When will Air Cabs become Reality?

Air cabs have been researched and developed for years. But how far is the vision from reality?

At the Bruchsal-based flight cab startup Volocopter, people talk about the "Dorothee Bär moment": the moment a few months after the last federal election in 2017, when CSU politician Bär spoke about the possibility of flight cabs being able to fly from A to B in the future shortly after her appointment as Minister of State for Digitalization in March 2018. She earned a lot of gloating for the sentence. But the idea of autonomous flying machines that could relieve traffic congestion has long been on the minds of many companies, and at the time catapulted the topic unexpectedly into the public eye. Now the next federal election is coming up - how far have the utopias of yesteryear progressed?

"There are already many technically mature prototypes, but reality checks are still lacking," says Michael Decker of the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS) in Karlsruhe. That's because many questions remain unanswered: "For example, where would they be allowed to take off and land? What about noise during the day or at night, given Germany's already very strict guideline values?"

He also says a big question is whether or not the aircraft will have a pilot on board: "If the device flies completely autonomously, then some acceptance issues already come into play," he says. "On a sunny and windless day, it might feel good, but in a thunderstorm or storm, it's likely to quickly make some people uncomfortable."

Acceptance is indeed still lacking, as researchers at the Stuttgart-based Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering (IAO) found in a user survey in Germany, the U.S. and South Korea. According to the study, just under 40 percent of respondents in Germany would not board an autonomous air cab, and a good 28 percent would find it at least rather unlikely. Instead, fears and apprehensions prevailed across all age groups. The conclusion of the study, published in February of this year, is that autonomous air cabs for transporting people in cities should still be considered more of a hype topic.

"We are aware of the critical acceptance studies," counters Florian Reuter, CEO of Volocopter - and counters this. A study conducted by the Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences in 2019 shows that acceptance is far higher once respondents themselves have had the opportunity to see an air cab fly, he says. In December 2019, a Volocopter flight cab had flown for the first time in front of an audience in a European city in Stuttgart. Afterwards, around 1,200 of the 12,000 spectators were surveyed - 67 percent had reportedly described the use of a flight cab as probable to very probable.

The Bruchsal-based company has been working on the subject of air cabs for more than ten years, "we are the pioneers in this field, no one can fool us that quickly," says Reuter. Volocopter wants to offer commercial connections in time for the 2024 Olympics in Paris - if the authorities there play ball, he says. "There are still some national confirmations needed." Volocopter wants to clear the final hurdle by the end of 2023, after which it will enter trial operations - "then we want to be able to fly to some Olympic venues from the airport."

Reuter, however, wants to take concerns about autonomous cabs seriously in principle. "We're flying with a pilot first, so you have to break the ice," he says. He also says authorities, who must regulate airspace, feel more comfortable with a pilot on board, "because the legal framework for fully autonomous operation doesn't exist yet."

Air cab projects around the globe are numerous, with estimates from experts ranging from 100 to 120. Many companies are involved in the segment - as are Airbus, Daimler and Volkswagen, for example. The Bavarian start-up Lilium also wants to go into series production with its electric flying machines in a few years and has just made its debut on the U.S. stock market.

However, Decker believes that many of the key prerequisites for commercial flights are still lacking: Neither are there enough take-off and landing sites, nor is there an effective airspace management system that could navigate thousands or even tens of thousands of air cabs over cities at some point in the future. Projects at the European level such as SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) have been researching this for years.

A completely different question is that of cost. In the long run, flying with an air cab will be comparable to the price of a cab ride, says Reuter. But that would require a sufficient number of passengers - and when that will be is written in the stars. That's because Decker of the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS) in Karlsruhe, Germany, wouldn't get into an autonomous air cab just yet: "There are still too many imponderables for that."