Air travel never involves air travel alone. City to city transport usually goes something like car or cab to train to shuttle to the terminal where you catch a plane, only to reverse the process at the other end, often with a little running somewhere along the line for good measure. Airbus came up with a crazy idea to change all of that with Pop.Up, a conceptual two-passenger pod that clips to a set of wheels, hangs under a quadcopter, links with others to create a train, and even zips through a hyperloop tube.
This crazy concept blurs the once-firm lines between planes, trains, and automobiles to let people take to the skies when traffic backs up. In other words, it's a flying car. A really cool flying car, cooked up with help from Italdesign and unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show, but still, a flying car. Farfetched, yes, but Airbus says it is taking the idea seriously. “Adding the third dimension to seamless multi-modal transportation networks will, without a doubt, improve the way we live, and how we get from A to B,” said Mathias Thomsen, general manager for urban air mobility at Airbus.
Around town, the carbon fiber pod couples with an electric ground module and rolls along on a rather conventional four wheels. It's autonomous, of course, because everything is in the future. Don't want to creep along in gridlocked traffic? Simply summon an eight-rotor air module that resembles a supersized consumer drone. Clip in, take off, and enjoy a range that, should this technology ever actually work, will max out at about 60 miles. Whatever mode to choose, the Pop.Up parks itself at a recharging station upon arrival.
It all sounds crazy, but some big names see it happening. Dubai, the most superlative of emirates, plans to put people-carrying drones in service later this year. Last year, Uber said it could launch a flying car service within a decade. Such things will help wealthy (and brave) commuters skip over traffic, but don't solve the last mile problem unless your destination boasts a rooftop landing pad. That’s where the Pop.Up idea enjoys an edge. It eliminates a key point of friction in multi-modal transportation: changing from one mode to the next. You just chill out in your pod.
Wanna hear the really crazy part? This scheme isn't as far-fetched as you might think.
“This is getting to be less of a technology challenge,” says Pat Anderson, who is developing similar vehicle concepts at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University. He believes autonomous software and electric propulsion will subject the aviation industry to radical changes. Say goodbye to wings on tubes, at least for short distances: batteries and rotors will win the day. That doesn’t mean there aren’t hurdles, not the least of which are federal regulations.
“We designed these regulations in the 50s and 60s, and they go largely unchanged, due to inertia,” Anderson says. The General Aviation Manufacturers Association is pushing hard to move certification of novel planes away from the current fixed federal standards, and into a less prescriptive model. That will mean new ideas can be approved more quickly, similar to the way that safety devices in cars are. The FAA has already gotten on board with the changes, for small aircraft, but designing and applying rules for an entirely new class of aircraft will take years.
As humans pack into increasingly dense global mega-cities, they'll need new ideas for transport to avoid gridlock. But Airbus and Italdesign haven’t committed to any sort of timeframe for this one, so (unless you live in Dubai) gazing up longingly through your car’s sunroof is as close to zooming through the sacré bleu sky as you’re likely to get, for now.
