Gaspard Dispatch, No. 05
The Flying Taxi's Rooftop
Has Been Taken by Pickleball
An Osprey-style air taxi at IOI City Mall, and why it won't fix the traffic
Under the canopy at IOI City Mall sat a white aircraft. My first thought was that it was a Cessna. It's that big. Get closer, and you see giant propellers on the wings, pointing at the sky. It's a flying taxi. But this vehicle of the future has an unexpected rival: pickleball. This time, I've brought plenty of numbers to make sense of the dogfight.
The priciest thing in the mall
The aircraft is called the E20. It seats five including the pilot, and it takes off and lands vertically on electric power: an eVTOL, in the jargon. According to reports, it costs around RM12.26 million per aircraft. It is almost certainly the most expensive thing on display in the mall. For the record, the target price announced early in development was around 7 million yuan. It's not a like-for-like comparison, but true to form for an aircraft, the price seems to have caught an updraft.
It's made by TCab Tech, a Shanghai-based company. Its founder, Ng Yon Wui, was born in Perak. He led A350 research and development at Airbus China, then worked on flying-car development at a company under Chinese carmaker Geely. On 9 October, TCab Tech signed an MoU with SIDEC, the Selangor state agency, to explore bringing the E20 to market in Malaysia, and announced it would set up its Southeast Asian base in Selangor. The display runs until 9 November. A Malaysian engineer competing on the world stage: a heart-warming story. The aircraft hasn't flown here yet, but the talk has already taken off.
Why not a drone?
Honestly, my first question was: why not make it a drone? Say "flying taxi" and most people picture a giant drone covered in propellers. So why bother with wings and propellers that tilt?
The answer, it turns out, is distance. The leading drone-style aircraft, from China's EHang, seats two and flies about 35 km. The E20 cruises at 260 km/h and has a range of 200 km.
- Drone-style (EHang EH216-S)
- 2 seats / range about 35 km / top speed about 130 km/h
- Osprey-style (TCab Tech E20)
- 5 seats incl. pilot / range about 200 km / cruise about 260 km/h
Kuala Lumpur International Airport is more than 50 km from the city centre. A drone-style aircraft is great at a lap around the neighbourhood, but it can't get to the airport and back. To fly far and fast, it saves battery to take off and land like a helicopter, then cruise on wings like a plane. So mistaking it for a Cessna was half right.
The Osprey-style trade-off
Tilting the rotors to switch between vertical and horizontal flight is called a tilt-rotor design. In Japan, people know it from the US military's Osprey.
The upside is speed and range. Because the wings carry it in cruise, it uses far less power and can fly several times further than a drone-style aircraft.
The downside is complexity. The tilting mechanism adds parts and maintenance. The hardest moment of all is the transition, from hovering to flying on the wings. Doing that safely is the biggest hurdle in certification. During take-off and landing it's also power-hungry and loud. Tilt the rotors, never the company: the golden rule of tilt-rotor management.
And there's one downside unique to Japan: the word "Osprey" alone makes plenty of people frown. A technology let down by its name, you might say.
Where the world's flying taxis stand
So when can you ride one? Globally, China is in front. EHang received the world's first eVTOL type certificate in 2023 and is already carrying passengers on sightseeing flights. In the US camp, Joby and Archer are aiming for their first passenger flights in the UAE in 2026. Meanwhile, two of Europe's early leaders stalled financially before take-off and have both gone under. A dream machine, it seems, can also burn cash at a dreamlike pace.
China's seriousness shows in the numbers. Its civil aviation regulator expects the "low-altitude economy", which covers drones and flying taxis, to reach 1.5 trillion yuan in 2025 and 3.5 trillion yuan by 2035. One report puts confirmed and intended eVTOL orders in China at over 5,000 aircraft, worth more than 30 billion yuan. Just to be clear, the low-altitude economy is not an economy whose earnings are flying low.
The E20 completed its first crewed flight in October 2025, reportedly with the founder himself at the controls. A company whose boss flies the thing himself is usually serious. Still, before it can carry passengers in Malaysia, it needs certification from the Civil Aviation Authority of Malaysia. Selangor's Menteri Besar made that point himself. For now, certification is still hovering. When can you ride one? For sightseeing, in China. For your Malaysian commute, not yet.
So, will it ease the traffic?
In short: no. Let's look at the numbers.
Start with capacity: four passengers. Moving a full busload would take a dozen-odd trips. Divide the aircraft price by the passenger seats and you get about RM3 million per seat. A seat that costs as much as a luxury condo. Fares won't match the bus or the train any time soon. The people who get to ride won't be the crowds causing the jams, but a very small few.
Run it backwards and it gets better. The RM20 billion Malaysia loses to congestion each year would buy about 1,600 E20s. Buy them all, and the traffic wouldn't shrink one bit. There'd be nowhere to land that many aircraft in the first place.
Then there's the weather. Malaysian afternoons come with downpours and thunder. And there's the haze season I wrote about in No. 04. A day when the sky is hazy enough to stare at the sun is, for a pilot, a day when it's hard to see ahead.
The Menteri Besar himself said Selangor needs to gauge whether people are ready to adopt it as an everyday mode of transport rather than a luxury. A flying taxi isn't a vehicle that reduces traffic. It's a vehicle that flies over it.
Where it is useful
That said, it has its uses: getting between the airport and the city, reaching islands with no roads, urgent medical transfers, and tourism. TCab Tech itself gives the example of flying from Tawau in Sabah to places such as Sipadan Island in 30 minutes. Places you could once reach only by boat, in half an hour. Perhaps it shines brightest where there's no traffic at all.
Follow the money
Occupational hazard, but let's follow the money. For now, the money won't be in the passengers themselves but in everything around them: aircraft certification, maintenance, building and running landing sites, pilot training, insurance. It's the same story as the gold rush, where the people who got rich weren't the ones digging for gold but the ones selling picks and jeans.
Malaysia's aerospace industry generated RM32.5 billion in revenue in 2025. The government is targeting RM55.2 billion by 2030, and Selangor already accounts for 68% of the country's aerospace output. The head of the national aerospace industry agency has even said aerospace and the low-altitude economy together could exceed RM100 billion by 2035. Before the flying taxis, the numbers have already taken off.
Just as France's Safran supplies the E20's motors, there is plenty of room for Japanese companies too, in parts, batteries and materials. Riding a flying taxi may be some way off, but you can start selling picks today.
The battle for the rooftops
Finally, time to bring this story in to land. The prime candidates for flying-taxi landing sites are the rooftops of buildings and malls. But as I wrote in No. 02, those rooftops are already being taken over by pickleball courts. There's no room at the top.
Before we take to the skies, we'll have to win the rooftops back from pickleball. Until then, I'll be stuck in traffic, gazing up at the sky.