The concept of small, usually unconventional, aircraft, carrying small numbers of passengers, weaving their way through towering skyscrapers and speeding over suburbs, has been a staple of especially visual science fiction – films, comic books (now pompously called ‘graphic novels’) and TV series – since at least the 1927 German silent film Metropolis. Now, however, it is on the verge of becoming reality. As a real-world concept, it is currently referred to as urban air mobility (UAM), which ...
