A Skyryse employee demonstrates a tablet designed by the company to replace the traditional stick, ... [+]
A licensed driver can easily hop behind the wheel of most any car or truck and peel away. That’s not the case with aircraft: large helicopters and airplanes can have very different controls from model to model, and pilots are generally required to win licensing to fly each one individually.
The Los Angeles-based startup Skyryse is saying it can change that.
Skyryse has been working since 2017 to developing simplified, automated flight controls for helicopters with the aim of launching an urban air taxi network using today’s aircraft. Now CEO Mark Groden has decided the greater opportunity is in the flight controls themselves. The company is pivoting to trying to sell its technology to both helicopter and fixed-wing aircraft makers and to developers of futuristic electric and hybrid air taxis, saying that its system, dubbed FlightOS, will allow anyone to control an aircraft after 30 minutes of training with just a touchscreen tablet or a joystick.
Groden isn’t claiming it will turn anyone into a real pilot quite that quickly. The promise is that Skyryse’s simplified flight controls will cut down on required training, helping to alleviate a mounting pilot shortage, and make experienced pilots safer by freeing them from the heavy cognitive engagement that current manual controls demand, as well as give smaller airplanes and helicopters the kind of automated “envelope protection” that’s on modern Airbus airliners and the Boeing 787 that stabilizes them and prevents pilots from performing unsafe maneuvers.
Groden says the Skyryse system, which includes exterior radar and other sensors to give it real-time situational awareness, will lower the high number of crashes that result from pilot error. He points to the death in January of basketball star Kobe Bryant and eight others in a crash of a Sikorsky S-76B helicopter in which it’s suspected that the pilot became disoriented in cloudy conditions.
“The helicopter or the plane shouldn’t care what weather it’s flying through so long as the weather doesn’t prevent it from being capable of maintaining stable flight,” he says. “We’re taking control of all the dynamic flight tasks away so that the pilot can focus on management of the flight itself.”
In December, Skyryse showed off a video of a Robinson R-44 helicopter equipped with its technology flying autonomously.
Groden says that a number of makers of small “general aviation” planes and helicopters had approached Skyryse to ask if the company would sell them its flight control system, as well as developers of urban air taxis, prompting the change in direction. He says that FlightOS will be available for retrofit on existing aircraft as well.
Groden wouldn’t disclose a price or launch customers. “We’re working with a wide range of customers,” he said. “We believe that every aircraft should have this level of safety and mission capability and we’re pricing it accordingly.”
Skyryse may be underestimating the complexity and expense of winning safety certification from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration for every single type of aircraft it aims to install FlightOS on, warns Robert Schulman, head of software for the VTOL air taxi developer Transcend Air.
Schulman experienced these problems firsthand as founder of Seaweed Systems, a company that developed powerful graphics processing systems for aircraft cockpits.
“Everyone’s aircraft and everyone’s system is a bit different, and as much as we wanted to punch a generalized product out the door, you can’t do that — the integration issues are huge,” he says. “What they’re doing is a lot more complicated than what we did at Seaweed.”
Groden says Skyryse has been working with FAA and has a path forward to certification within two years.
In the long run, if the company’s flight control system can become the de facto standard on urban air taxis, he envisions it taking on another audacious and broad task: handling vehicle to vehicle communications and air traffic control.
The company has raised $38 million from private equity funds including Venrock, Eclipse Ventures and Fontinalis, as well as from Ford Motor Chairman Bill Ford.
