Nice to be reading about Skypod Aerospace. I happened to be at the 5th Transformative Flight conference, which was held in SF, Jan. last year, organized by AHS and NASA Ames Research. An Air Force colonel warned everyone attending never ever to lose sight of the logistics aspect — “Battles are won or lost because of logistics”. Every time you transport someone or something from A to B, logistics are involved. It’s THE reason why Uber’s vision of using road taxis to pick you up and drop you off at the vertiport upon which you take off in an eVTOL (same happens but then in reverse order when you arrive) will never work. Too much of a hassle.

Why the fixation on combining road- and aerial transit? Simple, using passenger eVTOLs will never be as simple as landing on and taking off from your own backyard (unless you own a substantial piece of land). Noise is just one of the concerns. That is why people dream of flying cars, and why auto makers haven taken an interest in aerial vehicles too. Here is an overview of known projects. However, it is safe to say that 2-in-1 contraptions like the ones Terrafugia came up with, will never work. So, you end up with the challenge of engineering a separate, lightweight, but still safe road vehicle, and a separate rotor/airfoil combo; the two can then be put together modularly.

This might work. As a matter of fact, I gave a presentation at the conference afore mentioned regarding what you see here in a nutshell, titled: “Seamless 2D and 3D transit”. Having the road vehicle engineer, comes first though. Want to read more about this, go to Smartphone Should Inspire Us to Bring a Smart-Mobility ‘APP’ road-vehicle.

Cheers, Ralph