The storyline of the first Blade Runner movie is imagined to take place in 2019 Los Angeles, a city of the future where acid rain falls from the sky, while the air is filled with gliders, which are actually cars flying on the air highway.
After this movie was first released in 1982, the world’s technological progress is very fast, the emergence of cell phone selfie sticks, killer Drones, online social media platforms, such as the topic of hashtag politics, even Hollywood can not imagine, but the hovercraft-style air cab still seems to be a distant fantasy, will only appear in Science Fiction and theme parks.
The fact is that flying cars are already real and could change the way humans commute, work and live in the coming decades. Advances in battery energy density, materials science and computer simulation have already spurred the emergence of a range of personal flying machines, such as electric gliders, fixed-wing vehicles and quadcopters, and the development of their navigation systems.
Such flying machines may not be quite the same as those imagined in Blade Runner, but the differences are not that great. These air vehicles are much smaller than commercial aircraft, and most are designed with rotor wings rather than the traditional fixed wings so that the vehicle can take off and land vertically. For example, the design is tilt-rotor, can be efficient for long distance forward flight, while the multi-rotor design is said to reduce noise when hovering flight. Most importantly, the design of such flying vehicles is to provide individuals with a faster commute than traditional modes of transportation, especially in cities with traffic congestion.
Flying vehicles
For now, the market for self-driving urban aircraft remains somewhat like the pioneering West. Dozens of startups are racing to develop commercial jetpack vehicles, flying motorcycles and private air cabs. Venture capitalists, automobiles and airlines, and even transportation network Uber and its ambitious Uber Elevate program are all eying this nascent industry. By 2040, the industry could be worth as much as $1.5 trillion. At the same Time, aviation authorities are discussing and negotiating the development of policies and safety standards that will govern this emerging transportation industry.
Chinese man Zhao Deli test-flies his Home-built flying motorcycle in 2019.
For example, Volocopter, a German aircraft manufacturer, announced its VoloCity, the first commercially licensed electric air cab, which will eventually fly unmanned. Fabien Nestmann, Volocopter’s vice president of public affairs, said the city flying car will provide “a high-end service like the Uber Premium Bridge or others.”
But there are a few key differences from Uber’s premium service. At first, the City Flyer will carry only one passenger, which means the initial cost per ride will be high, but Volocopter hopes to build consumer confidence before transitioning to fully automated mode. The fully automated City Flyer is a wingless electric vehicle powered by nine batteries that picks up passengers using a network of vertical takeoff and landing airports established between major cities. The company’s Urban Flyer is expected to begin commercial flights in 2022.
Tickets for the first flights will cost 300 euros ($350) each. But Nesterman said the company’s ultimate goal is to make its costs competitive with Uber’s premium sedan (Uber Black) service. We don’t want to make urban flying cars a toy for the rich, but rather a part of a complementary transportation system in urban areas that anyone can afford,” he said. Everyone will be able to choose whether to walk, drive their own car, ride a bike or take a flying car.”
German aircraft manufacturer Volocopter is launching an urban flying car for public debut in Singapore in 2019.
Other companies have partnered with existing automakers to develop flying vehicles for eventual commercial use. For example, Japanese startup SkyDrive recently partnered with Toyota Motor to test-fly its development of the all-electric air cab SD-03, which is said to be the world’s smallest electric vehicle that can take off and land vertically. in the summer of 2020, the company successfully flew the SD-03 for a few minutes at an airport with a pilot at the helm.
SkyDrive representative Takako Wada said, “Consumer demand in this area has grown, i.e., or with electric cars or fast French intercity TGV high-speed trains, but mankind has yet to provide a clear solution to the transportation problem. It can be said that SkyDrive’s development of flexible and fast transportation was made possible by consumer demand and technological advances.”
