Autonomous flying vehicles are being prepared by Airbus! A team of engineers at Airbus is said to be developing autonomous flying taxis with the goal of flying over traffic to transport individual passengers and cargo in busy cities. The utopian vision may sound a bit exaggerated, but according to the company they plan to start testing a prototype vehicle at the end of 2017.
In the FORUM a corporate magazine of Airbus, the project executive, Mr. Rodin Lyasoff claims that “In just ten years, we could have programs on the market that will bring a revolution in urban mobility for millions of people.”
The project, called Vahana, started in February 2016, and is a division of the Airbus group that is based (where else?) in Silicon Valley. The vehicle's design is already complete, and now the engineers have begun developing the subsystems of the first test vehicle.
The idea of flying over traffic is wonderful, but there are many practical issues that need to be examined. The US regulatory authorities are very conservative with unmanned aircraft and autonomous vehicles, and thus the decade-long timeline does not appear realistic.
Furthermore, there are technical obstacles: the aircraft must definitely have a technology that allows it to “sense” and avoid which is still under development.
“This is one of the biggest problems we aim to solve as soon as possible,” says Lyasoff. Moreover, when (and if) air taxis are operational and legal, there will be no shift of traffic from the ground to the air;
Despite the challenges, however, the CEO of the Airbus Group, Tom Enders, is convinced that the company's plans are realistic.
“I am not a fan of Star Wars, but it's not crazy to imagine that one day our big cities will have flying cars along the roads in the sky” says.
“In a not-so-distant future, we will use our smartphones to book a fully automated flying taxi that lands outside our door. – Pilotless”
Photo: techcrunch.com
