Making door to door flight as normal as driving
How we move has profoundly shaped humanity’s progress. We first domesticated horses and built carriages to extend our reach. Steam locomotives connected distant overland endpoints like the East Coast and California for the first time. The Model T and later automobiles unlocked personal mobility, supercharged by the highway network. Today, autonomous vehicles refine that ground-based mobility even further.
Yet an enduring constraint remains: the tyranny of distance.
The time it takes to traverse features like a mountain range or a body of water has defined where we live, who we see, and what we do. Tackling peak hour traffic in today’s cars, or even a Tesla or Waymo is not meaningfully faster than in a Ford or GM from 100 years ago. In more rural settings, our vehicles remain bound to highways and the contours of the Earth. We have reached the limits of ground-based everyday travel.
We think the answer is to make door-to-door flying as normal as driving.
This will not meaningfully start with air taxis over urban skies. The $1B costs and many years to certify these aircraft have made that clear. Cities offer limited spaces for helicopters (or eVTOLs) to take off and land, at least for now.
Instead, true door-to-door flying experiences will start in more open spaces.
It starts at a rural property, with two people vertically taking off for sunset vistas before returning for dinner. It’s a quick hop from a mountain cabin to a remote trailhead for an unforgettable hike or fishing excursion. It’s island-hopping for a morning adventure or a trip to a winery or golf course.
Flying from your personal property at 120 mph (almost 200 kph) can be up to 5 times faster than a drive constrained by geography. You arrive faster and the flights themselves become as interesting as the destination. Vight‘s first generation eVTOL will enable all of these experiences.
This world is a lot closer than most people think. Enabling technologies now make these experiences possible; while the FAA’s new MOSAIC regulations allow for compelling personal-use electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles (eVTOLs).
Electric propulsion, software and autonomous technologies are reshaping personal aviation. Multirotor electric propulsion offers safety, redundancy and noise profiles not possible in single-engine airplanes and helicopters. Software-defined controls dramatically lower the workload needed to fly, turning the pilot into a system supervisor. The controls are engineered with autonomy in mind, with minimal pilot inputs needed from takeoff to landing.
A credible regulatory path finally exists. MOSAIC’s world-first framework provides a clear path to simple, safe personal-use eVTOLs. It enables FAA oversight of factory‑built aircraft certification based on industry consensus standards. That means significantly lower cost and higher velocity development than possible before.
Our strategy is built for speed and scaling demand. We will deliver vehicles directly to private customers, starting with high net worth rural landowners. In the US alone, our analysis shows a market approaching a million people that already have the means and the land for a two-seat personal eVTOL. Globally, that number approximately doubles. Our products will delight this vast, underserved market.
This market will grow rapidly as Vight scales. We will relentlessly increase range, seating/payload and other capabilities. We will shrink the takeoff and landing footprint. Scale will drive costs lower, accelerating the decades-long cost curves already in place for electric and compute technologies.
Combined, that means our path ahead is clear:
Build a compelling, intelligent vehicle
Build vehicles capable of landing on more surfaces
Use the proceeds to build more affordable and longer range vehicles
Add more capabilities and form factors
Overcome the tyranny of distance
Over time, all light aircraft will converge on autonomous personal flight. Ours is the path to get there first, starting with thousands and eventually expanding thousand-fold. Of course, we’ll be partnering with regulators and sharing our safety data at every step along the way.
We know these volumes have never been achieved in aviation. But that’s because it’s never been possible before. Indeed, it’s an insanely difficult set of engineering problems. But now the technology is finally ready, the regulations have changed and the path to market is clear. We believe the world-class team we’re assembling will lead the charge.
This is how we soar above the tyranny of distance. This is how we make door-to-door flying as normal as driving.
I’m building Vight to tackle this. Follow our progress on X and LinkedIn.
Love this!
Instead of eVTOLs, I see hybrid-electric eSTOLs as the more realistic next step in aviation.
Here's why they make sense:
- They can use very short runways thanks to distributed electric propulsion.
- They're easier to certify because they're fixed-wing aircraft, not radical new designs.
- Their fixed-wing setup gives them much better range than eVTOLs.
This technology could allow every small town with 2,000+ people to have its own airport. Right now, the world has between 50,000 and 80,000 airports, depending on how you count them. By the end of this century, we could see that number grow to a million airports.
The countries where this will have the biggest impact first are Australia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. These nations have many remote communities that would benefit from better air connections. This isn't just about making travel more convenient—it could transform how people and goods move across regions.