By David E. Brody
Imagine if you could walk a couple of blocks to an “air taxi stand” and board a piloted or autonomous vertical takeoff and landing (“VTOL”) aircraft for a short trip to the airport or the grocery store, or for a meeting across town, flying over stifling gridlock all the way and dropping you off at your destination. Or imagine stepping into the hangar attached to your home and boarding your personal advanced technology fixed-wing aircraft – also a VTOL aircraft that’s autonomous, self-piloted, or piloted by a professional – and it could take you on a comfortable and quiet trip of several hundred miles at the speed of a business aircraft, arriving at the landing pad a few feet from the front door of your destination.
For the last several decades, traffic congestion in cities has been worsening, impacting our productivity as individuals and as a nation, and making driving frustrating, costly, and more difficult. The impacts of gridlock and population density in general led to public and private investments in various transportation technologies in the 1990s and early 2000s — technologies which held some promise as potential solutions to our crowded highways and downtown streets. They included high-speed trains, autonomous vehicles, “smart” highways with computer chips embedded in the pavement to create communication among all the vehicles and feedback into the system that could modulate and control traffic flow in real time, as well as Hyperloop technologies (high pressure tubes moving pods of passengers at 600 miles an hour). The traffic congestion and the pandemic also resulted in an increase in the use of private charter and in private business aircraft sales.
However, none of the technologies was actually adopted and there were no other innovative solutions that held any meaningful promise in solving the problem of traffic congestion. Extra lanes on highway and streets has been the “go-to” solution for decades. But it’s not a solution. For example, after the Katy Freeway in Houston was expanded to 23 lanes, rush-hour commute times from one major suburb increased 51%. The traffic congestion around the world keeps getting worse. Driverless cars certainly are not expected to make a material difference either, at least for many decades. Hyperloop technologies would cost the taxpayers billions of dollars that would be extremely difficult to generate from public funds. Even if the public agreed to be taxed at sufficient levels to generate those billions in the budget, Hyperloops would mean disruptive multi-decade construction projects and would not move enough people off the highways to materially reduce traffic congestion.
Uber Air
In 2015, Uber had a vision of a radically different kind of solution. It was so radical, it sparked a revolution that’s now imminent. I’m not referring to the car service. Rather, the company’s new idea in 2015 was called Uber Air, which would enable the average person to travel by a personal VTOL aircraft. The vision was similar to that of aviation pioneers Horace Pentecost and Stanley Hiller 65 years earlier who developed VTOL personal air vehicles (“PAVs”). In Uber’s 21st century PAV, you will summon an all-electric battery powered VTOL air taxi just like you hail an Uber or Lyft car today with the app on your phone and catch a 15 or 20-minute ride home during rush hour for about the same price as an UberX car ride.
As certain as there is gravity, this vision of clean and quiet air taxis will become a common means of travel, most likely before the end of this decade. In early December of 2015, I accepted an invitation from Jeff Holden, the head of Uber’s air taxi program, which was not yet public, to sit down with him and his newly formed team at Uber’s San Francisco headquarters, the nerve center of one of the most innovative and influential companies in the world, and an incredible story in American business. Two years earlier, I had formed XTI Aircraft Company to develop a different type of VTOL aircraft – not battery-powered air taxis for short hops over traffic, but a long-range fast fixed-wing airplane – the TriFan 600 — with two large powerful turbine engines that could fly 1,000 miles non-stop at 350 mph, at 30,000 feet, like other business aircraft, and at the same time take off and land vertically like a helicopter. In 2014, I recruited Jeff Pino, the former CEO of Sikorsky, to lead XTI. Dennis Olcott was our chief engineer. XTI is continuing its development of the TriFan, which will play a different role than the air taxis in the VTOL aircraft revolution.
Jeff Holden was the former head of Uber’s driverless car program and had been reassigned to lead Uber’s new air taxi initiative. Jeff Pino and Dennis accompanied me to the meeting with Jeff Holden. Uber’s vision was to create an air transportation system similar to its ground-based system that would expand our space and our lives to three dimensions. Just as buildings and cities began to grow skyward in the 20th century to provide space for people to work in urban areas and to provide room for cities to grow “upward”, Uber was turning to the skies as the only viable approach to alleviating traffic congestion in the 21st century.
