Will flying become everyday public transportation?

As urban ground transportation becomes increasingly congested with population growth, the number of aircraft in urban environments is expected to increase dramatically. For Corwin Huber, CEO, and co-founder of Skyroads AG, the challenge of building digital roads in the sky to lessen urban air mobility is what he has been waiting for.

Huber was enthusiastic about flying from an early age. "Flight is in my genes," he said. "I flew planes alone before I had a driver's license. He was and enchanted by the idea of ​​living like a bird, with the sense of freedom conveyed by the mastery of the air.

Inspired by his father, an aeronautical engineer, he studied aerospace engineering at the Technical University of Munich. He managed several aircraft manufacturers, some of which led to successful launches in Britain and the United States. "I'm always disappointed because they only touch a small demographic," he said.

He started thinking about extending the usefulness of three-dimensional navigation to a much larger segment of the population. He came up with the idea of ​​highways and new approaches to air traffic management and vehicle orientation. "We need to break away from the traditional notion that only fearless superheroes can fly," Huber said. "For that, we need a usability revolution, similar to what was observed in cell phones at the end of the last century."

Skyroads was founded in 2019 by Huber also a team of entrepreneurs, engineers, and industry experts with the common goal of making aviation accessible to everyone by creating an air management system that allows fully automated and autonomous passenger and cargo vehicles to fly in manned urban areas. . .

Combining several vehicles with different performance characteristics and requirements into an integrated safe driving system is a huge undertaking. However, Skyroads reached its first milestone last September, proving that its basic architectural concept can be built and controlled by drone commands via an end-to-end system. It is now making the world's first flight test site in the Munich area, equipped with a traffic management and routing infrastructure that can safely steer different aircraft types in a highly automated manner.