Before this becomes reality though, some technological innovations are needed. It’s not the technology to allow these vehicles to fly — that already exists — but the technology that makes them safe enough to allay the concerns of customers and regulators and affordable enough to ignite an industry.
The most important and perhaps biggest challenge is autonomy, said Scott Drennan, vice president of innovation for the helicopter manufacturer Bell. At CES 2019, the company unveiled its Nexus air taxi, which uses six tiling rotors to vertically propel itself off the ground. The Nexus seats five, including one pilot, but is designed for autonomous flight.
Imagine how terrified people will be of autonomous aircraft after the first one crashes. Or how suspicious they’ll be of a drone carrying six people over their backyard.
In 2017, Bell partnered with Uber, which wants someone else to build the vehicles for Uber Air. To make the service affordable, their air taxis must fly autonomously, Drennan said, removing the expense of paying a pilot. Autonomous air taxis would also, in theory, be safer than those piloted by humans, removing the possibility of human error that plays a role in 90 percent of noncommercial plane accidents, according to Aviation Safety magazine.
Singh, the Carnegie Mellon robotics research professor, spent the first years of his career working on self-driving cars or, as he calls them, “mobile robots big enough to be outdoors.” These were big, clunky machines better suited for moving through a strip mine than navigating the streets of Palo Alto. But the advancements made since Singh began working with autonomous vehicles in the 1980s provide a model for autonomous personal aircraft.
Self-driving cars were once purely theoretical, then they became real, then they started racking up thousands of hours on public streets. They haven’t yet lost their novelty — the attacks by knife-wielding residents of Chandler, Arizona, make that clear — but many can now see what was once considered absurd: Self-driving cars will soon fill the streets.
The parallel between autonomous cars and autonomous aircraft isn’t perfect. Driving on the roads requires a precision that flying doesn’t. You don’t have to stay within the lines in the sky. But, as Singh noted, in an autonomous ground vehicle, “if something bad were to happen, you could pull over. For an air vehicle, this is a significant issue.” Translation: You might drop out of the sky.
Along with autonomous flight systems, the flying cars of the future will require batteries that can get them up in the air and keep them there. That battery “does not exist,” Celina Mikolajczak, Uber’s director of engineering for energy storage systems, said at an international battery conference last year. Poached from Tesla, Mikolajczak spent years testing and refining batteries for electric cars.
One thing Mikolajczak didn’t worry much about at Tesla was the weight of batteries. But in the air, that matters. The key to building the right batteries for eVTOLS is increasing the energy density of batteries, which, even at their best, lag well behind jet fuel. According to one estimate, jet fuel produces 14 times more energy per pound than batteries. But that gap is narrowing. The current rate of innovation has the density of batteries improving by about five percent per year. Conservatively, that means the batteries needed to carry commuters from the suburbs to downtown will be here by mid-century.
Difficult as these technological hurdles appear, the human ones may be even more vexing. Major questions remain about how flying taxis would be allowed to operate in the sky. What kind of air traffic control system will be developed? How quickly will the FAA allow the move toward autonomy? Will each air taxi company build its own infrastructure, including charging stations and vertiports? Will people actually call them “vertiports”?
Then there’s the noise. “This is a physics problem,” said Singh. “It doesn’t matter which mode you use; they make a lot of noise.” If people want the convenience these vehicles will offer, they’ll have to accept the annoyance of commuters buzzing past their upper-story windows, he said.
That acceptance may not come easily. Self-driving cars, which have been on the road for years and have racked up millions of test miles, are still regarded with skepticism by many people, and drones are being shot out of the sky by suspicious neighbors. Imagine how terrified people will be of autonomous aircraft after the first one crashes. Or how suspicious they’ll be of a drone carrying six people over their backyard.
“We want to be a great neighbor as we fly these vehicles,” said Drennan. That’s not just a key for his company, Bell Helicopter, but for the entire industry. People may have been anticipating flying cars for decades, but will they be ready to step into them when the technology arrives?
Singh said that process will be helped by increased visibility. “We will start seeing people testing, and we will start seeing people establishing good processes,” he said. “This is the way we’re going to progress.” After waiting for more than 100 years for flying cars, “we’re not trying to rush anything.”
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This article was originally posted at https://medium.com/s/2069/flying-cars-are-closer-to-reality-than-you-think-a3ab21ff9373
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