When I received the invitation to discuss that vision with Jeff Holden, Uber was ten months away from drafting and releasing a confidential white paper that would describe its vision and create this potentially disruptive change to transportation, perhaps the most revolutionary change since the invention of the car and the invention of the airplane. Holden was interested in collaborating with innovative aircraft companies like XTI and wanted to know if XTI could design an air taxi that would fit Uber’s vision. His email to me in November said, “One scenario that’s interesting for us is a 4-seat aircraft (can initially be piloted, ultimately fully autonomous) with roughly a 200-mile range at a cruising speed of 200 mph.” Uber believed that its short-range air taxi service could be ready to serve the public within a few years and eventually would be available to millions of people.
Jeff, Dennis, and I checked in and received our visitor badges at the reception desk at Uber’s headquarters where the company occupied ten floors. Brian McClendon, head of Uber Advanced Technologies, and Alexandra Hall, a consultant reporting to Holden, greeted us in the waiting area and escorted us through the throngs of Millennial youth working there, all holding their iPhones, listening intently through their earpieces and talking, while 25 other people within earshot were doing the same thing. Typical among the unfinished lofts of San Francisco’s South of Market district, Uber’s headquarters were open-office style, with no actual offices or walls. This arrangement was once in vogue because it was supposed to encourage collaboration. That assumption was later disproved by surveys indicating that employees preferred less noise and distractions, and more privacy. We made our way through the employees and the potpourri of couches and other furniture scattered about, and into a conference room with a worn wooden conference table large enough to seat ten or twelve people.
We sat down across from Brian and Alexandra, eager to help Uber brainstorm on its air taxi strategy. Hoping XTI might secure some funding from Uber to design and develop the perfect Uber air taxi, we expected Uber to take advantage of our thoughts, particularly the wisdom available from Jeff Pino as an icon in the aircraft industry and the former head of the largest VTOL aircraft company in the world.
Jeff Holden had come down with the flu and didn’t join us in person, but was on the phone during the meeting. Brian and Alexandra were climbing a steep learning curve about aircraft and the aviation industry. At the same time, they made it clear their mission was not to retrofit helicopters or use any type of existing aircraft. Uber was starting from scratch and the members of its small team were determined to make Uber the catalyst for a new industry founded on an entirely new type of VTOL aircraft:
- All-electric, to completely eliminate air emissions and drastically reduce noise;
- Pilot-optional, to eventually fill the pilot seat with a paying passenger;
- Advanced collision-avoidance technology, for safety in a crowded sky; and
- An aircraft capable of efficient short-range transport of up to six people.
Uber was serious about applying substantial funds to disrupt the transportation industry — by brute force, if necessary, similar to the “move-fast-and-break-things” approach implemented by Uber’s founder and former CEO, Travis Kalanick. The company’s highly successful strategy in its early years of operation (beginning in 2010) was to burst into cities around the world, set up the ground transportation App, hire the driver network, and through legal challenges and public relations push back against all attempts to be regulated by those cities’ governments or to be prohibited from operating there, fighting the taxi lobby and others at every turn.
Jeff, Dennis, and I listened to Holden, Brian, and Alexandra describe the Uber vision for the next hour: All-electric urban air taxis intended to eventually take millions of cars off the streets and highways, reduce air pollution around the world, and save people time by traveling point-to-point in the air taxis. Uber’s vision had the potential to dramatically impact all of humanity:
- Air taxis — Aircraft manufacturers (existing and future, large and small) would design and build battery-powered air taxis.
- The Uber App — Uber would develop the digital framework for passengers to call or reserve an air taxi just as it created the App for ground transportation. Customers would use the expanded Uber App or a new App for air taxis.
- The physical infrastructure — Uber’s plan also involved building the physical infrastructure comprised of landing pads or “vertiports”, including charging stations for the battery-powered aircraft, mostly in cities.
- The operators of the aircraft — Individual operators of the air taxis would buy or lease the air taxis from the manufacturers and would furnish the pilots, just like Uber hires drivers who own or lease their cars. Manufacturers of the air taxis could also provide the air transportation services if they chose to do that.
- Say bye to pilots — Eventually, pilots would become obsolete as the air taxis became autonomous, with collision-avoidance capability similar to driverless cars. This was an important element of their economics because the pilot seat could then be filled with a paying passenger instead of a highly paid employee.
