While United’s order for supersonic planes, when and if built, grabbed headlines for a few days, a much slower kind of aircraft hit the news in the later part of the week: Electric air taxis.
This time the new centered on American Airlines and Virgin Atlantic, which both signed orders with Vertical Aerospace for hundreds of eVTOL aircraft, a new category that flies not too fast, carries not too many passengers, and travels not too far after taking off vertically like a helicopter.
A couple of months ago, United put in an order with another company, Archer, for 200 similar vehicles. Embraer has ordered 200 from a company called Eve, and now Vertical has scored orders from American for 250, from Virgin for 150 and from aircraft leasing company Avolon for as many as 500.
So, why all the sudden interest in these new planes that are at least two years away from certification and market, if not more? While there’s a general interest, of course, in possible future electric airliners, this is not that. A clue to their real market can be seen in Virgin’s plans for the planes.
Virgin has said it believes the aircraft will enable sustainable and price competitive regional connectivity—aka, getting people to airports and on to your flights. One example from Virgin: It now takes 90 minutes by road from Cambridge to Heathrow; on a Virgin air taxi it would take 22 minutes, and the passengers would already be checked in to their final destinations. It’s identified 37 towns and cities within 100 miles of Heathrow that it could serve, and could move 7.7 million passengers a year to Heathrow.
Applying a similar concept in the U.S., it might allow airlines to make more efficient overseas or mainline flights. American, for instance, operates trans-Atlantic flights from Boston, New York and Philadelphia. These smaller craft might allow funneling passengers into fewer flights, as well as making flights at those cities more accessible to outlying areas.
Clearly, the air taxi idea is no long Buck Rogers anymore, but we’re still a few years away from the Jetsons.
