The First Pilotless Sky Taxis Are Coming This Year

The first practical passenger-carrying sky taxi might just be around the corner. Tech firms are in heavy competition with each other to put one of these in the air as soon as possible.

Dubai seems to be leading this race with the signing of an agreement between its Road Transport Authority (RTA) and German start-up Volocopter to try out these taxis towards the end of 2017.

Volocopter has been awarded 25m euros by investors including German motor manufacturer Daimler to make the 18-rotor prototype which should be able to carry 2 people at a time.

The promo clip for this new craft  by Volocopter emphasizes on their speed and flight time. The company claims that its sky taxi will have a top speed of 60 mph and will be airborne for a maximum 30 minutes.

Safety assurances have also been made by the German company. For starters, its pilotless sky taxi prototype will have nine independent batteries and a parachute as a precaution.

A Chinese Firm is Also Working On It

Dubai’s RTA is also in partnership with Chinese firm Ehang and is conducting test flights of the single passenger carrying prototype called Ehang 184 “autonomous aerial vehicle”.

Even though Dubai is leading but the rest of the world is not far behind. Uber got NASA’s chief technologist Mark Moore to work with them as head of their Project Elevate, which is to be a future Uber air transport system.

French air transport giant Airbus is also involved in developing an air taxi, claiming that it will begin testing on them at the end of the year and have one out by 2020.

The horizontal rotor technology used for this innovation will enable their sky taxi to do a vertical takeoff and landing. That way no special runways are needed for these sky taxis and it is best suited for use in an urban area. Light materials like carbon fibre are to be used for the body to help reduce their weight as much as possible.

On the question of affordability, Uber’s Mr Moore says the cost, with three or four passengers sharing a pool, will be “very similar to what an UberX [car] costs today”.

When considering flight time, it is to be noted that 23 minutes is the maximum which Ehang’s craft has achieved as of yet. However, Uber’s Mr Moore says that currently batteries are being improved and would be ready by 2023 when Uber plans to launch 50 air taxis.

The main concern at the moment is their rapid recharging capability. A solution to this problem could be to use a two-part drone in which batteries are to be stored in a removeable base. These can be switched in between flight as suggested by Tim Robinson, editor of Royal Aeronautical Society’s magazine, Aerospace.

He also said that the taxi would be programmed to make an emergency landing in the case of fuel running very low while in mid-flight. To counter the critical fuel level problems, he believes that the drone would have various backup systems like an automatically triggered ballistic parachute if the drone descends beyond the stored parameters.

Managing airspace is another issue which needs to be dealt with before these taxis hit the sky. The NTX research center at Nasa is determining ways to work flight corridors without voice interactions. Their improved “sense-and-avoid” technology would aid taxis in communicating with each other, thereby maintaining their distance and avoiding collision.

Regulation is perhaps the biggest issue regarding sky taxi flights. Even though commercial aircrafts can takeoff, fly and land on their own, still the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and European Aviation Safety Agency requires a pilot to be present. So winning over regulatory and gaining favorable public views is going to be quite difficult.

Uber’s Mr Moore believes air taxis will have autonomous capability built in from 2023, but pilots will be present for about 10 years till enough data is gathered to convince the regulators that the taxis are safe.