- Safety and certification — The Federal Aviation Administration would set the regulatory standards certifying the air taxis and allowing them to operate in public airspace. There would not be any human air traffic controllers involved in the air taxi operations because with hundreds of air taxis in the air simultaneously (piloted and autonomous) over any given metro area in the United States and around the world at any given time, it wouldn’t be possible to have one-on-one communications between an air traffic controller and an individual piloted or autonomous aircraft.
This Uber vision was tantalizing, intriguing, and high risk. It had the potential to disrupt the established transportation industry, much like the iPhone transformed communication, photos, and music, and like Amazon and Google created new industries and revolutionized everyday life for billions of people. If someone could transform the music and telephone industries, and radically change how we use computers, get news and information about the world, and order and receive services and consumer goods delivered to your door in a day or two, and if the banking industry could be revolutionized by Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, and other apps, then why not revolutionize transportation?
Toward the end of our meeting, Jeff, Dennis, and I presented our slides and explained that XTI could develop a 65% scale prototype of the TriFan 600 – a four-seat “TriFan 400”, powered by a turbine engine and capable of a range up to 600 miles – as a separate product – basically, a smaller version of the six-seat powerful TriFan 600. Uber had created a technical challenge for themselves because batteries hadn’t advanced sufficiently by the end of 2015 to power a VTOL aircraft with people in it for more than a few minutes. So we proposed the TriFan 400 that Uber could use in a “transition” strategy that would enable Uber to achieve its end game and final vision of all-electric autonomous aircraft, as battery technology advanced over the coming years. We explained that the TriFan 400 would include off-the-shelf certified components and would provide a much faster path to FAA certification, as compared to an all-electric aircraft with uncertified motors and other components.
But in the end, Holden. Brian, and Alexandra weren’t open to deviating from any of their criteria, particularly the all-electric clean/quiet requirement. We went home with an understanding of Uber’s vision and reasoning.
Uber’s relentless focus on a goal was the reason for its successful ground transportation business. The same level of focus on their business model, technology, and vision for Uber Air also made good sense from Uber’s viewpoint. At the same time, it was clear to Jeff Pino, Dennis, and me that there were several challenges and flaws, some possibly fatal, in Uber’s business plan for Uber Air. We questioned whether the battery technology would provide enough time in the air for the air taxis to perform the mission. We also expected the operators to face opposition when the public and local government officials, not to mention the FAA, were confronted with the prospect of hundreds of piloted and unmanned aircraft simultaneously hovering over, crossing over, and landing and taking off in their crowded cities. It was also unclear when the air taxis would become integrated into society and available for use by the average person. And at what cost.
Uber Elevate
On October 27, 2016, ten months after our meeting, Uber issued a 98-page white paper, called Uber Elevate, which became a catalyst for the air taxi revolution globally. The document outlined Uber’s vision in detail. “If VTOLs can serve the on-demand urban transit case well…”, said Uber, “there is a path to high production volume manufacturing (at least thousands of a specific model type built per year)… The economics of manufacturing VTOLs will become more akin to automobiles than aircraft.”
The white paper addressed the aircraft (safety, noise, emissions, performance, and certification); infrastructure (charging and operations); the passenger experience (requesting a ride, boarding, and the flight itself); economics and the economic model intended to make air taxis a viable business; and next steps. These subjects collectively represented the path to market for air taxis. With the Uber Elevate white paper, the new “urban air mobility” industry was born. It was the most comprehensive effort in history to fulfill the 90-year-old concept of “flying cars”, and the most promising strategy to have a meaningful impact on reducing traffic congestion and improving the level of convenience and efficiency in metro areas around the world.
This was not a revelation or news to many people in the aviation business or the aircraft manufacturing industry, because over the past few decades we saw the incremental development of technology that could make this a reality and bring VTOL aircraft to your doorstep. Ever since Amazon’s ads began running in 2013, the public was also aware of drones delivering packages and pizza to your front door. Sitting at a desk thousands of miles from Iraq and Afghanistan, Army “pilots” had been controlling autonomous weaponized drones to surveille and kill the enemy during the wars there. Before the white paper was issued, a handful of aircraft designers had already started designing and building all-electric air taxis. For example, the German air taxi company Volocopter was founded in 2011. In 2015, Airbus announced the development of the Vahana air taxi. Google co-founder Larry Page had founded two startups to develop air taxis. There were other indications on many levels and in many segments of the industry that the world was on the verge of some revolutionary developments in civilian aircraft.
