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The Current Transcript for July 20, 2017

Host:Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music:Theme]

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[French] C’et un refus desriminatoire. On ne peut pas se baser sur un refus de 19. C’est insensé. C’est incroyable.

LAURA LYNCH: Discriminatory unbelievable and crazy. That's part of Mohamed Kesri’s reaction to a referendum result in a small Quebec community this week, blocking the way for a Muslim faith cemetery. It would be the first Muslim run and operated cemetery for the provincial capital area, not far from the site of this January's deadly terror attack on a community mosque. But now it's off and questions about why, remain. We're starting there today with the forces that may have been at play behind the boat and what's next for Quebec’s Muslim community. Then, whatever happened to the promise of flying cars?

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[Sound: Brakes’ screech and engine start]

VOICE 1: Hey, Doc. We better back up. We do not have enough road to get up to 88.

VOICE 2: Ross, where we are going, we do not need roads.

[Sound: Music]

LL: Speaking of Back to the Future, the formerly futuristic flying car may be making a comeback of sorts. That is to say, they may finally be ready for lift off. Seat belts on. I'm Laura Lynch. This is the summer edition of The Current.

Did a far-right group meddle in Quebec cemetery referendum?

Guests: Hassan Guillet, Jonathan Montpetit

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Honestly I’m live in peace here. I really, really like Quebec and I love it to stay here.

LL: That is Mohamed Dougsiye, who regularly attends daily prayers Quebec city’s Islamic cultural center. That's the same mosque that was the site of a shooting rampage that left six dead this past January. And this week a project spearheaded by the mosque, to create a Muslim cemetery in the nearby community of St. Apollinaire, was Vito in a local referendum. Because of the rules of the referendum only 36 people in the town of 6400 even participated in the vote, and it was a close one but the cemetery rejected by a margin of three people. But the result is making provincial and national news. Here is Mohamed Dougsiye, once more speaking to CBC reporter Catou MacKinnon.

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MOHAMED DOUGSIYE: We know as a Muslim, and as a Muslim community, that there is racism in Quebec. They are so many like 10%. The shocking things is not what they do in the 10%, it is the silence of the 90%.

LL: Opponents of the project campaigned against it, door to door, saying they preferred only secular non-denominational cemeteries. But the mayors of both St. Apollinaire and Quebec City have expressed their disappointment in the results. And premier Philippe Couillard says the province will have to act to ensure Muslims do get their own burial grounds. He spoke with CBC's power and politics yesterday.

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PHILIPPE COUILLARD: First let me say that it's, as you said, from a small number of people and people in the extreme right that infiltrated the process, which is deplorable, and I've said this many times since it's been announced. I've also said that this doesn't reflect the attitude of the citizens of Quebec City towards their Muslim fellow citizens. Why? Because when the tragedy happened in January, thousands of Quebecers were out in the street expressing their solidarity and friendship towards their fellow Quebecers of Muslim persuasion. I've said that we will take care of this. The story is not over. We will take leadership in this. We will talk to the community, we will talk to various authorities around Quebec City because these people, like all Quebecers, like all Canadians, deserve to have a place to bury their dead. It's a fundamental issue and it will happen. We will make sure that it does happen and all this is behind us.

LL: That was Quebec premier Philippe Couillard. Hassan Guillet is an imam at a mosque Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, outside Montreal and a member of the Council of Imams of Quebec. He joins us from St. Remi, Quebec. Hello.

HASSAN GUILLET: Hello, good morning.

LL: You were at a meeting on Tuesday for members of the Muslim community to discuss what possibilities exist for a Muslim cemetery for Quebec City. Tell me what the mood was at the meeting?

HASSAN GUILLET: The mood. The mood was very very bad. I mean people could not understand how come a project of this magnitude that affects thousands and thousands of people, who have been working to have their own burial ground, they were working on this for generations. Muslims in the mosque were frustrated. How could only two people block the dreams of thousands and thousands of Muslims in the area. Why we are saying two people, because as you as you said it yourself, 19 voted no and 16 voted yes. If only two people changed their mind, then the outcome would have been different. So definitely, there is frustration. There are certain Muslims who feel that they are rejected. Certain Muslims are saying if we are not accepted dead, how we will be accepted alive. And I understand the frustration, even though I do not share the frustration, and I a heard one of the commentators here before, who was saying that there is racism. And he said, if I heard well, he was saying that 10% of the people are racists. It's far from true. I do not think 10 percent of the people are racist.

