While walking home from school among the redwoods in the remote Santa Cruz Mountains, JoeBen Bevirt, the founder of Joby Aviation, yearned to build a flying car.
“This has been my dream since I was a little boy,” Bevirt said. “I wanted a better way for people to be able to get from A to B.”
Fifteen years ago, Bevirt founded Joby Aviation, a Santa Cruz-based company that’s developing an electric aircraft that lifts off and lands vertically like a helicopter, but flies with the efficiency of an airplane. The company is building a fleet for air taxi service in the Bay Area — and beyond — that would be nearly twice as fast as a helicopter, but 100 times quieter. The 5-seat aircraft could take to the skies as early as next year, company officials said.
In the 1970s, families on the space-age series “The Jetsons” were the only ones whipping through the sky in flying automobiles. But now, there’s plenty of competition.
One day, perhaps in the not so distant future, Bay Area commuters will be able to hail an electric plane just like they do an Uber. Already, there are one-passenger electric planes for short trips and joy rides. From Joby to LIFT and Wisk to Archer Air, technology is poised to allow people to get off the roads and into the sky not only for long trips but short jaunts to the office.
Joby’s aircraft is able to fly up to 100 miles on a single charge and travel up to 200 mph. The aircraft uses six propellers and four battery packs, and produces zero operating emissions, company officials said. Joby — which is working through the Federal Aviation Administration’s certification process, a key step before Bay Area residents can hop aboard — has flown more than 33,000 miles with its full-scale prototype of electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, dubbed eVTOL, over the last seven years.
Archer Aviation, which recently set up shop in San Jose, on Friday announced it had joined forces with Southwest Airlines for air taxi services. Archer already has Midnight, a flying taxi that is a piloted, 4-passenger aircraft designed to perform rapid back-to-back flights with minimal charge time between flights, the company said. Under the Southwest deal, Archer aircraft will have access to 14 California airports the airline serves.
Archer and Kilroy Realty Corp. also plan to develop a vertiport in the water adjacent to the development company’s offices at Oyster Point in South San Francisco. The vertiport will also be a “sea portal” that would offer electric-powered ferry services across the Bay, Archer said.
LIFT Aircraft out of Austin, Texas, is already renting its HEXA electric plane, which looks more like a large drone than an aircraft. The single-seat plane, which travels at 90 feet in the air and about 45 mph, goes 10 miles in about 10 minutes, CEO and founder Matt Chasen said.
The company has plans to bring the aircraft to the Bay Area so people can go for joyrides or short trips for about $250. The plane is considered an “ultralight vehicle” and does not need FAA approval to fly, but is banned from flying over congested areas like busy freeways.
The experience, which includes ground training and flying the aircraft in a virtual reality flight simulator, plus flights, lasts about 2 hours. Once trained, people pilot HEXA themselves under the remote guidance of flight instructors.
“We’re not just providing entertainment, we’re offering the chance to step into a new era of mobility,’’ Chasen said. “We’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in aviation.”
Airbus, Boeing and Embraer are also working on electric aircraft and Wisk Aero, which is based in Mountain View, last year became a fully-owned subsidiary of Boeing in a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Wisk is eying the end of the year for a first flight of its Generation 6 eVTOL while it also strives for certification of an autonomous aircraft by the end of the decade.
The surging electric air taxi industry is giving some transit experts pause, however.
Adam Cohen, a senior transportation researcher at UC Berkeley and the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University, said Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) — an umbrella term for a collection of new and emerging technologies for new aircraft types — may face barriers.
“There is a policy question of whether or not travelers should take air taxis to destinations that are already well served by public transit,” Cohen said. “And I think there is a question here that if we are investing in AAM, are we doing it at the expense of other public investments?”
Eric Allison, chief product officer at Joby, said the air taxi service the company plans to offer isn’t like any existing air travel. The company has developed an app that pairs passengers with available aircraft and landing sites.
In addition to operating domestically, the company plans to work with the U.S. Department of Defense and internationally in cities like Dubai, said Bonny Simi, Joby’s president of operations.
“We expect travelers to book on-demand and to be boarding an aircraft just minutes later, much like the experience of using ground-based ridesharing today. That required us to totally rethink the software and the operations of these aircraft,” Allison said.
The cost of a trip will be a little more than taking the higher-end Uber Black and may cost just a few dollars a mile, company officials said.
Still, “there are concerns about the affordability of these services and will they be available to the general public,” Cohen said.
Some planes are expected to take off and land on vertiports atop buildings, garages or heliports. According to estimates from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, “large, dense, high-income cities, such as New York or London, would need 85 to 100 takeoff and landing pads, which could be distributed among 20 to 30 vertiports.”
From Joby to its competitors, Cohen said communities and neighborhoods would need to buy in on where veritports are placed and how they would operate due to likely concerns about noise, privacy, visual pollution, energy use and emissions, and land use compatibility.
“It’s about potential community impact,” Cohen said. “I think we are likely to see operations to and from existing airports. I think you need to demonstrate viability and market demand before you can consider building a network of new infrastructure.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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