Dream or Disaster, Flying Cars Face Multibillion Dollar Moment

Stu Turley

4 weeks ago

The bleak, blustery skies above Guangzhou are whipping the cramped two-seater aircraft with rain. One hundred feet above the ground, the plane’s 16 small electric rotors thrash alarmingly against the wind. Waiting below are murky waterways and hard-edged industrial sprawl.

Inside the tiny plane, there’s only one person — a Bloomberg News reporter — and he’s not a pilot.

EHang’s EH216-S eVTOL during a test flight in Guangzhou, China, on July 29. Source: EHang Holdings Ltd.

Far from an imaginary nightmare, this test flight in China last month was an unsettling reality. The bubble-like automated vehicle is made by EHang Holdings Ltd. and is vying to become the world’s first uncrewed commercial flying taxi this year.

The advances by the Chinese company give it early bragging rights in the race to break through air transport’s next frontier. The once-fictional future of electric flying cars, long a Hollywood fantasy, has, in some fashion, already arrived.

An Archer Aviation model at the 2023 Dubai Airshow. Photographer: Giuseppe Cacace/AFP/Getty Images

In New York, Joby Aviation Inc. and Archer Aviation Inc. aim to buzz people from downtown Manhattan to the city’s airports in a few minutes, about the same time it takes to walk two blocks. Both companies plan commercial flights with a pilot in the Middle East as soon as next year. More radically, Boeing Co.-owned Wisk wants to operate air taxis with four passengers — and no pilot — before the decade is out.

The potential market for these next-generation flights could be $1 trillion by 2040, Morgan Stanley has estimated. If that prediction is even close to accurate, in not much more than a decade, the world will be spending more on flying-car trips carrying people and goods — many of them with no pilot — than it currently does on conventional air travel.

The competition to corner these revenue streams of the future has inevitably drawn aviation’s dominant manufacturers, including Boeing. But the riches potentially up for grabs have also attracted startups and established names with little aviation expertise. Hyundai Motor Co., Toyota Motor Corp., Stellantis NV and even Chinese technology giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. have all committed money, manufacturing capacity or know-how in an emerging market loosely described as advanced air mobility.

With billions of dollars already spent, questions hang over the sector’s viability. The years of cheap money are over and even the best-known flying taxi makers in Europe like Lilium NV and Volocopter GmbH have at times battled to get funding. At the same time, it’s not clear that the traveling public will want to board a flying machine that doesn’t have a pilot, even if — and it remains a big if — regulators such as the US Federal Aviation Administration clear the aircraft to fly.

Fleets of Next Generation Taxis Set to Take Flight

Photographer: Wisk Aero, Getty Images, Archer Aviation, Joby Aviation, LiliumSources: Company reports

To offer rides in flying taxis for the price of an Uber — the seemingly improbable goal of many manufacturers including Boeing’s Wisk — will require production of electric aircraft at unprecedented scale. It’s reasonable to assume many companies, perhaps even most of them, won’t survive, according to Robin Riedel, a San Francisco-based partner at McKinsey & Co.

“Some people will lose a lot of money. No doubt,” said Riedel, who co-leads the McKinsey Center for Future Mobility. “A whole bunch of them are not going to make it.”

The stage is set for a financial reckoning.

For some, electric flying taxis are an emissions-free solution to megacity congestion. It’s no coincidence that Sao Paulo, one of the most gridlocked cities on the planet, boasts the world’s largest helicopter fleet, with about 450 choppers. Others like Guangzhou-based EHang hope its people-carrying drones will also create a new market for affordable aerial tourism in China — at a fraction of the cost of a helicopter ride.

Fictional variants of these aircraft have been on the big screen for more than 50 years. An AMC Matador coupe with wings on its roof took off in the 1974 James Bond movie, The Man with the Golden Gun. The 1982 sci-fi Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford, featured cars that could do it all — speed down roads before taking off and flying around effortlessly.

