Why zero-carbon ‘flight-hailing’ may be just around the corner

It’s ride-hailing, but with planes instead of cars. Finnish startup Lygg has rolled out a smart mobility platform for booking charter flights as part of a total concept they call FlyMaaS (i.e. flying with a MaaS component). Make it ‘guilt-free’ (i.e. zero-carbon), and we have a winner. 

Lygg already offers services between Finland, Sweden and Estonia, and are now targeting expansion to the Estonian city of Tartu, and in a following stage also between Tartu and Riga, the capital of neighbouring Latvia. 

Airborne Uber

University town Tartu is an important hub for business and R&D, but its small airport lacks scheduled air service with the outside world. It is one of several cities in the industrious but sparsely populated Nordic and Baltic regions that share this predicament. 

Lygg (slogan: “Fly private, pay commercial”) aims to resolve this issue, by essentially offering the same solution as land-based ride-hailing does: customers book a plane via an app, and it takes them to a destination of their choice.  

This ‘airborne Uber’ is most suitable for corporate travel – especially if the concept can be used to fill the “empty legs” that are quite common in business aviation. In that way, Lygg could offer a solution that integrates rather than competes with current practices in business aviation. 

Electric and hydrogen

So, will we soon all be taking the air taxi to our next appointment? That depends on whether we can overcome the major disadvantage of air travel: its massive carbon footprint. Until then, corporates may choose to deprioritize air travel, as a coalition of large Dutch companies (Coalitie Anders Reizen, or the ‘Alternate Travel Coalition’) is pledging to do. 

By 2025, they want to lower the CO2 from business air travel by 25%, among other measures by no longer flying for business meetings less than 700 km from the office, or scheduled to last less than 3 hours.

But carbon-free air travel may not be science fiction for very much longer.  The UK, for one, is investing £113 (€127) million in electric and hydrogen airplane engine technologies via the Aerospace Technology Institute (ATI). This would ultimately allow zero-carbon flights. In fact, a hydrogen fuel cell-powered 19-seater aircraft operated by a UK company called ZeroAvia (pictured) has just made its maiden flight this January. 

So, perhaps guilt-free air travel – and zero-carbon air taxis – might not be that far off into the future after all.

Credit: ZeroAvia