Australia’s first AAM Summit to spark new conversations and bring host of stakeholders together in virtual event

As momen­tum con­tin­ues to gath­er around the world in the advanced air mobil­i­ty indus­try, the Aus­tralian Asso­ci­a­tion for Unmanned Sys­tems’ (AAUS) AAM Sum­mit 2021 will be the coun­try’s first-of-its-kind event to focus on under­stand­ing the ecosys­tem and what the key chal­lenges will be.

Tak­ing place from Sep­tem­ber 1st-2nd, the vir­tu­al event will be sup­port­ed by key gov­ern­ment and indus­try organ­i­sa­tions in Aus­tralia and across the world. Com­pa­nies con­firmed to attend include Nexa Cap­i­tal Part­ners, Sky­portz, Wisk, AMSL Aero, Eve Air Mobil­i­ty, CIVATA­Glob­al, Sky­ports, Arup and Airser­vices Aus­tralia.

eVTOL Insights spoke to AAUS Pres­i­dent and board chair Dr. Reece Cloth­ier about this event, what impact it can have on Aus­tralia and what atten­dees can expect over the two days.

Intro­duc­ing the event, Cloth­ier, said: “AAUS was set up in 2009 and start­ed with about 30 mem­bers. It has now grown to 3,000 small and large cor­po­rate mem­bers. We have rep­re­sen­ta­tion from across the entire ecosys­tem; a large num­ber of those are oper­a­tors, but an increas­ing num­ber of infra­struc­ture providers, sup­port ser­vices, con­sul­tants, insur­ance and finance. All of the nec­es­sary ele­ments for a healthy emerg­ing avi­a­tion tech­nol­o­gy sec­tor.

“We also rep­re­sent sur­face and ground drones and those emerg­ing sec­tors as well because a lot of cross chal­lenges and between land, sea and air is that we’re see­ing and a lot of oppor­tu­ni­ty there to address those simul­ta­ne­ous­ly.

“So although 90 per cent of our mem­ber­ship and focus has been to date on the air­borne sec­tors, and that’s the AAM or drone sec­tor, AUS has long recog­nised the oppor­tu­ni­ty for Aus­tralia to be a poten­tial leader in AAM. This is in par­tic­u­lar on the fact we have a very for­ward lean­ing reg­u­la­to­ry author­i­ty, which has pio­neered the reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work for unmanned air­craft sys­tems or drones since 2001. They’ve since moved for­ward in that and being quite inno­v­a­tive in their approach.”

AAM Sum­mit 2021 will begin with an intro­duc­tion from Cloth­ier, before a keynote by Naa Opoku, Assis­tance Sec­re­tary, Safe­ty and Future Tech­nol­o­gy at the Depart­ment of Infra­struc­ture, Trans­port, Region­al Devel­op­ment and Com­mu­ni­ca­tions (DITRDC).

Pip Spence, who is CEO of Aus­trali­a’s Civ­il Avi­a­tion Safe­ty Author­i­ty (CASA), will also be doing an address before the first pre­sen­ta­tion at 10.15am, which is ‘An Intro­duc­tion to Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty’ by Phil Owen of To70, one of the world’s biggest avi­a­tion con­sul­tan­cies. All pre­sen­ta­tion times are GMT +10.

Natasha San­tha of L.E.K Con­sult­ing will talk about Com­mer­cial Attrac­tive­ness and Indus­try Poten­tial of AAM at 11.45am, before Clem New­ton-Brown of Sky­portz and Michael Dyment of NEXA Cap­i­tal will dis­cuss ‘Prepar­ing Aus­tralia for Invest­ment in Air Taxi Infra­struc­ture’.

Peter Smith from Bar­ton­va­le Tech­nolo­gies will speak about ‘eVTOL Man­u­fac­tur­ing — Aus­trali­a’s Place on the Path from Pro­to­type to Prof­it’ at 1.45pm, with ‘Advanced Aer­i­al Mobil­i­ty in Aus­tralia — Con­quer­ing the Tyran­ny of Dis­tance’ will be deliv­ered by Andrew Moore of AMSL Aero.

Wisk will also be pre­sent­ing at this event, with its Asia Pacif­ic Region Direc­tor Anna Kominik and Simon Top­ping, Senior Man­ag­er — Strate­gic Projects talk­ing about ‘Redefin­ing Air­space — Inte­grat­ing tech­nol­o­gy, reg­u­la­tion and Com­mu­ni­ty’ at 2.45pm. The penul­ti­mate ses­sion of the day will be from Philip But­ter­worth-Hayes and Andrew Charl­ton of CIVATA­Glob­al, where they will deliv­er a pre­sen­ta­tion enti­tled ‘A Route Map for Local Author­i­ties Cre­at­ing a UAM Ecosys­tem – Chal­lenges and Oppor­tu­ni­ties’.

