The daily commute is a grind for millions of people, whether it is into Manhattan, Tokyo or along the E11 from Dubai to Abu Dhabi.
But a radical solution of the kind you would normally expect to see in a sci-fi movie could be on the horizon courtesy of Airbus.
It revealed in its report, Future of urban mobility: My kind of flyover, that it is trying to create an autonomous flying vehicle platform for individual passenger and cargo transport. In other words, a flying taxi.
Flight tests of the first vehicle prototype are slated for the end of next year.
“Many of the technologies needed, such as batteries, motors and avionics, are most of the way there,” said Rodin Lyasoff, the project executive of A3 – Airbus Group’s innovation unit.
The project is known as Vahana and will need reliable sense-and-avoid technology, which is being introduced in cars by tech companies such as Google.
The report said that transport service providers are one target group for such vehicles, with a system that could operate in a similar way to car-sharing applications in which travellers book a vehicle through a smartphone app. More info
By Ian Oxborrow www.thenational.ae
