Sasha G. Rao

Rao has yet to soar in the flying car she’s working on as outside counsel to Airbus LLC’s A3 unit in Sunnyvale. But she’s eager.

“I volunteered to be the first passenger” when the company scheduled its first test flight last year, she said. “It was declined, but as soon as permissible, I’ll be in the air.”

The term the Maynard Cooper & Gale LLP partner prefers is “flying taxi,” because it is more precise; Airbus’ self-piloted Vahana Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing or EVTOL vehicle cannot be driven on roads, so strictly speaking it’s not a car.

Rao is chair of Maynard Cooper’s intellectual property practice. Along with Airbus, other clients include Square Inc., Airbnb Inc., Casetext Inc., HP Inc. and Hawaiian Telcom Inc.

The complexities surrounding the Vahana EVTOL go well beyond IP, of course. Rao said that the legal issues relating to urban air mobility include protection of the hardware and software patents involved, along with airspace regulation by the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; FAA airworthiness certifications; and regulation and policy concerns by local, state and federal governments.

“We’re looking at noise regulations as we create charging stations and vertiports for these vehicles, for instance,” Rao said. She added that the competition is fierce as rivals like Uber Technologies Inc.’s Elevate, Germany’s Volocopter GmbH, Kitty Hawk Corp., Joby Aviation LLC, Zee Aero and Boeing Co.’s Aurora Flight Sciences.

“I’m one of many plunging into this new legal realm,” she said.

Last year Rao went to Pendleton, Oregon, where Airbus flew its new taxi—another term for it was “autonomous passenger shuttlecraft”—for the first time. She wasn’t allowed to be the passenger; that honor went to a stuffed toy the engineers put in the cabin.

“It went great,” she said. “We had FAA inspectors there. It was quite a moving thing to watch it take off for the first time. I loved watching it fly.”

Her fascination with the emerging air taxi industry began when Congress in 2015 authorized small drones by passing the Consumer Drone Safety Act. Then, Rao said, a friend invited her to see what Airbus was up to. “Autonomous cars are slowly gaining more and more acceptance,” she added. “It’s especially true as we can all see that the urban traffic congestion problem is getting worse and worse. It’s not just major American cities. There are terrible traffic problems in Brazil and India and elsewhere.”

So the potential market is immense and the technology is speedily catching up.

“They are coming,” she said of autonomous air taxis. “They are closer than you think.”

— John Roemer