Varon Vehicles’ think tank leads conversation about vertiports in Latin America

How ver­ti­ports can be imple­ment­ed in cities with­in Latin Amer­i­ca was the next con­ver­sa­tion top­ic in Varon Vehi­cles’ lat­est think tank.

This ses­sion, which took place on 11th Sep­tem­ber, was the third in the com­pa­ny’s series as it aims to bring togeth­er stake­hold­ers from across the indus­try.

Join­ing this dis­cus­sion were Charles Clauser from PS&S Inte­grat­ed Ser­vices, Sankar Villupu­ram of Arup, Gary Ver­maak from Air­Taxi Now, Clement Mon­net, for­mer CEO of Voom by Air­bus, and Car­los Par­do from New Urban Mobil­i­ty Alliance (NUMO).

Intro­duc­ing the ses­sion, Felipe Varon, CEO of Varon Vehi­cles, said: “As we all know there are a lot of pieces to the puz­zle of Urban Air Mobil­i­ty. The air­craft them­selves can­not oper­ate on their own; they need a lot of oth­er sys­tems oper­at­ing as well. We need places for them to land, and these places are called ver­ti­ports.

“They bring togeth­er all these oth­er pieces, such as pas­sen­ger man­age­ment, inte­gra­tion into our modes of trans­port, and air­space traf­fic man­age­ment. Ver­ti­ports are where it all hap­pens.”

Varon start­ed the dis­cus­sion by ask­ing the pan­el how they think ver­ti­ports could be imple­ment­ed in cities across Latin Amer­i­ca, where there is quite a lot of urban den­si­ty. “Try­ing to open space in these exist­ing cities would be a major chal­lenge, so the lack of urban space is one of the first things we realise when try­ing to build these ver­ti­ports, or when choos­ing where to build them,” Varon said.

“The oth­er point would be where to place them; would it be ground lev­el, or on top of high sky-rise build­ings — like many of the heli­ports which have been built.”

Speak­ing first, Clauser said there are a whole host of points which have to be con­sid­ered first when think­ing about plac­ing ver­ti­ports in a city, such as avail­able land, appro­pri­ate build­ings and the poten­tial for the expan­sion of site util­i­ties.

“There is also the con­sid­er­a­tion of neigh­bour­hood eval­u­a­tions as well, to see where sen­si­tive areas are. I know we’re talk­ing about very dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed munic­i­pal­i­ties, but at the same time, there may be more favourable routes that can be devel­oped between and amongst the var­i­ous ver­ti­ports, and that would favour less objec­tion­able areas.

“So we’re look­ing at not only the site loca­tion and what the ameni­ties can pro­vide there, but the avail­abil­i­ty of util­i­ties, pro­vi­sion and exten­sion of high-ener­gy elec­tric, neigh­bour­hood con­sen­sus that would allow the accep­tance of a ver­ti­port in a par­tic­u­lar area, route com­po­si­tion from both an air­space and cityscape stand­point and the inter-con­nec­tiv­i­ty between air mobil­i­ty and exist­ing ground mobil­i­ty, and how to two can com­ple­ment one anoth­er.

“All of these things are items that we need to look at very care­ful­ly so what we are build­ing makes sense, is eco­nom­i­cal and accept­ed by the com­mu­ni­ty, approv­able and least dis­rup­tive to peo­ple’s qual­i­ty of life, but at the same time improv­ing the qual­i­ty of the life for the trav­eller.”

Speak­ing next was Sankar Villupu­ram from Arup, who said the selec­tion of which city to imple­ment Urban Air Mobil­i­ty is going to be very impor­tant.

Based in Hong Kong, he gave a com­par­i­son to the bustling city, say­ing: “It is chal­leng­ing. First­ly, we are an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly dense city and there are alter­na­tive pub­lic trans­ports which are extreme­ly pop­u­lar. So the selec­tion of the city or the demand itself is going to play an impor­tant role of where this is going to make a dif­fer­ence.”

“The moment when we have a demand in those places you can’t reach or the alter­na­tive trans­porta­tion is non-exis­tent, then the ver­ti­ports will be able to solve it bet­ter. If you want to do a com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion and in a scal­able way, it has to have a stronger demand and use case, then the ver­ti­port’s prob­lem will be auto­mat­i­cal­ly solved.”

Clement Mon­net spoke about how crit­i­cal the infra­struc­ture issue will be for Urban Air Mobil­i­ty, say­ing it is the least invest­ed area so far.

He also elab­o­rat­ed about his time as CEO of Voom, which was launched as an Acubed project in 2016 and the first-to-mar­ket, on-demand heli­copter-book­ing plat­form.

It con­nect­ed pas­sen­gers between air taxi com­pa­nies in Mex­i­co City, Sao Paulo and San Fran­cis­co, with any­one able to book a trip in sec­onds via a mobile app. In Voom’s first year of oper­a­tion, the project achieved more than 150,000 active app users, 15,000 heli­copter pas­sen­gers and a 45 per cent repeat cus­tomer rate. Voom ceased oper­a­tions in April 2020, but it enabled Air­bus to gain a huge wealth of knowl­edge and data as it con­tin­ues to invest in the Urban Air Mobil­i­ty mar­ket.

