Ever been stuck in traffic and wished you could just levitate and fly over the crawling cars? Flying cars of various sorts entered the popular imagination more than five decades ago. Think “The Jetsons.”
And now, a division of aerospace giant Airbus is getting ready to test a pilotless flying air taxi.
An Airbus outpost in Silicon Valley—known as A^3 or “A-cubed”—is currently assembling the first prototypes of a single seat, electric, self-flying shuttle craft called “Vahana”, an allusion to Hindu mythology and flying carpets.
Project executive Zach Lovering said the airframes will be shipped up to Oregon probably starting in October to begin flight testing in November at Eastern Oregon Regional Airport in Pendleton.
“It’s kind of the pivotal time where you have real hardware coming in. It’s the first time people are seeing these parts being bolted together,” Lovering said. “Today we have two full scale aircraft in our shop.”
Uber in the sky
Lovering does not foresee this personal aircraft being parked in your driveway. You would probably order it like a taxi or ride-hailing service to escape urban congestion.
“The idea is that you would call it up through an app and go to the nearest takeoff site,” he said. “In this case, we’ll start off with helipads and existing infrastructure before we expand to more modernized infrastructure.”
The aircraft takes off vertically, transitions to horizontal flight and lands vertically on a helipad. Paired sets of tilting wings fitted with a total of eight props jut out of the
Article source: http://nwnewsnetwork.org/post/your-future-commute-airbus-flying-robo-taxi-readied-testing-oregon