PROGRESS78
CORPORATE BETS
Richly funded concepts
include Kitty Hawk’s Cora
(below), backed by Google’s
Larry Page, and the Airbus
Alpha One (left).Some big names are in the game. The Kitty Hawk Flyer,
a dronelike machine intended to be flyable without a pilot’s
license, is backed by Google co-founder Larry Page, who is
said to have invested more than $100 million in flying-car
startups. And luxury automaker Aston Martin has teamed
with Rolls-Royce (the maker of turbine aircraft engines,
not the automaker of the same name) to produce the three-
passenger, hybrid-electric Volante Vision eVTOL concept.
“We approached Cranfield University, the U.K.’s leading
university for aerospace research, about exploring what a
low-altitude luxury aviation vehicle might look like,” Aston
Martin chief marketing officer Simon Sproule says. “They
agreed to work with us—and also suggested we reach out
to Rolls-Royce. By 2018 we’d built a 40 percent model and
unveiled it not at a car show but at an air show. And there
we were—a little booth amid the huge displays by Boeing,
Lockheed—and the response was remarkable! So now
we’ve moved on to studying whether there’s a business
case for our ‘sports car in the sky.’”And then there are the big aviation firms.
Airbus is working on a fully automated fly-
ing taxi under its Silicon Valley-based A3
arm. The Project Vahana team’s 20-foot-wide
Alpha One eVTOL prototype completed its
first test flight in early 2018 on a test range
near Pendleton, Oregon. In January of this
year, Boeing also began test-flying an eVTOL
concept, produced by its recently acquired
Aurora Flight Sciences subsidiary under the
direction of Boeing NeXt, the company’s fu-
ture-transport unit.