Rob McDonald, who worked at Cal Poly for more than a decade, joined Uber in January to serve as the company’s head of aircraft engineering.
In May, Uber plans to host its second annual Elevate Summit in Los Angeles, an invitation-only aviation conference that brings together more than 700 of “the world’s foremost on-demand aviation leaders in industry, government and academia” to explore “the exciting future of urban aviation,” according to the company’s website.
Uber, which is best known for its on-demand ride-hailing application, is working to build a network of small, electric aircraft that take off and land vertically. They’re known as VTOL (Vertical Take-off and Landing).
Uber’s head of product Jeff Holden told The Verge in November 2017 the company hopes to launch tests in Los Angeles, Dallas-Fort Worth and Dubai by 2020.
“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,” Uber says in its Fast-Forwarding to Future of On-Demand Urban Air Transportation document online.
McDonald is scheduled to speak during the second day of the conference on May 9 as part of the “Vehicles, Batteries and Key Technologies” segment.
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