In fact it could be argued that it is these advances that have enabled so many aircraft designers to compete to make their mark in aerial design. Companies like German aircraft developer Lillium, Wisk, a joint venture between Boeing and personal electric aircraft manufacturer Kitty Hawk, personal aircraft developer Joby Aviation, Bell Canada (Bell), and many others are throwing money around to invest in innovations for flying cars, such as electric propulsion that can dramatically reduce noise emissions and can improve high power batteries that can increase range, and more. For this fledgling industry, there is no shortage of designs for vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) technology, or the imagined heights it could reach.
Take, for example, the British airline Gravity Industries, which has built a 1,050-horsepower wearable jetpack vehicle. Richard Browning, the company’s founder and chief test pilot, said, “It’s a bit like a Formula 1 car.” Currently, the wearable jetpack is a professionals’ device that can only be flown by commercial professionals and military pilots. In his studio, Browning pointed to a Batman-style metal device and said, “One day, this jetpack vehicle could allow a medical superhero hovering in the air to fly wherever he wants to go and do whatever he wants to do.”
Richard Browning of British airline Gravity Industries unveils his company’s development of a backpack flying machine in the Lake District in September 2020.
That’s not an extravagance that sounds out of reach. Great North Air Ambulance Service recently partnered with Gravity Industries to conduct a simulated search and rescue mission using a jetpack vehicle. Browning donned a jetpack and flew from the rugged valley floor at the foot of Langdale Peak in England’s Lake District to a pre-determined mountain disaster site. On foot, it would have taken 25 minutes of hard climbing, but Browning flew for only 90 seconds. The exercise illustrated the potential of jetpack vehicles to provide critical care in remote areas.
Parimal Kopardekar, director of the NASA Aeronautics Institute at Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, Calif. He says, “The dream of air transportation has been around for a long time, and now there is a great opportunity to design a vehicle that can deliver cargo and provide services to places that are not currently accessible by air.”
Kpadkar is responsible for developing new aviation technologies such as autopilot and its high-end flight technology, such as vertical takeoff and landing. The task is quite complex, and this NASA research team he leads must address and test all elements of the entire flight ecosystem, including the vehicle, airways, infrastructure, connections to communities, weather patterns, GPS navigation, noise standards, maintenance, supply chain, parts procurement, and more …… This is a long list of issues, some not so obvious, that must be addressed before shared air transportation at scale can become a reality.
Human-piloted, all-electric air cab test flight in Japan in August 2020.
Redesigning new modes of human flight will require consideration of “legal flight paths” and flight safety for such new modes of flight, but it will also require public willingness to fly in such new air transportation. Industry leaders need to convince passengers that vertical takeoff and landing vehicles are compelling not only because they are technically feasible, but also because they are more convenient and safer than other modes of transportation.
You can’t offer commercial service without an extremely rigorous testing regime,” said Nesterman, who is in charge of Volocopter’s public Education program. Part of that is to develop the infrastructure for new flying vehicles.” That could mean hardware such as a vertical takeoff and landing pad for the vehicle and storage facilities equipped with electricity would need to be built, as well as software to operate the hardware facilities. The systems needed to operate the vertical lift vehicles will undoubtedly have to be nearly fully automated so that they can accurately coordinate the takeoffs and landings of the large number of vehicles envisioned. While the commercial aircraft we fly in today are monitored by real people in control towers, the aircraft of the future rely on UTM, or unmanned traffic control. This digital tracking control is to ensure that all aircraft are aware of the flight information of other aircraft on their routes.
A fully automated lift traffic system with a proven track record may reassure the public, but a large network of flying vehicles also presents a new set of challenges. Vertical lift traffic would not require runways or surface parking, but would require dedicated air corridors and air ports to park aircraft. Air cabs will reduce the number of cars traveling on the ground and improve the predictability of arrival and departure times, but there are all sorts of obstacles in the air – tall buildings, birds, unmanned cargo planes, and airplanes – that will require pilots (at least for vertical takeoff and landing vehicles) to use new maneuvering systems to avoid them. This new form of transportation, referred to as “skyways,” requires a set of tailored laws.
