Uber is teaming up with NASA to make flying taxis happen
Uber strikes a deal with NASA to develop software for managing “flying taxi” routes in the air along the lines of ride-hailing services it has pioneered on the ground. Emily Wither reports.
Ready for flying taxis? Uber is.
The company announced Wednesday that it has teamed up with NASA to take one small step forward to make its giant plans to shuttle people through the air a reality — and make our dreams of flying around like “The Jetsons” seem more possible.
In April, Uber announced partnerships with Dallas, Texas, and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to test out a (yet to be built) network of flying cars, but now it’s adding Los Angeles to the mix, with hopes of having flying cars in the air by 2020. This week, Uber shared new details about its plans for a network of on-demand vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal.
"Technology will allow L.A. residents to literally fly over the city's historically bad traffic, giving them time back to use in far more productive ways," chief product officer Jeff Holden told USA Today. "At scale, we expect UberAir will perform tens of thousands of flights each day across the city."
A rooftop-hopping air taxi service called uberAIR is on the way, the company says, and it’ll look a little something like this:
How could this possibly work? The biggest news from Uber is that it has signed a Space Act Agreement with NASA to develop software for driverless air traffic management systems and that NASA’s efforts in what’s referred to as “unmanned traffic management” (UTM) are well underway.
“NASA has the knowledge and the expertise to help make urban air mobility happen,” said Jaiwon Shin, NASA’s associate administrator for aeronautics, in a statement released on Wednesday.
You can read all about NASA’s work in this area here.
“With UberAir, we’re going to be having a lot of aircraft flying over cities — an unprecedented number of aircraft flying over cities,” Holden said in an interview with Bloomberg. “In order to manage that air traffic in a way that’s efficient and safe, we just need new technology. UTM, we believe, is the answer to that.”
This is a super complicated topic, so here’s an interview with Holden further explaining what it all means.
Back to L.A.
With 200-mph speed and VTOL technology, a flight across L.A. would be “price competitive” with Uber’s car service, but much faster, the company says. It gives the example of a trip from Los Angeles International Airport and Staples Center taking just 30 minutes, rather than the usual hour-and-a-half trip.
The ultimate plan is to have these flying taxis be commercially available by 2023, which is well ahead of the 2028 Olympics in L.A.
Are you ready for this? Would you be one of the first in line to take an air taxi from Uber?
Here’s a look at the discussion surrounding Uber’s announcement on social media.
Watch the full presentation from Uber at Web Summit below.