A 5-Minute Ride Proves the Future of Air Travel Is Already Here
The Urban Air Mobility vehicle is already waiting as I step from the New York City curbside into the waiting lounge. The room is sleek, equipped with couches and an open bar, but there’s no time for me to luxuriate. An attendant dressed in black ushers me through a door and out onto a platform that projects over the Hudson River. Another attendant helps me and a second passenger strap in — and then we’re off. Amid a thrumming downwash of air, we levitate, and the bustle of the city falls away beneath us.
Through the bubble windows I look down on sailboats, brownstone courtyards, bustling avenues. We’re zooming along at 95 miles per hour, just 800 feet off the ground, low enough that all the everyday details stand out, so that everything seems more like flying in a dream than the normal experience of aviation. And, like a good dream, it’s over too soon: the sensation of dropping, the ground growing closer. We touch down on a landing pad, the doors pop open, and another attendant helps us out. We’ve traveled 13 miles across the congested city — a distance that would have taken an hour by limo and even longer by train — in just five minutes.
This is the kind of travel that science fiction has long promised: levitating vehicles that whisk impatient humans from here to there with ease. But mine was not an imaginary voyage. Short hop vertical travel is here for real, and while coming advances in technology will certainly transform it (some 135 companies are currently competing to field the world’s first viable electronic vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, or eVTOL), current technology can already provide the necessary capabilities. In this case, my journey was carried out in a Bell 407GX helicopter chartered by Blade Urban Air Mobility, a company that operates 22 core routes from 11 bases around the country and plans to start service in India this fall.
To call Blade’s helicopters “urban air mobility” is not simply a question of pasting a new label on an old technology. Blade is pioneering a transportation network that moves people through the air in a new way, and it’s serving as the prototype for how eVTOL systems will work in the future. That’s a unique and valuable skill set for the manufacturers…