LL: So let's keep the focus on the cemetery, for the moment. What options are being explored for a Muslim cemetery in the region, in the wake of the referendum result?

HASSAN GUILLET: There are different options. One option is to still continue the discussion with St. Apollinaire to see if there is any way out of this because definitely the referendum was… I would say almost kidnapped, as our Premier said, by the far right. So there's still discussion going on with the company who is selling the land and with whom we have a contract to manage the cemetery later, the name is Harmonia. The discussion is still going on with Harmonia and with the municipal authorities in St. Apollinaire.

LL: What about going to court?

HASSAN GUILLET: This is one option, you said about the options. This is one option. Another option is to go to another town, this is the second option. Third option, maybe, as [unintelligible] was saying yesterday that there is a ground to go to contest in court, this referendum processes as a whole. And it's not an option yet but it's still an option. Other option is to knock on the door as the provincial government as we both heard, Mr. Couillard said it very clearly that the provincial governments will do her part and the Muslims will have their cemetery. So, one of the option is to go to talk to, say Mr. Couillard, we have to go an action toward. There is another option to go to see Mr. Labeaume, the mayor of Quebec City, because if you remember in February when he came when I raised the issue in my eulogy of the victims he came after me. I mentioned the need for the cemetery in my eulogy. And he came after me he reassured us and promised us that we will have our cemetery. All options are open.

LL: I hear you on that. On Tuesday, it was revealed that the Quebec City mosque, where six people were killed in January, received a parcel last Friday. What was in it?

HASSAN GUILLET: There was a copy of the Quran torn, cut. As you know the Quran is our holy book.

So, that was a cut session of the Quran. And there was a paper with pictures of pigs and [unintelligible] and saying: “You are looking for a place to hide your dirty carcass, or your dirty corpse. This is the right place for you; it will smell the pigs anyway.”

LL: Obviously this is disturbing to everyone and the mosque didn't reveal it before the referendum vote on Sunday. We have a clip. We'd like you to hear from the mayor of St. Apollinaire, where the proposed cemetery would have been. This is Bernard Ouellet. Have a listen.

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It's not worse than anywhere else, I have to tell you. It's not only that. It's maybe more lack of information and then fear, fear a bit of the unknown. Racists are very very very rare. Racist people are a small small minority. It's more a lack of information and knowledge about Muslims and their funeral rites. It's that which made it not work. I think.

LL: Mr. Guillet, what do you think of the suggestion that the people of St. Apollinaire simply didn't have enough information about Muslims and Muslim funeral rites?

HASSAN GUILLET: It could be. And we tried from our side to get the information. I, personally, was in an information session in St. Apollinaire with some members of the mosque, Quebec Mosque, and the hall was packed and we had many questions, some very aggressive, from the same small group the fighting of racist. But many people, goodwill people, normal people, who came to ask questions and we answer the questions. The meeting ended up with that they came and they hugged us and [unintelligible] arms and tears in the eyes and say you are welcome. So, and during the campaign, there was some people from Harmonia and the mosque, they were doing some door to door activities to each thing. However we were out walked by the far wing group, who go was very very organized very present in the door to door campaign and very harassing. We heard it in the news, in the media. People were saying that they were very very harassed by the right wing.

LL: So, was this result down to racism entirely down to racism, according to your view?

HASSAN GUILLET: Yes, but I wouldn't say that… I qualify what I'm saying. I'm not saying that people of St. Apollinaire or the people of Quebec are racist. No, the motivation of the right wing group is racist. But on the other side, we were like caught between the racists, the very active very adamant group of racists, on one end, and that lack of interest on the other. And, you see, the 62 people had the right to vote in the in this neighborhood. Only 39 people showed up.

LL: But what is that down to then? Why is that lack of interest? Is that perhaps that could be what they sometimes call casual racism, if they didn't even bother to vote?

HASSAN GUILLET: No, at the contrary, if people are racist, if they felt, as some of the right wing people are saying, that they were threat by Muslims, they would have gone to vote. No. However, they don't feel threatened by Muslims. They are not concerned by the presence of Muslims. But they go around their personal issues, their personal life, the family life. They don't care. But definitely, it is not, they are not racist. People who do not come to vote, they were not racist. I don't know them individually, but if they were racists, they would have come to vote. If they feel danger, they would have done something. I'm quite sure that people who did not come, very likely if they came, the result would have been different.

