Coronavirus Recovery Foreseen 109 Years Ago

How a ride sharing company and dead economist envisioned one key to economic recovery in face of disaster like Coronavirus.

By Howard Leventhal

MARCH 23, 2020 - Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), wrote “The Theory of Economic Development” in 1911. This book set forth the Austrian economist’s thinking behind his theory of “Creative Destruction,” an economic law he defined as “the cyclical process by which the system eliminates the people and institutions which are mentally too vulnerable for useful economic service.” Sound brutal? Maybe, but within this theory lies one of the nearly certain engines likely to drive worldwide economic resurrection from the current pandemic fallout. And who saw this coming more recently?

Uber.

Four years ago, Uber launched a program called “Elevate,” a first-principles analysis that breaks down the critical barriers to launching a scaled, aerial ridesharing product on Uber’s platform. What does this have to do with Coronavirus? Plenty.

Thinking about boarding a multi-hundred seat transport aircraft today? Probably not. If you’ve watched five minutes of TV lately, surely it must be obvious that loading oneself into a tin can packed with breathing, sneezing human beings spaced a few inches apart and sharing the same recirculated air for a few hours, is a horrendously bad idea. Unless one has a death wish.

On the other hand, if you had a critical business mission and could buy a seat or two on a four or six seat aircraft, particularly among people you know were tested and uninfected, would you? Very likely. It is precisely this form of personal aviation foreseen by Uber – that will fundamentally transform the aviation industry into something both radically different and radically the same, while adapting to widespread disease in a way today's transportation industry is intellectually unprepared to implement.

Creative destruction, personified.

From the Elevate whitepaper: “Imagine traveling from San Francisco’s Marina to work in downtown San Jose—a drive that would normally occupy the better part of two hours—in only 15 minutes. What if you could save nearly four hours round-trip between S?o Paulo’s city center and the suburbs in Campinas? Or imagine reducing your 90-plus minute stop-and-go commute from Gurgaon to your office in central New Delhi to a mere six minutes.”

Uber may have actually been trying to pound its square peg app into a touchy-feely round hole future that (formerly) may or may not have come to pass. However the Coronavirus catastrophe has plowed a previously unseen, verdant field of economic prospects for personal aviation: Small group flying in easily sanitized small aircraft at low altitudes where packaged bulk oxygen is unnecessary.

Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) aircraft are ideal for these sorts of missions. Exactly the type of aircraft Uber sees as its future. 

Virulent contagions like Coronavirus are nothing new. Around 1350, the Black Plague killed 200 million people throughout Europe and Asia. In 1918, “Spanish Flu” killed as many as 50 million people. These days with crazies all over the world intentionally attempting to cause panic for fun, God only knows what might come next. Whether by human design or freak of nature, the inevitable cure for Coronavirus will not terminate fears of future epidemics. Personal aviation, if properly resourced, may provide a certain, if modestly partial barrier against contagion, to say nothing of the associated economic recovery opportunity.

Hygiene is only one, albeit now perhaps the most valuable benefit of scaling up personal on-demand aviation. “Every day, millions of hours are wasted on the road worldwide” the Elevate whitepaper states further.  “Last year, the average San Francisco resident spent 230 hours commuting between work and home—that’s half a million hours of productivity lost every single day. In Los Angeles and Sydney, residents spend seven whole working weeks each year commuting, two of which are wasted unproductively stuck in gridlock. In many global megacities, the problem is more severe: the average commute in Mumbai exceeds a staggering 90 minutes.”

“For all of us, that’s less time with family, less time at work growing our economies, more money spent on fuel—and a marked increase in our stress levels: a study in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, for example, found that those who commute more than 10 miles were at increased odds of elevated blood pressure.”

Uber’s whitepaper continues: “On-demand aviation, has the potential to radically improve urban mobility, giving people back time lost in their daily commutes. Uber is close to the commute pain that citizens in cities around the world feel. We view helping to solve this problem as core to our mission and our commitment to our rider base. Just as skyscrapers allowed cities to use limited land more efficiently, urban air transportation will use three-dimensional airspace to alleviate transportation congestion on the ground. A network of small, electric aircraft that take off and land vertically (called VTOL aircraft for Vertical Take-off and Landing, and pronounced vee-tol), will enable rapid, reliable transportation between suburbs and cities and, ultimately, within cities.” (End of Uber Elevate quotes)

From this writer’s point of view, On-Demand Aviation more or less in the way Uber envisioned it four years ago, will be an indispensable element of the economic recovery which will certainly follow Coronavirus – with one exception. It will be decades before customers voluntarily board ineptly-programmed, A.I.-controlled aircraft designed by the same engineers who flew 737 Maxes into the ground.  The writer believes that those pilots, passengers, investors, educational institutions and regulators who embrace this reality and can tolerate a bit of patience, are certain to see light on the horizon at the end of a long, dark night. Through the polycarbonate windshield of a VTOL.

Howard Leventhal is a private pilot and lifelong technology developer. Now in his early sixties, he is working on entering the aviation program at a midwestern university. He plans on working toward becoming a certified flight instructor providing primary flight training to young human VTOL pilots of the (now much closer) future.