It's pretty logical really. Normally, we wouldn't consider letting anyone except licensed pilots to pilot a vehicle that could crash onto our heads, but in the world of self-driven vehicles, letting the computer drive an airplane is just as logical as letting it drive a car or a truck. I mean, passenger jetliners are already mostly automated anyway and with the advent of excellent AI (Artificial Intelligence), it's easy to go from letting ourselves being driven around safely on the streets to letting ourselves get flown around.
Uber, among others, have thought of this in order to alleviate further the transportation problems we have in general: traffic and transit time. Using roads to go from point A to B is good, but what if you could go faster and "as the crow flies" when using their upcoming fleet of self-driven vehicles? You could get where you need to go much faster and you aren't encountering any traffic since you're flying over everyone else. Bonus is that you can go from building to building without even touching the Earth itself! This of course, is possible due to VTOL (Vertical TakeOff and Landing) technologies.
In the video below I talk a little bit about the implications of such transportation systems further if you are interested:
Of course, in order for these air taxis to work, we'd need to be able to ensure the vehicle is at the 5th level of automation, which necessitates absolutely no input from a pilot or driver. So it is possible that the first ones may be piloted by remote or at least there is a way for a designated "pilot" to take the controls in some special cases to ensure the air taxi gets people down safely (which is the 4th level of automation).
But as I mentioned before, this is not that far off. In fact, Google's self-driven cars have been operating at level 4 of the automation chart for years already. It excites me to think that we could finally remove some of the congestion from our streets by finally using the air above our heads to move around. It just allows for so much more freedom of movement and more options for city planners to allow traffic to flow. But what about noise?
Well, Uber's design is electric with propellers to push air around, so that's pretty quiet...quieter than our regular gasoline guzzling cars at least. Lilium, a German company, is proposing their own eVTOL design which uses ducted fans instead of propellers. Generally the same concept.
Though it is unclear what Uber's timeline looks like regarding their eVTOL concept, it is safe to assume that these bad boys will only be deployed after the deployment of their fleets of self-driven cars near 2020. Chinese company EHang already has an agreement to deploy their 2 seater drones in Dubai in the next couple years (those presumably are guided by a controller, not self-driven, but details are not clear on that). In the meantime, Lilium wishes to conduct manned flights of their entirely self-driven eVTOL air taxis in 2019.
Just to give you an idea of specs, Lilium's model will likely be able to carry up to 5 people up to 300 km distance at a speed of 300 km / h. In perspective that's a 5 minute ride from JFK Airport to Manhattan, instead of the current 55 minute drive. Not too shabby indeed!
All I can say is that offering different ways to commute and move around using the area above our head, all using electricity, no emissions, making it all quiet, and self-driven, is like looking back on so many science fiction movies asking myself "What were they thinking! We're doing so much better with this!"
Yep. Looks like we can engineer better systems than what science fiction writers can imagine.
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