In addition, manufacturers and operators would have to prove that the Skyway would not cause harm to passengers or people on the ground. Kpadkar and his Nasa team worked with the Federal Aviation Administration and other regulatory agencies to create the Urban Air Mobility Maturity Levels Scale (UAMLS). Maturity Levels Scale, which ranks aircraft, airspace and other systems on a scale of 1 to 6 based on complexity and urban density. They are designing methods to streamline cockpit operations through a combination of automation and emergency management. For example, instructing vertical takeoff and landing vehicles on how to respond to bad weather, bird strikes or sudden jetpacker incursions into the flight path.
In October 2020, the crew of a commercial airliner near Los Angeles International Airport spotted a jetpack flier at an altitude of 1,828 meters. There is a serious risk of collision between the two at this altitude.
An aerial plane spotted over a park in West London. As more and more flying machines are invented, there is an urgent need for regulations that guarantee the safety of the skyways.
The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has developed a set of technical specifications for flying cars with vertical takeoff and landing, although the agency has not yet decided how to certify them. The specifications are intended to address issues raised by the uniqueness of flying cars, as well as detailed airworthiness criteria such as emergency exits, lightning protection, landing gear systems and pressurized chambers. EASA’s statement said that flying cars “have design characteristics of either conventional aircraft or rotary-wing aircraft, or both, but in most cases EASA is not yet in a position to classify these new vehicles as conventional or rotary-wing aircraft.” In other words, it appears that EASA has not yet made a decision on what criteria to use to distinguish vertical takeoff and landing aircraft from fixed-wing commercial aircraft or helicopters. Clearly, the successful operation of vertical takeoff and landing aircraft requires a coordinated effort across sectors, including government, technology, transportation, urban planning and public services.
What accounts for the sudden surge in the number of vertical takeoff and landing aircraft developers? It is global trends such as the rise of e-commerce, climate change, the piecework economy and integrated supply chains that have accelerated interest in personal air travel, and the failure of our current infrastructure and related industries that underscore its necessity. As cities such as New York, Hong Kong and Beijing reach the limits of their carrying capacity, urban Life becomes increasingly unsustainable, yet our increasingly interconnected economies require constant mobility between cities.
As we know, these impacts will change the way we commute and the way we live. Kpadekar notes, “Right now, most people are optimizing their lives based on transportation convenience. Vertical takeoff and landing vehicles and drones will enable people to reach their destinations no matter where they are, leading to life-based transportation optimization.” In the future, companies will not need to locate their headquarters in the city’s central business district, and employees will have the option to live anywhere an air cab can reach. Owning a vertical takeoff and landing vehicle could become as cheap and ubiquitous in the future as owning a bicycle.
The S-A1, an air cab designed by South Korea’s Hyundai Group for Uber Elevate’s urban air transportation service, goes on display in January 2020.
Nestleman said, “At a macro level, growing cities are creating an increasing demand for mobility for the residents of those cities, which is making us rethink urban development because building everything around car transportation does not improve our quality of life.”
Transportation bottlenecks erode the highways of our cities and the cars we drive, increasing carbon emissions, which in turn threaten our planet’s fragile ecosystems and our own health. But at the same time, electric vertical takeoff and landing flying vehicles (eVTOLS) will significantly reduce vehicle emissions or reliance on diesel fuel.
Because the increase in flying cars will also naturally lead to changes in the urban fabric as cities become taller, with more rooftop landing facilities and elevated highways connecting super skyscrapers, thus freeing up a lot of space on the ground. Fewer vehicles on the ground will reduce congestion and potentially generate parks and green space. In the long run (2045 and beyond), business and green space will become more inseparable,” says Kpadekar. While we may never be able to eliminate subways and roads, we may be able to reduce the carbon footprint of subways and roads with these flying machines.”
Flying cars could have a huge impact on the future of transportation, work life, consumption, urban design, and even healthcare and ecology. Perhaps as early as 2030, consumers will be able to press a button to book an air cab directly to their cloud-shrouded skyscraper offices. In a few decades, we may end up with less and less need to go down to the ground and can keep doing business and living our lives on a city in the sky.
Kpadekar says, “Walking a mile only gets you a mile away, but flying a mile can take you anywhere.”
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