One flying car company says New York’s Skies could one day look like a scene from The Fifth Element.
Video: Gaumont, Sony Pictures Entertainment
Those scanning the skies over the East River this summer may spot something unfamiliar — a cargo drone schlepping packages between the Downtown Skyport in lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn Marine Terminal just south of Brooklyn Bridge Park. With its seven-foot wingspan, the white Speedbird drone — which looks like the love child of a Stormtrooper and a spider — can be spotted a mile away. Overseen by a team of three, it’s operated by a big outfit, Skyports Drone Services, a U.K.-based logistics company “delivering what matters” for governments and businesses around the globe. So what exactly is this thing hauling over the river?
On a recent morning, Kyle St. Paul, a drone hub operator for Skyports and a former Air Force surveillance technician, was on the downtown tarmac readying the drone for its first flight of the day. The elaborate safety check included tightening the arms, checking the GPS system and parachute, swapping the battery, and, yes, inspecting the cargo. Slowly, as if to prolong the suspense, St. Paul lifted the box lid to reveal its contents: an $8 package of printer paper.
From left: James Greenway and Kyle St. James ready the Skyport drone for its first flight of the day. Photo: Anne KadetOffice printer paper! Photo: Anne Kadet
From top: James Greenway and Kyle St. James ready the Skyport drone for its first flight of the day. Photo: Anne KadetOffice printer paper! Photo: Ann… more
From top: James Greenway and Kyle St. James ready the Skyport drone for its first flight of the day. Photo: Anne KadetOffice printer paper! Photo: Anne Kadet
Relax! This is only a test. It’s not yet possible to get printer paper delivered by drone to one’s office. Skyports is partnering with the Port Authority on a yearlong trial of its drone delivery service. Seven times a day, its aircraft make the four-minute East River crossing carrying dummy cargo, an operation overseen by James Greenway, a remote pilot who came to Skyports from Amazon, where he managed flight operations for its Prime Air delivery service. This test is Skyports’s first step on the long road to launching in New York, says Greenway. Later this year, the drones will be carrying medical supplies for the program’s first client, a hospital. And then, assuming all the approvals are in place, Skyports — and its competitors — can open for business, speeding everything from blood samples to documents through the city skies. “We’re all very excited about this,” says Greenway. “I think it’s going to bring good things to New York.”
Skyport’s drone over the East River.
Photo: Anne Kadet
Recent years have seen major advances in aerial technology, from the creation of autonomous flying taxis to the launch of helium zeppelins the length of a football field. Though little has made its way here, many companies developing these sci-fi-seeming technologies see New York as an essential proving ground. Earlier this year, Santa Cruz, California–based Joby Aviation ran a series of demonstration flights between Manhattan and JFK Airport for its battery-powered air taxis. Skyports Infrastructure is upgrading the Downtown Skyport to accommodate electric aircraft. And while it’s likely years off, Google parent Alphabet is already looking to bring its Wing consumer-delivery service to the five boroughs. “Say it’s Taco Tuesday night, and you’ve forgotten the ground beef. We’re going to be the fastest way to get you that ground beef, so that you can continue preparing dinner for your kids,” says Heather Rivera, Wing’s chief business officer, who lives in New York.
The technology is here, these companies say. It’s just a matter of figuring out how to make it work in a city that offers both the biggest opportunities in terms of market size and what may be the nation’s toughest challenges in actually getting it off the ground. (You can’t even fly a drone in this town without multiple permits.) “We have the most complicated transportation system, with the most stakeholders, and many different layers of regulation — federal, state, and local,” says Kathryn Garcia, executive director of the Port Authority, one of the many agencies that will be determining what the city’s skies will look like decades from now. “But — and this is to quote a classic line — ‘if any of these folks can make it here, they can make it anywhere.’”
Back at the Downtown Skyport, as helicopters whisked tourists off on sightseeing tours and a Blackhawk military chopper landed for a training exercise, Robbie Ladov, U.S. general manager for Skysports Infrastructure, was giving a tour of the terminal. The two-acre facility, owned by the city and operated by Downtown Skyport, is the busiest commercial heliport in the world, hosting up to 200 flights a day. But until recently, it was also among the most outdated. When Skyports took over from the previous operator last year, “all of the paperwork — the billing, passenger logs, fuel logs, fuel receipts — was completely done by hand,” says Ladov.
Skyport Infrastructure’s Robbie Ladov is overseeing upgrades at the downtown heliport.
Photo: Anne Kadet
Skyports computerized the records, remodeled the 1980s-era terminal, upgraded the radio operations center, installed a pilots lounge, and redid the security systems, all of which brought the heliport up-to-date. But Ladov is most excited about the next step. Later this year, Skyports will enable electric charging at three parking stations to create the city’s first vertiport — a landing pad for flying taxis. Right now, few New Yorkers can afford to commute by helicopter, says Ladov. But the new electric aircrafts are not only quieter, they cost less to build, use cheaper fuel, and are easier to maintain. “They’re really going to open the market for vertical-lift transportation to the masses,” he says.