Uber’s plan began to generate tremendous interest throughout the investor community and the aviation industry. With its proven expertise in moving people around with sophisticated Apps, Uber already had credibility. But by its written “promise” in the white paper, Uber had reached a new level by committing to manufacturers, suppliers, and vendors that Uber itself would purchase, lease, or use those products and services directly or indirectly. Uber Elevate sent out a “demand signal”, as journalist Graham Warwick later described it in an Aviation Week article, so much so that investments by companies, VCs, and others developing air taxis and the would-be vendors and consultants supporting those OEMs would reach billions of dollars over the ensuing years. Uber made it known that it wanted to be the prime customer of all-electric VTOL manned and unmanned aircraft. Startups popped up in the U.S., Europe, and China. Designs and prototypes of numerous configurations of air taxis began to accelerate around the world. Following its ground transportation business model, Uber wasn’t intending to pay for eVTOL design or development, but it was prepared to buy prototypes from manufacturers or work with leasing companies to acquire an inventory of aircraft. Uber would be the network manager and participate in securing the FAA’s approval of airspace. It also planned to spur development of infrastructure, as well as develop its own software to manage eVTOLs on the “Elevate Network” that would connect customers to air taxi operators and aircraft landing facilities.
Uber began developing strategic business relationships with the key aircraft manufacturers, in order for Uber to have multiple options for aircraft. It also began working closely with the FAA, NASA, cities, and experts on air space management in order to lay the regulatory groundwork necessary to turn Uber’s vision into reality.
A period of irrational exuberance
Within just six months after the Uber Elevate white paper was released, Uber Elevate’s vision reached enormous global proportions, and was going viral within the aviation community. I attended the “Summit” that Uber hosted in Dallas from April 25-27, 2017. Uber invited individuals and companies throughout the traditional aircraft industry and people in the VTOL aircraft space to attend the gathering. The purpose of the conference was to generate communication, for networking, and to publicly announce major alliances and developments. Here are some excerpts from an article by Aviation Week’s Graham Warwick, written the day after the conference ended.
Uber Unveils 2020 Plans For Electric VTOL Air-Taxis Demos
Uber’s urban air transport vision advances
April 28, 2017 Graham Warwick | Aviation Week & Space Technology
In October 2016, ride-hailing giant Uber gave the embryonic electric-aircraft market what it needed most—a demand signal. The transportation services company released a white paper detailing its concept for Uber Elevate, a network of vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft for urban air mobility. In Dallas on April 25-27, Uber took the next step, announcing partnerships with vehicle developers and infrastructure providers to support electric VTOL, or eVTOL, flight demonstrations in Dallas and Dubai in 2020. Full-scale services are planned to be launched in 2023.
At the Uber Elevate Summit, the company brought together aircraft developers, technology providers, researchers, regulators and investors in a bid to kickstart the development of an ecosystem that will enable it to deploy thousands of eVTOL air taxis across major cities to overcome congestion.
Uber’s stated goal is to develop a network of aircraft and vertiports that can carry up to four passengers short ranges, up to 50 miles, at a higher speed than cars—around 150 mph—but with trip costs roughly similar to the UberX private car service. Long term, Uber wants a passenger-mile cost lower than that of owning a car, as it pursues a vision of ridding cities of gridlocked traffic and parking spaces.
To enable urban eVTOL operations, Uber will also work with NASA, the FAA and National Air Traffic Controllers Association to extend the Unmanned Traffic Management construct now under development for low-altitude operation of small unmanned aircraft. “We will develop and test scheduling, sequencing and separation methods with the FAA and NASA,” says Jeff Holden, Uber chief product officer.
UberAIR eVTOL operations will begin with piloted aircraft, but move over time to optionally piloted and eventually to fully autonomous flights to minimize costs. Uber’s initial goal is for flying in its eVTOL aircraft to be twice as safe as driving a car and four times safer than FAA Part 135 air taxis, through redundancy possible with electric propulsion.
Warwick’s article went on to explain that both battery and charging technologies need further development to meet Uber’s goals, and that Uber had entered into a business relationship with Chargepoint, the largest provider of electric vehicle charging, to develop charging stations that will enable electric VTOL aircraft to be recharged and turned around rapidly — the key to achieving the low trip-cost targets set by Uber.
