A BRITISH-built “flying taxi” could whisk you from Manchester to Leeds in record time – by soaring straight over the Pennines.
The Sun spoke to pioneering tech firm Vertical Aerospace, which is testing out an all-electric aircraft that promises to slash commute times.
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This four-passenger craft says it could even manage a trip from London’s Heathrow airport to central Battersea in just 12 minutes.
That’s a trip that could take well over an hour in bad traffic.
The VX4 looks a bit like a helicopter crossed with a jetplane – but it’s not technically either.
Officially it’s an eVTOL, or Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft.
Read more on flying taxis
“We’re at an incredibly exciting time for aerospace,” said Michael Cervenka, the CTO of Vertical Aerospace, speaking to The Sun.
“If you think we’ve not really seen a major transformation in aerospace since the jet age, which was in the 1960s. We’ve seen really impressive incremental improvements in safety and performance, but we’ve not seen a real disruption.
“When we think about aerospace, most of us get on aircraft to fly long distances. We’d love to get on aircraft to fly over the traffic and to avoid congestion.
“But unless we’re super wealthy and can afford a helicopter with all the challenges that helicopters have, that’s not something that today we do.
“So we dreamt about doing this for a long, long time. And the exciting bit is we’ve just got to this incredible tipping point in technology.
“Where particularly all the improvements we’ve seen in electric technologies – a lot of which have been driven by the automotive industry, things like lighter motors, batteries and so on – have now reached a tipping point.
“Where we can come up with a completely different type of aircraft that’s all electric.
“And what we’re able to do is come up with an aircraft that can take off and land vertically, just like a helicopter.
“And that’s super important, because if you’re trying to fly over the traffic, you want to get to very close to where you want to get to.
“So you don’t want to be dependent on a runway. So being able to take off and land vertically is really important.”
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It’s powered by propellers hooked up to electric motors that let it cruise at speeds of around 150mph.
That’s faster than a car can legally travel, and far speedier than any vehicle could ever hope to move across a big city at rush hour.
The hope is that once it’s airborne and operational, it’ll eventually cost less than a helicopter trip.
Much of the savings, Michael tells me, are from the fact that maintenance is far cheaper for the VX4 versus a helicopter.
This is very much within the next few years. This isn’t waiting until the next decade.
Michael Cervenka
And while it might not beat a car on price, it should be much more convenient for tricky journeys.
“Certainly to start with, it’s not going to be as cheap as taking a car, I think, in most use cases,” Cervenka explained.
“But then you’re offering a different value proposition. You’re saving multiple times the time it would take to take a car.
“So there’s lots of examples where you’re taking an hour and a half to take a car and we can do it in 15 minutes.
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“So inevitably, some people will be willing to pay for the time saving, the convenience, the reliability, because you don’t have traffic to worry about. It’s a different time of the day.
“So those are all the convenience factors, if you like. And hopefully you get a brilliant view and it’s cool and it’s also environmentally friendly and all of those kind of other things that go with it.”
It might sound like a nightmare to have fleets of flying taxis soaring overhead – keeping you awake at all hours.
But Vertical Aerospace claims its high-flying cabs create almost no noise.
“These things are probably about the sound of a loud conversation in hover and the sound of a domestic fridge in cruise,” Michael told The Sun.
“So if you think about helicopters, you’ve got that whop, whop, whop noise. That’s quite disruptive. We’re really quiet.
He continued: “We are actually able to design an aircraft that can achieve the same level of safety as a commercial airliner.
“So we don’t think about, you know, are we comfortable with those flying over big cities?
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FLYING TAXI VS CAR – THE JOURNEYS COMPARED
Here’s how much time Vertical Aerospace reckons you’ll save in a VX4…
Battersea to London Heathrow
Distance: 15 miles
- VX4: 8 minutes
- Road: 52 minutes
- Rail: 65 minutes
Miami airport to Fort Lauderdale
Distance: 22 miles
- VX4: 11 minutes
- Road: 80 minutes
- Rail: 60 minutes
Yumeshima Port to Osaka International Airport
Distance: 29 miles
- VX4: 9 minutes
- Road: 50 minutes
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“So the safety is super important. And it’s actually also much cheaper to operate.”
The exact designs for inside the cabin will depend on what taxi companies who buy the VX4 want it to look like.
But they’ll all have a generally similar configuration that has room for a pilot, four passengers, and plenty of storage space.
In fact Vertical Aerospace says it’ll be quite similar to a London cab.
“We’ve designed this aircraft to be future-proofed and we think we’re going to have a really class leading cabin in terms of space,” Michael told The Sun.
“We’ve also got a lot of space for luggage by nature of the design of the aircraft. Some of that actually is just making it really aerodynamic.
“So you end up naturally with a sort of space behind the passenger cabin.
“I think the other bit for us that was quite important is we’ve got a layout where the pilot is single pilot up front, fully physically segregated from the passengers.
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“So if you think, you know, quite a lot of these flights you might be getting into with some other people that you don’t necessarily know.
“I think there’s a real and a perceived safety about the passengers are separate.
“But actually, the layout we’ve got is quite like a London taxi cab if you think about the kind of the size that you’ve got in there.
“So absolutely, it’s quite spacious. There’s room to not feel you’re crammed in.”
Vertical Aerospace is currently testing out the aircraft in the Cotswolds.
If successful, commercial flights for the VX4 might be just a few years away.
Michael explained: “This is very much within the next few years. This isn’t waiting until the next decade.
“We, over the coming months, will, I hope, do a number of public demonstrations.
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“We’ve got a UK-funded programme, so we should be flying into a lab vertiport, a real vertiport that’s being built in Bicester.
“We’re going to fly into Heathrow, some other demonstration flights.”
He added that a full commercial launch is “a few years off”, and said: “Then, really, the question for us is, well, how quickly can we start meeting the huge demand that’s out there? And that’s very much a global demand.”
