TRANSPORT: The Flying Taxi will carry a single passenger or packages …
“There has been a century of urban transport that went under the ground. Now we have the technological means to raise them in the air.” The image is beautiful and the words chosen to dream, but “Vahana” the flying taxi project from Airbus, is solid, says Airbus.
Monday, Tom Enders, the boss of the company, repeated at the DLD conference in Munich to take “very seriously” the development of its unmanned flying machine, capable of taking off vertically adjustable with four rotors, to transport a single passenger or packages through the air. According to him, a prototype of the air taxi whose images were unveiled last October could also “walk the Sky” by the end of the year, paving the way for commercial exploitation “from 2021”.
Decongest cities
Stressing its commitment to this mode of transport that still belongs to science fiction, Tom Enders noted that it would have extremely beneficial effects, allowing to decongest cities and even to reinvent the point of view of the urbanism “when you can fly, you do not need to spend billions in roads and concrete bridges.”
“If we ignore these developments, significant market share we lose our industry,” he even said. Other players, such as Uber, indeed reflect their own transportation solutions to leave the ground.