The article quoted Jeff Holden on Uber teaming up with the cities of Dallas and Dubai to launch the service. Dubai would later drop out from the early collaborators and be replaced with Melbourne, Australia. In Dallas, said Holden, the company also partnered with billionaire property developer Ross Perot Jr., for the vertiports for air taxi flights from the new Dallas Cowboys team headquarters to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport – six minutes versus one hour and ten minutes for the UberX private-car service. Perot told Warwick that vertiports would be built at the American Airlines Center arena in Dallas, the existing heliport at the convention center in downtown Dallas, and another in downtown Fort Worth. Perot also proposed using his Fort Worth Alliance Airport as a manufacturing, training, and maintenance center to support Uber Elevate. Other potential vertiport locations were planned to be constructed atop buildings and in rooftop parking lots.
Warwick’s article also captured and summarized the financing issues addressed during the Uber Elevate Summit in April 2017 and swirling around the nascent industry:
Venture capitalists at the Elevate Summit were cautiously optimistic about Uber’s plans. “Our two biggest concerns are market risk and regulatory risk. Uber’s commitment reduces a lot of the market risk,” says Michael Linse, founder and managing director of Linse Capital, announcing the creation of a fund, Levitate Capital, specifically to invest in early-stage companies within the eVTOL ecosystem. “The regulatory risk is what we are most worried about, and Uber’s policy team is focused on that.”
Bilal Zuberi, partner at Lux Capital, likens the impact of Uber’s Elevate white paper to Jeff Bezos’s unveiling of Amazon’s Prime Air delivery drone on TV in 2013, which catalyzed an industry. He also welcomes the collaborative approach. “That Uber has kept this as an open ecosystem is a positive thing,” he says.
Vehicle certification and production, passenger acceptance and airspace and infrastructure buildout will all pace Uber’s Elevate plans, but investors clearly see the potential. ”This is an enormous opportunity,” says Alexander Asseily, entrepreneur partner in Atomico, a backer of eVTOL developer Lilium. “Transportation of all types is a $2.5 trillion market,” he says. “If this takes just a part of that market, that is a lot of value.”
Round Two…
Eleven months after our trip to Uber’s offices, we had a second encounter with Uber. I had reached out to Jeff Holden right after Uber issued the white paper and offered to bring him up to date on XTI Aircraft Company’s TriFan 600 development program. I proposed the transition strategy again, with Uber using the TriFan 400 as the ideal VTOL aircraft to move customers to their destinations. Holden forwarded my email to Nikhil Goel, Product Manager in the Uber Elevate program and co-author (along with Holden) of the Uber Elevate white paper. Nikhil sent us an email inviting us to resume the conversation. “We’re glad you enjoyed the read!” he said.
Dennis, Andy Woglom (our former CFO), and I met with Nikhil virtually just a week after the white paper went public. Nikhil was on the other end of our large screen in the conference room along with Mark Moore from NASA. At the time, Moore had been an aeronautical engineer for 32 years at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, where he was a strong proponent for advanced vertical takeoff and landing concepts. Uber had been working closely with NASA and Moore, who was listed as a contributor on the white paper. Moore was focused on efforts to reduce the noise from propellers by placing them in a duct or shroud like those on XTI’s TriFan 600. A year later, Moore would become Uber’s Engineering Director of Elevate Vehicle Systems, and would move on from there to other positions in the eVTOL aircraft industry, continuing to apply the lessons learned from his many years with NASA trying to figure out solutions to the public’s vehement rejection of noisy helicopters in close proximity to people in urban communities.
During our video meeting, Jeff Holden was walking around the room at Uber’s offices, popping in and out of view in the background behind Nikhil, leaving and re-entering the room intermittently. He waived hello, but didn’t join the conversation.
The call ended as inconclusively as the meeting in San Francisco. Our team at XTI was committed to turbine engines and not interested in pivoting to try to develop an air taxi with battery power. We felt that XTI could have developed an excellent high powered TriFan 400 air taxi that would have fulfilled a period of transition for Uber Air. But that was not to be. There wasn’t any further communication between XTI and Uber.
