In the summer of 2019, entrepreneur Matthew Pearson stated his ambition to create the world’s first racing series for electric flying cars. His mission, influenced by the role racing has historically played in accelerating the development of both ground and air mobility, has resulted in the first flights of a full-scale electric flying racing car (Speeder) — the remotely-piloted Alauda Mk3.
These flights, which took place at undisclosed test locations in the deserts of South Australia, were observed by Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA).
Throughout the development process, the Alauda team worked with the regulator to ensure compliance with all required procedures while developing robust safety protocols. Moreover, the success of these flights means that uncrewed electric flying car Grand Prix will take place in 2021 at three soon-to-be-revealed international locations.
These races will see ‘elite pilots’ — drawn from aviation, motor-sport and eSports backgrounds — remotely pilot the ‘world’s only racing electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) craft’.
These pilots will remotely control their Speeders in races across electronically governed, augmented reality-enabled sky-tracks, while audiences will watch via digital streams that show the full dynamic potential of these vehicles, which are said to have a greater thrust-to-weight ratio than an F15 fighter jet.
Mr Pearson says these races will “rapidly hasten the arrival of eVTOL advanced air mobility craft. This technology, predicted by Morgan Stanley to be worth $1.5 trillion by 2040, is already finding potent applications in air logistics and remote medical care; it also has the potential to liberate cities from congestion though clean-air passenger applications like air taxis.”
The Alauda Mk3 race-craft are remotely controlled by pilots seated in a simulator environment that mimics the dynamics and ergonomics of the Mk3 cockpit environment. From there they control the vehicle in exactly the same way as a pilot located in the cockpit, with finger-tip commands sent instantly to the physical Speeder as it plots a series of courses dictated by electronic sky-tracks. Each race-craft will have an identical specification, meaning it is pilot skill and team strategy that will determine race-winners.
Furthermore, ‘physical tele-robotic avatars’ that have been designed to represent the frame of human pilots, will sit within the cockpit of the Speeder and provide engineers with key data and information on the effects of high-speed racing, rapid turning, and acceleration and deceleration on the human frame — data that will shorten the progression to the human piloted races scheduled for 2022.