The Jetsons are coming! Flying taxis will soon be a reality

“You will see highways in the sky,” says Archer Aviation CEO Adam Goldstein says. “There will be hundreds, maybe thousands of these aircraft flying over cities.”

Aviation pioneer JoeBen Bevirt with his Joby vertical takeoff and landing air taxi at an airfield in Marina, California. Picture: AP

When he was still a boy making long, tedious trips between his school and his woodsy home in the mountains during the 1980s, JoeBen Bevirt began fantasising about flying cars that could whisk him to his destination in a matter of minutes.

As CEO of Joby Aviation, he is getting closer to turning his boyhood flights of fancy into a dream come true as he and latter-day versions of the Wright brothers launch a new class of electric-powered aircraft vying to become taxis in the sky.

The aircraft – known as an “electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle, or eVTOL – lift off the ground like a helicopter before flying at speeds up to 322km/h with a range of about 160km. And they do it without filling the air with noise caused by fuel-powered helicopters and aeroplanes.

“We are just a few steps from the finish line. We want to turn what are now one- and two-hour trips into five-minute trips,” Mr Bevirt, 51, told Associated Press before a Joby air taxi took off on a test flight in Marina, California, located about 65km from where he grew up in the mountains.

Archer Aviation, a Silicon Valley company backed by United Airlines and car company, has been testing its own eVTOLs over farmland in Salinas, California, where a prototype called Midnight could be seen gliding above a tractor ploughing fields last ­November.

The tests are part of the journey that Joby Aviation and other ambitious companies that collectively have raised billions of dollars are taking to turn flying cars into more than just pie-in-the-sky concepts popularised in 1960s-era cartoon series The Jetsons and science fiction films such as the 1982 blockbuster Blade Runner.

Archer Aviation and nearby Wisk Aero, with ties to aerospace giant Boeing and Google co-founder Larry Page, are also at the forefront in the race to bring air taxis to market. Joby has already formed a partnership to connect its air taxis with Delta Air Lines, passengers while Archer Aviation has lined up a deal to sell up to 200 of its aircraft to United Airlines.

Flying taxis have made enough regulatory inroads with the US Federal Aviation Administration to result in the recent creation of a new aircraft category called “powered lift” a step the agency hadn’t taken since helicopters were introduced for civilian use in the 1940s.

But there are more regulatory hurdles to be cleared before air taxis will be allowed to carry passengers in the US, making Dubai the most likely place where eVTOLs will be flown first, perhaps before the end of this year.

“It’s a tricky business to develop a whole new class of vehicle,” said Adam Lim, director of Alton Aviation Consultancy, a firm tracking the industry’s evolution. “It is going to be like a crawl, walk, run situation. Right now, I think we are still crawling. We are not going to have the Jetsons-type reality where everyone will be flying around everywhere in the next two to three years.”

China is also vying to make flying cars a reality, a quest that has piqued president-elect Donald Trump’s interest in making the vehicles a priority for his incoming administration.

If the ambitions of eVTOL pioneers are realised in the US, people will be able to hop in an air taxi to get to and from airports serving New York and Los Angeles within the next few years.

Because its electric taxis can fly unimpeded at high speeds, Joby envisions transporting up to four Delta Air Lines passengers at a time from New York area airports to Manhattan in about 10 minutes or less. To start, air taxi prices almost certainly will be significantly more that the cost of taking a cab or Uber ride from JFK airport to Manhattan, but the difference could narrow over time because eVTOLs should be able to transport a higher volume of passengers than ground vehicles stuck in traffic going each way.

“You will see highways in the sky,” Archer Aviation CEO Adam Goldstein predicted during an interview at the company’s San Jose, California, headquarters.

“There will be hundreds, maybe thousands of these aircraft flying in these individual cities and it will truly change the way cities are being built.”

While they moved to commercial air taxi services, both Joby and Archer are trying to bring in revenue by negotiating contracts to use their eVTOLs in the military for deliveries and other short-range missions.

Mr Bevirt sees blue skies ahead. “eVTOLs are going to transform the way we move,” he said. “It’s a dramatically better way to get around..”

AP