NASA And Uber Partner To Bring Air Taxis To Los Angeles
Uber continues to aim for the sky.
The tech company has partnered with NASA to help it develop air traffic management systems for its flying taxi initiatives, chief product officer Jeff Holden said on Wednesday. Holden made the announcement at Web Summit, a technology conference in Lisbon.
In April, Uber unveiled its plans to introduce flying taxi fleets, known as uberAIR.
The four-person ridesharing flights won't become a reality anytime soon but Holden said there are plans for demos coming to Los Angeles in 2020. Uber previously announced cities Dallas, Texas and Dubai as other partner cities.
So Uber is partnering with NASA to make flying taxis a reality. I have a lot of feelings about this; naturally, I think it’s a pretty bad idea since getting in an Uber is scary enough without having to vet my driver to see if he’s worthy of being a pilot. However, I don’t think this news is all bad- in fact, this calls for a classic winners/losers list. Here we go.
Winners:
- Uber. Congratulations Uber, you partnered with NASA, that’s pretty great news for you. Sure, Lyft might donate millions of donors to the ACLU while you act like a bunch of scumbags, but hey, who's gonna reach space first?
- Los Angeles. LA traffic is pretty bad, so how do we fix it? Let’s start flying everywhere. I can’t wait for LA and NYC to just become absolute polar opposites in terms of transportation. While we’ve got LA moving towards flying taxis, New Yorkers are one L line shut down away from saying fuck it, demolishing all of subway stations and just walking everywhere. Also it’s worth mentioning that the LA Olympics are in 2028, and flying taxis may be the city’s only chance of not self-destructing from the congestion.
- Disgraced pilots. Are you a disgraced pilot looking for work? Maybe you’re a little too much Denzel Washington from Flight and not enough Tom Hanks from Sully. Maybe you’re a crop duster who ran out of crops or dust. Maybe you’re a taxi driver looking to put that spare pilot’s license to good use. Well good news, fellas, lots of jobs coming to LA.
Losers:
- NASA. You guys are fucking losers. We all thought about it, we all had a hunch, but now it’s official. You guys are galactic explorers! You guys won the space race for us (allegedly)! Now you pull this shit? You partner with Uber? And here’s a shut the fuck up to all of you nerds who are saying, “NASA doesn’t just deal with space” to yourselves. Well, they should just be dealing with space. Maybe if we were colonizing Mars like we were promised I’d be a little bit more understanding of this move. But given that our space program isn’t doing anything cool anymore (I remind you that I don’t know anything about space), I feel like their priorities should be elsewhere. They can make their earthly partnerships once they make us some extraterrestrial partnerships, how about that? I tell you, our biggest mistake was giving those nerds the Hubble Telescope. They used to go places and now they just look at shit.
- LA/Earth. Los Angeles already has a pollution problem, so I can’t imagine that throwing a bunch of air taxis into the equation is going to help things. Also, here’s a genuine wish of good luck to all of the athletes competing in the Olympic games of 2028. We’ll have smog so thick you’ll think you never left Beijing!
- Self-driving cars. Real bummer for these bad boys. Right about when you figure out how to have these things operate without killing everybody, we’ll start flying everywhere! I hate when that happens!
So there you have it, folks, the official winners/losers list of Uber’s air taxis. Summed up, it sucks unless you’re Uber or someone who’d want to fly an air taxi. LA's clearly the only place this would work; New Yorkers would just ignore the air taxis, and Philly would dismantle them and throw the scraps at tourists' children.
P.S. It used to be that people from LA could only give you shit for walking places and not valeting your car, so I’m psyched that someone thought that they needed something else douchey to talk about.
P.P.S. It's been brought to my attention (I watched the video all the way through (30 seconds)), and apparently these are self-piloted and can't crash? So, I owe an apology to all of the disgraced pilots whose hopes I got up.