There will also be a pan­el ses­sion mod­er­at­ed by Rob Weaver about ‘Gov­ern­ment and Indus­try set­ting a Flight Path Towards a Viable AAM’.

On the sec­ond day, the first pre­sen­ta­tion at 9am will be by David Rot­tblatt, VP of Busi­ness Devel­op­ment at Eve Air Mobil­i­ty. He will be talk­ing about ‘Devel­op­ing the Ecosys­tem to Enable a New Sus­tain­able Air Mobil­i­ty Indus­try.’ Bri­an Dun­can from Bell will be talk­ing about the com­pa­ny’s Autonomous Pod Trans­port (APT) and Mark Halver­son from Pre­ci­sion Auton­o­my will talk about ‘Accel­er­at­ing AAM Adop­tion with Inno­v­a­tive Insur­ance’.

The three pre­sen­ta­tions before lunch will fea­ture Yun-yuan Tay of Sky­ports, who will focus on ‘Lay­ing the Infra­struc­ture Foun­da­tions for Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty in Aus­tralia’, Jesse Suskin from Wing will talk about ‘Deliv­ery Drones in our Neigh­bour­hood’, and ‘Social Licence to Oper­ate AAM (UAM and Drone Deliv­er­ies) will be deliv­ered by Ronan Delaney of Arup.

Then the final ses­sions will see Luke Gum­ley from CASA talk about the ‘Devel­op­ment of a Reg­u­la­to­ry Roadmap for the RPAS and AAM Sec­tor’, with James Kamin­s­ki of Airser­vices Aus­tralia fin­ish­ing the day’s pre­sen­ta­tions on ‘UAM Con­cepts: What We’ve Found and What’s Next’.

“The AAM Sum­mit real­ly is a land­mark event,” Cloth­ier said. “This will be the first nation­al event or we would call a foun­da­tion event for Aus­tralia. As with all of our events, they are out­come ori­en­tat­ed so it’s real­ly to iden­ti­fy those key areas to bring togeth­er the net­work and stake­hold­ers present in the coun­try and iden­ti­fy those chal­lenges and gaps.

“If you look at what is hap­pen­ing in the indus­try at the moment, the event could­n’t actu­al­ly be bet­ter timed. There is a sig­nif­i­cant amount of pol­i­cy and reg­u­la­to­ry devel­op­ment work ongo­ing in Aus­tralia; one which AUS is active­ly involved in is the nation­al emerg­ing avi­a­tion tech­nol­o­gy pol­i­cy. It is a nation­al, fed­er­al lev­el pol­i­cy devel­op­ment ini­tia­tive which has been released, but we’re mov­ing in the stage of how do we go about oper­a­tional­is­ing their high lev­el state­ments and turn­ing them into mean­ing­ful action across the gov­ern­ment.”

Despite the ongo­ing restric­tions due to Covid-19, the eVTOL air­craft and urban air mobil­i­ty mar­kets con­tin­ue to make sol­id progress — where we are now see­ing com­pa­nies begin flight tests and even com­mit to a year when they hope to launch com­mer­cial ser­vices.

Cloth­ier said: “It’s an emerg­ing sec­tor that that we’re aware of in terms of our mem­ber­ship. We have a grow­ing num­ber of mem­bers who are inter­est­ed in the AAM and it’s now about con­nect­ing the var­i­ous pieces of stake­hold­ers in that ecosys­tem. And this event real­ly pro­vides that oppor­tu­ni­ty to do that for the first time.

“And I think, to be suc­cess­ful in AAM, you’re going to need to have those con­sor­tiums of part­ner­ships or stake­hold­ers. No one per­son, for exam­ple a plat­form man­u­fac­tur­er, can advance all ele­ments need­ed to make their plat­form a viable one just yet. For the first time, all of those stake­hold­ers, includ­ing some non tra­di­tion­al ones such as prop­er­ty, land use plan­ning or the local gov­ern­ments and coun­cils and com­mu­ni­ty groups. All of these are real­ly impor­tant stake­hold­ers in the AAM dis­cus­sion.”

Reg­is­tra­tion fees will cost 350 AUD for AAUS mem­bers and gov­ern­ment offi­cials and 390 AUD for indus­try pro­fes­sion­als or non-mem­bers.

Live reg­is­tra­tion includes access to all con­fer­ence ses­sions at Metrop­o­lis Events in Mel­bourne dur­ing Sep­tem­ber 1st-2nd. It also includes on-demand access to record­ed con­fer­ence ses­sions for post-event view­ing.

For more infor­ma­tion or to reg­is­ter for AAUS’ AAM Sum­mit, click here.