Aurora: eVTOL Only Economic With Autonomy

Building certified systems that allow autonomous flight with pilotless aircraft is the key to creating a financially sustainable urban air-taxi market. That was the proposition put forward this week at the second annual Uber Elevate summit by John Langford, CEO of Boeing unit Aurora Flight Sciences.

“Taking the human out of the cockpit and making these [air taxis] certified autonomous operations is absolutely key to the economics,” said Langford. “We believe that the only way you can have an airplane that seats two to four people is to have none of those seats devoted to the crew. We have two pilots up front on a 747 with hundreds of passengers. The economics don't work if you put one or two pilots up front and there are only one or two people in the back. Autonomy is also absolutely essential to getting the utilization rates, to getting the safety rates.”

Even if somehow the economics could be made to work, the steady decline in the pilot population over the last 40 years would simply make it impossible to have enough qualified aviators available to meet the demand of a robust urban air network with manually flown craft, Langford said. 

“It's been a generally downward trend over time. This is in spite of a whole range of developments over the years that, each time, people said this would change the game, this would revitalize general aviation, this is going to make urban mobility possible.…There has been only one technology in 50 years that has actually moved the needle, and that has been the drone revolution. That is what exponential growth really looks like. That is what changing the game really looks like, the number of registered drone operators in the FAA database…That's what a revolution looks like. Why is that? It is because of the autonomy. The automation...takes a complex task and simplifies it. That's what makes it possible to take what's the hardest thing in flying small airplanes and made it so literally anybody can do it,” Langford said. 

Langford said Aurora already has successfully demonstrated autonomous aircraft control systems in recent programs including ACAS (automatic collision avoidance system), which, in collaboration with the Office of Naval Research, autonomously flew a Bell Huey last year; the XV-24 it developed with DARPA; and Centaur, a program that installs robotics in certified general aviation aircraft. “These are the kinds of technologies that are in there. Aurora is building certifiable autonomous systems that will enable all of tomorrow's autonomous aircraft of any shape. This is not a game. This is not a business about what the aircraft looks like. What all [urban taxis] need is the certifiable autonomy," he said, adding that Boeing had made a corporate commitment to supporting the timetable laid out by Uber to begin test flying its Elevate network in select markets by 2020 and begin commercial service by 2023.