Flying taxis? Hang on, I’m still waiting for my anti-gravity skateboard
And what about my ray gun and light-sabre, eh?
“When God wants to punish a nation, he makes them invade Afghanistan.”
A lesser-known variant of this epigram states: "When God wants to punish a transport business, he makes them announce a flying taxi."
And thus it came to pass that the curse of the flying taxi is making headlines yet again. This week, British newspapers were quoting Sir Stephen Hillier, chair of the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority, predicting the “widespread adoption” of commercial winged cabs.
Poor man. One can only imagine what must he have done in a previous life to incur karma’s wrath. Even so, it never fails to impress me how, despite the very long and well-documented history of failed ventures over the decades, there is no shortage of otherwise intelligent people still willing to join this queue to proclaim that the era of the flying taxi is upon us.
The last time I wrote about ‘taxis in the sky’ – let’s call them TITS for short – was shortly after the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2020. On that occasion, the target of the Lord of Hosts' wrath was Uber.
Not content with trying to turn urban streets into a kind of Wild West with tarmac and smartphones, Uber used CES to announce it was going to launch an airborne passenger service with sexy-looking, Hyundai electric aeroplanes that didn’t exist. It was as if the company was so upset by its failure to secure a licence for operating on London roads the previous year that it decided, in a huff, it would float above them instead.
Just imagine the skies being darkened by hundreds of empty Uber planes aimlessly buzzing around in the hope of picking up a booking.
Well, you'll have to keep imagining because it'll never come about. You see, it's a drearily repetitive fact of commercial inevitability that every few months, someone, somewhere, will announce to the press with a great deal of fanfare their plans to launch a hi-tech, flying taxi.
They will never be heard from again. It’s all a bit spooky but hey, that’s the Holy Ghost for you.
OK, I tell a lie: Uber’s flying taxi was heard from again. In December of that same year Uber sold off its flying taxi project, which it had disappointingly called ‘Elevate’ (boring) rather than ‘TITS’ (uh-heh-heh), to Joby Aviation. Apparently, the ideal moment to launch a new taxi service turned out not to be a few weeks before a worldwide pandemic broke out.
By the way, a similar proverb posits: “When God wants to punish a musician for being too successful, he makes them do the theme song for the next Bond film.” But that's another story – and a career trajectory infographic I'd very much like to see.
Returning to our fantasy world in which flying taxis could exist – heck, let's go for it, why not handheld ray guns and a cat-toast perpetual engine too? – there’s no way that they could operate like ground-level minicabs. The concept is considerably more elaborate than mere app-booking, nor could it be a hail-and-ride service. You couldn’t just raise your hand and grab a TITS.
For a start, you’d hope that a TITS operator would have been a little more insistent than Uber has been in the past with its driver qualification. The last thing you want is to jump into a winged coffin being piloted by someone who’d borrowed it of his cousin for the weekend. Nor would it instil confidence if, having jumped in the back, you have to spend the next five minutes anxiously muttering “come on, let's go” while the driver fiddles with the booking app and wrestles to find your destination in Google Maps.
“Oh!” you cry, “What about private-hire helicopters in major cities? Aren’t they flying taxis?”
Not quite. Bookings can't really be taken on the, er, fly like a taxi. Route plans and timings have to be pre-approved and adhered to. You can't launch an app, punch in your location as 34 Acacia Park Drive (Roof) and check the prices and availability of currently airborne helicopters nearest to your location for an immediate pickup.
The freedom to jump in and bark out your destination seems unlikely too. I doubt city security authorities would permit lots of vaguely licensed, trust-based passenger transport vehicles being deliberately dropped on their heads or being crashed into tall buildings. Flying taxi pilots and their agents, therefore, might be required to run passengers through a more extensive ID trace than just validating their credit cards for payment.
Would a quick glance at your photo ID be enough for the pilot? In that case, I really must get around to ordering one of those rubber party masks that make you look like someone famous. That way, I can go out on the lash, take a flying taxi home and throw up all over the seats, safe in the knowledge that both the biometrics and the onboard CCTV confirm that Jacob Rees-Mogg was to blame.
