Fly like the wind!

The largest American taxi service Uber announced a fundamentally new direction of its activity - air passenger transportation, in Lisbon at the WebSummit conference.

Perhaps someone has reacted to this statement with skepticism, remembering the footage from the film "The Fifth Element", but while some continue to doubt, the company presented its first air taxi concept.

Presentation of the model was held in Los Angeles at the Uber Elevate Summit 2018. Here, in the "City of Angels", it will be tested. Six months ago, neither the NASA participating in the development, nor the taxi service itself could tell something concrete about how the air transport would look. But all the questions were answered by the presented concept on Summit.

Presentation of the model was held in Los Angeles at the Uber Elevate Summit 2018, photo WEB

It is between an airplane and a helicopter and can lift four passengers into the air. The device is equipped with four horizontally rotating screws, which are folded at the landing. And the fifth screw is fixed and is located in the tail.

The structures are designed to create a minimum of noise, since this factor is one of the key factors in the conditions of working on residential areas. The taxi flies on electric traction, and therefore is completely environmentally safe - another factor in favor of this type of transport. The estimated altitude of its flight is 300 - 600 meters, the speed is about 250 km / h.

The structures are designed to create a minimum of noise, photo Uber

While such aircraft will be controlled by pilots, but in the future, they will certainly be replaced by computers. The Uber management promises that the air taxi will be available to everyone who can afford to go by traditional, land-based taxi. And in the future, most likely, this service will become even cheaper. This type of transport will relieve the streets of metropolises in traffic jams and, in addition, reduce the time of passengers en route by approximately 6 times.

Presumably, air taxi platforms will be located on the roofs of high-rise buildings, where the operator will regulate passenger traffic. He will have plenty of work, because, according to preliminary forecasts, this platform will take about two hundred taxis per hour, and this is about thousand people.

Garrett Camp (left) и Travis Kalanick (right), Uber co-founders, photo WEB

The presentation, which became the debut of the Uber air taxi, is a unique opportunity for business people and politicians, industry professionals and property owners, car companies and other interested persons to get acquainted with the prospects for the development of passenger transport and stand at the roots of its completely new concept.

According to the project, air taxi will begin to serve customers in 2023, and residents of Los Angeles and Dubai will be the first to use this service. By this time, there is still a lot of work to be done in various directions - from the regulation of the legal framework to the equipment of the landing platforms.

But according to Uber's leaders, all the issues that arise appear to be solved. The first working model of a taxi, which will run directly on the air mains, should begin its work in 2020. Its presentation is expected in Dubai, at the World Expo.

Victoria Romanova, Russia, Moscow

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