Volocopter Publishes Roadmap for Scalable Urban Air Mobility (UAM) in Cities
Today, Volocopter, the pioneer of urban air mobility, published a white paper “The Roadmap to Scalable Urban Air Mobility” outlining what is needed to operate the full ecosystem enabling urban air mobility. As the first and only electric air taxi developer with Design Organisation Approval by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), Volocopter moves swiftly towards commercial launch in the next 2-3 years. The company has now laid out the key steps to both launch commercial air taxi services in cities and build the necessary supporting ecosystem to scale the UAM business.
“Volocopter is leading the pack for implementing urban air mobility internationally. With our VoloCity and chosen go-to-market approach, we can fit into the existing ecosystem well enough to get started in the next 2-3 years. However, in order to subsequently scale our operations in a safe and efficient manner and offer a fantastic experience to our customers, we need to establish a comprehensive and integrated UAM ecosystem. This is what we are doing together with our partners.”
The paper directly confronts the current challenges facing the electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) industry with solutions focused on a holistic partnership approach for introducing this next dimension of mobility. While the technical details are equally important to create the aircraft, as Volocopter laid out in their first white paper in 2019, this new white paper provides a glimpse into the complexity of the ecosystem around the aircraft. It gives an overview of what UAM is, what progress has been made, and how Volocopter plans to implement their UAM services in cities like Singapore and Paris with a scalable business approach. Key points in the paper:
- The UAM industry is expected to have a €11.3 trillion addressable market by 2035 with a €241 billion market potential. Over half of the market potential lies in passenger mobility (e.g., VoloCity air taxi services), and the rest is covered by logistic-type, cargo services (e.g., VoloDrone services).
- Strong partnerships and an ecosystem strategy will play a pivotal role for entry into the electric air taxi market and setting a precedent for future UAM services.
- The most successful approach will put the customers first in all critical areas including safety, infrastructure, aircraft design, air operations, city integration, and acceptance.
- Volocopter supports the high safety standards for air taxis defined by the EASA’s SC-VTOL and the progress with concurrent type certificate validation from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the US and the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS).
- Digitalization and autonomous flight will help decrease prices for air taxi services in the long-term. Volocopter is already underway to ensure that the aircraft produced can fly autonomously and that all various components of the UAM ecosystem can be connected using a digital backbone and platform, VoloIQ.
This article was originally published by Volocopter GmbH.
