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Uber is excited to announce a partnership with Mooney for large-scale deployment of electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles (VTOLs) in order to fulfill its mission of providing a safe, reliable transportation service to everyone, everywhere. The goal of this partnership is to enable users of a future Uber Elevate Network to request a Mooney electric VTOL.
Uber has signed a partnership with Embraer for large-scale deployment of electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles (VTOLs) in order to fulfill its mission of providing a safe, reliable transportation service to everyone, everywhere. The goal of this partnership is to enable users of a future Uber Elevate Network to request an Embraer electric VTOL.
Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority is partnering with Uber to launch a demonstration transportation network of vertical takeoff and landing vehicles (VTOLs) by 2020. As part of this partnership, Uber and Dubai RTA will conduct a joint study into pricing models, people movement, and determining where VTOL routes should be created in the city. The partnership will result in everything from hover and forward flight tests to actual flight operations in the Dubai area.
Our goal is to launch an Elevate flight demonstration with passengers in Dubai in conjunction with the World Expo in October of 2020.
Twenty years ago, in the March/April 1997 issue of Vertiflite, I published my first article. The 20-page “V/STOL: The First Half-Century” included the wheel of “V/STOL Aircraft and Propulsion Concepts,” which can now be found on the AHS Vertipedia site at www.vtol.org/wheel.
The article and the V/STOL Wheel catalogued the most prominent attempts to combine the vertical takeoff and landing capabilities of a helicopter with the high-speed forward flight of a fixed-wing aircraft.
An aviation gold rush is on. The belief that advances in electric propulsion and autonomy technologies are making cheap, quiet and even fully automated air taxis as feasible as automatic elevators is fueling a frenzy of design and development of small electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. Some e-VTOLs are already flying. Others will be soon. Many more are on the drawing boards.
The hurdles are high and there is ample reason for skepticism, but tech entrepreneurs are pushing electric aircraft ideas that could lead to a new era for vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, aka VTOLs (pronounced VEE-talls). The latest entrant is Uber Technologies, the $68B cell phone app rent-a-ride provider, which recently announced it will invest in and promote “on-demand aviation.” Uber’s vision — shared by a growing number of aviation experts — is to use electric-powered VTOL (e-VTOL) aircraft as “air taxis” to revolutionize transport in and around big cities.
The third annual Joint Workshop on Transformative Vertical Flight Concepts, with the subtitle of “Enabling New Flight Concepts through Novel Propulsion and Energy Architectures,” was held on Sept. 29-30 in Hartford, Connecticut. The workshop series has brought together vehicle developers, technology companies, government scientists and regulators, investors, and potential electric VTOL customers/operators
During the AHS-sponsored reception, Nikhil Goel, a product manager of special projects at Uber Technologies, commented on Uber's plans for moving urban transportation to the skies with electric VTOL. A transcription follows:
At Uber, we are super obsessed with cities, improving cities, unlocking their immense value through urban mobility.And to us urban mobility means a couple of things. One, it means cutting congestion. It means eliminating parking, which can take up to a third of urban real estate, and dramatically reducing pollution.
In an onstage interview with me today at the Nantucket Conference, Uber products head Jeff Holden said the fast-growing ride sharing company was seriously looking at a new form of transportation to offer its customers: Short-haul flying in cities.
