Russian company is developing a flying taxi

Russia's Hoversurf company has presented a newly-developed model of flying taxi.

The aircraft will be tested with the use of 5G network, and if successful, the product can be launched into mass production at the end of 2021, the company said in a statement.

The model has already successfully passed a number of tests in Russia and the UAE and Hoversurf said it is working on an ambitious goal to ensure the possibility of flights over the city in 2023 to 2025.

In 2017, Hoversurf made a deal with the Dubai police, giving them its first production copy of the Hoverbike S3—a single-seat personal drone, which, according to Hoversurf CEO Alexander Atamanov, was a much more "extreme" model.

"Since then, we have been constantly modernizing the technology of transporting a person by air using a drone, constantly striving for some new goals, and all these technologies are moving from one type of aircraft to another, constantly improving and becoming safer," Atamanov said.

"At the current level of battery development, we can already talk about 30 minutes of horizontal flight, which in general solves the problem of transporting passengers in a metropolis," he added.

The estimated price for a flight by air taxi in the future will be about 20 roubles (around P12) per kilometer.

Since 2016, the company has attracted $3 million in investments for its flying passenger drone. —Reuters