LL: Mr. Guillet, we will have to leave it there, because of time, but I thank you.

HASSAN GUILLET: Thank you very much.

LL: Hassan Guillet is an imam at a mosque in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, outside Montreal and a member of the Council of Imams of Quebec and he's been involved in discussions about a Muslim cemetery. He was in South Remi, Québec. Now there is a backstory to the blocking of the cemetery and it may be a harbinger of things to come, according to my next guest. A far right group in Quebec called La Meute, or The Wolfpack, has been tied to the north side of the St. Apollinaire cemetery referendum. On Tuesday, Quebec City mayor, Régis Labeaume, warned the group to stop meddling. And yesterday Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked about the group by reporters in Quebec. Jonathan Montpetit is a senior writer with CBC Montreal website. He did a four part series on Quebec’s far right last year and he spent time with the members of La Meute. He also covered the Quebec City mosque shooting. Jonathan Montpetit is in Montreal. Hello.

JONATHAN MONTPETIT: Hi Laura.

LL: Now before we talk about the connection to the cemetery referendum, can you tell me what we know about La Meute? How did it get started? Who are its members?

JONATHAN MONTPETIT: So La Meute started in 2015. It was founded by a group that included several former Canadian Forces soldiers and it started and had until recently existed largely as an online group, largely as a secret Facebook page. However, it has grown steadily since then. It now has listed on Facebook about 43000 members. We don't know how many of those are active members. How many of those are people who are actively contributing to posts and activities. But we do know is that over the past say six months or so, the group has progressively tried to organize itself so that it kind of transcends the virtual world, and has taken an increasingly visible role in everyday life. So they have attended protests, they attended a protest on the border on Canada Day, teaming up with another group in order to protest the asylum seekers crossing illegally from the U.S. into Canada. And this is the most recent manifestation of this desire to get involved in politics.

LL: What's the group trying to accomplish then?

JONATHAN MONTPETIT: So the group believes firmly that radical Islam in Quebec is on the rise, that Quebec traditional Quebec values; what they would kind of loosely define as, you know, a secular Quebec, kind of a latent Christian Quebec, is under threat. And they're very concerned that this traditional way of being Quebec is under threat. And so they're trying to organize as much as possible in order to prevent Islamism from taking a firmer root in society, at least that's their justification.

LL: You refer to them as far right. Why?

JONATHAN MONTPETIT: Well I think for a number of reasons; one, they reject all the current political parties in Quebec, all the establishment parties in Quebec, including the ones further to the right. They also profess a certain sympathy with figures in Europe, mainly Marie Le Pen and the Fort Nationale, which obviously are commonly described as far right. And now, they should we say, they object to the term, but at the same time I think if you look at the rhetoric of the leaders, their perception of Islam or their perception of what constitutes traditional values, I think all these things align very closely with groups that have widely been characterized as far right, especially in Europe.

LL: Let's get to the referendum. What we know about La Meute’s connection to the referendum in St. Apollinaire?

JONATHAN MONTPETIT: So we know that several members of the “No” committee are members of La Meute. They say their participation in La Meute, is purely passive, they're just on there to observe and take part in discussions about the cemetery. We do know however that… So basically, if I just go back for a second, the referendum had two phases. In order to trigger the referendum they needed to gather enough signatures on a petition. At that early stage, La Meute was more actively involved. And so up until about April, local members were helping residents in St Apollinaire gather enough signatures to trigger the referendum. After April, the head of the “No” committee asked La Meute to take a back seat, to be less visible, concerned that they would play a divisive role, an upsetting role. And so they took a back seat, at least at the organizational level. Now we do know that some members do live in the area. We do know that there was a lot of aggressive campaigning as Imam Guillet made reference to. Whether or not it was involved in that, we don't know.

LL: Now yesterday we did speak with the referendums “No” committee leader Sunny Letourneau, she didn't want to be recorded, she didn't want to do an interview, but she says she prohibited La Meute’s involvement in the campaign, although she did agree to keep them up to date on their progress. What do you make of that?

