Delivery Drones, 'Flying Cars' Planned for Cutting-Edge Air Corridor
Two cutting-edge testing grounds for flying cars and delivery drones are underway in North Texas, making the area ground zero for vertical take-off innovations.
Construction is scheduled to wrap up in the next 45 days on the Uber Elevate skyport in Frisco, Texas, as part of a partnership between developer Hillwood and Uber Technologies. The skyport will host the first test demonstration flights in the world for Uber Air in 2020. At this early stage, flying cars are essentially aircraft that land and take off vertically, rather than something out of the 1960s Jetsons cartoon series.
"We want to give the flying public the ability to get from Frisco to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport to downtown Dallas to Fort Worth," said Mike Berry, president of Hillwood, in an interview.
Uber's other first test markets for skyports are in Los Angeles and Melbourne, Australia, and the company plans to start actual commercial service with Uber Air in 2023.
Hillwood is also the developer behind a transportation innovation center about 42 miles away from Uber Elevate at AllianceTexas, a sprawling community surrounding Alliance Airport, the first industrial airport specifically built to ship goods throughout the United States.
Hillwood has hired consulting firm Deloitte LLP to build the AllianceTexas Mobility Innovation Zone, where drone and vertical-take-off and landing applications will be tested and integrated into the National Airspace System, Berry said.
An airspace corridor between Uber Elevate and AllianceTexas will have the ability to be established and it could set the tone for future Uber Elevate corridors in other U.S. cities, Berry said.
"That's our bigger plan with Uber Elevate and at AllianceTexas is to focus more on that innovation and bring it all together," he said.
The AllianceTexas Mobility Innovation Zone is expected to include a surface freight mobility program for shipping containers to move by autonomous trucks along a smart road system to allow retailers, consumer goods companies and other businesses to increase their supply-chain efficiency.
Innovation Center
There has yet to be any drawings of a building at the Mobility Innovation Zone that will act as a center of excellence that will be a front-facing building for entrepreneurs, startups and universities, said Berry, adding it was at least two or three years down the road. He couldn't immediately offer any additional information on the facility, but said it would likely be the front door to the eastern side of Alliance Airport.
"With the freight mecca portion of Alliance on the western side, it would make sense for the innovation center to serve as a front door on the eastern side," he added.
Indeed, the freight mecca includes Amazon Air's newest regional air hub, which is in the midst of being built on the western side of Alliance Airport, with other freight carriers, such as FedEx Southwest Regional Sort Hub, two UPS Sort Hubs, as well as BNSF Railway's Alliance Intermodal Facility. Walmart also has a major air freight presence at airport.
AllianceTexas is also home to the Federal Aviation Administration's regional headquarters, as well as more than 500 global and regional companies, such as Fidelity Investments and Charles Schwab. The 26,000-acre community also includes over 162 miles of major arterial, state and federal highway systems.
"In reality, this is the next generation of what we've been doing for 30 years," Berry said. "We are taking our platform, which is focused on transportation, mobility and logistics and looking at all these new technologies."
Hillwood has partnered up with Deloitte to develop the business strategy of the Mobility Innovation Zone. Deloitte has a global practice focused on the future of mobility and recently won a big contract with NASA to help design the airspace corridors for this type of new technology. With Deloitte University already located in AllianceTexas, it made sense to bring in the "fire power of Deloitte," to help convene a center for companies and individuals to further develop this kind of technology, Berry said.
Meanwhile, Uber Elevate is in Frisco Station, a 242-acre mixed-use development near the Dallas Cowboys headquarters that became one of the first communities in the United States built out with AT&T's 5G infrastructure network. The move was in preparation for the amped up operations of Uber Elevate, which is expected to use the infrastructure for broadband transmissions.
Hillwood plans to replicate that network at AllianceTexas and add other features to support emerging mobility innovations, such as adding a special paint system to the roadways for autonomous vehicles, creating a new testing ground.
The addition of the Mobility Innovation Zone comes after Alliance Airport recently extended two of its runways to 11,000 feet to increase the airport's air cargo capacity and add nonstop flights from as far away as Europe for overseas expansion. Globally, air freight demand has fallen 4.7% year-over-year in April, continuing a negative year-over-year trend that began in January, according to the International Air Transport Association. Declining demand is tied to continued trade tensions and a weakened global economy, the trade organization said.