Northwest Aerospace News October | November Issue No. 11 | Page 30

W hy is it important to Lindbergh, his partners, and employees to develop this product now? “Our traffic and infrastructure on ground is saturated by cars and is incredibility wasteful.” He asks hypothetically, “Why can’t we use the third dimen- sion to do short distance air transportation?” Lindbergh notes that with electric propul- sion, this can happen. Further, he feels that due to the Uber model of passenger trans- portation, and other technolog- ical innovations, autonomous passenger vehicles will soon occur. 30 NORTHWEST AEROSPACE NEWS He also cited that the FAA is working to embrace the idea. “The big aerospace industry is here in the U.S., but the worst traffic is in China and India,” which he posed could indicate the technology might arrive there sooner but added that he thinks that air mobility will still happen first in the United States. However, Lindbergh notes, “It’s one thing to fly experi- mentally and one thing to fly commercially,” as it relates to the FAA. VerdeGo Aero™ has some iron bird equipment that they are testing now. “We’ve been working in this area for 10 years. When we launched the company, we were working on the new Spirit of St. Louis with Embry-Rid- dle, and during that process we decided we had all the right tools to build a flying car. We have lots of test hardware,” Lindbergh said. They have just announced a partnership with Continental Aerospace Technologies. Lind- bergh said,