If you’re like me you probably also noticed that what used to be pure science fiction is becoming reality – fast. If we watch the trends – we can extrapolate a little. Here is some extrapolation. It’s a long one, but stay with it.
We are on the cusp of an enormous change in the way we travel and get around.
To realise this we must first look at the way we travel now and why we travel like this.
Combine this with recent discoveries, advancements in technology and pace of progress and innovation and a very high probability prediction can be made based on all this.
So let’s look at our current methods of travel, their traits and the problems with them.
Most transport, especially long distance, is very inefficient for a number of reasons. These inefficiencies mean higher cost – both in terms of the price consumers (travellers) pay and the price the environment pays. The latter really means how much risk there is to the survival of the human race and other species on Earth.
First we have planes. Planes are very expensive and take a long time to build. They are very complex which is the main reason for the costs. Lots of research and development goes into making each model and the costs have to be recouped. The parts manufacturing and assembly is high precision, highly complex, with high risk of errors – therefore, with the need for extremely stringent processes to minimise failure or error.
Since airplanes carry a lot of people, and since any failure usually is fatal – you can’t just pull over to the hard shoulder or stop the train – cost of failure is extremely high and so even more care has to be taken to ensure probability of failure is miniscule. Such care costs a lot of money too. So the final bill for an airplane is always vast.
There are not many airplanes and since they cost a lot, they have to be flying as much as possible – maintenance is a huge expense too as it also has to ensure safety and doing all to satisfy all these conflicting goals is also very expensive.
Economies of scale are simple. If you do something a few times – it costs a lot. If you do something thousands of times – it becomes a lot cheaper. Since there are relatively speaking only a few airplanes in the world (if compared to the ratio of cars per capita to ratio of airplanes per capita), airplanes are very expensive.
Even though airplanes have advanced autopilot systems, they still require a pilot and those take a very long time to train, not everybody can learn to become one and so again we have a bottleneck, a deficit and a cost issue.
To sum up, airplanes have a cost and availability issue which means that you can’t just fly whenever you like, flights are often fully booked and tickets close to date of travel can be so expensive that they become unaffordable.
Then we have the way you get on a plane – at the airport.
Airports are usually not very near a home, take quite a while to get to – often not very easily and requiring a number of transport methods – also costing quite a lot in the end just to get from homer to the airport. Once at the airport, there are queues and bottlenecks everywhere and more costs.
Airports are also a security and a health risk, since they have a huge amount of people in a relatively small area of space.
Airports are also extremely expensive to build and maintain – both from a pure cost in materials and labour as well as price the environment pays.
To sum up – to get on an airplane, a lot of time is wasted and there are more costs.
Trains and train stations and tracks are perhaps not quite as drastic as airplanes but they also have similar issues of getting to the train station, stations needing to be built and maintained and still having a misbalance between supply and demand. More on this for both airplanes and trains later.
Both airplanes and trains have one major problem in common – they are centralised systems, with a central, single possible point of failure. If there is an issue with the airplane or a train – hundreds of people are affected immediately. If a train station or an airport is affected – thousands of people are affected.
Cars, buses and other wheeled, road based vehicles are seemingly decentralised but they still depend on a road and fuel infrastructure system. Roads can also see a huge disbalance between supply and demand, which is manifested in traffic jams. Roads and routing is also not highly efficient. Many routes are 30-60% longer to get from point A to B if compared with a direct line between the 2 points.
All airplanes, some trains and most cars also suffer another common problem – propulsion system fuel. They are all powered by combustion engines of some sort.
At the risk of stating the obvious, combustion systems – be it a jet or an internal combustion rotary engine – have a two fold problem.
Firstly, they all have to have the fuel extracted from earth, typically being quite logistically expensive – both money wise and environment. Once extracted the fuel has to be refined and finally transported and distributed to the vehicle which requires it – incurring further monetary and environmental costs.
Secondly, they produce emissions when they operate. Emissions which contribute to global warming, pollution, health deterioration of humans, plants and animals.
Fuel also has another risk – the risk of accidental explosion. Airplanes, trains and cars are getting better and better at reducing the number of these incidents but the possibility is still always there, be it a small one.
To sum up, using fuel which has to be dug up, processed and distributed – all adds to the overall cost of travel.
Let’s now look at the alternatives which are emerging fast.
Firstly, electric propulsion is getting more and more advanced. Motors and battery technology is becoming more and more viable for both land based and aerial travel. Consumer electric cars are now common place and man carrying aircraft powered electrically is emerging, including big players – for example, the Airbus E-Fan. E-Hang is still a little too fringe to be mainstream but it is an early prototype and more are coming out every year.
Electric power can be generated and stored anywhere and once the generators and the storage are installed, there are no logistics to keep delivering the fuel. Solar panels or wind farms can be close to where the aircraft is parked, completely removing the fuel delivery workflow – removing cost and time and making scalability almost infinite.
Aircraft equipped with solar panels on wings, especially once the efficiency of the panels exceeds the power requirement of the aircraft mean that there is not even any need to maintain a nearby fuel delivery system, be it a solar panel farm a few kilometres away. A self fuelling aircraft is a complete game changer.
