In September, Uber said flying cars could be hovering over cities and transporting people from point A to B within a decade. Now, the app-based car service has hired someone to help bring that vision to life, an advanced aircraft engineer by the name of Mark Moore.
Moore has spent the past three decades working at NASA, where he served as chief technologist of on-demand mobility at Langley Research Center, and studied the feasibility of so-called Vertical Take-off and Landing (VTOL, pronounced vee-tol) devices, aka flying cars. He will now serve as director of aviation engineering at Uber, where he'll oversee the company's Elevate intiative, according to Bloomberg Technology.
"Uber continues to see its role as a catalyst to the growing developing VTOL ecosystem," Uber's head of product for advanced programs, Nikhil Goel, said in a statement emailed to PCMag. "We're excited to have Mark join us to work with companies and stakeholders as we continue to explore the use case described in our white paper."
Uber in October released a lengthy paper on Elevate, saying that its flying cars would allow someone to travel from San Francisco to San Jose in just 15 minutes. On solid ground, that drive would normally take around two hours.
"A network of small, electric aircraft that take off and land vertically … will enable rapid, reliable transportation between suburbs and cities and, ultimately, within cities," Uber wrote a paper on which Moore consulted.
"I can't think of another company in a stronger position to be the leader for this new ecosystem and make the urban electric VTOL market real," Moore told Bloomberg.
As is the case with its self-driving car initiative, Uber isn't constructing its own flying car at this time, Bloomberg notes. Instead, the company is making moves to "organize the industry to help spur development" of them, the report adds.
Uber has offered helicopter service before, linking New York City with the Hamptons on Long Island, for example. But those efforts have mostly been expensive, temporary marketing gimmicks. The advantage of VTOL planes, which have fixed wings instead of rotors, is that they are in theory cheaper to operate.