In November 2022, Dominique Lazarski stood among a small crowd of people on the Pontoise airfield near Paris, watching a flying taxi trace wide circles in a clear blue sky, after taking off for the first time from a working vertiport in France. Airborne, the vehicle looked like a giant quadcopter; its rotors spinning rapidly to keep a small taxi cab airborne. Yet Lazarski, who lives in the city part time, was only thinking about the whirring sound coming from above her head. “I thought it was quite, quite noisy,” she remembers.
What Lazarski—who is president of ADERA, a group that campaigns against increased air traffic at Paris-Beauvais Airport, north of the city—had witnessed was the beginning of a campaign to get Parisians excited about the prospect of flying taxis in the skies above the Summer Olympics.
“The development of low-altitude aviation for urban air mobility is an adventure full of promise; for employment, for the environment and for the lives of Ile-de-France residents,” pledged Valérie Pécresse, president of the regional council of Ile-de-France, the region which includes Paris, that same year. The first airline ticket might have been issued in Florida, she added, but the first flying taxi would take off from French soil. “The Olympics are an incredible opportunity and showcase to launch this project.”
Yet after years of planning, the project failed to convince Parisian politicians, the public and safety officials that the technology was ready for widespread use at The Summer Olympics. A sole flying taxi ascended over Versailles for five minutes on the last day of The Olympics, but it had no passengers. The promise of tourists traveling over Paris in flying taxis failed to materialize and instead the technology suffered a high-profile set-back. Volocopter declined WIRED’s request for an on-record comment about what went wrong.
Flying cars have been mythologized by sci-fi, featuring in movies from the Fifth Element to Blade Runner as a symbol of the future. But what happened in Paris shows the barriers that stand between the technology and its modern-day debut. Their supporters have yet to find a way to effectively sell them to the public or even decide what—or who—exactly flying taxis are for.
The idea of Olympic tourists soaring over Paris in flying taxis was initially greeted with enthusiasm. “Paris Dreams of Flying Taxis for 2024” read a 2021 headline in news outlet Les Echos.
By 2023, a year after the demo in Pontoise, the two companies behind the project, German flying taxi developer Volocopter and French airport operator ADP, remained bullish. The noise wasn’t going to be a problem, they said, claiming the flying taxis would not be audible from the ground when flown at an altitude of around 500 meters. Edward Arkwright, ADP’s deputy CEO, acknowledged in June 2023 there would be challenges ahead. But he insisted: “All lights are green for us to be there in the summer of 2024”. ADP did not reply to a request to comment.