I cannot TELL you how exciting this is, though you know it will actually take YEARS for anything like this to go through! Anyone who has ever had to get from downtown Mobile to West Mobile, or across the Bayway or Three Mile Bridge when there is a major traffic jam and thought "Man if I could just lift up and fly over there" may soon get their wish!
If everything goes according to plan for AAA Air Taxi — a new startup owned by Kathy Carlton, who also owns Brock's Auto Sales in Brent — then you'll be able to do just that at some point in the near future.
"We're getting 10 vehicles that we're going to be buying," said Brock's General Manager John James. "They're like overgrown drones on steroids, dude." And they apparently work just like a drone but for human passengers, and would fly on direct patterns to ports set up around the most popular locations in the city. The company said it plans to have 10 landing ports in Pensacola and 10 flying taxis will navigate between them.
But there are a series of hoops AAA Air Taxi has to jump through to make this dream a reality, including approval from the Federal Aviation Administration, as well as from the city when it comes to mapping out the air tracks the flying taxis must follow while flying.
A flying taxi test flight was completed in Dubai in September, and Uber recently revealed its plans to partner with NASA for a flying taxi service it hopes to have up and running by 2020. Let's hope they can get these up and running before then, AND that they branch out to Mobile and all the beaches inbetween too!