Flying Cars – Page 4

Uber will bring flying cars to Dallas and Dubai

http://www.geekwire.com/2017/uber-flying-car-2020-dallas-dubai/

Uber has been talking about flying cars for months, but today the ride-sharing company fleshed out its plan to become a flight-sharing company in 2020.

“We actually get to live in this era of flying cars,” Jeff Holden, Uber’s chief product officer, said today at the first-ever Uber Elevate Summit in Dallas. “I hate that term, by the way, but we’ll have to live with it.”

The Dallas-Fort Worth region in Texas and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates have been targeted as the pilot cities for the Uber Elevate Network, Holden said. Eventually, the company sees urban aviation as a service that can roll out to the hundreds of cities that Uber serves around the world.

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Kitty Hawk’s flying car looks like a flying raft

The prototype Kitty Hawk Flyer takes to the air. (Kitty Hawk via YouTube)

Kitty Hawk, the hush-hush flying car venture backed by Google billionaire co-founder Larry Page, unveiled the first working prototype of its all-electric Flyer today – but this one is more suited for a dock than a garage.

The single-seat vehicle looks like a cross between a Jet Ski watercraft and a scaled-up octocopter, with a couple of floats attached to the bottom.

“As you can see it’s a bit rough around the edges,” Kitty Hawk said on its website, “but we were so excited to show you its capabilities that we didn’t want to wait until we finished its design. The consumer version will be available by the end of this year.”

Kitty Hawk said the finished Flyer “will have a different design.” But like the prototype, it’ll be classified as an ultralight and won’t require a pilot’s license to operate. Kitty Hawk expects it to win approval from the Federal Aviation Administration for recreational flying over fresh water in uncongested areas.

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