The Bell Nexus May Be the Coolest Thing I’ve Ever Seen

dan-in-nexus Imagine landing at O’Hare and then instead of sitting in a taxi and spending more than an hour crawling along in traffic to get into the city, you climb into a drone and zoom downtown and land on top of a skyscraper in just a few minutes. Better yet, imagine the drone doesn’t have a human pilot, and just flies itself. This sounds like science fiction, but companies are already working on this – it’s called Urban Air Mobility (UAM) – and they’re farther along than you might think. In fact a couple days ago, I sat in one of these things.

It’s called the Bell Nexus, and it’s built by Bell Helicopter Textron. The engineering is done in Texas. It was like getting a little taste of the future. This happened at a conference in Chicago hosted by the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI). I was there to give a keynote address. As soon as I got off stage I raced over to the expo hall to meet the people from Bell and see the Nexus.

It’s an amazing machine. It looks like a Parrot drone that’s been blown up to enormous proportions and kitted out with a really deluxe interior. It’s all electric. There are six rotors, each with a set of redundant electric motors. They’re all powered by a giant battery pack in the tail.

The Nexus holds four passengers and a pilot. Eventually the idea is to build a Nexus that can operate as an autonomous vehicle. But at first the aircraft will be piloted by a human. Someday there might be dozens of them shuttling people around inside big cities. There are loads of hurtles to get over before we get to that point, obviously. But a lot of people believe we’ll have things like the Nexus operating in the airspace around big cities within 10 years.

Another thing I learned: people in the UAM are really, really tired of hearing about the Jetsons. Supposedly there’s a guy at the FAA who keeps a bowl on his desk, and anyone who says the word “Jetsons” has to put a dollar in the bowl.

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