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Skai Air Taxi Costs The Same As Uber
Wouldn't it be great to be picked up and whisked away to your destination without needing to be in contact with America's crumbling infrastructure of roads and bridges?
Well, Skai believes that its long-range hydrogen-powered eVTOL air taxis are the answer.
(Skai hydrogen fuel cell-powered air cars)
Brian Morrison, CTO of Skai and its parent company, Alaka'i Technologies:The test vehicle is up at Minuteman Field up in Stow, and all the tests we've been conducting to date have been with it tethered to a concrete pad, which is part of the FAA requirements.,P> "We use liquid hydrogen on board. The fuel cells actually use it in gaseous form, so it's stored in liquid but it comes out and goes through an expansion chamber which allows it to change from the liquid state into a gaseous state. Then we put it through a heat exchanger to warm it up a little bit, and that's what goes into the fuel cells."
The core philosophy is keep it simple. And by keeping it simple, we'll get certified sooner and we'll be a much lower cost vehicle than the more complex designs. You add complexity, you add weight, and you add certification risk.
The first use of the phrase "air-car" is from the 1934 story A Matter of Size by Harry Bates.
In several scattered places were other roof doors like the one he had emerged from, and straight ahead stood a row of transparent objects that had to be the air-cars...It, like the others, was small, hardly five feet high, with open sides and streamlined shells of a stuff like glass, front and back. Within was one wide seat, in front of which were three control levers which led to a boxed space below. It rested on three splayed legs.
(Read more about air-cars)
As far as I know, the first use of the exact phrase air-taxi is found in Isaac Asimov's 1988 Prelude to Foundation.
Via NewAtlas.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 5/25/2019)
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Related News Stories - (" Transportation ")
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'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street...' - Stanley G. and Helen Weinbaum, 1938.
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Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
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