Skyportz to work with Secure Parking in Australia and help deliver up to 400 potential landing sites for eVTOL aircraft

Air taxi infra­struc­ture start­up Sky­portz has announced a part­ner­ship with Secure Park­ing, which could deliv­er up to 400 land­ing sites for eVTOL air­craft in Aus­tralia.

With changes in the way peo­ple now work, Sky­portz is explor­ing the future of cities and our trans­port needs. The com­pa­ny says if the shift to home-based work we have seen through the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic becomes the new nor­mal, then it believes this opens the pos­si­bil­i­ties for all sorts of alter­na­tive uses for some of our city assets.

Clem New­ton-Brown, CEO and founder of Sky­portz and who was recent­ly recog­nised in eVTOL Insights’ Pow­er Book 2022, said: “While there will always be a need for car park­ing in our cities it may be that the demand is not going to bounce to pre-pan­dem­ic lev­els. Car parks are ide­al loca­tions for Sky­portz facil­i­ties.

“They are gen­er­al­ly locat­ed in places peo­ple want to go and they are con­struct­ed to a stan­dard which can take the weight of vehi­cles on flat rooftops.

“With­out a Sky­portz land­ing site net­work these air­craft are not going to be able to realise their full poten­tial. Our net­works will be avail­able for all air taxi entrants and we expect that we will see a major infra­struc­ture investor part­ner with us when the time is right.”

Secure Park­ing was estab­lished in 1979 and since that time, has iden­ti­fied an oppor­tu­ni­ty to devel­op a fresh and more rel­e­vant approach to car park­ing that ben­e­fits all types of park­ing cus­tomers. In Decem­ber 2016 Secure was acquired by Park24 – one of the largest park­ing oper­a­tors in the world.

It has more than 600 car parks through­out Aus­tralia and New Zealand, in cities includ­ing Syd­ney, Bris­bane, Mel­bourne, Perth and Ade­laide.

Secure Park­ing CEO, Peter Anson said: “Secure Park­ing is delight­ed to part­ner with an organ­i­sa­tion that shares our vision for push­ing the bound­aries to find inno­v­a­tive solu­tions through next gen­er­a­tion tech­nolo­gies. We look for­ward to work­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly with Sky­portz as we explore what can be achieved togeth­er”

Sky­portz is devel­op­ing a com­pre­hen­sive infra­struc­ture net­work in Aus­tralia to attract and sup­port future urban and region­al air mobil­i­ty ser­vices. It signed an MoU with Electra.aero, which includes a Pur­chase Agree­ment for up to 100 eSTOL air­craft, enabling the com­pa­ny and its oper­at­ing part­ners to direct­ly con­nect city cen­tres or dis­persed logis­tics facil­i­ties and deliv­er car­go to remote regions.

The com­pa­ny is also simul­ta­ne­ous­ly work­ing with Aus­tralian Fed­er­al and State gov­ern­ments to help devel­op the stan­dards, reg­u­la­tions and zones which will enable the Sky­portz ‘mini air­ports’ in new loca­tions in and around cities and region­al cen­tres

New­ton-Brown added: “There is strong polit­i­cal sup­port to devel­op a new era in clean, green elec­tric avi­a­tion in Aus­tralia, how­ev­er we are wait­ing on Fed­er­al stan­dards and new State reg­u­la­tions to be devel­oped before we can pro­ceed to build the net­work.”

“Com­mu­ni­ty sup­port for this new era in avi­a­tion is going to be essen­tial and we expect that ser­vices will start out­side urban areas in the ini­tial phase expect­ed to com­mence with the first elec­tric air­craft becom­ing oper­a­tional in the next few years.”