Uber’s planned “flying cars” will navigate crowded city skies with some help from NASA, if everything goes according to plan.
The space agency has signed an agreement with Uber to help develop an air-traffic-control system for the flying-car project, which goes by the name Uber Elevate or UberAir, according to USA Today.
“UberAir will be performing far more flights over cities on a daily basis than has ever been done before,” Uber Chief Product Officer Jeff Holden said in a statement provided to USA Today. “Doing this safely and efficiently is going to require a foundational change in airspace-management technologies.”
NASA has already been working to develop such technologies and help make “urban air mobility” (UAM) a reality, agency officials have said. In 2011, the agency’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) started a project called Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration in the National Airspace System (UAS in the NAS), which focused on relatively large, uncrewed vehicles flying above 500 feet (150 meters).
