BOEING

Company wants to market flying car in the 2020s
The dream of flying cars already existed before Boeing started manufacturing aircraft. Now a view taken from the pages of Jules Verne is close enough to occupy the current plans of the Boeing leadership."I believe this will happen faster than any of us imagine," CEO Dennis Muilenburg said in an interview. "Real prototypes are being built now. So the technology is very viable. "The new era of urban flying vehicles is close enough for the man who oversees passenger planes and spacecraft to begin tracing what he calls the" road rules "for three-dimensional highways.Stand-alone air taxis and parcel delivery drones have the potential to be the next disruptive event to revolutionize the aerospace industry, with Boeing and its archrival Airbus among the construction companies striving to achieve these goals quickly.
 Muilenburg sees this as a rare opportunity to formulate a new transport ecosystem. Autopilot aircraft fleets could be hovering over city streets and dodging buildings within a decade, he said. The drivers of these advances are a large amount of investment, the rapid evolution of autonomy, and the increasing frustration of the consumer with traffic jams.

Projections
Other observers share their aggressive timeline. According to a new study by Deloitte, electric passenger drones, with two to five seats and seeming cousins distant from current helicopters, could reach the market within two years. Until the early 2020s, according to the study, flying cars could go to an airport through the streets and then accelerate on the runways and take off.
Even NASA is studying the feasibility of what the US government space agency calls "Urban Air Mobility." But for some of these technologies to be consolidated, regulators first need to address a number of fundamental safety issues, starting with how to manage conventional traffic and that of new flying machines.

Since Muilenburg became CEO in mid-2015, Boeing has expanded its line of futuristic aircraft and has created a venture capital arm called HorizonX to encourage promising technologies such as electric hybrid propulsion. The largest US manufacturing company is also investing in digital design tools and 3D printers that can quickly transform aircraft concepts into working models.

Source:exame.com