VERTICAL

Flying taxi is successfully tested by CEO of energy company

The founder of one of the UK's energy supply companies has a new company and wants it to offer intermunicipal services with flying taxis that take off and land vertically within the next four years. Vertical Aerospace, which is headed by CEO Stephen Fitzpatrick and has former Airbus and Boeing staff members, completed his first successful test flight with an unmanned vehicle prototype."We focus on the market for short-haul routes between cities," he said in an interview. "We expect our piloted vehicles to take people from one city to another and pick up near their home, not necessarily at airports."Fitzpatrick's company, which he himself financed, is not the only participant in the global race to produce vertical take-off and landing vehicles, and many of the competitors have a greater initial advantage. A Deloitte study published in January described the research and prototyping of passenger drones and flying cars dating back to the early 1980s, and almost all of them are not yet in production.Airbus and Boeing have very advanced plans for flying cabs, and Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg said in January that "real prototypes" are being built with the idea that autonomous craft could hover on city streets within a decade. The government of Japan projects a similar deadline, as does the CEO of Uber.But Fitzpatrick, who is also CEO of Ovo Energy, is not new to the world of high-tech vehicles and is confident that his team of engineers can put their plans into practice. In 2015, a year before he founded Vertical Aerospace, he bought the Formula 1 Manor Marussia team days before managers auctioned their race cars after a financial crisis.
"I saw a business opportunity in applying Formula One technology to aviation to revolutionize short-haul transport and shorten routes like London-Madrid by eliminating the need to take off from a lane," he said.The company said the test flight of its all-electric, unmanned prototype, which looks like a car-sized version of many popular drones, was successfully demonstrated at a small English airport in June. It could only fly for about five minutes, a spokeswoman for the startup said, but is capable of speeds up to 80 km / h. It is projected that piloted models will travel distances of 800 kilometers with a small number of passengers.The UK Civil Aviation Authority has granted permission for Vertical Aerospace to conduct the test flight, but there are huge regulatory hurdles for any company investing in this technology. For example, what is the reasonable amount of reserve power required for electric vehicles capable of flying? Do pilots need a license? In what part of the sky can they fly?"We believe it will take a long time for regulatory bodies and passengers to feel comfortable with this," said Fitzpatrick. "Proving that technology works is very different from proving that it never fails, which is what aircraft regulation requires."


Nate Lanxon, Marie Mawad and mundophone