Earlier this year, Uber announced that it plans to have flying taxis in the air by the year 2020. Now it seems the company has already begun prepping, by participating in a joint partnership with NASA to develop software that would manage those airborne taxi routes.
Uber, on Wednesday, announced its first official contract with NASA covering low-altitude airspace. The software being developed will work similar to Uber¡¯s current ride-hailing app, except it¡¯ll be limited to the company¡¯s flight division services.
Uber¡¯s Chief Product Officer Jeff Holden also said the company will begin testing four-passenger flying taxis across Los Angeles in 2020. Once the vehicles are cruising across the skies at 322 km/h without a hitch, that testing will be expanded to Fort Worth in Texas.
Basically, Uber is doing what it can to get approvals from aviation regulators in place before it announces any local commercial flights. ¡°There is a reality that Uber has grown up a lot as a company,¡± Holden said at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon. ¡°We are now a major company on the world stage and you can¡¯t do things the same way where you are a large-scale, global company that you can do when you are a small, scrappy startup.¡±
Reuters
NASA confirmed that it had signed an agreement with Uber in January that lets the company join a number of industry partners working with the space agency on driverless air traffic management systems. Uber will be joining at the start of Phase 4 of the program, beginning March 2019.
Uber¡¯s taxis meanwhile are envisioned to be electric-powered drones of sorts, capable of vertical takeoffs and landings, ideal for dense urban areas.