No traffic jams now. Japanese flying taxi took to the sky with a man on board

The device, which looked like a motorcycle with propellers, rose several feet (1-2 meters) above the ground and hung in a protected area for four minutes.

Tomohiro Fukuzawa, who leads the SkyDrive project, said he hoped the flying car could be turned into a real product by 2023, but he acknowledged that safety is critical.

“More than 100 projects for the creation of flying cars in the world, only a few have achieved success, that is, flight with human participation. I hope that many people will want to ride it and feel safe”, – he said.

So far, the car can only fly 5 to 10 minutes, but if the flight time is extended to 30 minutes, it has more options, including exporting to places like China, Fukuzawa said.

Unlike airplanes and helicopters, eVTOL, or “electric vertical take-off and landing”, at least in principle, offers fast private point-to-point travel.

They can help to get rid of traffic congestion, as well as the cost of hiring pilots, and they could fly automatically. Battery sizes, air traffic control and other infrastructure issues are cited as major barriers to the development of this mode of transport.

“A lot has to happen. If they are $ 10,000,000, nobody will buy it. If they fly for 5 minutes, nobody will buy it. If they fall from the sky from time to time, no one will buy them, ”said Sanjeev Singh, a professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University who is also working on the eVTOL aircraft for the Near Earth Autonomy project.

Source: nv.ua