Air taxis and self-driving aircraft: Aviation industry faces its future

Traditional plane deals grabbed headlines at the Farnborough International Airshow this past week. But a handful of futuristic air-travel concepts signalled a new excitement coursing through the industry. Global aerospace companies are grappling with new technology from self-flying planes to electrically-powered aerial taxis, perhaps the industry’s biggest tech surge since the dawn of the jet age in the late 1950s. Much of the attention at the biennial aerospace jamboree was on still-developing forms of air transport that were widely dismissed as science fiction barely a few years ago. Such next-generation projects are a contrast with the industry’s recent fixation on designing and building more fuel-efficient planes, such as Boeing’s Dreamliner and Airbus’s A350 long-range jet. Fast-selling single-aisle jets, variants of the Boeing 737 and Airbus’s A320 and the industry’s workhorses, have been the stars of recent shows. Those new planes were dreamt up when the industry’s future seemed focused in kerosene-burning, tube-and-wing shaped aircraft; the recent technological wizardry of such planes is in their fuel conservation, range and quiet engines. But a look at what generated the most excitement in Farnborough indicates another future for the industry is coming into view. At a Boeing briefing on the future of next-generation air transportation, Chief Technology Officer Greg Hyslop predicted urban flying vehicles would be able to transport passengers and goods relatively soon. Although it isn’t clear whether they would be fully autonomous, or how regulators would manage air traffic, Hyslop boldly called it a “new era of transportation and mobility.”<br/>