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In an announcement that drew immediate comparisons with “The Jetsons,” the city of Orlando, Florida, and a German airline officially unveiled plans on Wednesday to build the first hub for flying cars in the United States.
The 56,000-square-foot transportation hub, first shown in renderings and a video simulation, resembles an airport terminal. Think of Eero Saarinen.
The so-called vertiport is expected to be completed in 2025 and will allow passengers to bypass Florida’s notoriously congested freeways, the city and the hub’s developers say.
The electric-powered aircraft will be able to take off vertically from the hub to the ground and reach a top speed of 186 miles per hour, according to Munich-based airline Lilium, which is working with Orlando Tavistock Development Company on the project.
But is the ambitious plan to introduce Lilium’s flying taxis as a faster but more expensive alternative to ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft viable? There is a caveat: the planes are still in development.
Orlando officials do not seem deterred by this uncertainty. On Monday, city council approved more than $ 800,000 in potential tax cuts in Lilium.
Buddy Dyer, the city’s longtime mayor, called the project transformational in a statement Wednesday.
“For this new technology to truly reshape the transportation ecosystem and benefit Orlando residents in the long term, it will take a true partnership between cities, developers and transportation operators,” said Dyer. “We have strived to find the right partners to become a global leader in advanced air mobility.”
The site selected for the transportation hub is at Lake Nona, a planned 17 square mile community within the city limits, adjacent to the Orlando International Airport. It will require approval from the Federal Aviation Administration. The planes themselves will also come under the agency’s surveillance.
“The FAA is the regulatory authority for all flight activities in the United States, including urban air mobility aircraft,” the FAA said in a statement Wednesday evening. “The agency is in the early stages of working with these candidates and will continue to work with them as they strive to meet certification standards.”
Jim Gray, a city council commissioner whose district includes the planned hub site, said Monday the tax incentives were justified and the project would create around 140 jobs that would bring in about $ 65,000 a year on average.
“This is what we need,” Gray said at the board meeting. “We need better paying jobs. So I think our investment, which is to prime the pump to help this job with tax cuts, is absolutely the right thing to do.
Orlando officials noted that projected salaries would be more than 25% higher than the average salary in Orange County, which includes the city. They also said the tax cuts did not support existing funds.
“The focus should also be on the discounts that are on the value they generate,” Dyer said Monday. “We are refunding money that would not be there otherwise.
In a January 2019 report on the emergence of flying cars, analysts at Morgan Stanley said that “autonomous urban planes may not be comic books anymore.” But they looked at the technology longer term, saying flying cars would be mainstream by 2040, with the global market expected to be between $ 1.4 trillion and $ 2.9 trillion by then.
Some officials in Florida couldn’t help but recall the 1960s animated series “The Jetsons,” in which the father, George Jetson, crossed the skies in a flying car.
“This,” said Jerry L. Demings, Mayor of Orange County, “is really making the Jetsons come true in the central Florida backyard.”
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