Page and Boeing, sees the future in much the same way. Wisk Aero, a company that spun out of Kitty Hawk in 2019 with backing from Mr. He could not be heard over the whir of the rotors. Thrun boasted about how quiet the aircraft was, but when it took off, he had no choice but to stop talking. Sitting a few hundred feet from the vehicle, Mr. There is also the noise factor, a crucial selling point over loud combustion engine helicopters. These planes will need landing pads, and they could have trouble navigating dense urban areas, thanks to power lines and other low-flying aircraft. Yes, there are regulatory hurdles and other practical matters. He envisions an American suburbia where his aircraft ferries people to their front doors sometime in the future. When Sebastian Thrun watches his flying vehicle - Heaviside - rise up from its own grassy landing pad, he sees more than just the trees, hills and crags of the California test site. ‘It is going to take longer than people think’
So they are betting on something very different. And they say the technology is too important and transformative to remain a plaything for millionaires. They estimate it will be years - or even decades - before regulators will allow just anyone to fly such a vehicle over cities. In much the same way, he is unsure how BlackFly will work its way into everyday life, but he is confident of the possibilities.
He did not initially know what it would be good for, but this “memory foam” wound up in office chairs, car seats and mattresses. He compares BlackFly to one of his other inventions: a new kind of foam padding that molded itself to your body when you sat on it. By putting his vehicle into the hands of a relative few people, he argues, he can open the eyes of many more. Leng believes this technology will improve, prices will drop to “the cost of an S.U.V.” and the world will ultimately embrace the idea of electric urban flight. “I have always had a dream that we could have unfettered three-dimensional freedom like a bird does - that we can take off and just fly around,” he said.īut Mr. Leng sees all this as a step toward the starry future envisioned by “The Jetsons,” the classic cartoon in which flying cars are commonplace. The few Opener employees who have flown it describe an exhilarating rush, like driving a Tesla through the sky - an analogy that will not be lost on the company’s target customer. It has enough room for a six foot, six-inch person, and it can fly for about 25 miles without recharging. Buyers can learn to fly via virtual reality simulations, and the aircraft will include autopilot services like a “return to home” button that lands the plane on command. But the idea is that a person will sit in the cockpit and pilot the aircraft solo over rural areas. But an ultralight also cannot be flown over cities or other bustling areas.Īs it works to ensure the vehicle is safe, Opener does most of its testing without anyone riding in the aircraft. The next few years will be crucial to the industry as it transitions from what Silicon Valley is known for - building cutting edge technology - to something much harder: the messy details of actually getting it into the world.īlackFly is classified by the government as an experimental “ultralight” vehicle, so it does not need regulatory approval before being sold. “You can fly in a straight line and you don’t have the massive weight or the stop-and-go of a car” on the ground, he said.
He now says that autonomy will be far more powerful in the air than on the ground, and that it will enter our daily lives much sooner. Thrun, the Stanford University computer science professor who founded Google’s self-driving car project. One of the air taxi companies, Kitty Hawk, is run by Mr. Some are designing vehicles that can fly without a pilot. Others are building larger vehicles they hope to deploy as city air taxis as soon as 2024 - an Uber for the skies. Leng’s company, Opener, is building a single-person aircraft for use in rural areas - essentially a private flying car for the rich - that could start selling this year. Thrun have kept their prototypes hidden from the rest of the world - few people have seen them, much less flown in them - but they are now beginning to lift the curtain.
Dozens of companies are now building these aircraft, and three recently agreed to go public in deals that value them as high as $6 billion. That dream, most experts agree, is a long way from reality.
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