A NASA illustration of notional advanced air mobility operations. Credit: NASA
AIAA AVIATION FORUM, Las Vegas — The general public will need a better understanding of how electric air taxis can benefit their lives if the nascent advanced air mobility industry is ever to move beyond a few hundred or thousand such aircraft serving tourists or the very wealthy, a panel said here on Thursday.
“How many of you have witnessed someone asking that vertiports be built in their city or demanding air taxi services?” Robin Grace, chief of AAM integration and strategy at the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, asked the audience. Nobody raised their hand.
But when she asked if anyone had struggled to explain what AAM is, a dozen hands went up.
“This illustrates the issue we are facing. We’ve been talking about this for years, and the public still doesn’t really understand what is planned,” she said. “What we know from focus groups, polling and public comment is that they want safe, climate-conscious and integrated transportation systems. They are open to innovation, but they’re wary of disruption, especially if it feels imposed or inequitable. So that’s where we need to start.”
Grace and other panel members said the industry’s use of the term “public acceptance” as a goal for electric air taxis reveals a flawed emphasis.
“‘Acceptance’ implies something negative we must deal with, but accepting something enthusiastically is the definition of the word ‘embrace,’” said Nick Tepylo, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Clarkson University in New York. He said some in the AAM industry have coined the term “embracement” as the goal.
Tepylo cited the technology acceptance model developed by technologist Fred Davis, which states that the public only embraces new technology after people perceive its usefulness and ease of use.
“Polls asking people if they would fly on an electric air taxi have been all over the board for years, and most of those polls reflect a lack of interest,” Tepylo said. But he noted public interest surged after people were shown a video depicting a woman taking a quick flight from a downtown office tower to a vertiport near her home, released in 2018 by Uber Elevate, the rideshare company’s former flying taxi unit. Uber sold Elevate in 2020 to Joby Aviation of California, which plans to begin passenger service in the United Arab Emirates next year with its S4 air taxis.
“When people see exactly what AAM service might look like, they are more likely to buy into the idea, and that’s important for how we move forward,” Tepylo said.
The price of electric air taxis and passenger service may exclude many people, especially in remote rural areas, for years to come, said Jeremy Wang, co-founder and chief operating officer of Toronto-based Ribbit, which is developing inexpensive autonomous cargo planes to ferry food and supplies to rural northern Canada. Ribbit see its initial customers as families with limited annual income of about $40,000.
But he said higher price points may be necessary to get manufacturing of electric air taxis scaled up to a level where developers can produce more aircraft less expensively.
Wang said he’s glad some AAM companies are claiming they will provide service to remote areas, but “I think there is danger if you’re looking at remote areas as a stepping stone when you haven’t been designing for the actual target user or environment that needs to be served.”
As for the industry’s future aspirations of operating autonomous aircraft with no pilot on board, the panelists agreed that convincing the public of the safety of those designs will be a tougher challenge.
Rather than throwing out the number of minutes saved by flying in an air taxi, marketing messages should focus on what people could do with that saved time, said Alison Mendoza, founder of Outlook Lab marketing and communications firm in North Carolina.
“It’s an hour more to be at home with family, or an hour more to prepare a presentation for the next day,” Mendoza added.
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