Uber has a plan to launch a fleet of electric aircraft for on-demand aviation. The plan, called Uber Elevate, is set to design these ‘cars’ to take off and land vertically, travel 100 miles on a single charge and has set 2021 as the ready date.
To expand the scope of its flying car experiment, the company just hired NASA engineer Mark Moore, who worked at the federal agency as an advanced aircraft engineer and basically kickstarted the current interest in vertical take-off and landing craft for short-haul urban flight with a 2010 paper on the feasibility of the helicopter-like vehicles.
“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,” he says.
Moore also said that key to his decision to join Uber was that the company seemed to have a practical business case for making a flying commuter transit service real – and nothing would ever get done without market motivation behind the vision.
This is an important hire for Uber as the company continues to prove it’s no longer just a ride-sharing platform. In addition to its flying car project, the company is also at the forefront of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