JONATHAN MONTPETIT: All the indications that we have, at least that I have, from my monitoring of the secret element of their Facebook page is that does seem to be correct. However, La Meute members were very interested in the outcome of this referendum. We can't… It's quite possible, I mean it's dangerous to go suggesting this, but it's quite possible that people affiliated with La Meute may have freelance their own participation in the campaign. We do know that Letourneau and Sylvain Brouilletteis, who is a senior figure of La Meute, did meet in the spring in the lead up to the referendum. So their involvement may be in an unofficial capacity, but their interest in the outcome was vivid, very expressed. And they kind of cited the referendum as kind of the type of policy issue, the type of political event that they would like to get involved in in the future.

LL: How did La Meute react after the referendum result?

JONATHAN MONTPETIT: They welcomed it warmly. They see it as a victory for democracy. They see it as a victory for empowering local citizens. That's at least how they're describing it. And I think one of the elements of their discourse, which again aligns with a lot of the populist rhetoric we see coming out of other far right groups, is you know that representative democracy has failed, that it excludes people it is dominated by elites and establishment. And this St. Apollinaire referendum was a chance for the people to wake up, to quote a recent communique by the group, to kind of wake up and show their power and kind of stick it to the elites.

LL: Now let's just flip this around for a second. Is there a danger that by focusing on La Meute’s involvement in this referendum we're being distracted from the issue of what we call casual racism or everyday racism in Quebec?

JONATHAN MONTPETIT: I mean, I think so. I think La Meute has taken up a lot of, and I include myself in hearing, you know, a lot of the media's attention. There are several other groups alive in Quebec and I think also there is this issue of unease in Quebec, as elsewhere, about the role of religion and especially Islam. You know Mayor Labeaume recently refused to describe the attack at the Quebec City mosque as a terrorist attack. Premier Couillard recently linked terrorism and Islam together. They're intrinsically linked. He was criticized roundly by Muslim leaders in Quebec for that. Again to go back to Mayor Labeaume, the anti-radicalization center in Montreal wanted to open up a branch in Quebec City, concerned about the far right activity in Quebec City, concerned about the rise of Islamophobia in Quebec City, but Marylebone refused to say that the city had a problem with Islamophobia and far-right activity and so refuse to participate in the activity. So I think there is a kind of conflictual contradicting discourse coming from a lot of the leaders in Quebec and kind of hesitancy to address the kind of more structural issues head on.

LL: Jonathan we will leave it there. Thank you very much.

JONATHAN MONTPETIT: My pleasure.

LL: Jonathan Monody is a senior writer with CBC's Montreal website and he was in our Montreal's studio. Okay. Coming up next: We are switching gears.

[Sound: Music]

LL: Familiar sound. The CBC News is next then the flying car was a mainstay of the Jetsons. It never materialized in real life but it could be on the horizon now. Why transport companies are scrambling to develop personal flying machines in our next half hour. I'm Laura Lynch. You're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

ENCORE: Flying cars? 'We are closer than we've ever been'

Guest

LL: Hello I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

LL: Up next: A vision of the future from the past.

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[Sound: Car engine and Beeps]

LL: The sound of flying cars in Blade Runner, the 1982 American science fiction film. The dream of personalized air flight has long been fodder for fiction but the reality of so-called flying cars might be closer than you think, at least according to Uber. In April the ride sharing company announced its goal of creating a network of flying taxis in Dubai and the Dallas area by 2020. And Uber is just one of many tech and transportation companies in the race to design something that could completely disrupt the way we travel and live. Anna Maria Tremonti looked at the future of flying cars as part of our season long project The Disruptors, in May. She started with Andrew Hawkins who is a transportation reporter at The Verge. He spoke to Anna Maria from New York.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Why are flying cars getting so much attention right now? What's going on in the industry?

ANDREW HAWKINS: Well, a lot is going on sort of concurrently. You have a lot of start-ups and tech companies that are sort of interested in pursuing this concept of aviation, more sustainable and efficient aviation. So you're talking about things like electric powered propulsion and a tilt rotor aircraft, the types of aircraft that can take off and land vertically like a helicopter but then fly through the air like an airplane. And then you also have this sort of other trend going on right now which is that it's very difficult to drive anywhere these days especially in major urban centres. Gridlock and traffic are about as worse as they've ever been and it's leading to a lot of frustration. And these tech companies—Uber and others—think that they can make a little bit of money by bypassing the roads and going through the air instead.

AMT: So tell us who the big players are involved in this race to design flying cars.

