Electric air taxis need a perfect safety record. They won't get one

A single accident has derailed every new transportation technology. Electric air taxis are nearly commercial and statistically guaranteed to have one

Mao Siqian / Xinhua via Getty Images

Electric air taxi companies have real aircraft, real flights, and real money behind them. Joby Aviation is a partner in five of eight federal pilot projects. Archer Aviation has a factory ramping up in Georgia. The Federal Aviation Administration has created a formal regulatory pathway for what it calls the first new category of civil aircraft since helicopters. The industry is now years, not decades, from commercial reality.

The optimistic case has never been stronger. It also rests on an assumption that deserves scrutiny: that the industry can reach commercial scale without a serious, public, fatal accident.

The history of novel transportation technologies suggests it can't. When that accident comes, the damage won't be measured in engineering setbacks. It will be measured in public trust, regulatory retrenchment, and years of lost momentum.

The cost of a single failure

Any new technology must compile thousands of safe hours to build confidence, but a single failure can destroy it. Two recent cases show how that plays out.

On March 18, 2018, an Uber $UBER autonomous test vehicle struck and killed a 49-year-old pedestrian in Tempe, Ariz. The National Transportation Safety Board found........

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