Urban air mobility has the potential to change how people get around, but it is not yet a disruptive technology
of the strangest flying machines yet built. Its body resembles a small whale—though, when flying, the whale is facing backwards. Attached to its nose and tail are two wings, angled to the horizontal. Each wing sports four propellers. Seen from below when airborne, the thing resembles a slightly flattened letter. Its inventor, Marcus Leng, and its sponsor, Larry Page, co-founder of Google, hope it will spawn a transport revolution.
Urban air mobility is the buzz phrase behind Blackfly. And the firm is not alone. A bunch of companies, many of them, like Opener, founded specifically for the purpose, have come up recently with a plethora of designs for single or two-seat personal air transport. That is catnip to technophiles like Mr Page.
Another firm building a scaled-up drone is Volocopter, a German startup. The two-seat cabin of its eponymous vehicle is attached below an 18-propeller structure that resembles a spider’s web built of curved strands of silk. This, like eHang’s craft, will offer a preprogrammed point-to-point service for avoiding traffic jams. A second German company, Lilium, has another approach.
Unlike everything else discussed in this report—even the return of supersonic passenger aircraft—urban air mobility has the potential to change the way society works. It is not exactly a disruptive technology, at least not yet. Planes, trains and automobiles will continue to run more or less as now. But if flying cars really take off, as it were, it would be a transformative technology, for local transport networks would surely change quite a lot.
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