The aircraft looked like a large black and white spider squatting on the ground near a wharf in the southern Chinese port city of Guangzhou, with two rotors at the end of each of its eight legs. There was a growl as the blades began to turn and the vehicle, with two seats but no pilot, rose vertically into the sky.
This was the EH216-S, an electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft – or flying taxi – produced by EHang, China’s market leader in the sector. It flew out over the Pearl River before turning back and hovering for a minute over the vertiport before it landed just as it took off, in a straight vertical line.
“Most people who have flown in it feel that it’s like riding in an elevator. It takes off very smoothly, and then flies and lands very smoothly, without much shaking or turbulence,” He Tian Xing, a vice-president at EHang, told The Irish Times.
“It’s an electrically powered aircraft, so its noise level is extremely low. The take-off noise is less than 70 decibels, which is significantly lower than traditional helicopters. I can talk, make a phone call and even film or livestream inside the cabin without any problems. I don’t need simultaneous interpretation headsets to talk to people next to me; I can speak directly without any noise.”
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The EH216-S is the world’s first autonomous eVTOL to be certified for passenger-carrying commercial operations but it is currently used only for short sightseeing flights. Its range of about 30km makes it suitable for short hops within a city but EHang last month launched a new aircraft, the VT-30, which has a range of 200km and could be used to fly between cities.
EHang’s ambitions for its fleet of flying taxis are part of China’s growing low-altitude economy, the commercial exploitation of airspace up to 3,000m but usually below 1,000m. The sector already includes everything from drones that spray agricultural fields to those that deliver parcels, food and medicine, but much of its future growth depends on the success of passenger services.
Beijing has been prioritising the sector for the past four years and China accounts for 70 per cent of patent applications for low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles with more than 50,000 firms engaged in related businesses. Last year the government established a separate division to promote the sector, hoping to emulate its success in nurturing world-beating industries in electric vehicles and renewable energy.
In China’s logistics industry, drones are already halving delivery times in big cities, flying packages to drop-off stations from where couriers deliver them locally. But for passenger services, the key obstacle is in reassuring the public that flying in a pilotless drone is safe.
EHang’s He claims that such aircraft are safer than helicopters because the 16 rotors mean that if even two or three fail during flight, it will continue to function. The flight control system and battery units have data backups so that, if the primary data stream fails during the flight, a backup system takes over.
“Traditional helicopters typically rely on a single engine and a single rotor system, offering no backup during flight,” he said. “Our 216 aircraft uses multiple backups; we can distribute power across different rotors, ensuring that, during flight, the aircraft won’t crash due to a single point of failure.”
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China’s electric car manufacturers owe much of their success to Beijing’s decision to build extensive networks of charging stations in big cities before there were enough electric vehicles on the road to keep them busy. Flying taxis will also require new infrastructure, including a low-altitude air traffic control system and a network of vertiports.
“The future of low-altitude flight will evolve in phases. The first phase involves the large-scale deployment of aircraft within cities to establish a public transportation model for flight,” He said. “This means you won’t need to buy the aircraft yourself, you can simply book a flight on demand.
“In the second stage we will have both public transportation services with many aircraft in use, and also a portion of aircraft that can be owned and flown by individuals. However, the prerequisite for this stage is the development of widespread vertiport infrastructure. Personal ownership and operation can only become viable once sufficient take-off and landing sites are available.”
China is not alone in developing the low-altitude economy. The European Investment Bank (EIB) this year approved €2.1 billion for a Europe-wide network of vertiports called Skyway Nexus. The sector is also growing in the United States, where Amazon’s Prime Air drone service hub in Dallas can handle 1,200 sorties a day.
For He, the low-altitude economy offers an opportunity to reshape the way we live by escaping the need to plan cities around the car industry and ground transportation.
“The advent of low-altitude aircraft will introduce a fascinating new dynamic: we will be establishing a brand-new transportation network in the sky. We can make human travel time more fixed and efficient. There will be less need for everyone to converge on a single city centre,” he said.
“Rapid air travel will create multiple decentralised hubs, dispersing congestion from large cities across various points. So the future development of low-altitude airspace will significantly impact urban construction, planning and the future direction of population distribution.”