Electric power is also significantly safer and the risk of accidental explosion of the batteries is minute and rare compared to fossil based fuels.
Regardless of the size of the aircraft, electric propulsion, especially combined with solar power and on-craft generation of power simply means significantly cheaper overall cost of travel thanks to removal of the fuel cost.
Making smaller aircraft is also cheaper and more can be made faster. Electric vehicles and aircraft have fewer, simpler components and once production is setup, making thousands is cost effective. Tesla proves this by being able – after just a few years – to compete on price and features with major combustion engine car manufacturers who have been in business for decades.
Flying a “car”, however, is clearly not something which can be left to be done manually by consumers (travellers). It is something which must be done autonomously and automatically.
Technology for this is coming up to speed fast and many ground based and aircraft autopilot systems are capable today of flying autonomously, whilst avoiding obstacles and performing automated landings, take offs and for ground cars – parking and valet pick up, as recently demonstrated by Faraday futures. Redundancy and better sensing – longer range, in adverse visibility and so on – are the final obstacles which remain in the way of the technical solution for fully autonomous aircraft autopilot systems.
Once these are resolved, the final pieces of the puzzle will be coordinated, multi aircraft flight and ground control systems. If a lot autonomous, small aircraft in the skies are to be, they will all need to 1) be aware of each other and be able to talk to each other 2) be able to operate in dense areas and stick to local 3D “roads”, for which they would need to read instructions from local ground control systems, akin to “virtual traffic lights” and 3) be able to be coordinated via regional and national air traffic systems. This piece is more about complex, highly secure and redundant ground based networks with radio extensions.
When all the technical pieces are in place, regulation will be the only thing standing in the way of “skies full of small, autonomous aircraft”, since it is currently illegal for any person or company to operate an aircraft completely autonomously.
However, autonomous, small electric, solar power aircraft will be cheap to manufacture – many parts already are – and it will be possible to manufacture these at great scale, further contributing to lower cost.
This would mean a true revolution in the way we travel. Just 10 years ago it seemed like complete science fiction but now it is becoming a reality very quickly.
Several components all need to come together to enable the revolution – electric motors, additive manufacturing, faster and cheaper research, development and prototyping, battery technology, solar panels / PV’s, autonomous and intelligent autopilot systems are the main disciplines.
All are advancing rapidly every year and even every few months, getting closer and closer to the intersection that will enable safe, scalable personal aerial transport.
Ground transportation companies (i.e. Tesla) are already talking about cars becoming an on-demand service model, instead of the current “owned asset” one. Why pay upfront huge amounts of money for something which is only used on a rare occasion by most when you can (once they are autonomous and cheaper than taxis) call one to be at your house – or wherever you need a pickup – within minutes. Dubai – the drone and consumer tech pioneers – are already advertising the “driverless taxi” service. In a few years we will start to see this future tech in our day to day lives as technology improves, usage hours mount up and regulations allow this.
The same goes for aerial transport, especially personal / family.
Humans are not great at operating complex machines at high speeds in complex, dynamics environments. There are statistically and proportionally more crashes caused by humans that have been by driverless cars autopilots. Of course there will be fatal accidents – but the main point is that there will be fewer than there are now.
Soon autopilot systems, communications and infrastructure will be sufficiently redundant and safe for them to go into scaled roll out. Then it will be a matter of time and a gradual but rapidly accelerating adoption rate – just like we’ve seen with all technology, including cars, aeroplanes, computers and many more.
Autonomous autopilot powered small aircraft, taking off and landing vertically in small areas and later unfolding large, efficient wings for long flight range – with solar panels on the wings – are coming and components of all these technologies are already here in some way, shape or form.
With safe, cheap, available, scaled personal aerial transport being available, mass travel by means of airplanes, trains and buses will reduce, especially outside of metropolises – where public transport is usually half loaded at best.
“Point to point” and “door to door” personal travel will be the norm and the majority, with mass transport only being called upon where there is a genuine need for 100’s of people to travel at the same time together.
You would simply call or ask in a mobile app for a pick up and minutes later be picked up from your garden, front drive or nearby landing area or local hub – if you happen to live in a flat or in a densely populated area with nowhere to land right by your home.
Different classes and types of aircraft would probably exist, much like there are different types of cars – small 2 seaters, 4-6 family saloons, mini buses and so on. You might travel via several hubs to your final destination instead of going long haul, swapping aircraft in several transfer hubs. Perhaps stopping for a meal in a nice restaurant instead of eating vacuum sealed sandwiches or oven reheated chicken and rice.
The way we travel now is ending its life span and a new era is coming – decentralised, clean, electric, less stressful, cheaper and more efficient.
This new way will also dictate how and where we live. No longer bound by how we get from home to the shops, office, schools and friends will mean we can live in a less centralised manner, with fewer cities and towns and more villages and stand alone homes.
The new era is coming and it’s messengers are already here.
The only question is – how soon.
Thank you so much for reading to the end I would love thoughts and feedback!
Mind Iterations 