ANDREW HAWKINS: Uber definitely sort of has spurred a lot of interest when they released this white paper that they put out about last year. I think it was October of last year where they announced their interest in pursuing what they called at the time an on-demand aviation service. They don’t come right out and say flying cars and a lot of people in the industry sort of disdain that term. They feel like it is not a very accurate way to describe what they're really working on. You referenced Blade Runner.

AMT: You’re one of those people. You’re one of those people that doesn’t like that term.

ANDREW HAWKINS: I am. I wrote an article entitled stop calling them flying cars because what we're talking about here is not your Buick or a Chevy with wings attached to the side of it. It's actually more akin to a helicopter, a very lightweight helicopter. A lot of these vehicles that we've seen do not have wheels. They would not be allowed to drive around on the road. And so in the industry what they call them is VTOL—vertical take-off and landing aircraft and that's a more accurate description. Not everybody knows what that means and if they saw VTOL written somewhere they would probably roll their eyes and click to the next site. So flying cars have become sort of the colloquial way to describe them.

AMT: Basically a helicopter.

ANDREW HAWKINS: A lightweight helicopter that can carry passengers, a number up to maybe—you know Uber has been talking about wanting to put up to five to eight people in one of these vehicles. So it really depends on sort of who you're looking at and what you're talking about because then you also have Larry Page, one of the co-founders of Google is working on a project of his own called Kitty Hawk. It came out around the same time that Uber had this big conference in Dallas a couple of weeks ago where they were discussing the subject. Images and video of Larry Page’s Kitty Hawk vehicle surfaced around that same time and it looks more like a sort of half aquatic, half aerial hover bike type vehicle. It was a very strange looking prototype, but the underlying technology is really sort of the same as what Uber's talking about and what a lot of these start-ups around the world are talking about, which is achieving lift through a series of rotors, propellers that will propel the vehicle upwards like a helicopter and then some sort of wing type apparatus that would then allow for lift in flight from there.

AMT: So let's go back to Google for a minute because Google's doing this through what is it, its Google X lab? Kitty Hawk would be only over water about 15 feet up or something?

ANDREW HAWKINS: We should say that I don't know what connection this has actually to Google and to the Google X lab. Google obviously was where the self-driving car project that has since become Waymo spun out of. Kitty Hawk I think is just a side project that is being funded and was founded by Larry Page.

AMT: Okay. He’s got a lot of money so he’s dabbling in this to.

ANDREW HAWKINS: Exactly. Exactly.

AMT: Okay. Got you. So tell us a little bit more. So Dubai and Dallas—the two Ds—what would Uber’s flying car, vertical take-off and landing thing look like?

ANDREW HAWKINS: So they envision it being a fleet of these types of vehicles and there would also be some launch pads which they’d call vertiports, that would be either on the surface street level or they would take off from the tops of buildings and skyscrapers or maybe the rooftops of parking garages. And the idea being that you would pull out your phone, call up the Uber app and you would get a series of options. If you wanted to go from downtown Dubai to their airport and you know a regular Uber X would take you know 45, 50 minutes. That would be one option and then another option would be Uber Elevate is what they're calling it or Uber Air. I don't think they’d settled on the term actually if you could get to the nearest vertiport, maybe that would take just five or 10 minutes. You would hop into one of these aircraft and zip across town over to the airport and land at the vertiport that's adjacent to the airport. They price it in a certain way. They say initially it would be between $60 and $70 or maybe even $120. It depends on the trip. But they see over time as they achieve more volume and more interest and more demand that they could bring that price down to something commensurate with a normal Uber X trip.

AMT: Why Dubai?

ANDREW HAWKINS: Dubai is an interesting place right now in terms of transportation. You know it's a place where they're really interested in all of these sort of far reaching futuristic sort of sci-fi proposals that we've seen in the transportation world. They want to build their own Hyperloop and they want their own passenger carrying drones. They want this Uber network, this flying car network. They have a government structure where you know the royal family of Dubai. The United Arab Emirates controls a lot of what goes on. They have a lot of money to play with and they really want to become sort of a place where a lot of these experiments take place first so that they can become somewhat of a platform in case they need these technologies spread across the world.

AMT: And what does it mean to have such big names in the tech industry focused on achieving this goal?