Mon­net said: “We have dozens if not hun­dreds of com­pa­nies which are build­ing the vehi­cles and some are mak­ing great progress, but the infra­struc­ture stream is the least invest­ed so far.

“The major issue we saw at Voom was that demand was crit­i­cal. On Thurs­day or Fri­day evening, traf­fic in these cities was ter­ri­ble from down­town to the air­port. But if you go on a Tues­day after­noon for exam­ple it OK. Our flights were on aver­age about 11 min­utes, but if you count the end-to-end expe­ri­ence for the pas­sen­ger, from check­ing in to the time they were arriv­ing at their des­ti­na­tion, that can be 40–45 min­utes.

“If you count this 40–45 min­utes for an end-to-end expe­ri­ence, then UAM make total sense when the alter­na­tive is maybe two, three or four hours on a Thurs­day or Fri­day evening. But if you have to take your car to the near­est heli­pad and it takes a long time, then UAM does­n’t make sense.”

Anoth­er issue Mon­net raised from his time at Voom was traf­fic at heli­pad loca­tions.

“Dur­ing those peak times, we had a high demand and if you only have one heli­pad in a crit­i­cal loca­tion then every­one wants to book at the same time,” he added.

“And you can’t land sev­er­al heli­copters on one heli­pad, so peo­ple have to book at oth­er sites which aren’t near to them. So it is real­ly crit­i­cal and impor­tant to build this infra­struc­ture net­work, and I believe we will have a mix of ver­ti­ports and ver­ti­pads.

“Where we will build these will be most­ly based on demand — we have to have the ver­ti­pads close to where peo­ple need them to start and end a jour­ney, while the loca­tion of the ver­ti­ports will be based on avail­able space, and it’s not obvi­ous that we will find enough space in down­town Mex­i­co City or Sao Paulo.”

Varon then asked Par­do to give his view­point on how the indus­try tack­les the chal­lenge of a lack of urban space in Latin Amer­i­ca. Par­do works in the design and imple­men­ta­tion of pilots with NUMO allies and said: “How are we work­ing with the pub­lic to make sure soci­ety is hap­py with our indus­try plans. How do we make sure that we solve peo­ple’s prob­lems, and not cre­ate more.”

Speak­ing about the work of NUMO, Par­do said: “We’ve been work­ing to under­stand how to inte­grate new and dis­rup­tive modes of trans­port — such as scoot­ers and autonomous vehi­cles. When we start­ed talk­ing about aer­i­al trans­port, it does inte­grate into the ques­tion we’re ask­ing our­selves.

“In terms of the oth­er argu­ments, how can we iden­ti­fy the best loca­tion which makes sense in terms of what the pri­vate sec­tor is look­ing for and at the same time, it pro­vides ben­e­fits to the users because it is achiev­ing the reduc­tion in trav­el time, the improve­ment of some exter­nal­i­ties, and is not gen­er­at­ing any risk on soci­ety.

“I think that is going to be the bal­ance we are going to have to achieve and we need to keep on hav­ing these dis­cus­sions to see what every­one is agree­ing on.”

And when focus­ing on the inte­gra­tion of ver­ti­ports, Ver­maak said: “I think we have to try and iden­ti­fy the spots which are with­in walk­ing dis­tance — a mile at most — from where the client is. Whether it’s their office or place of res­i­dence and allows it to be inte­grat­ed with exist­ing urban mobil­i­ty hubs, such a bus depot or rail­way sta­tion, makes a lot of sense.

“We’ve already seen in a lot of cities that these urban mobil­i­ty hubs have already become retail space as well, whether it’s cof­fee shops or food stalls, and that’s a good stream of rev­enue. It’s about mak­ing mon­ey out of all of these ancil­lary ser­vices, and that makes it more attrac­tive for peo­ple, because you can grab a bite to eat before jump­ing on the air shut­tle. It makes a lot of sense.

“The major hold-back for cur­rent UAM ser­vices with heli­copters is the land­ing fees, in Lon­don it costs almost as much in land­ing fees as it does for a pas­sen­ger to take a 20-minute flight. This all adds to the costs, but if the ver­ti­port is mak­ing mon­ey through rental it means they don’t have to charge those mas­sive land­ing feeds and kill the busi­ness mod­el imme­di­ate­ly.

The next ses­sion will be held tomor­row (Thurs­day) from 12noon to 1pm EDT, and focus on Inno­va­tion in Reg­u­la­tion & Air­space Inte­gra­tion.

The pan­el of speak­ers will include Edgar Rivera, Direc­tor of Aero­civ­il Reg­u­la­tions in Colom­bia, Mauri­cio Gomez of DNSA UTM Aero­civ­il Colom­bia, Amit Gan­joo of ANRA, Rex Alexan­der of Ver­ti­cal Flight Society/Five Alpha, Peter Shan­non of Radius Cap­i­tal, and Justin Towles of Akin Gump.

To watch this dis­cus­sion, reg­is­ter for the next ses­sion, and watch pre­vi­ous think tanks, vis­it https://www.varonvehicles.com/skyscraper