Most days, the Bentonville Municipal Airport in Arkansas is a pretty quiet place, servicing the occasional small private airplanes that pass through, or one or two business jets, most likely visiting the area's largest employer—Walmart, which has its headquarters in town. But earlier this month, it saw a sudden influx. The sleek business jets started arriving in Bentonville on Thursday. By Friday, a dozen of the things were smartly lined up on the ramp, wingtip to wingtip.
That night, an aerobatic plane pulled high-G maneuvers over the runway during a private airshow, right in front of the open hangar where the men and women who’d flown in on those jets, joined by a few dozen more who’d flown commercial, were having dinner. About 10 minutes into the routine, a fierce storm rolled in. The pilot landed, the party moved inside, and the hangar door slammed shut.
The next morning, the group, which featured more than 100 leaders from well-known high-tech companies, research entities, and investment firms, went to work on a single, seemingly impossible challenge: bringing the nascent air taxi industry to life.
That vision—most prominently laid out by Uber—requires an entirely new class of vehicle powered by batteries far better than the ones we have now. It will depend on approvals from sluggish regulators and safe integration into crowded airspace. Autonomous flight systems that are nowhere near ready for human passengers will be essential. The field will need seemingly unlimited funding and a strategy for convincing the public to put their lives in the hands of this new tech. Oh, and the whole effort already risks being upstaged by well-financed Chinese innovators who are plowing forward absent many of these constraints.
This secretive two-day meeting-of-the-minds, called Bentonville UP, didn’t feature public panels or a national media presence, apart from WIRED. “We wanted the participants, many of whom are startups still in stealth mode, to feel comfortable sharing information with each other openly and freely,” says Ben Marcus, who organized the event with colleague Cyrus Sigari. (Marcus is chairman of AirMap, which developed drone flight management software that could help guide autonomous air taxis; Sigari heads business jet brokerage JetAviva.) “They are competitors, but they recognize it will take a huge army to create a new industry, and there will be enough opportunity for everybody.”
The attendance list consisted of the new aerial mobility nobility, including representatives from Airbus, Google, Joby Aviation, TerraFugia, Uber, and Virgin Galactic, as well as NASA and the US Air Force. And yes, Walmart: Sam Walton’s grandson Steuart Walton hosted the event. His company, Game Composites, developed an aerobatic airplane—the one that performed Friday night—as an excuse to hone carbon fiber manufacturing techniques, a key ingredient for future electric vertical-lift aircraft.
Signs of progress toward a flying car future came briskly. Richard Browning flew in on his jetpack to announce he was launching a new jetpack racing league. Presenters showed videos of the electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft they’re developing, some of them more advanced than videos now online suggest.
The conference also featured a key sign of maturation: Many companies in this young field are finding their way into niches, rather than developing their own aircraft. In short, they’re acting more like traditional aviation companies. Walton’s Game Composites is focused on carbon composite manufacturing. Verdego Aero, founded by Charles Lindbergh’s grandson Erik Lindbergh, recently pivoted away from making its own plane, and toward developing a propulsion system that it can offer to other manufacturers. “That led me to focus just on electric propulsion, avoiding the long, torturous process of aircraft certification,” Lindbergh told me.
It’s well avoided: Boom Supersonic founder Blake Scholl told the group it would cost $6 billion to get his supersonic airliner certified. “It sucked the wind out of the room,” a participant recalled. The aircraft many companies hope to launch will be smaller and slower than Scholl’s jet, but the FAA has never approved an electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle before, let alone an autonomous one. To ease the way, many of the companies in Bentonville plan to start off with humans at the controls, and possibly with hybrid propulsion systems.
Helpfully, the FAA has been working to shorten its certification process. Greg Bowles, the General Aviation Manufacturers Association’s head of policy, says his group’s nine-year effort to help the agency rewrite the certification rules will allow for a much faster and less complicated process. “Electric propulsion has only been feasible for the last five or so ears, but it already fits the rules of the new process,” he says. “It will be much easier to achieve certification going forward.”
Still, the industry will have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to develop this new system—too much money for the traditional VC funding model. “The finance panel spoke to the fact that over the next few years this industry is going to be driven more by strategic aerospace investment and non-VC investors with long time horizons,” says Verdego co-founder Eric Bartsch. “While urban air mobility is a huge financial opportunity, it doesn't fit the classic mold for startup investment, which has traditionally been focused on less capital-intensive markets.”
Jeff Schumacher, CEO of BCG Digital Ventures, an innovation, incubation, and investment arm of the Boston Consulting Group, thinks investors can handle long-term plays. “We will see the startups that have the most viable designs in the market first,” he says. “Those that have designs that include a pilot first will get up in the air faster than the ones that don’t. We will also see the two-seater options enter the market sooner than the four-seater, as they weigh significantly less.”
He cautioned air taxi startups to think about their go-to-market strategy, including starting with tourist flights, just to get in the air fast. They also have to prove their case to the market. “You have to look at the friction that we are solving here, which is the friction of time,” Schumacher says. “Humans are susceptible to things that make life easier. eVTOL is going to make it easier to get places much faster.”
Perhaps the most disconcerting revelation of the show, for many participants, was the edge that Chinese counterparts appear to already have. “Both Ehang and Yuneec showed videos of their capabilities that really freaked people out,” according to one attendee who wished to remain anonymous, since his company is still in stealth mode. Ark Invest analyst Tasha Keeney agreed. “The US is far behind other countries in terms of regulation—which we already thought, but received strong affirmation on,” she says. “China and Europe will likely be first, and I was surprised at how much testing the Ehang team had accomplished.”
The question, then, is whether US companies—and the government that supports them—can rally to keep this innovation happening on local soil. Or above it.
- “Netflix for open source” wants developers to get paid
- The stubborn bike commuter gap between American cities
- Jon M. Chu shot this short film on an iPhone XS Max
- The long, strange history of female superhero names
- Edward Snowden on fighting turnkey tyranny
- Looking for more? Sign up for our daily newsletter and never miss our latest and greatest stories