If being stuck in traffic every morning isn’t your idea of a good time, relief may soon be here by way of the friendly skies thanks to the aerospace geniuses over at Boeing.
The company’s new Electronic Vertical-Take-Off-and-Landing (eVTOL) prototype stands four feet tall, measures 15 by 18 feet across, and weighs over 700 hundred pounds. Suffice to say, this unmanned cargo air vehicle (CAV) isn’t your typical consumer drone.
This giant unmanned flying hunk of metal carries its weight with the help of eight giant rotary blades that each run on custom batteries. As a result, it can carry cargo up to a maximum of 500 pounds—or roughly three to five human adults. And no, the company doesn’t plan on using the eVTOL to ship mattresses or deliver those precious, perishable scented candles you bought on Amazon Prime.
Considering Boeing bought Aurora Flight Sciences ind 2017, a company which also dabbles in eVTOL technology, it isn’t too far-fetched to think the two are working on a way to make this prototype a commercial flying vehicle. Think of it as a helicopter—only instead of a million buttons to press, pilots can fly the machine using conventional drone controls.
The project is still far from completion, and there’s the matter of jumping through a multitude of approval hoops should it ever be used as a personal helicopter, but having more of these in the sky just might be the closest we’ve ever gotten to that “flying car” future humans have always wanted.
