Taking flight from an automotive cradle

DETROIT — Weeds grow from cracks on the tarmac. Runways sit empty for hours. The last commercial passengers departed two decades ago.

Coleman A. Young Airport, better known as Detroit City Airport, seems like a crumbling remnant of a bygone era of Motor City greatness. But from his vantage point on the second floor of a dilapidated terminal building, Jon Rimanelli swears he sees the future.

"Look, there's 760 million passengers that enplane at the nation's top 50 airports every year, and there's like 13,000 airports that are underutilized in the United States," he says. "There's a gap in air mobility and vehicle platforms that connect the big airports to the small ones like this one and urban centers to suburbs. If you do that, you end up with a distributed network of air transportation and literally tens of thousands of new aircraft that will be pulled into the system."

Rimanelli intends to build those aircraft. He's CEO of Airspace Experience Technologies, or ASX, a Detroit startup creating the Mobi-One, an electric vertical takeoff-and-landing aircraft capable of carrying cargo and passengers.

Like the industry it's trying to help create, the Mobi-One doesn't yet exist. Smaller-scale prototypes are hovering around City Airport, a test mule should be ready in the next 60 days and a full-scale prototype should be operational by the fall of 2020.

Once aloft, Rimanelli says, the aircraft could usher in a new era of urban air mobility, linking travelers to key destinations five times faster than conventional modes of transportation do — at prices comparable to those offered in today's ride-hailing networks.

It's an ambitious vision.

Incumbent aviation manufacturers, he says, are ensnared by the high expenses associated with lower-volume production runs and the complexity of systems needed for higher-altitude flying. Simplifying systems for flights no higher than 3,000 feet and plans for high-volume production should hold down costs.

So will a novel approach — eschewing traditional aviation suppliers for automotive ones. Central to ASX's plan is relying on Detroit's traditional auto industry and supply base, and repurposing them for aviation use.

"We're not building flying cars, but we are assembling car parts that you can fly," says Rimanelli, a Dartmouth business school graduate who previously founded Nextronix Inc., an electronics design and manufacturing firm in Romulus, Mich. "The reality is the automotive industry is very interested in electrification, automation, lightweighting, safety and reliability. Those are all the same things I'm interested in."

This wouldn't be the first time the auto industry's collective might would be harnessed for aviation. During World War II, Ford Motor Co. built B-24 Liberators at the Willow Run assembly plant in Ypsilanti, Mich. At its peak in 1944, a bomber rolled off the assembly line once every hour.

Mobi-Ones might not be replicated at that pace, but Rimanelli wants to borrow from that general idea.

"We've got this great industrial base here, we've got skilled labor and capacity," he says. "We can leverage this at scale and make it an accessible product that everyone can afford through ride-sharing programs."

Factories in Hamtramck and Detroit have been identified as potential assembly sites. Production could start as early as 2022, when ASX intends to launch its first wave of aircraft for use in the logistics and emergency-response industries. In June, ASX signed a memorandum of understanding with TPS Logistics, a $1.5 billion global transportation company in Troy, Mich., to explore such possibilities.

Passengers may board the Mobi-One starting in 2025. That's when Rimanelli hopes to build 2,500 aircraft and launch 50 in each of the most populous cities on ride-hailing networks. Toward that end, ASX has conferred with Uber and has sketched its technical plans for the Mobi-One to meet specifications outlined by the ride-hailing network.

Those specifications include a tilt-wing design that enables vertical takeoffs and transitions into winged flight — meaning trips can start or end on tops of buildings, parking garages or the so-called vertiports that some mobility leaders foresee. The Mobi-One could also perform more energy-efficient takeoffs and landings from traditional runways.

The aircraft is slated to have an all-electric range of 65 miles, enough to get from one side of a major city to the other or, alternately, ferry passengers from suburbs to major airports. A version with a hybrid powertrain could extend the range to 260 miles.

Affordability might be in the eye of the beholder. By Rimanelli's estimates, a trip might cost $75 per seat for a 15-minute flight. (That's in the ballpark of the $68.03 Uber charged for a recent trip between Detroit and Ann Arbor, Mich., for one example.) At that rate, Rimanelli suggests each aircraft could be profitable if it carries seven riders an hour, eight hours a day.

If the novelty of passengers boarding flying taxis at their neighborhood vertiports in just a few years sounds like the latest permutation of the Jetsons-style hype rife in the transportation technology industry, well, many experts share or have shared some skepticism.

"I met Jon at a mobility conference in Montreal," says Anita Sengupta, a former NASA aerospace engineer responsible for the design of the supersonic parachute system that landed the Curiosity Rover on Mars. "He's going on about making electric aviation cheap, and I'm like, 'This is bullshit. I'm from aerospace and this is impossible.' "

She's been converted into a believer. After the conference, the two became friends, and Sengupta eventually became an adviser to ASX. Now she is the company's chief product officer.

Others also have warmed to air mobility. A June report from consulting firm Deloitte noted that, after "decades of false starts," new classes of aircraft are emerging that could make urban air mobility a reality. By 2025, the study projects a $1 billion market for intracity passenger service via electric or hybrid-electric vertical takeoff and landing, a figure that reaches $13.8 billion by 2040. Meanwhile, Deloitte expects the intercity passenger market for such vehicles to grow from $2.6 billion to $3.9 billion.

Projected growth underscores "significant business opportunities for aerospace and manufacturing industries to reexamine product mixes and business models," says the report, released ahead of June's Paris Air Show.

"These will open up new markets that helicopters can't service today because of price and sound," says Robin Lineberger, head of Deloitte's global aerospace and defense industry practice. "You'll see some people think that all these aircraft have the same flight characteristics, and that it's one size fits all. One size doesn't fit all. How much energy you need, how much weight you carry and how far you want to go — that's the design box, and aircraft are being developed for different corners of that box."

Dozens of companies have ventured into the vertical takeoff and landing realm in recent years, including Airbus, Uber and Bell, which captured attention in January at CES with the unveiling of its Nexus air taxi concept that would use a hybrid propulsion system. Others include the Larry Page-backed Kitty Hawk, Volvo's Terrafugia subsidiary and Joby Aviation, which has received investment from the Toyota AI Ventures fund.

For those pursuing electrification, batteries present some technical challenges and perhaps regulatory uncertainty — namely, how will federal fuel-reserve requirements be measured in charge instead of fuel. But there are other, less obvious complexities.

"Electrification is a net new play or need for the aviation industry," Lineberger says. "They'll have to work on building the supply chain for that, and if this is tens of thousands of vehicles, that's not how the industry builds today. That supply chain velocity is totally new."

From the cradle of the auto industry, that's exactly where ASX plans to excel.

"This is not aviation in the traditional commercial jet sense at high altitude," Sengupta says. "This is general aviation travel for the masses. And when you look at mass production, the car is a supercomplicated device that costs almost nothing. So for us, the proof is in that pudding."