Or would travelling by TITS demand full airport-style security checks? Our atompunk vision of a city of flying cars takes another dystopian step away from The Jetsons and one closer to Viz Comic’s The Bottom Inspectors. Before your flying ace can take you on your five-minute trip downtown, you would have to show a boarding pass, photo ID, letters of authenticity from your great-grandparents, and legal dispensations from the High Court, MI5, two Popes and NASA.
And being a disruptive technology, all this must be juggled simultaneously, online and in real time, on a smartphone.
This means the joyful experience of undergoing background ID checks will be boosted by the thrills of trying to get adequate 5G signal on 6 per cent battery. You had plenty of battery life when you started the process, of course, but the app keeps downloading updates, rebuilding massive booking confirmation PDFs, bullying you to re-enable Bluetooth and NFC, and auto-brightening the screen enough to burn out the retinas of everyone within a radius of five metres, all the while also secretly sucking up personal data from your contacts, caller history and browser cache. It's all in the Ts & Cs that you tapped ‘Agree’ to, remember?
The days when you could screenshot your travel ticket for offline use and show it to an inspector will be long gone. No connection? Then you're not stepping aboard, pal.
To be honest, you haven't really been able to do this for a while already, which is a shame. I used to find that for train bookings, a clean screenshot of a barcode or QR code in the confirmation email, zoomed in a little, was recognised more readily by the inspectors' handheld readers than the train company’s own booking app.
For added entertainment, I would try to screenshot it on my laptop in such a way that an intriguing sliver of another browser window would peek around the edges, to see if the inspector notices. A saucy movie still from Carry On Girls; bits of email subject lines such as Congratulations on your €25m Eurolottery win! or TOP SECRET: your licence to kill is approved; grainy photos of UFO or Bigfoot sightings; and so on.
As usual, I digress.
Whether it's technology, security or air traffic control practicality, for one reason or another, these TITS schemes never get off the ground, as it were. One wonders whether, mimicking techniques perfected by Ryanair, these fantasy announcements are never intended to be serious but simply to gain good publicity – either to boost investment or distract attention from bad publicity.
It’s like how Richard Branson insists that Virgin Galactic will start running space tourist flights “next year”. He has made this claim annually since the mid-2000s. And this is the man who, apparently without irony, launched himself into a publicity drive a few years ago to combat online scams and over-optimistic investment opportunities.
Anyone remember this video?
I especially enjoy cartoon-Branson's hint that you should associate Bitcoin with “get-rich-quick schemes” and “a sure-fire way to lose your investment”. He should know: Virgin Galactic has been taking bookings in Bitcoin since 2013.
His final snippet of advice? “Don't ever give your personal details to anyone.” So says the bearded ticket inspector for the non-existent space taxi.
Back here on Earth, nobody would be happier than me if noisy, dirty urban helicopters were replaced with electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft like those that Joby is prototyping for the US air force. Perhaps they really will demonstrate drone-style short-jump airborne vehicles at the Paris Olympics next year.
But that’s not really a taxi service, is it? It would be like describing Waystar RoyCo’s private jet as a “school minibus”. Announcing a “flying taxi” is simply the equivalent of Ryanair telling journalists that it plans to fit outside toilets on its 737s. It gets publicity and tricks journalists into writing about them.
Hey, even I am writing about it, and I know that TITS are bollocks.
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. He looks forward to writing this article, about the imminent launch of flying taxis, all over again in a year’s time. And then again every year after that, forever.
Flying Taxis, yellow, and piloted by Bruce Willis in an orange vest.
One of my favourite films.
On a trip to southern Germany, I go to great lengths to get a digital ticket for my train and bus journey to my destination. For the train part, nobody cares to check my ticket. For the bus part, the driver wonders what the heck that is. Next time, I just bought a paper ticket from the machine or tte driver.