An Autoflight eVTOL aircraft is shown at Shekou Cruise Home port before a demonstration flight on February 27, 2024, in Shenzhen, China. Developed by Shanghai-based company AutoFlight, the five-seat aircraft successfully completed its first intercity air-taxi demonstration with a flight from Shekou Cruise Home port in Shenzhen to Jiuzhou Port in Zhuhai.
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All over the world, inventors and entrepreneurs are trying to build a future where fresh food drops out of the sky and onto your doorstep, and commuters get home in minutes rather than hours—all without drivers and without smog. A few urban planners and architects have even tried their hand at designing an urban landscape for a world where the law of gravity is partially repealed.
All of which is true for China, but with one difference: the Chinese government has decided that it wants that future now.
Last July, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party threw its support behind what government economic planners have dubbed the “low-altitude economy,” directing a variety of grants and investments to spur the development of low-altitude flight and flight-related services, with low-altitude defined as either the 3,280 feet (1,000 meters) or the 9,842 feet (3,000 m) of air space nearest the ground.
Some government economists forecast that the sector could produce up to 2 trillion yuan (around US$280 billion) as early as 2030.
That might sound outlandish, but engineering consultants, university aeronautics professors, startup executives, and long-time China watchers agree the idea isn’t some pie-in-the-sky fantasy.
Some observers say it’s already on the way. “We are currently in a testing phase, a transitional phase,” says James Wong, who currently serves as Global Governing Trustee for the Urban Land Institute and is executive chairman of the Chinney Alliance Group, a Hong Kong construction and engineering company with a unit that specializes in aviation navigation systems.
Others say that even if it’s not here yet, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen: China has a habit of setting audacious goals and achieving them. Over the past 30 years, many of the industrial and infrastructure development milestones the central government has set down in its Five-Year Plans have been realized. Outcomes have often been spectacular, particularly in transportation:
- In 2007, there were no high-speed train lines in China. Today, there are more than 29,204 miles (47,000 km) of high-speed tracks, as well as a network of trains that crisscross the country at 217 miles (350 km) per hour—about four times the high-speed mileage in the entire European Union.
- In 2009, fewer than 500 electric vehicles were sold throughout the entire country. Last year, the country produced 12.9 million electric vehicles—60 percent of global production.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results, as investors are often reminded, but Alan Beebe, ULI’s chief executive officer for the Asia Pacific region and former president of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, advises not betting against a government that has delivered nearly 900 percent GDP growth in the past 30 years.
“The way China’s government develops their five-year plans is very thoughtful,” says Beebe, “and once the plan is developed, they tend to execute it on all levels, especially when it comes to industrial policies.”
In this case, Beebe suspects the focus on the low-altitude economy may have grown out of planners noting the success of Chinese startups in drone manufacturing (such as DJI, in Shenzhen), a relatively open niche in the increasingly nationalistic global aviation market, as well as intuition that the technology may have uses both in China’s dense cities as well as in remote rural areas not well-served by road or rail.
Developing a more robust navigation system that can accommodate multiple drones and other flying vehicles remains a major challenge. “It’s 1910, and we’re figuring out traffic rules,” says Wong.
In fact, a few low-altitude aerial services have already launched.
In Shenzhen, for example, Meituan, a publicly listed e-commerce company, made its first drone food deliveries in 2021, and more than 200,000 deliveries in 2024. The company has expanded to Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing.
“The current fast-food–delivery service end points in Shenzhen are, sort of, kiosks located in what might be described as plaza areas between buildings,” explains Geoffrey Moore, a senior associate at Arup, a global engineering and design firm. “So, customers come to those kiosks to collect . . . items once they’re delivered.”
Many challenges remain, however. Although drone operations in the city make use of unmanned traffic management developed with the support of the Civil Aviation Authority of China, Moore points out the inherent vulnerabilities of systems built around 5G networks and commodity satellite navigation systems, and he questions their resilience and ability to scale.
For now, point-to-point air corridors—which look a bit like a cable-free ski-lift—seem to be the dominant design for deliveries, but such one-user systems are a strictly temporary solution, low altitude experts agree—particularly as JD, Alibaba, and other retail and logistics giants have made no secret of their interest in creating their own low-altitude delivery networks.
The new transit hub
Urban planners are also trying to think through how this new mode of transportation should be integrated into cities.
