Canadian Advanced Air Mobility Consortium (CAAM) announces Toronto as its second launch market

Cana­di­an Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty Con­sor­tium (CAAM) has named Toron­to and the Ontario region as its sec­ond launch mar­ket, after Van­cou­ver, and revealed more details about its projects in 2021 dur­ing a Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety pre­sen­ta­tion.

JR Ham­mond, CAAM’s Exec­u­tive Direc­tor, revealed the excit­ing news on Decem­ber 14th, which also out­lined its future goals in Cana­da as part of a 20-year vision: Zero emis­sions from advanced air mobil­i­ty oper­a­tions, 40 bil­lion rev­enue pas­sen­ger kilo­me­tres per year and 40 mil­lion freight tonne kilo­me­tres per year.

Com­ment­ing on the Toron­to announce­ment, he said: “We know the suc­cess that we have been able to show­case in Van­cou­ver and British Colum­bia are a start­ing point for our con­ver­sa­tions, but our true suc­cess will be shown if we can take this frame­work and quick­ly repli­cate it across the nation of Cana­da, to ensure it is effec­tive and imple­mentable across dif­fer­ent juris­dic­tions.

“Over the past three months, we have been bring­ing togeth­er round­ta­bles of the provin­cial gov­ern­ment, local city offi­cials, air­ports, acad­e­mia and investors with­in the Toron­to region — show­cas­ing and start­ing to brain­storm what Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty is and how it can play out in the area, under­stand­ing the con­nec­tion to Lake Ontario, the north­east cor­ri­dor of the Unit­ed States and the gold­en tri­an­gle of Ottawa, Mon­tre­al and Toron­to.”

Ham­mond also used the pre­sen­ta­tion to update view­ers about how CAAM is build­ing out its strate­gic projects for 2021, and reach­ing out to organ­i­sa­tions, gov­ern­ments and investors to lean in and under­stand the four key aspects that CAAM is com­mit­ting to for Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty in the next year.

This include bring­ing a nation­al AAM strat­e­gy and roadmap for effi­cient and sim­i­lar under­stand­ing of how advanced air mobil­i­ty is going to be rolling out.

“This is what we call the nation­al song sheet, so that we can all look and under­stand how indi­vid­ual city or region­al oper­a­tions play into a nation­al strat­e­gy,” Ham­mond said.

“This is only going to be in con­junc­tion with not only the nation­al research coun­cil, Trans­port Cana­da and Nav Cana­da, but lean­ing into what insights that we can have, hav­ing a nim­ble and alignable mar­ket here in Cana­da, and bring­ing the nec­es­sary deci­sion mak­ers from a fed­er­al basis togeth­er to cre­ate this nation­al AAM strat­e­gy and roadmap.”

The sec­ond project CAAM will be focus­ing on is mov­ing Van­cou­ver to the oper­a­tional stage for Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty oper­a­tions with its can­cer iso­tope use case.

The fea­si­bil­i­ty study focused on the envi­ron­men­tal, eco­nom­i­cal and social impact of trans­port­ing can­cer iso­topes from Van­cou­ver Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal to the Roy­al Jubilee Hos­pi­tal in British Columbia’s cap­i­tal, Vic­to­ria.

It is com­par­ing infor­ma­tion between trans­port­ing these iso­topes via tra­di­tion­al ground trans­porta­tion, heli­copter, and an eVTOL plat­form – with a focus on time-sav­ings for the rapid­ly decay­ing mate­r­i­al and emis­sions-sav­ing from using an eVTOL air­craft.

Ham­mond said: “We under­stand there will be a phased approach for build­ing towards the actu­al eVTOL oper­a­tions for the can­cer iso­tope, but build­ing the foun­da­tion on a dig­i­tal twin aspect, test­ing out ini­tial oper­a­tions with­in the dense air­space of Van­cou­ver, and then expand­ing into the rev­enue-gen­er­at­ing oper­a­tions in con­junc­tion with our part­ner­ship with Heli­jet. This will be a key aspect for the Van­cou­ver iso­tope oper­a­tion in 2021.”

The third aspect is to under­stand the huge oppor­tu­ni­ty in bring­ing togeth­er the next gen­er­a­tion of man­u­fac­tur­ing for eVTOL air­craft in the Cana­di­an con­text and the syn­er­gies between exist­ing auto­mo­tive sec­tor in south­west Ontario; how it can work togeth­er with aero­space and the effi­cient, mod­u­lar, dig­i­tal man­u­fac­tur­ing side.

And build­ing upon the frame­work CAAM has cre­at­ed in Van­cou­ver, the final aspect for CAAM in 2021 will be the oppor­tu­ni­ty in the Toron­to area to lean into the Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty fea­si­bil­i­ty study, show­cas­ing a white paper of the 20-year roadmap of how the mar­ket can play out in the city, and iden­ti­fy the use cas­es that are essen­tial for the next steps.

Con­clud­ing the pre­sen­ta­tion, Ham­mond also announced CAAM’s new glob­al part­ner­ship with the World Eco­nom­ic Forum — which will see Van­cou­ver become the one of the inau­gur­al cities for the upcom­ing World Eco­nom­ic Forum Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty coali­tion. More details about this work is set to be revealed in ear­ly 2021.

“This is an oppor­tu­ni­ty to bring Canada’s voice and where we see that eco­nom­ic, envi­ron­men­tal and social aspect of Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty play out in con­junc­tion with the plat­form that the World Eco­nom­ic Forum has cre­at­ed,” Ham­mond added.

“We want to ensure that this is an inclu­sive con­ver­sa­tion and an invi­ta­tion to the indus­try to con­tin­ue to lead in with the work that we envi­sion. We’ve show­cased in Cana­da with a start­ing mar­ket of Van­cou­ver, how we envi­sion advanced air mobil­i­ty play­ing out and bring­ing it to a real­i­ty with­in the Cana­di­an con­text.

“Our goals are not to be tak­en light­ly. They are auda­cious, chal­leng­ing and will require the col­lab­o­ra­tion nation­wide and inter­na­tion­al­ly across indus­tries pre­vi­ous­ly hav­ing nev­er worked togeth­er. This is our oppor­tu­ni­ty and what we’re com­mit­ted to going for­ward.”

You can watch the full pre­sen­ta­tion, by click­ing here. For more infor­ma­tion about CAAM’s work and roadmap, vis­it www.canadianaam.com