Flying is the easy part.
We’ve all been waiting for our flying car for a long time now, so a lot of people are excited about the coming deployment of electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles, or eVTOLs.
But this is definitely one of those technologies where scaling up is way harder than just making more units. One autonomous air taxi is easy to believe: there have been many demonstrations. But the moment the second one takes off, you know they’re going to run into each other!
This summer Kamesh Namuduri and Keven Gambold discuss the challenges of actually having hundreds of autonomous aircraft flying above a real city [1]. Their title mentions “3 Challenges to Solve”, but they actually list seven challenges in the article. Mainly, they are dealing here with technical stuff, and not with legal stuff.
N&G report on activities at a test corridor over Fort Worth, Texas. This area is set up to simulate flights in a real urban airspace. A conventional helicopter stands in for an autonomous flyer, and is commanded by test software using prototype monitoring and communications systems. The flights were over real urban areas, in real weather conditions.
Clearly, the flying taxi people are getting very serious!
And equally clearly, there’s quite a way to go before this stuff is really ready. Unsurprisingly, even these simple tests with one vehicle were challenged by unreliable communications. Scaling up to real traffic levels will be even more challenging.
- Kamesh Namuduri and Keven Gambold, 3 Challenges to Solve Before We Can Commute by Air Taxi, in IEEE Spectrum – Aerospace, July 8, 2023. https://spectrum.ieee.org/evtol-2661135407
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