Singapore: Airbus has announced to reveal more details about its unmanned parcel-delivery drone trail soon in Singapore. Along with this, the company also announced to extend its plan of transporting passengers as well.
The comments came a day after Singapore’s Ministry of Transport, in a press interview said that it is talking to some firms about trying out human-carrying drones as a mode of transport. When the question was posed to Airbus, Airbus said: “Airbus is heavily involved in studying the future of urban mobility with several projects underway, including the Skyways initiative in Singapore. This project is ongoing and we will provide an update on the trial phase in the coming months.”
The project came into being after an agreement signed in February 2016 between Airbus and the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS). Under the contract, the Europe-based plane-maker is to test a drone parcel delivery service on the campus of the National University of Singapore in mid-2017.
But that’s not all: on its website, Airbus says, that after that pilot, it is hopeful that commercial projects can be launched in Singapore, and that testing can be extended to “passenger transport”.
According to Singapore’s air traffic-management researcher Mohamed Faisal bin Mohamed Salleh, Airbus is already developing concepts that will enable commuters to fly over traffic jams at the push of a button.
“We know that developers in France and Germany are working on an electrically-operated platform concept for multiple passengers,” the deputy director at the Air Traffic Management Research Institute (ATMRI) of the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) told a news agency. ATMRI is a joint research centre by NTU and CAAS.
The Airbus platform, which goes by the name CityAirbus, would have multiple propellers and resemble a small drone in its basic design, said Prof Faisal.
