Tech companies are rekindling dreams of flight which have long been relegated to science-fiction
Powered flight has been the stuff of dreams since Icarus, and the stuff of reality since the Wright Brothers took off in 1903 and travelled 120 feet. A mere 66 years later, man was on the Moon, 239,000 miles away. But advances in the half-century since have been modest by comparison.
We have not been back to the moon since 1972, our out-of-orbit ambitions residing in the International Space Station, a mere 250 miles up. Now, though, air travel might be entering another gravity-defying innovation explosion.
The seeds of change are being sown by destruction of business-as-usual. Covid has seen global air passenger traffic collapse, down 91pc in May compared to a year earlier; it is not expected to recover until 2024. Many airlines are not expected to survive to see that.
As the old model is shattered, however, a host of entrepreneurs are re-imagining air travel as we know it, while others rekindle dreams of flight which have long been relegated to science-fiction.
Air taxis take off
We have been waiting for flying cars since the Jetsons aired in 1962. Now a swarm of them have appeared, championing multiple methods of getting airborne, from fixed wing to drone-like quadcopter.
Despite the pandemic, two of the big names in the sector – Joby and Lilium – have just raised eye-catching sums (£437m and £178m respectively). Joby’s four-seater aircraft opts for six rotors; Lilium’s five-seater jet uses 36 motors built into a hinged wing: both are fully electric, and both allow Vertical Take off and Landing (VTOL).
The Lilium flying taxi has a range of 300km and no operation emissions
Essentially, these are helicopter replacements. But there are two immediate advantages: on fuel, batteries will lead to savings; on safety, multiple motors build in redundancy over the helicopter’s single rotor, avoiding constant checks.
Longer term, autonomy means no pilot, cutting costs still further – down in the near term, companies hope, to £2-£3 per mile. Ultimately, Uber hopes that at scale flying cars can hit less than £1.50 per mile – cheaper even than its shared vehicles on the ground.
As on the ground, however, it will not build those vehicles, instead providing support to developers. No wonder Joby, one of its partners, insists that its vehicles are the mass transportation of the future – “freed from the constraints of ground-based transportation, where daily life is no longer defined by hours wasted sitting in traffic”.
And no wonder the biggest single investor in its $590m (£437m) funding round this year, spending $394 million, was the world’s biggest carmaker – Toyota, looking perhaps for a bestselling runabout of the 2040s.
Uber plans flying taxi tests in 2020 before making them available to the public in 2023
Credit: Uber
But there are still major hurdles to overcome. While prototype air taxis look ever more ready, regulation and infrastructure are certainly not. Crowded cities have struggled to incorporate e-scooters into their transport mix. Giant drones swooping overhead are enough to make administrators swoon.
Even as they catch up, a whole industry is emerging to build infrastructure like landing pads for so-called Urban Air Mobility (UAM) vehicles. Among these is London-based Skyports, a company which designs and operates the “vertiports» needed for VTOL electric air taxis.
It too has been subject to investment from traditional transport operators – in its case German rail titan Deutsche Bahn.
“Our train stations already connect different modes of public and private transportation,” Boris Kuehn, Managing Director of Deutsche Bahn Digital Ventures, said this month. “In big cities they are located right at the centre and serve as a transfer point. We are currently in the process of assessing the feasibility of integrating vertiports in our train stations.”
Air taxis | Models in development
Yet the reality is that developing new aircraft, even modest city-hoppers, is an expensive business. Most air-taxi companies are burning through cash. Few will survive. Those that do, however, will be in pole position to capitalise on a huge new market.
Today annual spending on ground-based and helicopter transport is estimated to be worth about $1.1tn. Hyundai, launching its own air taxi division a year ago, suggested UAMs will be worth $1.5tn within 20 years.
- Read more: The ‘flying taxi’ that can soar from London to Brighton in 30 minutes
Greener commercial flight
Jet fuel is expensive and contributes to the air industry’s reputation as a polluter (estimates suggest the aviation industry accounts for about 2pc of global CO2 emissions). No wonder small is now beautiful.
Even before Covid, airlines were moving away from huge, wide body aircraft towards small, fuel efficient point-to-point planes like the Airbus A321neo and the ill-fated Boeing 737 Max. The huge 747 and Airbus A380 are now being mothballed. Increasingly, narrow body aircraft are doing the long haul.
That intense focus on fuel cost and emissions is good news for short-haul electric aircraft. In a standard year, half of the world’s 4bn flights are sub-500 mile journeys.
Electric motors – clean, cheap at point of use and quiet – provide a 75pc reduction in CO2 emission per passenger kilometre and a 65pc reduction in noise according to Britain’s Electric Aviation Group, behind a 70-seat Hybrid Electric Regional Aircraft (Hera).
Hybrid gets over batteries’ principal problem – weight. In May, a modified Cessna Caravan became the world’s biggest all-electric aircraft after completing a 30-minute test. But it can only carry nine passengers.
Fuel simply contains far more energy per kilo than batteries, plus it also disappears as you burn it up, meaning aircraft get lighter as the journey goes on. All of which confirm the challenge EasyJet faces in realising plans to have a short-haul 186-seat passenger jet, with a 550km range, in the air by 2030.
If all-electric short haul is the goal, hybrids are likely to bridge the technology gap to help the industry get there. The British start-up Faradair, for example, is developing both a hybrid electric model and an all-electric, which it also hopes will be airborne by 2030. At 18 seats, quickly convertible into all-cargo, it hopes to transport regional air transport. If Lilium and Uber are working on flying cars, Faradair has been described as “the flying van” – a workhorse of the skies.
Another British company, Zeroavia, is aiming for all electric, but ditching the batteries. Instead, it deploys a fuel cell, which mixes hydrogen with oxygen to create an electric current. The exhaust is water. It has a greater energy-to-weight ratio than batteries allowing Zeroavia to claim that its current 10-20-seat test planes will become 50-100 seater by the end of the decade.
But ditching jet fuel for electricity brings with it a host of problems. High voltages at altitude carries the risk of fire. One co-project between Airbus, Siemens and Rolls-Royce – the E-Fan X – revealed the need to rethink insulation, cables and switches. “You kind of go, ‘Ah, actually, this is going to be a lot more challenging than we thought’,” Riona Armesmith, chief project engineer for hybrid electric propulsion at Rolls-Royce, told the BBC recently.
- Read more: ‘Zero emissions planes’ a step closer after ammonia breakthrough
Until recently, flying taxis seemed the stuff of rich-kids dreams – fanciful not practical. But many hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into the sector now. The attractions are obvious – no more traffic jams – even if the regulatory pathway isn’t.
As for the air industry, it is struggling to survive. Highly efficient narrow body jets are coming to dominate ever more of the long haul. But most flights are short haul. And that opens up the possibility of electric aircraft, especially those powered by hydrogen fuel-cell technology rather than heavy batteries.
Read more in The Future of Transport series:
Part one: Is this the end of the road for the traditional car?
Part two: All change as Silicon Valley comes for public transport
Part four: When the boat comes in, it won’t have a crew
Part five: All aboard Elon Musk’s Starship enterprise
What do you think will happen to air travel in the future? Do you plan to fly more or less? Let us know in the comments below.
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