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posted by martyb on Monday October 31 2016, @11:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the Bring-on-Korben-Dallas-and-Leeloo dept.

Uber on Thursday laid out a vision for on-demand aircraft that can whisk commuters to home or work in a fraction of the time it would take on the road.

The ride-sharing giant assessed the feasibility of what it called "vertical take-off and landing" vehicles in a 98-page white paper, inviting innovators and entrepreneurs to take flight with the idea.

San Francisco-based Uber said it will be reaching out to cities, manufacturers and others about the concept.

"Just as skyscrapers allowed cities to use limited land more efficiently, urban air transportation will use three-dimensional airspace to alleviate transportation congestion on the ground," said the white paper, authored by Uber chief product officer Jeff Holden and product manager Nikhil Goel.

"A network of small, electric aircraft that take off and land vertically will enable rapid, reliable transportation between suburbs and cities and, ultimately, within cities."

Diagrams in the paper showed aircraft bodies of various designs with propellers that can rotate to allow for vertical lift-off or landing, then move into position for flying forward.

Perhaps Vitalstatistix was onto something.


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  • (Score: 1) by driven on Monday October 31 2016, @01:46PM

    by driven (6295) on Monday October 31 2016, @01:46PM (#420856)

    Agreed, and I will add (as I have said for years): flying cars won't be a reality until they are completely computer driven. Present day seems a lot closer to such a reality.

  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday October 31 2016, @06:15PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Monday October 31 2016, @06:15PM (#420958)

    AND ... The computer can object to flying until some diagnostic code has been addressed.
    People drive all the time in cars that they'll fix tomorrow. Because they don't have time today, something's urgent, and that light has been on for three weeks already anyway...

    Well, it's not quite the same if you're flying. But people will still think the same about the priorities of dumb engineers who throw random unjustified error codes at them.
    Ain't gonna buy no flying car if it can leave me stranded because of a warning light!