ANDREW HAWKINS: Well, it certainly is a shot in the arm for the VTOL industry which has been sort of operating in the shadows for a number of years. I've written about this for about a year now and it's interesting because we've always been talking about flying cars ever since the fifties and sixties when they appeared first on the covers of magazines like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. And it always was sort of this vision, this unattainable vision and it was supposed to represent the future sort of the same as jetpacks. But then you know sort of technology regressed and then in the nineties and the early 2000s we started to see some actual prototypes. None of them really got off the ground. A lot of the inventors and the companies behind them went bankrupt. One gentleman was killed in an accident where they were trying to fly. I think it was a Ford Pinto with wings attached to it and he perished in one of their test flights. It wasn't going very well for a long time and then there had been a number of technological advancements like battery, the ability of electric propulsion and battery life being able to power these vehicles and lightweight carbon fibre materials used to build the actual aircraft. So we've gotten to a point now where a lot of the experts and the technology minds that are operating in this field believe that we are very close to having these types of vehicles in operation. So the question becomes how are we going to use them? What sort of purpose will they serve? And that’s when Uber comes along and says we have this giant network where people would like to use these for an on-demand transportation service. Why not just connect the two?

AMT: Okay. Well, my next guests are standing by to talk about how we might use all of this. Andrew Hawkins, thank you very much for your time.

ANDREW HAWKINS: Sure thing.

AMT: Andrew Hawkins, transportation reporter at The Verge. He's in New York City.

SOUNDCLIP

I'm in favour of flying things. Obviously I do rockets. And I like things that fly. This is not some inherent bias against flying things. But there is a challenge with flying cars in that they'll be quite noisy. The wind-force generated will be very high. Let's just say that if something's flying over your head, if there are a whole bunch of flying cars going all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation. You don't think to yourself, “Well, I feel better about today.” You're thinking, “Did they service their hubcap or is it going to come off and guillotine me as they're flying past?”

AMT: Well, that is Tesla CEO Elon Musk in Vancouver speaking at the TED conference on April 28th. The tech entrepreneur is not alone in his concerns about the reality of flying cars. For more on what it will take to realize the dream of the flying car, I'm joined by two guests. Missy Cummings is the director of the humans and autonomy laboratory at Duke University. She is researching personal air transport for NASA. She's a former US Naval pilot, former fighter jet pilot. She's in Durham, North Carolina. Michael Wade is director of the Global Center for Digital Business Transformation. He's a professor of innovation and strategy at IMD Business School in Switzerland. Today he joins me in our Toronto studio. Hello to you both.

MICHAEL WADE: Good morning.

MISSY CUMMINGS: Good morning.

AMT: Missy Cummings, let's begin with you. How close are we to realizing the dream of the flying car?

MISSY CUMMINGS: Well, as you heard Andrew say, there's a difference between a car that both flies and drives and this idea of the air taxis which are really more like advanced helicopters. In both cases, we have the technology today. You can actually buy a flying car. You have to have a sport pilot's licence and $300,000 but you can do it and you can hire your own helicopter to transport you around. So there's nothing magical about the technology. However, trying to get to Uber’s vision with this vertical takeoff and landing and all electric propulsion, that is a pretty big leap from where we are today.

AMT: And so how many years do you think before you see the highways in the air?

MISSY CUMMINGS: Well, I see Uber's vision about 2030 and that’s academics speak for it's out there. You know we know it's possible but there's still a lot of technological and regulatory hurdles that have to be crossed.

AMT: Michael Wade, what do you think? Are we as close as the companies such as Uber and Kitty Hawk would like us to believe?

MICHAEL WADE: I don't think so. I agree with Missy. I think the idea of the flying car is a great one. I would love to have one so that if I'm driving to work and there's a little bit of traffic, I can just take off and fly the rest of the way. But I think practically speaking, there are a number of barriers for this to happen so I really don't see it happening in the next 10 years. After that, it’s so hard to predict.

AMT: What are the barriers that you see?

MICHAEL WADE: I think there's probably three categories of barriers that you have for flying cars. The first one is technical, in that most of the new ideas today are talking about battery powered flight. And until we can get the power to weight ratio of batteries to the point where we can fly above gravity for a decent amount of time with the weight of one or two humans or more, it's going to be very difficult. We probably need a change in the technology. I think the second one is social. There are all kinds of issues there about privacy. I mean do you really want a flying car hovering outside your bedroom window? Legislation and regulation, public safety—I mean these are dangerous you know spinning rotors—all kinds of issues around public safety. And then I think the people who are going to pilot them—unless they're autonomous of course—you know what type of training do they need? It's bad enough when you drive on surface roads, which is essentially a 2-D landscape. You imagine the third dimension can create all kinds of issues. And then the third hurdle I think is economical, the cost. As Missy mentioned, the flying cars or wherever you'd like to call them that are out today, that you can get today—by the way you can pay for them today, you can't get them for at least two years—is hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. So it's really out of the range of the mainstream.

