LISBON—Uber now has its eyes on the skies. In a talk Wednesday morning at the Web Summit conference here, chief product officer Jeff Holden outlined the ride-hailing firm’s plans to take commuters across major cities in electric-powered air taxis by 2020, starting in Los Angeles.
But its plans to have four-passenger, vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft zip above skyscrapers faces a major obstacle that Holden brushed off during that 25-minute presentation.
Traffic is a problem in the sky, too
As part of what it’s also called its Elevate project, Uber is banking on a major reengineering of the air-traffic control system — the current one isn’t geared to handle the flocks of new aircraft that Uber envisions.
“We need to handle a lot more air traffic flying over cities than has ever been done before,” Holden said. “We need a foundational reboot of the air-traffic system.”
Uber plans to do that by putting its UberAir operations into an existing NASA project to open up the nation’s airspace to drone traffic called UTM (for Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management). But UTM is still far from completion, and Uber’s piloted vehicles will be far larger and heavier than any drone.
A longtime aviation analyst’s take: Good luck with that.
Bob Mann, president of the airline consulting firm R.W. Mann & Co., called Uber’s 2020 goal “purely aspirational, but then that’s Uber.”
He wrote in an e-mail that integrating commercial UberAir service into the existing air system would start without a “vision, protocol or procedure.” Uber might be able to begin commercial flights in time for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles — “but most likely beyond that time,” he added.
Indeed, the history of past attempts to modernize the air-traffic control system is full of delays. And the air is worse than the roads in one important aspect: Uber can’t just start service first and ask permission later.
Beyond helicopters
The rest of Uber’s aerial effort seems better-grounded. Holden pitched it as both a logical response to big-city traffic getting worse all the time and an outgrowth of its earlier venture into aerial transportation with its UberChopper service.
Holden said traditional helicopters will never work for more than luxury commuting: They are too noisy, not safe enough, too polluting and too expensive.
“We need an entirely new kind of aircraft,” Holden said.
So instead of a helicopter’s one large rotor or the two massive, rotating propellers of a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) plane like the Boeing (BA) V-22 Osprey, Uber’s four-passenger air taxi will take to the air with six electrically-driven rotors.