Uber’s ambitions for the Indian market are reaching the skies, quite literally, as the cab aggregator is planning to test its flying taxis Uber Elevate in the country. Eric Allison, Global CEO at Uber Aviation Program, who recently met Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is hopeful that India will use its innovation to drive down costs for flying taxis and make them as affordable as road taxis. In an interview with BusinessLine , he talked about the company’s plans to partner with local developers and even consider local manufacturing for these flying cars. Excerpts:

Existing helicopter services are already facing permit issues. How will you manage operations with an entirely new type of aircraft?

It begins with starting to work with regulators as soon as possible. We think that early conversations are critical as aviation is a highly-regulated industry and there’s no way around that. You have to work with regulators. The next important aspect is that we are introducing a new type of technology that has benefits that helicopters don’t have. The noise and safety profile are quite different.

And, we are not making an elitist product. We want to make something that is accessible to a wide number of people. Even if it starts out at a higher price point, we want to aggressively drive down the price so that it becomes more and more accessible to people.

Uber Elevate is not only for the Ambanis of the world. It is for the people who take an Uber everyday. All our analysis projects that we will be able to get this at an affordable price. And actually in pretty short time.

You can’t just have a regulator working on a new type of air traffic management solution because you’re flying at a different altitude compared to any other mode of transport. So who will create that infrastructure and who will be able to manage it?

We are actually building out our own air traffic management infrastructure for these vehicles. We will manage our network and then interface our network management service in a non interfering way, with the air traffic control system.

In the US, we are working with the Air Traffic Organization and we’re actually doing some experiments in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, which is one of our launch markets in the US. We have an agreement with NASA, where we’re experimenting together to demonstrate, in a simulated environment, that the type of operations we’re proposing to do with Uber don’t cause any problems for commercial aviation.

On the infrastructure side, we’ll be looking to partner with some premier real estate players in India.

Whether it is Mumbai, Delhi or Bengaluru, we will be looking for a partner for skyports.

Will these be skyports be built independently or on top of existing infrastructure?

A lot of real estate developers we’ve talked to are interested in dual use, or multi-use, options.

So, multi-use developments where you go shopping and have food become attractive. And you can almost view the skyport as an amenity, a mixed use development.

Multiplexes or malls or even the public transit — we would be interested in being co-located with. You can imagine taking a Mumbai local train and then rising to the top (of the station) taking Uber (air taxi) to somewhere else.

Uber Elevate costs $1.8 per mile, which may work for markets like the US and Japan. But it is still expensive for India if you’re looking at mass market adoption....

Those figures are all in the US context. We have not yet taken those models and adapted them to an Indian context, which is one of the things we will be doing in the next few months. Those costs will go down significantly just the way our rides business did. UberX here costs less than what it costs in the US.

We actually think there’s a huge potential to make something that’s extremely competitive in the Indian market and then expand from there to be able to make something that is even more compelling for the other markets where we take them to.

So, we think that’s the big advantage that India has — to develop something that could be quite magical as we scale it up.

If we were to develop a manufacturing partner here, that’s conceivable because a lot of manufacturing happens here, both on the aerospace and car side.

Flying autonomous cars is technically easier driving them, given the relatively less number of variables there. Why is it then taking longer to develop?

It is easier technologically but it is harder from a regulatory standpoint. That is why we think the right thing to do is to start with pilots. There’s also a social acceptance angle to it that I think we don’t fully understand yet. Our intuition is that starting with pilots is the right way to go.

We think the fastest way to go is to have pilots and then we will develop autonomy in parallel with the pilot flights and eventually down the road, we’ll have a hybrid fleet.

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