AMT: Missy, do you agree that there are a lot of barriers?

MISSY CUMMINGS: There are a lot of barriers. But you know I want to encourage people, still dream big. We are closer than we've ever been. And you know if we looked at the turn of the century between the 1900s, no one even thought that cars—there was a huge debate about whether or not cars would actually replace the horse and buggy. And so we've been at this place before where there's a revolutionary new technology coming that does have potential. But there's still some core engineering challenges. The battery is one. The other one is vertical takeoff and landing flight for commercial passengers. This is really still a technology that only exists in the military. There has never been a VTOL aircraft that's been certified for commercial passenger flight. The United States military will not let the president of this country fly in its own VTOL aircraft because it's that dangerous. So you know we still have a lot of safety issues to go forward with and we'd have to reconfigure our entire air traffic control system to be able to handle these low flying, short hop flights. So it's definitely doable. We have all the working pieces in place, but how to integrate this all is going to be the challenge.

AMT: At the same time, given that so many people are involved in the actual design in trying to create this, is it just really a matter of time, Missy?

MISSY CUMMINGS: Yes. It is just a matter of time. It will happen. You know will my child—I have a nine year old—will she get to ride around in a flying car? Probably.

AMT: I have a clip I want to play for you. This is a demo commercial for the Kitty Hawk flyer followed by some thoughts from the comedian Stephen Colbert.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Phone ringing]

VOICE 1: Hello?

VOICE 2: Hey, Laura. Whatcha guys up to?

VOICE 1: Hey, Lise. Just getting ready for dinner. Mark invited a few friends over.

VOICE 1: Oh, nice. Well, I'd love to see you.

VOICE 2: Well, do you want to join us? Maybe you can bring the boat over.

VOICE 1: [Laughs] I have something better in mind. I'll see you in two minutes.

VOICE 2: How are you going to get here in two minutes?

VOICE 1: It's a surprise. You'll have to wait and see.

VOICE 2: Okay. [laughs] Alright. I’ll see you soon.

VOICE 1: I’ll see you soon.

VOICE 2: Okay. Bye-bye.

[Music]

VOICE 3: This is it—the thing we've been promised, the things we've been dreaming about our entire lives. Let's see our flying car. And…

[Sound: Laughter]

VOICE 3: It looks like a mini trampoline had sex with the Wienermobile. It's called the Kitty Hawk flyer and if the commercial they showed us is any indication, it is going to revolutionize how rich people travel across a lake. It starts with a problem we've all faced. We want to upstage the lakefront dinner party of our best friend who we secretly hate without using our boring old boat. But how? By strapping on our helmet, jumping on the Kitty Hawk we sort of know how to fly and hovering the exposed blades at the exact height of our friends’ heads, then recounting our flying machine escapades while drinking on our friends’ dock.

AMT: Okay. Missy Cummings, it's tongue in cheek of course, but Stephen Colbert makes an interesting point. Are our flying personal vehicles going to be toys for rich people?

MISSY CUMMINGS: [Laughs] Larry Page is a great guy. He's done a lot. But I think what we're seeing is the development of his toy which is in a completely different class of aircraft as opposed to the Aurora Flight Sciences’ personal transportation vehicle and they're one of Uber’s partners. I mean you can't even compare these vehicles. You know the Kitty Hawk flyer is just what Stephen Colbert said it was. I have to tell you that as an aerospace engineer, they're also incredibly dangerous. And so you know it may be a rich people's vehicle, but if a wife wants to get rid of her husband, that may be one toy she wants to buy him. I don't think it's a good comparison because that is clearly a recreational vehicle as opposed to—there are many companies around the world—Lilium, Joby, Aurora Flight Sciences—who are seriously trying to develop these vehicles. And so I think that we'll see more advancements coming from them in the near term.

AMT: Michael Wade, what do you think?

