight

06 November 2017

Does hopping in a small aircraft and flying over to a business meeting instead of taking a cab sound too farfetched or the vision of some far-off future?

Autonomous air taxi service Volocopter would disagree. In September 2017, in Dubai, the German-based transportation company conducted the first successful test flight of their manned, fully-electric passenger drone.

The giant helicopter slash drone has two seats, eighteen propellers, and is powered by nine electric batteries which give a flight time of around thirty minutes. Although the taxi service would involve pilots, the test flight was unmanned as its still in the testing phase.

The taxi service would work much like Uber, pairing with a smartphone app that allows customers to book one and have it pick them up, presumably from a suitable, nearby location. As a leader in innovation, Dubai see this as the future of passenger travel within the city.

But Volocopter is not the only transport company looking to the skies. Companies like Terrafugia, AeroMobil, and Moller International all have working prototypes of small, vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircrafts and are conducting full-scale unmanned tests.

These companies see air travel as a solution to growing mobility and space issues within dense urban environments. To them, the dream of a flying car future is not a dream but a much more feasible future scenario than the current thinking of more and more road-based travel.

There are technological limitations, however, at least at the moment. But these companies are built on the idea that the lack of flying cars isn’t due to technological or economical restraints. Rather, it’s because most human beings are too unreliable to fly anything — evident from the early days of flying cars that were littered with crash landings.

Now autonomous technology is a reality, human-error is no longer a barrier. One of the companies to recognise this early one, and that will quite possibly be the first to bring self-flying taxis to the masses, is, unsurprisingly, the world’s leading commercial aircraft manufacturer, Airbus.

Airbus recently announced it successfully tested the propulsion system for its first multi-passenger, electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle (eVTOL), CityAirbus. Advancing toward its impressive aim of bringing an automated flying taxi service to cities by 2023.

The aviation company plan to test a full prototype on the ground in the first half of 2018, with remotely piloted test flights planned to launch later in the year.

The CityAirbus will reach an estimated cruise speed of up to 75 mph, and initially be manually operated by certified pilots. Airbus say this is to give the public confidence and time to get comfortable with the idea, and that the crafts will eventually be released on self-flying routes.

The involvement of Airbus makes the flying-car future much more likely. The company plans to work with the government to create a new certification and system of urban air traffic management. This will help streamline flights, manage noise and air pollution, and bring some order to what could otherwise be a free for all and complete commercialisation of airspace.

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