The FoT Conference was one of the first to recognize the potential of ‘Getting Transportation Off the Ground’, and this year we will examine how soon personal airborne transportation systems will become viable VIP and later mass transportation. The futuristic vision of skyscrapers surrounded by airborne transport for mass commuting could be just a few years away, but are the world’s governments and existing transport providers and operators sizing themselves up for the change and creating infrastructure to enable it to happen?

It goes almost without saying that the FoT conference will be looking at where we may be with autonomous vehicles and their mass deployment. A great deal of possibly over-zealous predictions have been made in recent years. We are going to ask where we are really in relation to anything beyond application-specific uses of AVs and trial projects. What are the realistic timescales for mass autonomy and what are the major hurdles – legislative and technical – that need to be overcome?

We’ll be hearing from startups, leading firms of lawyers, OEMs and established players in MaaS, and this year we will include a special stream for road hauliers and other logistics-based operators. Plus there will be invited speakers from transportation authorities and city planners, technology and software giants, drone and personal air transportation companies, mass-transit solution providers, business consultants, and inventors of new and disruptive global mobility solutions, all with the common goal of devising better answers to the increasingly demanding challenge of providing safe, efficient, sustainable transportation for the world in 2030 and beyond.