Dubai Airports chief on how flying taxis will share the skies with A380s

Electric flying taxis that are set to take off from a vertiport near Dubai International Airport will require tight regulations and air traffic control that separates these aircraft from passenger planes.

Human expertise will take the lead but there is the potential for artificial intelligence to assist controllers, Paul Griffiths, chief executive of Dubai Airports, told The National.

"Clearly, there needs to be segregation between the low-level traffic of air taxis and the established pathways [of commercial aircraft]," he said.

"The airport facilitates take off and landing from quite high altitudes so it's only going to be restricted around the immediate vicinity of the airport and below 2,000 feet. Air taxis will be controlled via a network which will keep them separated."

Joby Aviation, which aims to begin operations in 2026 for the launch an electric air taxi service in Dubai, will use vertiports, which are being built at four locations. The company announced last week that construction of the first flying station, near Dubai International Airport, had started. It said the vertiport will be able handle 170,000 passengers a year.

The UAE's General Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) will define the overall regulation, corridors and airspace for these operations, but over time the control of these air taxis will be automated within a network, similar to Uber's network, to enable point-to-point journeys, according to Mr Griffiths.

"If you can manage in three dimensions, with height as well as position, you can actually create very efficient networks of corridors for people to move along. The AI and automation is going to transform the capacity of personal mobility in the air," he said.

"If you pursue a policy in the air that is purely automated, where the top technology can take care of the separation and optimisation of the traffic, then actually you end up with a very efficient solution," he said.

"That's probably the way that air taxis are going to become very quick, very convenient, very sustainable and very efficient over a short period of time."

Cutting through congestion

Air taxis will transform personal transport over the next 20 years, according to the airport industry veteran.

"We are going to see dramatic changes in our personal mobility over the next couple of decades and air taxis are just going to be one of those things which become ubiquitous very quickly ... It's nascent technology so there's a great deal of technical innovation going on, so the range and payload of air taxis is going to increase disproportionately over time and that's a very good thing," Mr Griffiths said.

A vertiport for air taxis next to the airport will enable onward travel into the city for tourists and business travellers, allowing them to bypass road traffic to explore the city or reach their appointments more quickly.

"Having a vertiport will give us seamless integration, so that you can arrive say from Europe or Australia on a plane at DXB and then be transported to an adjacent vertiport, then you can jump in an air taxi and miss all the traffic and glide over the city. It's going to be a very exciting development," Mr Griffiths said.

Visitors to Dubai can save time because air taxis will provide more predictable journey times.

"If you're traveling point-to-point with absolutely no obstacles in your path, then you're going to have a quick and convenient journey and you're going to see the city from a unique vista," he said.

"It's the convenience of a helicopter without the huge cost of a helicopter."

Trial to eliminate queues

Dubai International Airport (DXB) and its second hub DWC are together set to handle a record high of 93 million annual passengers in 2024, Mr Griffiths said on Tuesday after operator Dubai Airports released quarterly traffic results. DXB alone is forecast to handle 91.9 million this year.

DXB and the General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners Affairs in Dubai (GDRFA) are currently conducting trials for a new system that will eliminate queues.

"We're trialling with the immigration authorities here the ability to have check-in and immigration processes integrated into a single biometric signature so that we can do away with that particular step," Mr Griffiths said.

"The technology exists but what we need to do is bind all of that tech into a consolidated process so that we're making it as seamless and invisible to the customer as we possibly can."

The idea is to ask passengers for the required travel documentation only once and avoid several checks at different points at the airport.

"When you've brought your ticket, you specify the seat you want, specify your preferences and then you upload all your documentation. The idea is you just do that once at the time you make the commitment to travel and then everything else is seamless," Mr Griffiths said.

"When you arrive at the airport, you just drop off your bag as soon as you step out of your car, train or air taxi and then the next step is to get on the train which takes you directly to your airplane ... Security and immigration will be consolidated into one process that you don't even see."

'Mass immigration system'

The GDRFA is currently testing a new "mass immigration verification" system so that instead of walking through individual gates, passengers will walk through a single corridor that will compare their biometrics against their immigration records," Mr Griffiths said.

"If a green rectangle goes round someone's face, you know that's fine. But if there's a red rectangle around someone's face on the monitor, someone will need to just say, 'can I just ask you a few questions?' So we want to intervene by exception rather than forcing everyone through the same process. It's going to be far less intrusive. But just as secure," he said.

Asked about the timeline for rolling out these new systems, Mr Griffiths said that the airport is "on the cusp" of introducing some changes to the current procedures.

"The facial recognition is already in place. All we have to do is integrate that facial recognition signature behind the scenes so that more than one system can read the biometric data and verification that's been undertaken in a single transaction," he said.

Funneling more people through the airport in half the time, using the same space, will help double the capacity without building any additional infrastructure, he added.

This will help DXB make the most of its physical infrastructure as it approaches the limits of its physical infrastructure. The airport can handle 110 million annual passengers with the use of biometric technology, Mr Griffiths said.

"Our approach is, if we get more passengers, we just halve the processing time, we get happier customers and we get greater capacity from the same space. So it makes perfect business sense and perfect economic sense to do that," he said.