Volocopter and Kakao Mobility team up to conduct feasibility study on bringing urban air mobility to South Korea

Volo­copter and South Korea’s largest mobil­i­ty plat­form com­pa­ny, Kakao Mobil­i­ty (KM), have inked a mem­o­ran­dum of under­stand­ing to con­duct a fea­si­bil­i­ty study on intro­duc­ing urban air mobil­i­ty in the coun­try.

The study will iden­ti­fy a list of poten­tial com­mer­cial routes, oper­a­tional capa­bil­i­ties, and busi­ness mod­els nec­es­sary for an urban air mobil­i­ty ser­vice oper­a­tor in South Korea.

The find­ings will be released by Feb­ru­ary 2022 and lay the ground­work for pos­si­ble future coop­er­a­tion between both com­pa­nies to launch UAM ser­vices in South Korea, which plans to com­mer­cialise the ser­vice by 2025.

Flo­ri­an Reuter, CEO of Volo­copter, said, “Hav­ing a strong and reli­able net­work of part­ners has always been a fun­da­men­tal fac­tor for our con­tin­ued suc­cess. We believe that the syn­er­gy from the coop­er­a­tion with a lead­ing local part­ner helps us devel­op a ser­vice tai­lored for the domes­tic mar­ket.

“We are very excit­ed about our part­ner­ship with Kakao Mobil­i­ty, South Korea’s indus­try leader in plat­form tech­nol­o­gy. Through this part­ner­ship, we will lever­age Kakao Mobility’s exist­ing net­work of urban ground mobil­i­ty and readapt their strengths for urban air mobil­i­ty.” 

Volo­copter has recent­ly con­duct­ed two pub­lic test flights at Gim­po Inter­na­tion­al Air­port and Incheon Air­port of Seoul, South Korea, the republic’s first ever crewed pub­lic test flights of an eVTOL air­craft. The com­pa­ny is also the first and only eVTOL air­craft com­pa­ny glob­al­ly to have obtained both design and pro­duc­tion organ­i­sa­tion approvals from Euro­pean Union Avi­a­tion Safe­ty Agency. 

Kakao Mobil­i­ty has Kakao T app, which is the largest mobil­i­ty plat­form in South Korea and offers var­i­ous mobil­i­ty-relat­ed ser­vices such as taxis, park­ing, and nav­i­ga­tion through this Mobil­i­ty-as-a-Ser­vice app.

Seungil You, Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer of Kakao Mobil­i­ty, said: “As the largest mobil­i­ty plat­form in South Korea with 30 mil­lion reg­is­tered users, Kakao Mobil­i­ty has deep insights on traf­fic pat­terns and cus­tomer needs in the Kore­an mobil­i­ty mar­ket.

“Start­ing from the coop­er­a­tion with Volo­copter in the Kore­an mar­ket, we are look­ing for­ward to expand­ing our part­ner­ship across the UAM indus­try world­wide as well as our busi­ness as an air­space mobil­i­ty plat­form in the future.”