Moore, who has written extensively about advanced air mobility, says future city
planners might consider the concept of fulfillment zones “where large logistics, waste collection, and centralized kitchen facilities are served by larger autonomous trucks, trains, or boats—and where noisy or disruptive eVTOLs [electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles] might fly, as well as drone services for delivery, emergency response, and other issues.”
In such an urban transport system, you might use a personal electric car or an autonomous taxi to get to the fulfillment zone, and then take an eVTOL shuttle, a train, or electric bus to connect to a larger transportation hub.
Hashing over the details
Moore sees a lot of opportunity to build such hubs in modern, urban Asia.
Some of the finer points of these hubs’ architecture will have to wait until more is understood about new passenger aircraft. For instance, how much room might an eVTOL need to land, and how far does a vehicle need to be set away from people? Right now, Moore says, “It’s really hard to give people good advice about what they can actually do.”
Many details still need to be worked out, Moore says: “How are you going to maintain clearance of foreign objects . . . where the landing point is, so that you don’t end up throwing pieces of dirt and debris all over the place and hurting people or damaging property? How do you understand what the turbulence is going to look like between buildings as you try to land these things, particularly if there are several trying to operate at the same space—and then suddenly a little drone flies by?”
Designs and capabilities vary, but most eVTOLs look a bit like a small helicopter with multiple small rotors instead of one big rotor.
This resemblance leads many people to think eVTOLs should behave like helicopters. Moore, however, says, “Multirotor aircraft are very, very complicated—the way the air moves around them is incredibly complex. How that’s going to work in the urban canyon, perhaps with adverse weather and other vehicles moving around, as well, I think it’s very, very difficult to predict, but hopefully we won’t need to wait for the first major disaster before everybody wakes up to these issues.”
At bottom, eVTOL engineers face a dilemma. The demand for eVTOL services will be highest in dense, crowded places, but, for safety reasons, you want them in remote areas, says Liuqing Yang, acting director of LASERi, the Low Altitude Systems and Economy Research Institute at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Guangzhou. “This is a delicate art,” she says.
The big to-do list
People think low-altitude navigation systems should be easier because the vehicles are flying nearer the ground, but they are actually more complicated, according to Yang. “You’ve got to be more careful, in that the electromagnetic environment is much more challenging, and these vehicles are much smaller than . . . typical commercial airplanes . . . so, they’re very difficult to be detected and tracked,” she says. Together, she notes, these elements “pose unprecedented challenges in terms of the infrastructure plan.”
The system that manages streams of driverless cargo and passenger vehicles will also need to be able to handle more complexity, rather like the navigation for a multistory freeway where vehicles are constantly changing not just lanes but also elevation. “Imagine not just one lane above the freeway, but five lanes above the freeway,” Wong says. “If you have a car all the way at the top and it needs to come to the bottom, all the cars are talking to each other using Internet of Things—IoT—and then, you know, all the cars have to move aside, and some cargo, too.”
The way it will be done, he thinks—and hopes, as an aviation navigational systems manufacturer—is partly with sensors, mounted on every building along a low-altitude flight corridor, that will track drones and eVTOLs as they pass. Such signals will be as ubiquitous as Wi-Fi, according to Wong.
“I believe that 10 years from now, particularly in this part of China and southern China, every single building owner will be required to put in electricity, Wi-Fi, water, and aerial surveillance, which allows for unmanned vehicles, whether they carry passengers or cargo, to be able to use that building as a reference point in . . . whatever it’s doing, in its mission,” Wong says.
Cargo services will probably appear first, Wong predicts, as they are easier for regulators and users to think about. Already, some large medical campuses are using such services as a kind of 21st-century pneumatic tube. “If you have a blood sample that needs to travel from a patient to a lab, instead of having an orderly run it down the corridor, these drones now deliver it in minutes,” he says.
Passenger services will probably take more time, experts agree. Ambulances are also sometimes mentioned as a good use case, but Moore is skeptical in the short term and sees more potential for uncrewed aircraft offering telemedical services in remote areas, medical delivery, and rapid organ transfer between hospitals.
But most of all, eVTOLs need to find some profitable uses. “The eVTOLs need applications which can make money. That’s the most difficult part,” says Monica Yang, director of marketing for Chinney Alliance Engineering.
China’s edge
Although the low-altitude economy is a national initiative, much of the research and startup activity is concentrated in the Greater Bay Area of Southeast China, a densely populated region of 86 million people who live on 21,622 square miles (56,000 sq km) of land—an area, slightly smaller than West Virginia but with the GDP of Germany, that includes Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Yang says that what makes the area perfect for eVTOL research is that it has huge, crowded cities; a mild climate; and a lot of water, a factor that makes experiments safer.
