By The Future of Personal Flight Isn’t Piloted — It’s Autonomous
At Quantum Mobility, we’ve spent more than a year in deep conversation about the coming evolution of personal transportation—specifically, electrified aviation.
Terms like air taxi and flying cars have entered the public vernacular. Slightly less common, but increasingly present in industry and media discussions, are eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) and UAM (Urban Air Mobility). The leading American companies shaping this space today are Archer and Joby.
From the beginning, our discussions have centered on one core idea: electric flight becoming ubiquitous, accessible, and as simple to use as an Uber.
That vision has always implied one unavoidable conclusion. Personal electric aviation cannot scale with humans at the controls. From day one, the idea of everyone piloting their own electric aircraft was never part of the conversation. We’ve always understood that this evolution—if it is to happen at all—must arrive autonomously.
The real obstacles have never been technological. They’ve been public perception and regulatory approval.
The technology required for safe autonomous flight has existed for well over a decade—long before autonomous cars entered the public consciousness. What Tesla and Waymo have accomplished is not technical invention, but psychological progress. They’ve helped normalize the idea of being transported by software rather than a human operator.
Flying, however, occupies a different mental space for the public. Aviation has long been associated with trained pilots, cockpit authority, and manual decision-making. Even as automation has quietly dominated commercial flight for decades, the perception remains that safety comes from a human at the controls.
As a result, we’ve been presented with a transitional compromise: piloted eVTOLs. Both Archer’s and Joby’s aircraft are currently designed to be flown by pilots. And until very recently, neither company openly addressed what we have long considered the only viable end state for personal air mobility.
That changed.
In a recent Arena Magazine article titled Taking the Highway in the Sky, Archer CEO Adam Goldstein finally articulated the reality that has always been implicit:
“I want to build highways in the sky that allow you to take off vertically and fly wherever you need to go. In order for that to happen, everything has to be autonomous. It cannot be done with pilots. It’s too complex.”
Finally!
This is the conversation that matters!
Autonomy is not an optional enhancement—it is the foundation. Without it, urban air mobility remains niche, expensive, and operationally constrained. With it, we unlock a future that has long felt just out of reach. A Jetsons-like world of personal flight won’t arrive through incremental piloted steps.
It will arrive autonomously.