SAE TOMORROW TODAY: The Future of Urban Air Mobility

We take to the sky as a pioneering voice in VTOL, Mark Moore, the Engineering Director of Aviation at Uber Elevate, joins host Grayson Brulte to walk through his journey from NASA to Uber and how eVTOLs (electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft) will lead to redesigned cities with transportation freedom. Mark breaks down the misconceptions of eVTOLs and their benefits compared to helicopters, including reduced noise pollution and the safety parameters built into eVTOL design that create thrusting control redundancies to ensure continued operation even if a part is broken. He shares his unique perspective on how the traditional roles of commercial operators and government agencies have flipped with Silicon Valley leading the charge on the technological innovations and capital investment for eVTOLs. The two discuss Uber's Elevate strategy of collaboration for the establishment of an ecosystem of developers, public officials and key stakeholders to make the endeavor a reality. Mark compares the current and future eVTOL landscape with that of the early days of aviation and offers his insight on how the industry will evolve over the next two decades to allow city planners to "take off the gloves" and redesign cities for productivity around a nodal mobility system. And for the first time, Mark shares with Grayson how his groundbreaking "NASA Puffin Electric Tailsitter VTOL Concept" paper caught the eye of Google's Larry Page and ultimately led to a meeting where Larry showed Mark the building where he was going to start the industry's first eVTOL company. Learn more about Uber Elevate at https://www.uber.com/us/en/elevate/.