A packed house at January’s AHS International Transformative Vertical Flight Technical Meeting and Fifth Annual Workshop learned about bold visions for urban air taxis and the challenges of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL). Four days of presentations hosted by the AHS San Francisco Bay Area Chapter covered aeromechanics, propulsion, acoustics, infrastructure and certification advances aimed largely at airborne mass transit. The new rotorcraft suggested for moving people over clogged streets include multicopters, tiltrotors, tilt wings and ducted fans, nearly all designed around Distributed Electric Propulsion (DEP). AHS International executive director and workshop program chair Mike Hirschberg observed, “Really, transformative flight is [largely] about DEP and the design freedom that it enables.”