Known in the industry as eVTOLs (for electric vertical takeoff and landing), these small winged vehicles, which typically carry four passengers, fly like an airplane but take off and land like a helicopter, so they don’t need a runway. That means a vertiport can be built just about anywhere. And because eVTOLs are much quieter than helicopters (“Like a high-powered fan,” says Ladov), the technology’s backers hope they’ll be able to run more flights, between more locations, for longer periods of the day, without arousing community resistance.
Skyports is already building a network of vertiports in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, but New York was an obvious U.S. entry point, says Ladov, because the basic infrastructure is already largely in place. The region offers three major and four regional airports along with three commercial heliports that could all easily double as vertiports. Ladov envisions building additional vertiports around the region so that folks living in, say, Montclair, New Jersey, could hitch a ride in an air taxi for their daily commute. But there’s also potential for air-taxi trips within the city: “There are plenty of days where the traffic on the FDR is so bad, where it would make perfect sense to take a flying taxi from the West Side of Manhattan to the East Side of Manhattan,” he says. And how many vertiports might we see decades from now? “I’d hope hundreds,” says Ladov. “I’d hope every major building would have a vertiport on it or near it.”
While Skyports and other facility developers are literally laying the groundwork, companies large and small are busy developing the new aircraft. The furthest along may be Joby Aviation, which flew its electric air taxi, designed for short trips, on a series of demonstration flights this spring between JFK and Manhattan’s three heliports (travel time: ten minutes). Joby is eyeing New York as an initial launch market because the city already has an established pool of flyers commuting to work or traveling to the airport from Manhattan by helicopter.
Joby Aviation flew its electric taxi over the city in April.
Photo: Joby
Last year, Joby acquired Blade, a local helicopter service offering flights to JFK, Newark, Westchester, and the Hamptons, starting at $195 per seat. Over time, it plans to replace the helicopters with its flying taxis. While Blade serves about 90,000 passengers a year, the new aircraft could serve many more, says Joby’s chief product officer, Eric Allison, who previously worked at Uber. A flight will initially cost about the same per-seat-mile as an Uber Black ride, he says, but over time, it will cost the same as a standard rideshare. “With this aircraft we’re building, we can transform this into something that is more accessible, that is more ubiquitous, that people can use on a daily basis. Our goal is to see it replace lots of car trips,” says Allison.
Joby will soon launch the first commercial flights for its electric taxis in Dubai. The company still needs federal approval for its aircraft before it can launch in the States, but it’s a matter of years, not decades, says Allison: “The industry has been talking about this for a really long time, but we’re on the cusp now of this actually being real, and so that’s the exciting thing. This is going from science fiction to science reality.”
Mountain View, California–based Wisk, a subsidiary of Boeing, may be operating a bit deeper in science-fiction territory. It’s developed a four-seat flying taxi that needs no pilot. The autonomous flights will be monitored by a supervisor in a ground-based operations center, overseeing several aircraft at a time. This gives the service a huge cost advantage over manned aircraft, says JC Asencio, the company’s senior manager of commercial integration. When there’s no pilot aboard, you not only save money on labor, you free up an extra seat, producing a dramatic reduction in fares. “We saw that autonomy was really the path to a more affordable price point.” says Asencio. “That’s why our mission statement is ‘safe, everyday flight for everyone,’ and we always harp on that ‘everyone’ point.”
Wisk Aero’s autonomous air taxi seats four passengers — and zero pilots.
Photo: Wisk Aero/ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Wisk is developing different market strategies for different cities. New York is a great market for shorter routes that have a lot of demand, like Manhattan to JFK at rush hour, says Asencio. But the routes will depend, of course, on where vertiports are located. New York’s lack of space and strict zoning laws sharply limit the options, at least for now, but Asencio envisions new vertiports appearing on places like piers and the roofs of parking garages.
Wisk’s timeline is far more conservative than Joby’s. While it has been flight testing its “Gen 6” aircraft in California, “we want to have our aircraft certified by the end of the decade, by 2030,” Asencio says. “That’s when we plan to go into launch markets like Houston, Miami, and L.A.” These cities will likely come first because they offer more open skies and a friendlier regulatory environment. “New York is a market we would love to go to, because it’s the Big Apple, but when you’re looking at the airspace, it’s just very congested,” says Ascensio. “Once we build that confidence, we can bring it to a great city like New York.”
Most folks in the eVTOL community envision a tightly regulated New York where air taxis operate within strict flight-path controls similar to those imposed on airplanes and helicopters, and hours are restricted. In deference to nearby communities, for example, the Downtown Skyport shuts down at 9 p.m. and has limited weekend hours. Even LaGuardia Airport closes between midnight and 5 a.m.
But some envision a city skyscape straight out of The Jetsons. In San Mateo, California, Alef Aeronautics has designed a working prototype of an electric car that drives on the road, but, when it gets stuck in traffic, can ascend vertically into the air and cruise through the sky. Co-founder and CEO Jim Dukhovny says the company’s Model A Ultralight can be legally flown without a pilot’s license in unpopulated areas. He has more than 3,500 preorders for the $300,000 vehicle, which will go into production within the next 12 months.
