Eve Air Mobility and Ascent strengthen partnership as it continues to develop UAM ecosystem across Asia-Pacific region

Eve Urban Air Mobil­i­ty and Ascent Flights Glob­al have announced a deep­en­ing of their part­ner­ship which is aimed at devel­op­ing a robust Urban Air Mobil­i­ty ecosys­tem in the Asia-Pacif­ic region.

The ini­tial part­ner­ship was announced back in June 2021 and new details revealed will see Eve pro­vide Ascent with up to 100,000 hours of flight time per year on its eVTOL air­craft, for use in Aus­tralia, Japan, Philip­pines, Sin­ga­pore and Thai­land.

Eve plans to deploy up to 100 air­craft to be mar­ket­ed by Ascent on its cur­rent and future routes. Ascent acts as an inde­pen­dent on-demand plat­form and will pay for flight time utilised on Eve’s air­craft while oper­at­ing in com­bi­na­tion with part­ners in the Asia-Pacif­ic region and oth­er mar­kets.

This new agree­ment is part of Eve´s com­pre­hen­sive UAM strat­e­gy to posi­tion the com­pa­ny as a leader in the indus­try. The deploy­ment of Eve air­craft across the Ascent net­work is sub­ject to the par­ties enter­ing into defin­i­tive final agree­ments.

Andre Stein, Pres­i­dent & CEO of Eve, said: “Ascent is one of the great­est play­ers of Urban Air Mobil­i­ty in the Asia Pacif­ic and its strong pres­ence in the region makes it an ide­al part­ner for Eve’s oper­a­tions. The region holds a mas­sive demand for trans­porta­tion dis­rup­tion that can be filled with our low-emis­sion air­craft. This is the right recipe for sus­tain­able growth.”

The first flight of Eve’s the engi­neer­ing sim­u­la­tor hap­pened in July 2020, while a proof of con­cept fol­lowed in Octo­ber of the same year. In par­al­lel, Eve’s Urban Air Traf­fic Man­age­ment (UATM) project reached a new mile­stone in its col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Unit­ed Kingdom’s Civ­il Avi­a­tion Author­i­ty to devel­op a scal­able envi­ron­ment need­ed to host urban air mobil­i­ty flights.

Backed by Embraer’s more than 50-year his­to­ry of air­craft man­u­fac­tur­ing and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion exper­tise, Eve has unveils a unique val­ue propo­si­tion which con­sists of a com­pre­hen­sive suite of UAM prod­ucts and ser­vices.

Ascent is Asia’s first tech­nol­o­gy-pow­ered urban air mobil­i­ty ser­vice, was designed to make cities more con­nect­ed by mov­ing peo­ple seam­less­ly and afford­ably by air—using heli­copters today and eVTOLs in the future. 

Lionel Sinai-Sinel­nikoff, Founder & CEO of Ascent, added: “Eve’s inno­v­a­tive tech­nol­o­gy, com­bined with its man­u­fac­tur­ing exper­tise and glob­al ser­vic­ing foot­print through Embraer, com­fort us in bring­ing a solu­tion fit­ting the region’s com­plex require­ments.

With Ascent oper­at­ing sys­tem onboard­ing Eve’s fleet and con­nect­ed to Eve’s UATM, air oper­a­tor part­ners will be empow­ered to ele­vate UAM oper­a­tions at scale.”

Ear­li­er this year, Eve announced Halo Avi­a­tion as its launch cus­tomer with an order for 200 eVTOL air­craft. This deal will focus on urban air mobil­i­ty oper­a­tions in both the UK and USA, and it signed a sep­a­rate part­ner­ship with Helisul Avi­a­tion last week to focus on imple­ment­ing ser­vices in Brazil. This will include an ini­tial order of 50 eVTOL air­craft.

With Eve look­ing to utilise its ser­vices in Aus­tralia, the news has been wel­comed by Sky­portz CEO Clem New­ton-Brown. The com­pa­ny has been work­ing with the prop­er­ty indus­try, reg­u­la­tors and Fed­er­al and State gov­ern­ments on prepar­ing the land­ing infra­struc­ture for air taxis since 2018.

New­ton-Brown chairs the Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty work­ing group of the Aus­tralian Asso­ci­a­tion for Unmanned Sys­tems, which is hold­ing its first air taxi sum­mit in Mel­bourne next week. He also serves on the Fed­er­al New and Emerg­ing Avi­a­tion Tech­nolo­gies advi­so­ry group.

“This announce­ment is very excit­ing — Embraer is one of the fron­trun­ners in devel­op­ing an elec­tric air taxi and we wel­come this announce­ment and look for­ward to work­ing with them to devel­op routes and des­ti­na­tions”, he said.

“We are work­ing with a num­ber of air taxi design­ers who will be util­is­ing our sites. With­out the land­ing sites this new form of trans­port would be very lim­it­ed. We have been work­ing with prop­er­ty, freight and logis­tics part­ners for some years and have a sta­ble of sites ready to take to the next step”

“There is still a lot of work to do around reg­u­la­tions and stan­dards and a lot of work to do in get­ting the com­mu­ni­ty sup­port for this new form of clean, green and qui­et trans­port”

“Our view is that the ear­ly use cas­es will be tourism routes out­side of cities, but once the tech­nol­o­gy has been proven and accept­ed then we will start to see approval for land­ing sites in more urban loca­tions”