MICHAEL WADE: Yeah. I agree that for the foreseeable future, they're going to be toys for rich people just in the same way that a helicopter is really just for rich people today. So I think the time when we're all going to have one of these things in our driveways is a long way off in the future. But perhaps we might see what Uber is talking about, where we have very well-defined corridors where people can fly these things on a very regulated basis between point A and point B. That's maybe more realistic.

AMT: Missy, I want to ask you about that because you are a former fighter pilot. You're working with NASA right now on air transport. Is NASA not already looking at how air traffic regulations would change when there are more small and personal flying vehicles out there?

MISSY CUMMINGS: Yes. This is a major initiative to look at how to basically change the air traffic control system both for drones—the small drones that we see today—as well as potentially these more autonomous passenger carrying vehicles that will show up in the future. The big issue is that we have to change an air traffic control system from high altitude to low altitude. The radars that we have in today's world, they just don't function very well at low altitudes. And so there's been a lot of work that's been going on to leverage cell phone networks for example, which do very well at low altitudes to try to harness those to provide air traffic management for low flying aircraft. And so people are thinking about it, just as they are thinking about the security implications. And so that's good. I think all of these programs need more money. The United States needs to invest a lot more money. I will say Canada has been very good about helping advance some of these issues and in fact often we look to Canada for some of the testing protocols and sites. But we're working on it. But this is again one of the issues that I mentioned, that it's a systems integration problem and so these are typically the hardest problems to solve because they involve so many working parts.

AMT: Michael Wade, speak to me a little bit about the dream of it all. Why are flying cars so central to our ideas about what it means to live in the future?

MICHAEL WADE: Well, I think it is the dream that many people have had for a long time, to be able to fly. You know when you look at cars and planes, they were developed within about 15 years of each other more than 100 years ago. So there was always the thought that the two would be combined. Henry Ford issued a patent for a flying car in 1926. So this is not a new idea.

AMT: He actually said mark my words, there will be a flying car one day. He predicted it.

MICHAEL WADE: He did say that, as many others have done. And you know looking back at the fifties and sixties when they were predicting what life would be in the 2000s, all of those predictions included flying cars. It’s just one of those things that has not happened as quickly as people expected.

AMT: And now with all the congestion in cities around the world, it becomes more realistic?

MICHAEL WADE: Well, there's certainly a need to reduce the congestion. That's for sure. So this is one potential avenue to do that. There are other ideas out there. Elon Musk—you played the clip a little bit earlier—has an idea to build tunnels under cities to reduce congestion which has the advantage of being able to use existing technology. Of course, it's extremely expensive to do that. But reducing congestion is a major challenge that needs to be solved today.

AMT: Missy Cummings, what about those who would say to really reduce congestion, we should be thinking about transport on the ground, how are our roadways and our cities are planned, how public transportation exists. That's where the effort should be.

MISSY CUMMINGS: Right. You know I think this is really important and we're facing one of these dilemmas right now in the North Carolina area. The question is if driverless cars keep coming at the pace that they're coming, even if it's partial autonomy that's not necessarily a completely driverless car for all capacities that can do point to point service, you really have to question, at the urban level, whether or not we should be investing in light rail for example. And if we're already having these kinds of difficult questions about how driverless cars could disrupt the rail community, then I think you also have to think about what is the most cost-effective form if we're going to start talking about personal transportation in the air. In Silicon Valley, one of their hallmark scenarios is that you can fly from San Jose to San Francisco in this personal on-demand transportation which is about 40 miles much faster. But then the question is if we had these self-driving car networks, is it truly going to be faster if we can actually optimize the ground transportation. And again, as was previously mentioned, the cost is a huge issue. And so I do think that we're at a very interesting point in history where there are so many disruptive technologies happening at one time, but there’s not a clear path forward for what is going to be the best mode of transportation for the future or the best mixes of modes.

AMT: Okay. Well, we have to leave it there. Thank you both for your thoughts on this today.

MISSY CUMMINGS: Thank you.

LL: That was Anna Maria Tremonti’s conversation with Missy Cummings, director of the humans and autonomy laboratory at Duke University who was in Durham North Carolina and Michael Wade, director of the Global Center for Digital Business Transformation and a professor of innovation and strategy at IMT business school in Switzerland. He was in Toronto. That is our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio 1 for a new edition of Short Cuts from the BBC host Josie Long presents short documentaries captured bottled and buried overtime. I'm Laura Lynch. Thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

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July 20, 2017 full episode transcript

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