if you've ever had the fantasy of
soaring over bumper-to-bumper traffic in
a flying vehicle that may be possible
sooner than you think not with a flying
car but with a battery-powered aircraft
called an evital a clunky acronym for
electric vertical takeoff and landing
vehicle
dozens of companies are spending
billions of dollars to make ev tolls
that will operate like air taxis taking
off and landing from what are called
verta ports on the tops of buildings
parking garages or helipads in congested
cities
ev tolls promise a faster safer and
greener mode of transportation
potentially changing the way we work and
live
sound too good to be true we went for a
joy ride to find out
the story will continue in a moment
i will arm the aircraft if you were
ready yeah totally confirmed
if this looks like an oversized drone
i'm about to take off and that's pretty
much what it is
breaking ground right there
it's a single seat evitol called hexa
powered by 18 propellers each with its
own battery no jet fuel required you are
in control
onboard computers automatically adjust
for altitude and wind
you really feel the wind up here so all
i had to do was use a joystick to
control hexa's movement and speed it
took about 30 minutes of pre-flight
training to get the hang of it
use that yaw to rotate 90 degrees
wonderful
hexa is still in its testing phase so he
had to stay close to chief pilot jace
mccown and his ground crew but they say
it's flown up to 90 feet in the air and
45 miles per hour
whenever you're ready you can come back
to home the batteries last up to 15
minutes i was going to try to land over
the camera yeah absolutely
to land i maneuvered hexa into position
pressed a button and the computers did
the rest
right there you are on the ground and
the props are spinning down
that is cool
i can't stop laughing piece of cake that
was awesome that is so much fun
wow i so just want to like take off with
it i know
matt chason is ceo of austin based lyft
aircraft which makes hexa he envisions a
future where it's used by commuters to
skip rush hour traffic
you can fly 10 miles in 10 minutes
instead of spending
over an hour on the roads during rush
hour congestion would it be something
that an individual then in the future
owns and flies from their house to
somewhere we don't see individual
ownership is very practical these are
these are very expensive aircraft we see
putting fleets of aircraft at locations
where we provide maintenance we provide
training
and people can come in and basically pay
per flight
but that's still a long way off
federal state and local regulators not
to mention the nation's airspace aren't
ready for hundreds of thousands of
commuters piloting their own ev tolls in
the skies over congested cities
so to give people a taste of the future
now jason designed hexa as an ultralight
vehicle which means it doesn't have to
go through the federal aviation
administration's complex certification
process but also can't fly over
populated areas
jason plans to start offering rides to
paying customers for 250
by the end of this year
the initial market you see is
essentially joyrides for people yeah i
think there's a huge market for people
to just experience
the thrill and joy
of flight
around the world all kinds of ev tolls
are being developed cargo carriers air
ambulances and a whole lot of air taxis
some with a pilot some without
the air force is investing sows airbus
and american airlines and dozens of
companies are already working with the
faa
it's not the flying cars that science
fiction movies anticipate it
no but when you think about it i look
back over the arc of my own career
having been a pilot for 42 years and i'm
just amazed by the amount of innovation
that has taken place
billy nolan was head of safety for the
faa before being named acting
administrator last month how difficult a
certification process is there because
there's a lot of moving parts to this
first we have to certify the design of
the of the aircraft itself and then we
look at how it will operate is it
piloted is it autonomous we look at
where we'll operate so that means how do
we put it within our nation's airspace
so once it's met that safety threshold
and only until it's met that safety
threshold will be be prepared
to certify
some evital companies are well on their
way
we flew in a gas-guzzling helicopter
with one of the front-runners in the air
taxi arms race joe ben bevert ceo of
joby aviation he took us to this remote
facility in california where he's
testing his ev tall the joby aircraft
as we landed it felt like the old guard
meeting the new
obviously it's a combination of a
helicopter and a plane
exactly so it can take off like a
helicopter but it flies with the
efficiency of an airplane
bevert has been working on the joby for
more than a decade it has six propellers
and four batteries in its wings and will
operate as an air taxi carrying a pilot
and 4 passengers he says it can fly 150
miles on a single charge and has a top
speed of around 200 miles an hour
why this design so vertical takeoff is
important so we can take you to where
you want to go
right we don't need a huge runway and
then with the wing it gives you the
efficiency to fly far and to fly fast
you're cleared flight flex alpha blow
because it's still being tested the joby
was piloted remotely by a nearby ground
crew
for flight when they fired up the motors
unlike a helicopter the joby didn't need
time to warm up
it took off in about 20 seconds
that's it that's really quiet
we wanted this to sound more like the
wind in the trees than the whop whop of
a helicopter
noise levels are a critical issue since
evitals are meant to take off and land
near where people work and live
this is below the background noise level
of many cities
you know i go around with my decimal
meter on my phone and like measure sound
levels that's what you've been doing for
10 years exactly because we needed to
make sure that the aircraft was going to
be quiet enough
bevert studied mechanical engineering at
stanford where he invented this popular
flexible camera tripod and later created
a company that made flying wind turbines
but the joby had remained an elusive
dream
there was definitely skeptics
