Aerospace development firm Karem Aircraft said its ultimate goal is to have pilotless electric air taxis, but only in the “long term.”
The Lake Forest-based company, which develops and makes fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft, is developing the all-electric Butterfly air taxi for Uber, and has spun off a separate company to handle the work. The firm was featured in the August 19 edition of the Business Journal.
“The ultimate goal is for Butterfly to be pilotless,” Chief Commercial Officer Ryan Doss told the Business Journal earlier this month. “Realistically, we know it will start as a piloted vehicle and will remain piloted until three key hurdles are cleared.”
Those hurdles are:
• “Technology maturation” of autonomous aircraft enabling the required level of safety for passenger flight in urban areas.
• The regulatory and certification framework for the vehicles.
• Public acceptance of pilotless aircraft.
“Each of those hurdles brings their own challenges, but each is solvable long term,” Doss said by email. “We remain heads-down focused on development on the company-front.”
The company has $25 million in funding lined up from South Korea’s Hanwha Systems, and said in July that the vehicles from the new venture are being built for Uber for the development of an aerial ride-sharing program that the San Francisco-based company is looking to build. Hanwha Systems is part of a larger Korean conglomerate that has aerospace and defense business units.
The plan is to make a passenger-friendly adaptation of Karem’s core military-focused technology, one which “will enable aerial ride-sharing customers to dramatically shorten their commutes and avoid traffic in densely populated urban markets.”
The vertical takeoff-and-landing vehicles are expected to be significantly quieter than typical helicopters, which will help gain acceptance in cities, the companies believe, and they’re expected to be more affordable and environmentally friendly.
