Volocopter releases second white paper on urban air mobility, says strong partnerships vital for introducing air taxi services into cities

Volo­copter has pub­lished a white paper which out­lines what it thinks is need­ed to oper­ate the entire urban air mobil­i­ty ecosys­tem, say­ing strong part­ner­ships will be piv­otal for the intro­duc­tion of air taxi ser­vices and set­ting a prece­dent for future city oper­a­tions.

Enti­tled ‘The Roadmap to Scal­able Urban Air Mobil­i­ty’, this is the sec­ond white paper by the eVTOL air­craft devel­op­er, which believes the total address­able urban air mobil­i­ty mar­ket will be worth €11.3 tril­lion, with a mar­ket poten­tial of €241 bil­lion by 2035. Volo­copter’s first white paper was pub­lished in 2019.

The com­pa­ny also direct­ly con­fronts the cur­rent chal­lenges fac­ing the indus­try, with solu­tions focused on a holis­tic part­ner­ship approach for intro­duc­ing this next dimen­sion of mobil­i­ty. Addi­tion­al­ly, it gives an overview of what urban air mobil­i­ty is, what progress has been made and how Volo­copter plans to imple­ment its ser­vices in cities like Sin­ga­pore and Paris with a scal­able busi­ness approach.

Volo­copter has out­lined its inten­tion to launch the first air taxi ser­vices in Sin­ga­pore by 2023, with the first route expect­ed to be a tourist route offer­ing views across Mari­na Bay. Volo­copter is also the first indus­tri­al part­ner for Paris Region’s Urban Air Mobil­i­ty project, and will test its VoloC­i­ty eVTOL air taxi in the French cap­i­tal next year.

Flo­ri­an Reuter, CEO of Volo­copter, said: “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 white paper address­es a host of key top­ics from the indus­try. As well as the air taxi vehi­cle, oth­er areas include cus­tomer ser­vice offer­ing, air oper­a­tions, city inte­gra­tion and insti­tu­tion­al and pub­lic accep­tance.

Oth­er main points include:

• More than half of the mar­ket poten­tial lies in pas­sen­ger mobil­i­ty i.e. VoloC­i­ty eVTOL, and the rest is cov­ered by logis­tic-type, car­go 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
• Dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion and autonomous flight will help decrease prices for air taxi ser­vices in the long-term

Volo­copter has said it expects the largest mar­ket share to be short dis­tance flights in the inner city — from air­ports to city cen­tres and busi­ness dis­tricts. With a range of about 22 miles (35km), it says the VoloC­i­ty eVTOL air taxi will be able to serve the major­i­ty of cities across the world.

To put this into con­text, the cities of New York, Paris, Lon­don, Tokyo, Shang­hai, Bei­jing, Sao Paulo and Mum­bai span less than 30km or 19 miles from the city cen­tres. Addi­tion­al­ly 93 per cent of inter­na­tion­al air­ports serv­ing cities are with­in 30km of the city.

At an aver­age speed of 50–60 miles per hour, an eVTOL air taxi trip from New York’s JFK Air­port to Times Square would take just 20 min­utes — as opposed to near­ly 45 min­utes by taxi.

Volo­copter con­tin­ues to make great strides in the eVTOL air­craft mar­ket and recent­ly raised €200 mil­lion in Series D Fund­ing, which will be used to cer­ti­fy its VoloC­i­ty air taxi. It is cur­rent­ly the only com­pa­ny with Design Organ­i­sa­tion Approval by the Euro­pean Union Safe­ty Agency (EASA) and look­ing to achieve con­cur­rent cer­ti­fi­ca­tion from both EASA and the FAA. The lat­ter accept­ed its appli­ca­tion for Type Cer­tifi­cate val­i­da­tion in Jan­u­ary.

Away from its eVTOL air­craft, Volo­copter is work­ing with Lufthansa Indus­try Solu­tions to devel­op its VoloIQ soft­ware plat­form. It uses arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and has been designed to enable glob­al scale air taxi oper­a­tions, seam­less cus­tomer ser­vice – such as sim­ple book­ing – and inte­gra­tion with exist­ing mobil­i­ty providers and new ser­vices.

To down­load and read the white paper, click here.