“The only difficult bit is the fact that they’ve got . . . three separate sets of regulation and, technically, you need a passport to move between them,” Moore says.
eVTOL companies based in China and other countries have operations in the Greater Bay Area or elsewhere in Guangdong province, including Joby Aviation, Lilium, GAC Group, and EHang—all companies that offer variations of eVTOL aircraft.
Although low-altitude flight research has gone on for years in southeast China, the region isn’t unique. Cutting-edge research is being done all over the world, Wong says. He points to Alef, a California-based flying car startup in which he is an investor.
So, what’s different about what is happening now to low-altitude flight in China?
Wong says that the Chinese national government’s encouragement is the key differentiator. “I’m an engineer by training. From an engineering point of view, [low-altitude flight] is doable today. But is it going to happen?” Outside of China, he expects progress will continue to be slow. “Well, there’s going to be people concerned about safety. There’s going to be people concerned about their livelihoods, right? So, all the politics need to be worked out, and who knows how long that takes, right?”
China has decided to ignore all that, Wong says. “China is basically saying, ‘Hey, the door is open. We’re willing to take some risks.’”
Beebe notes that one of China’s competitive differentiators is the use of regulations to support industrial development. “You don’t have to spend years trying to battle regulatory authorities to fly drones for commercial purposes. In China, once policy directions are set, the authorities ask, “‘What do you need?’ And . . . then go and make that happen.”
In Asia, South Korea is the only other country with a similar top-down development focus for its own low-altitude economy. The government’s Urban Air Mobility (K-UAM) Grand Challenge is encouraging a wide range of lower-altitude development. “There is a lot of activity around the design of their support infrastructure, the design of networks, and the development of ideas about service provisions, involving a coordinated effort among aircraft [original equipment manufacturers], airspace planners, and air traffic management operators” says Jin Fan, Arup’s aviation business leader for East Asia.
In Japan, however, the effort to develop low-altitude mobility is more decentralized. Rather than trying to build a low-altitude ecosystem, the government is letting developers proceed independently on individual initiatives, like European and American drone and eVTOL makers, according to Fan.
Jim Dukhovny, CEO of Alef, the California flying car startup, says he would love to see that state pursue something like the Chinese low-altitude economy initiative. “It can help with some of . . . California’s current issues: boost economy, helping fight wildfires, provide an ecologically friendly transportation.”
For now, point-to-point air corridors—which look a bit like a cable-free ski-lift—seem to be the dominant design for deliveries, but such one-user systerms offer only a temporary solution, low-altitude experts agree—particularly as JD, Alibaba, and other retail and logistics giants have made no secret of their interest in creating their own low-altitutde delivery networks.
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First inning
It’s still very early days for the low-altitude economy, in Wong’s view. “I don’t even think we’re two outs into the first inning yet,” says Wong, who was educated in the United States. “We’re very, very early in the ball game.”
Yang says she has been working on intelligent autonomous transportation for 20 years, and the work is still not completely done, not even for ground transportation. “Rome was not built in one day . . . . I think it’s just going to be a gradual development,” she says. “We’re going to see ups and downs until a certain point. We’ll see that the majority of the infrastructure is ready, and all of a sudden, we’re at that tipping point when scaled deployment becomes possible.”
Nevertheless, progress is being made in China. Some things are happening now, Yang says. Some will happen in a few months. The rest? Five to 10 years, she predicts.
For property developers, a lot of uncertainty remains. Yang says that, in Hong Kong, high-rise developers are already planning landing spaces for drones, and, in Guangzhou, they are also preparing high-rise buildings for eVTOL landing pads.
But ULI’s Beebe advises developers and investors to keep an eye on the low-altitude economy as it takes shape, because the implications of a new technology are typically not clear in the beginning. “Sometimes it’s hard to imagine the unimaginable,” he says.
Moore insists that it is already time to start planning for the low-altitude economy, even if it’s unclear exactly what the specifications of the winning technology are likely to be. “It would be silly to not consider what services a range of small electric autonomous vehicles—in the air, on the ground, and in the water—might offer a development . . . today, given that it’ll take a decade-plus to make it happen, by which time we will have overcome most—if not all—of our current technical challenges,” Moore says.
“The main issue . . . however, is that, in a decade’s time, we will have an entirely new generation of vehicles that we don’t yet know about, and it’s hard to plan for that.” Moore says. “Visionary thinking required!”.
