Mobility of the future
Drone taxis – will the sky become a traffic route?
11.09.2020
When there’s no more space on Earth, it’s time to fly: Many companies and dozens of start-ups are working on drones that can transport people. Initially with a pilot, later autonomously – that’s the vision. Conclusion: The implementation of the concept is uncertain – and hardly suitable for mass use in the medium term.
You’re sitting on the beach. Gentle breeze, deep red sunset. Wonderfully relaxing – until a high-frequency hum affects your eardrum. Yes, drones can be extremely annoying, especially when package tourists capture every conceivable holiday moment with them. But in other ways, they do a lot of good things. For example, in supporting rescue services and the police, caring for disaster victims, detecting toxic contamination or monitoring harvests. In order to provide guidelines for “mini helicopters,” Switzerland will soon adopt the new European drone regulation. And only recently, it has agreed on closer cooperation with the US Aviation Administration. So far, so good. The question remains: What about the “big siblings” – air taxis as part of the transport system?
Sounding company names in the race
The European Union already invested in research projects in 2011 to develop technologies for air passenger transport. In the “MyCopter” project, scientists worked on control systems, operating interfaces and navigation systems. In the meantime, the long list of companies involved in air transport includes names such as Airbus, Bosch, Intel, Audi, Daimler and Microsoft. In addition, there are many start-ups such as Daimler subsidiary Volocopter, whose corporate promise symbolises all the endeavours of the industry: “We bring urban air mobility to life.”
“Taxis of the skies” are particularly suitable for large cities …
The world is faced with a steadily growing need for mobility. The new and promising forms of locomotion can be condensed into four keywords: networked, digital, post-fossil, shared. All criteria that the taxi drones meet. They also have a simple but decisive advantage over other modes of transport, says Michel Guillaume of the Mobility and Transportation Conference at the Zurich University of Engineering: “There is still plenty of space up to an altitude of 150 meters.” This space is all the more important when you consider that an estimated 60% of the world’s population (i.e. up to 5 billion people) will live in cities by 2030. There are also cities such as Singapore, Dubai, Dallas and Los Angeles where manned test flights have already taken place and where commercial flight operations are due to begin soon. This is where the potential lies: in cities with a population of five million or more.
«Networked, digital, post-fossil and shared – that’s the mobility of the future. »Michel Guillaume from the Mobility and Transportation Conference
… in emerging and developing countries
The overcrowded megacities in emerging and developing countries are particularly interesting markets. “5,000 to 10,000 senior managers with extremely packed diaries are desperately searching for mobility answers in cities of between 20 and 30 million,” explains Stefan Levadak from the Institute of Flight Systems Engineering in Braunschweig. In São Paulo, for example, helicopter flights are fully booked – at prices of over 1,000 dollars per quarter of an hour. On the other hand, experts rate the potential for Western industrialised nations to be significantly smaller. After all, local public transport is usually already well developed here. Air taxis are likely to be a niche market in countries such as Germany and Switzerland.
«Air taxis will not become a means of mass transport in the short to medium term.»Thomas Jarzombek, German Federal Government Coordinator for Aerospace
Split into fans and skeptics
As always with leaps in innovation and technology, society is divided. Here enthusiastic fans, there vehement skeptics. The often-mentioned advantages of air taxis “less congestion, less exhaust emissions, time savings on short journeys” are in fact offset by a multitude of concerns and problems that need to be solved. Self-learning software is currently considered to be the biggest challenge. Other topics include basic technology (car or helicopter technology?), energy supply, legal aspects (liability, data protection), safety, the issue of noise, weather situations such as heavy rain or storms, the provision of sufficient take-off and landing sites and the high costs. Above all of this, the basic question is: Are humans prepared to hand over full control to a flying machine without a pilot?
Not the big breakthrough for the time being – but who knows?
It seems clear that the acceleration of short- and medium-distance journeys by air taxis will initially only become a reality for a small, affluent group of customers in urban environments. Whether they will ever become a serious part of urban urban transport is “by no means predetermined,” says the Berlin-based mobility researcher Andreas Knie, for example. What’s more, as the number of air taxis rises, there is an increased risk that traffic jams, such as those on the road today, will also occur in the air. But who knows exactly what the long-term future will bring? Let us recall the famous quote of Kaiser Wilhelm II: “I believe in the horse. The automobile is a temporary phenomenon.”