even you know good friends of mine who
didn't believe that you could make this
with batteries and electrical propulsion
the battery technology just wasn't there
it wouldn't work yeah
bevert hired john wagner away from tesla
where he helped develop the car's
revolutionary batteries
to joby he figured out a way to make the
batteries lighter but still powerful
enough to get the two tiny vtol off the
ground
you had to play to the strengths of
battery power and the strengths of
electric motors so typical aircraft
might have one big motor but we can have
six motors distributed throughout the
aircraft and in that way operate in a
much more efficient manner the weight of
everything must be the most important
thing absolutely so how do you make
a plane as light as possible you
essentially have to engineer every piece
of it
the outside of the joby is made with
layers of lightweight carbon fiber
the batteries as well as computers
electronics and motors are constructed
under john wagner's watch
and his team shakes bakes and spins them
to ensure they'll meet the faa's
rigorous safety standards they have to
certify the aircraft as being safe and
capable of flying to their standards
they also have to certify the production
of all the parts of it exactly and the
operation the pilot training the
maintenance
steps every facet is heavily regulated
all this costs a lot of money toyota has
invested about 400 million dollars in
joby and bevert took the company public
last year i think the texture is good
billionaire paul ciara co-founder of the
website pinterest has also put in a
small fortune he's joby's executive
chairman and says they'll launch in up
to three cities and that passengers will
eventually end up paying around three to
four dollars a mile to fly a little more
than an average uber ride
can you just take me through as a
passenger what it looks like i want to
get to jfk airport it's bumper to bumper
traffic what do i do take out your phone
pull out an app and with one click
you're booking the whole trip
so a car is coming to wherever you are
in manhattan
it's taking you to the takeoff and
landing location the verta port
and you're hopping in your joby and it's
flying you to your final destination now
maybe there's a car at the other end or
you're just walking to the tail end if
people are taking cars to and from
vertiports
doesn't that just add to congestion if
we're able to
you know take out
80 percent of the miles
that people might be traveling and move
those miles from congested roads to the
air
i think that's going to have an impact
but just a few weeks after we saw this
joby aircraft fly it crashed in february
due to what federal investigators called
a component failure
no one was hurt but the ev toll was
totaled
bevert says that's all part of the
testing process and is as optimistic now
as he was when we interviewed him
how far are you from
getting the first joby in the sky with
passengers so we are launching our
service in 2024. you think you can do it
that quickly yes there have been a lot
of companies that have said oh we're
going to do this in two years and then
it doesn't happen we're very confident
there's a lot of confidence over at wisc
arrow as well though the ev tall they're
developing will be even more complicated
to bring to market because it's fully
autonomous there'll be passengers but no
pilot on board
you're not just figuring out an electric
vehicle
you're figuring out a fully autonomous
vehicle that's right we're going for it
you and i talked about that ceo gary
guyson says they're on track to spend
about two billion dollars the company is
bankrolled by boeing and google
co-founder larry page they've been
testing the technology for the last
eight years
control zap in position for liftoff so
how many test flights have you actually
done so close close to 1600 test flights
without you know knock on wood without
an incident selecting liftoff
we watched one of those test flights in
hollister california a team of engineers
about half a mile away started the vtol
with the click of a mouse
the entire route was pre-programmed
why autonomous why go this route so
we're going straight to south flying
several reasons one it's safer
safer he says because most plane
accidents involve human error much of
commercial aviation is already automated
and guyson sees the entire e-vitol
industry going that way eventually he's
determined to get there first
we do it primarily from a safety
perspective but also scale so if you
don't have a pilot in the aircraft it's
less expensive you don't have to do
pilot training
you're flying four passengers um we can
charge less we don't want this to be a
premium helicopter like service we want
this to be a service that's affordable
to the masses there is a hurdle
psychologically for people to get into
an aircraft that does not have a human
at the controls of course and so what
we're trying to do with that is each
passenger can be in
verbal communication with the ground
they can be talking to a pilot whenever
they want to so it's all designed to
provide comfort
it will take time this isn't going to
happen overnight
gysen wants to launch west's four-seater
air taxi service in the world's 20
busiest cities within the next decade
wheels down
you don't give a date of when you think
you'll be operational yeah you know why
we don't do that because we are not in
control of that part the faa is
in europe it's called yasa they're in
charge so when they certify aircraft to
fly that's when you fly
the faa won't say when an autonomous ev
toll might be certified but acting
administrator billy nolan told us
hailing a piloted air taxi by 2024 is
well within the realm of possibility the
challenge for us is to make sure that
innovation doesn't come at the expense
of safety but clearly we are seeing the
emergence of something that's fantastic
i think this is real i mean this is no
longer just the stuff of
fantasy we want to be very careful we
want to be very measured but you're
absolutely right this is real and this
is happening we've come a long way from
where we were just you know a mere
decade ago
it's really cool taking flight with
anderson cooper at 60 minutes overtime
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