Alef’s flying car can drive on the road and fly like a plane.
In the future, says Dukhovny, flying cars will be as ubiquitous in the skies of New York as ordinary cars are now — with none of the congestion that clogs our streets. Up in the sky, he says, “you can have a second lane, a third lane, a fourth lane. You can have the traffic never stop because your two lanes are never crossing each other. You can add 100 to 1,000 to a million more times the cars that you have on the ground right now. You will have something like what Hollywood was showing us, like The Fifth Element!”
If Skyports is planning on ferrying medical supplies and sensitive documents between businesses, vertiport to vertiport, what about your cappuccino? Right now, most New Yorkers can get their Starbucks delivered in 15 minutes by e-bike — after all the foam has dissolved. Wing, a delivery service already operating in four cities, says it has a better solution: It can deliver your coffee, fries, or piping-hot pizza in a five-minute drone flight.
Wing’s white-and-yellow drones, developed in-house, can carry packages weighing up to five pounds, says chief business officer Heather Rivera. With a five- to six-foot wingspan, they are quieter than an idling truck and typically fly 150 to 200 feet up in the sky. To deliver their cargo, they descend to a height about 20 feet from the ground, lower the box on a tether, and release the package. They need a clear space the size of a picnic blanket to make a delivery, says Rivera. In cities like Atlanta and Houston, where Wing has partnered with Walmart, drones typically pick up packages in the store parking lot and deliver them to the recipients’ backyards. Wing says it has made more than 1 million deliveries to date.
Wing’s chief business officer, Heather Rivera, is excited to bring drone delivery to New York.
Photo: Anne Kadet
In Manhattan, of course, few stores have parking lots, and hardly anyone has a yard. This is why the suburban outskirts of the outer boroughs may be the first to get drone delivery service, says Rivera. But it won’t stop there. “We really believe that Wing is absolutely the technology solution that’s right for New York,” she says. “New Yorkers are going to say, ‘I’ve been getting stuff via 15-minute delivery for years now. What do you have to offer?’ We want to make sure that we’ve got a great answer to that question when we’re here.”
For one, she says, Wing’s autonomous drones are able to detect and avoid other aircraft, making them ideal for navigating New York’s crowded airspace. They can also hover outside a storefront to accept a delivery and then deposit a package on a stoop, the roof of an apartment building, or perhaps even lower it by tether to a customer’s window. While they cruise through the sky at up to 60 miles per hour, they only land when they need to power up on charging pads that Wing refers to as nests. The estimated 100-odd nests necessary to maintain a citywide network could be installed just about anywhere. They would, of course, work with the city on where those locations would be, adds Rivera.
Wing is planning to launch in 270 locations nationwide by 2027, and so far, New York isn’t included. Nor has Wing started discussions with local officials, which is quite intentional. “We want to make sure we approach the city at the right time,” says Rivera. “When we approach New York, we will do it from a position of having proved this technology in lots of different types of operating environments. When we arrive in New York, we can say, ‘You can be confident that we can do it here.’”
A Wing delivery drone landing on a “nest” charging pad.
Photo: Wing/AP Content Services for Wing Drone Delivery
The obvious concern about all of these airborne ambitions, of course, is that in the quest to off-load its transportation burden to the heavens, the city will wind up with a sky as noisy, congested, and dangerous as its streets are today. And the outcome largely depends on the rules — yet to be written — by the tangle of agencies with jurisdiction over what goes on overhead, including the FAA, the U.S. and state DoTs, the Port Authority (which controls the airports), and the city.
Garcia, the Port Authority director, says she believes the new aerial technologies can relieve traffic congestion, make deliveries more efficient, and help people move about the region more freely — and it’s important to be on the cutting edge. “We see this as a fundamental way to think about our competitive advantage against other locations, not only in the United States but literally in the world,” she says. Then there’s the opportunity to reduce helicopter traffic, one of the city’s worst noise offenders. “I may never ride in an eVTOL taxi, just because I’m not that fancy,” she says. “But if it could be quieter in my neighborhood, that would make me very happy.”
That said, Garcia doesn’t foresee a sky crowded with air taxis and drones crisscrossing overhead. “We are not thinking we’re going to be doing point-to-point individual delivery,” she says. “It’s going to be much more like creating little highways.” At least initially, new flights will largely be confined to existing routes and landing zones. The Port Authority has earmarked $150 million to create vertiports in the region’s three major airports, for example. And commercial deliveries will likely be confined to hubs earmarked for drones rather than going straight to the recipient’s door, “because that does parallel the congestion of what we see on the streets today,” she says. “I don’t think anyone wants to end up in that position.”
But a flying electric taxi from Manhattan to JFK? A drone delivering a factory part in minutes when the line breaks down? That’s not so far away. “I don’t know if we are quite at George Jetson yet, though I look forward to it,” Garcia says. “And we are closer than we were.”