Billions pour in
The $125 billion European giant aircraft manufacturer Airbus invested millions of its own funds to develop the Vahana urban taxi, and several million more for its CityAirbus aircraft. Airbus also opened a “disruptive innovation” venture capital fund based in Silicon Valley called A3 or “A-cubed”. Commentators wondered whether Airbus’s CEO, Tom Enders, was implementing serious strategic initiatives to remain competitive, or whether these steps were just a “lame attempt to look cool” as suggested by writer Antoine Gelain in an Aviation Week article in June 2017.
By the end of 2017, Boeing and Jet Blue invested several million in the German company Zunum which was developing a hybrid-electric airplane. Toyota invested in Joby. The list of wildly speculative investments and projects attracting millions continued until it reached around $5 billion by 2020, invested in about 150 separate aircraft development projects around the world.
This was a frenzied atmosphere involving collaboration and competition among thousands of people and hundreds of projects, each one attempting to out-do the next in an effort to rise to the top of the new industry. In the early years of this bold experiment – 2017 through 2020 — many new companies were formed and many different configurations of aircraft were being developed. In general, however, air taxis combine sets of rotors with forward propulsion, and most have wings for lift during cruise. Some configurations of these small rotorcraft have multiple sets of blades or wings with multiple sets of rotors, which provide vertical lift for takeoff and landing and then rotate for forward propulsion.
Joby Aviation’s eVTOL Air Taxi and Archer Aviation’s Midnight Model eVTOL
It was an explosion of innovation in the development of small civilian rotorcraft. Because these aircraft are all-electric, they don’t have much range. Rather, their sole mission is simple, efficient, inexpensive, and single-purpose short-range transportation.
This period was remarkably similar to the U.S. auto industry in its infancy in the early 1900s when hundreds of companies were designing automobiles and many companies were manufacturing them. The auto industry boom was soon followed by scores of these companies merging, going bankrupt, or consolidating under just a handful of names, which created General Motors. The number of surviving original equipment manufacturers (“OEMs”) was reduced to 30 before the Great Depression, to seven before World War II, and then to only GM, Ford, and Chrysler as the sole surviving U.S. automakers by the 1960s.
Will Uber make the rules?
At the January 2019 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Bell Helicopter unveiled its hybrid-electric Bell Nexus, with six ducted fans that rotate from VTOL to forward cruise mode, much like the TriFan 600 ducts and fans. This was a “violation” of Uber’s original sacred criteria by designing a hybrid-electric aircraft. Bell made it clear it would establish its own rules and wouldn’t follow the pack.
Then in March of 2019 at the annual Heli-Expo convention, Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation jumped into the urban air mobility fray in a major way, announcing its Matrix Technologies autonomy program. The company had been working on this highly sophisticated flight control system as foundational to enabling safe, reliable, and affordable urban air mobility on a large scale. Sikorsky was developing the Matrix computerized flight controls as an autonomous system that would be agnostic to the platform – that is, it could be used in any VTOL aircraft, including the Uber urban air taxis. Sikorsky was testing Matrix in its two best-selling conventional helicopters, the S-76 and S-92, while the company emphasized that the flight technology infrastructure – safety and autonomy rather than the platform – must be solved and perfected first, before anyone settles on an aircraft. Other companies scrambled to design the perfect air taxi and investors poured billions into the programs in support of the hardware – that is, the aircraft – but Sikorsky focused on the software for autonomy and safety and said they would address the aircraft later.
Sikorsky took a page out of the personal computer revolution in the fourth quarter of the 20th century, which began with the hardware makers having all the power: Texas Instruments, Commodore, Hewlett-Packard, and others. As time went on, it became apparent that the more valuable position to occupy was developer of the software, as Bill Gates had determined early on. The differentiator was the software.
Sikorsky’s entry into the air taxi business added significant credibility to the revolution. Similar to Bell’s deviation from all-electric, Sikorsky’s Matrix Technology program was also notably arms-length and independent from Uber. Sikorsky’s announcements, videos, and roll out of Matrix included teaming arrangements with Virgin Galactic and Otis Elevators and didn’t mention Uber or Uber’s version of urban air mobility. Uber had proven they could develop ride share software and hire drivers, but that didn’t yet earn them a leadership position next to legendary leaders Bell or Sikorsky in the VTOL aircraft industry.