An AMC Matador coupe in *The Man with the Golden Gun.* Photographer Danjaq/Eon/Ua/Kobal/Shutterstock

*Blade Runner* featured a Spinner flying car. Source: Warner Bros./Archive Photos/Getty Images

In reality, there are now dozens of companies making so-called electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. Often laden with small rotors that allow the aircraft to hover like a bee or cruise like a plane, battery-powered eVTOLs are largely designed for short hops in and around cities. Initially at least, they’ll shuttle back and forth along tightly controlled urban flight corridors.

In functional terms, the aircraft mirror the capabilities of the Harrier jump jet, the military attack plane that revolutionized vertical takeoffs and landings in the 1960s.

A ConVairCar, designed by Theodore P. Hall for the Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation, during a test-flight in 1947. Photographer: FPG/Archive Photos/Getty Images

A Ford Levacar Mach 1 demonstrated in Michigan, in 1959. It never went into production. Photographer: Graphic House/Archive Photos

Among the growing ranks of eVTOL players, Boeing is one of the most audacious. Its development program extends more than 9,000 miles (14,500 kilometers) from the company’s Virginia headquarters to Australia, and underscores how far the industry has leaped in recent years.

On a November day in 2022, the planemaker sent 50 of its interns to a drab warehouse on the outskirts of Brisbane, halfway up Australia’s eastern flank, to learn how the nascent sector might evolve. Inside the building was the then-future of flight: Half-plane, half-helicopter, the Frankenstein creation on display was as yellow as a New York taxi and bristled with 12 rotors. There were just two seats — neither of them for a pilot. A newly hired former New Zealand air force officer told the young crowd they’d one day look back in wonder to an era when passenger aircraft were, incredibly, all flown by humans.

Less than two years later, using the successor to that experimental plane, Boeing’s Wisk aims to become the first uncrewed passenger-carrying taxi operator certified by the FAA, still the world’s most important aviation regulator. Amid a crisis of its own, Boeing continues to divert resources and engineers into Wisk. All this as the iconic planemaker burns through cash during a production slowdown and as regulators pore over the quality of its manufacturing. Unlike Joby or Archer, Wisk’s first commercial services will be completely autonomous, even if it takes longer to get them off the ground.

Catherine MacGowan, the ex-New Zealand military officer who’s now Wisk’s vice president of air operations, argues that stripping the pilot from flying taxis is key to making them financially viable. Wisk won’t have to worry about recruiting flight crew, who are almost always in short supply, and only paying passengers will take up space in the aircraft. “Autonomy does support scale and autonomy makes things affordable,” she said.

Wisk’s Generation 6 four-seater at the Farnborough International Airshow in July 2024. Photographer: John Keeble/Getty Images

But the very notion of commercial flights with no crew on board is drawing scrutiny. Before Wisk can launch for real, the FAA will have to approve the aircraft, every flight procedure and all emergency contingencies. That certification process will cover scenarios such as a power outage, a bird strike, or a loss of connection between the aircraft and the ground.

Among the most crucial elements will be the detect-and-avoid capability, a critical defense against crashes and mid-air collisions. “If something unexpected happens, people rightfully want to know: How will the aircraft respond?” MacGowan said.

The machine itself will ultimately be in the hands of a flight supervisor on the ground. Part pilot, part air-traffic controller, this remote backstop can monitor several Wisk flights at the same time, according to MacGowan. “We’re not removing humans from aviation, we’re changing their role,” she said.

Not everyone is convinced the concept of autonomous flight is viable.

Robert Joslin, a US Marine Corps veteran who was an FAA test pilot and flew helicopters for President George H. W. Bush, said it’s impossible to devise an automated response for every eventuality in the air. It’s simple enough to pre-program an aircraft to shut off leaky hydraulics, but things get complicated when an uncrewed plane runs into a problem that requires human judgment, said Joslin, who now teaches at Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University.

In a recent paper on the problems that might arise when autonomous flight meets human morality, Joslin used the notional example of an autonomous aircraft carrying passengers that’s forced into an emergency landing. Any number of scenarios could unfold, and some might need the sort of ethical assessment only a human is equipped to make, Joslin said.

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