On the Cusp of a Crowded City Sky
Image @ Eve Air Mobility
In a thought exercise, I look out the window of my apartment in New York City, and I imagine, on this beautiful clear day, gazing up, and above the city the sky is full of small aircraft. They are hopping in meshy linear formations through air corridors and diverting to land on and take off from the top of buildings and specially dedicated landing areas. These aircraft presumably make little noise, so the rumble of traffic has diminished considerably. However, a nonstop humming looms above our heads. Hundreds of traveling shadows are projected by these flying artifacts on all the city's surfaces, and the sky is never clear of buzzing fly-like moving aircraft. A new technology has been interjected into our lives: the electrical vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOLs.) With it our cityscape has radically changed, becoming nastier and cluttered, and we have been robbed of our basic right to look up and see a clear view above us. What sounds like science fiction today is ripe to begin appearing soon in our reality, disrupting our customs and day-to-day lives.
Design in mobility and transportation is undergoing significant changes and is brimming with innovations. Predictions abound that the pace of these innovations will soon experience drastic acceleration, so we can expect considerable transformations in the landscape of cities. When these innovations manifest themselves in an aggregated way, the necessary adjustments will have to be massive, and in some cases, disruptive.
eVTOLs are expected to be the first to begin erupting into our everyday world. They are small units for short distance intra-city and regional transportation of up to four people. These flying vehicles are in the helicopter family, but they radically differ from them. They comprise a group of flying vehicles driven by new engineering technologies and powered by electricity that instead of rolling down a runway, land and take off vertically.
eVTOLs will drastically alter the way we live, work, and commute, more so than motorization as a means of transportation at the beginning of the 20th century reshaped the lives of people when mobility was driven by horse-drawn carriages. These alterations will not necessarily be for the better. The eVTOLs are designed to offer faster movements from A to B in intracity and regional transportation for either individuals or very small groups of people. Their presence will be taking over air space in cities, suburbs and beyond. eVTOLs are being designed to offer relief to traffic-clogged metropolitan areas. It is also claimed that there will be a substantial reduction of carbon emissions. The air-taxi transportation field is taking most of the attention, because it is expected to be massive.
This technology is coming and is already unavoidable; we cannot stop it. The autonomous aircraft urban market is budding but already generating intense enthusiasm in the business realm. It is speculated that the trade may represent 1.5 trillion dollars by 2040. Partnerships and fundraising between eVTOL manufacturers and major corporations are booming. Early this year, Joby Aviation got funding from Uber, BlackRock, and Fidelity. It also developed a strategic partnership with Toyota and Uber’s new eVTOL division, Uber Elevate. UPS is planning to buy eVTOL aircraft from Beta Technologies. The germane eVTOL firm Volocopter got investments from Daimler, Intel, Continental, and Geely and is working with Singapore to launch air-taxi services. In addition, aerospace corporations such as Airbus, Boeing, and Bell Helicopter have each developed their own craft: CityAirbus and Vahana; Wisk; and Nexus, respectively. These developments will soon appear in our footsteps: many eVTOL developers are aiming to launch by 2024 and potentially establish networks by 2030.
The picture will get very complex. With the exponential development of eVTOLs, a new network to support them is already being envisioned. These aircraft need to be served by a new type of specialized infrastructure to be operational: the vertiports. These landing and takeoff platforms, claimed to be a new model of green infrastructure, can be placed on existing building tops, parking garages, or other unused urban spaces. Additionally, the vertiports will have to accommodate the needs of multiple eVTOL sizes, designs, and charging types. What can we imagine being the downside of the new eVTOL? Possible scenarios include significant disruptions in daily life when the weather gets nasty, overcrowded vertiports, crowds of people going up and down buildings, and the ensuing increase in robberies and assaults.
When learning more in-depth about all the elements that need to be coordinated for this new system to work properly, the scene gets increasingly intricate and hard to figure out. First, safety is of paramount concern to develop public trust and user confidence, and rigorous testing needs to be conducted to convince the public that eVTOLs are more convenient than traditional modes of transportation. However, safety will not be a guarantee until years of operation have passed. Additionally, an array of technical problems needs solutions. Among them is the need to upgrade electrical grids to supply the increased demands for battery charging and cooling. When thinking of implementation at a large scale, the challenges multiply to build an entirely new ecosystem that needs to run smoothly: laws and regulations need to be put in place to manage new circulations in the airspace, and response to weather patterns needs to be analyzed. Dedicated air corridors, maintenance, supply chain, and noise standards need to be solved. Additionally, storage facilities must be conceived, and near full automation of eVTOLs developed to coordinate the complex network properly. The number of objects circulating will require sophisticated technology to avoid the dynamic obstacles a flight will encounter, such as buildings, birds, drones, jetpacks, helicopters, and planes. That includes considering safety for people on the ground and inside buildings, for which GPS must be updated to monitor accurate air traffic and location detection and provide users with precision in positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services. Crashes are going to happen in midair when malfunctions will suddenly take place, and people on the ground are going to get hurt. We can easily imagine eVTOLs suddenly landing in our living room after crashing through our window. Not to mention the new types of robberies and harassments that the eVTOLS will make possible, with people able to land on a balcony.
Before motorization, transportation in big cities like New York was dominated by horse-drawn carriages, which performed all sorts of essential tasks necessary to make city life feasible. It also produced a tremendous amount of manure and significant human loss (in 1900, 200 deaths compare to 274 in 2021). With the advent of the automobile came air pollution and car accidents. All indicates that the eVTOLs are becoming a reality and with all certainty they will bring along an array of challenges that are difficult to pin down at this stage of their evolution. This technology might be efficient if it works but may be dramatically chaotic in cases of malfunction. Even if it were efficient in terms of transportation, this is a new medium that opens the doors to a series of possible new modalities of accidents, crimes, and disruptions that cannot be anticipated. Whatever it might be, the eVTOLs will bring along some adverse consequences, not least of which falling from the sky.