Elevator companies and aircraft OEMs have few things in common beyond the fact they both employ engineers. Elevators are “low tech” compared to aircraft and particularly compared to autonomous aircraft. So I was curious why Sikorsky commissioned Otis Elevators to help them with their entry into the air taxi industry. At the time, Sikorsky and Otis were both subsidiaries of United Technologies. That might have been the simplest explanation. But Sikorsky said it turned to Otis because of its vast experience in moving billions of people each day around the world safely in “self-piloted” vertical people-movers (push an elevator button to control the destination). “In our view, urban air mobility and that future solution has the ability to connect destinations in the same way that an elevator first started connecting floors together, allowing builders to look upwards and build skyscrapers and the modern cities we have today,” said Jonathan Hartman, disruptive technologies lead for Sikorsky Innovations. Sikorsky was hoping that Otis’s experience would provide valuable insights in designing and operating autonomous aircraft. Sikorsky’s theory was that the transition from elevators with operators to “self-operated” elevators would provide insights into the same human psychology that will come into play as the general public is asked to transition from piloted aircraft to autonomous air taxis. Would this similarity be useful?
The transition to self-piloted elevators is part of the obscure and interesting history of elevators. Until the 1940s almost all elevators in high rise buildings required an operator employed by the building to designate the floor, start and stop it, and open and close the door. When elevator manufacturers attempted to fully automate elevators in the early 1940s, most people refused to ride in the elevator because they considered them unsafe. But in September 1945, 15,000 elevator operators went on strike in New York City, and other strikes followed in the late 1940s, thus prompting building owners and elevator manufacturers to develop elevators that could easily be operated by the passengers, including clearly marked buttons, automatic starting and stopping, recorded voices on how to operate the elevator, emergency stop buttons, and a telephone in the elevator to summon help if needed.
The transition to the modern elevator provided Sikorsky with these lessons: provide screens in autonomous air taxis, giving the passengers a view of the surrounding area and making it clear that the vehicle “sees” everything stationary and moving in the vicinity; and include emergency “buttons” and the ability to communicate with an operator who can help. Sikorsky’s choice of an alliance with Otis Elevators was highly unconventional. Since the March 2019 announcement of their collaboration, there haven’t been any updates. The final outcome remains to be seen – or at least made public – on the question of how Otis is fitting into Sikorsky’s overall Matrix Technology strategy and whether two companies with radically different cultures would get along.
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Sikorsky’s and Bell’s approaches to urban air mobility set the tone for the future. Joby, Archer, and many other air taxi OEMs began to dominate the direction of this nascent industry. Uber sold Uber Elevate to Joby and Uber’s influence has diminished somewhat over the past few years as it reduced its investments in Uber Air and focused on making its ground transportation service profitable. The Uber white paper was the catalyst and Uber’s software certainly will be important in the years to come. Uber’s persistence and growing support from the aircraft industry also prompted the FAA and other government agencies to create several initiatives and research programs, all ultimately focused on solving the challenges presented by the eVTOL revolution. That includes work on autonomous all-electric VTOL air taxis, and the FAA “EZ Fly Aircraft and Demonstrator” project, unveiled in December 2018, “… which may lead to simpler piloting for urban mobility…”, as well as NASA’s “Urban Air Mobility Grand Challenge”, “…for aircraft and systems developers to work with government on baseline airworthiness and qualification of urban air taxis”.
Thousands of participants continue to play a role in achieving Uber’s vision. The FAA, NASA, pilots associations, industry trade associations, the leading aircraft manufacturers, and universities continue to be heavily involved in addressing the long list of technical and regulatory challenges that air taxi developers are facing today as their aircraft inch closer to entering service.
A major milestone was achieved in October 2024, when the FAA issued its final rule for the qualifications and training that instructors and pilots must have to fly aircraft in the “powered-lift” category, which is specifically intended to clarify the certification basis for eVTOL air taxis. The rule also addresses their operational requirements, including minimum safe altitudes and required visibility. The rule is the final piece in the puzzle for introducing and certifying these aircraft in the near term. This will enable air taxi operators to use their aircraft for transporting passengers, and for operations such as air ambulance services and cargo operations. The FAA rule provides a comprehensive framework for certifying the initial group of instructors and pilots of air taxis. Importantly, the rule represents validation from the FAA that the agency is ready to accept and even cheer on the VTOL aircraft revolution and the radical changes it’s likely to bring to how we work, play, and live.
