Over 600 companies are currently developing electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft—eVTOLs—to transform urban mobility on Earth. The promise is seductive: shorter trips between airports and city centers, fewer cars, less friction.
Many of these aircraft are being designed to fly autonomously.
That alone is a formidable challenge. Autonomous vertical flight demands fault-tolerant systems, redundant sensing, robust decision-making, and software that behaves predictably in edge cases. Add certification, public safety, and urban environments—and the difficulty compounds quickly.
Now consider a different problem.
https://newatlas.com/space/nasa-contacts-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-after-two-month-silence
Imagine flying a rotorcraft semi-autonomously on Mars, roughly 250 million miles away.
No real-time control.
No GPS.
No prepared landing pads.
No atmosphere worth mentioning.
Engineers at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory could provide only high-level guidance. The vehicle had to:
- Spin up its rotors in an alien atmosphere
- Lift off under radically different aerodynamic conditions
- Navigate unknown terrain
- Land upright on rock and dust—on its own
All with minutes of communication delay.
This is not autonomy as a convenience.
It’s autonomy as a requirement for survival.
When people argue that autonomous eVTOL flight on Earth is “too hard,” it’s worth remembering that we already solved a harsher version of the problem—on another planet.
Perspective matters.
Piece of pie?
Only if you’ve already mastered the oven.
