FeaturedNews

EXCLUSIVE: Skyports and Volocopter sit down to talk about Europe’s first Advanced Air Mobility testbed

All eyes were on Cormeilles-en-Vex­in air­field in France today (Thurs­day), as it was offi­cial­ly launched as Europe’s first test­bed for Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty. 

Locat­ed in Pon­toise to the north-west of Paris, the site has been home to Volo­copter as it con­tin­ues test­ing its full-scale 2X eVTOL pro­to­type. 

Along­side its part­ners Sky­ports, Choose Paris Region, île de France, Group ADP and Groupe RATP, the Euro­pean ver­ti­port test­bed will serve as a real-world test­ing facil­i­ty to be ful­ly inte­grat­ed into an oper­a­tional aero­nau­ti­cal set­ting. 

Live eVTOL test flights inte­grat­ed with manned con­ven­tion­al traf­fic, weath­er per­mit­ting, will com­plete the show­case to demon­strate the readi­ness of future elec­tric urban air trav­el. This event was also an oppor­tu­ni­ty to reflect on this year’s test­ing cam­paigns and share upcom­ing mile­stones.

eVTOL Insights spoke exclu­sive­ly to Dun­can Walk­er, CEO at Sky­ports, and Chris­t­ian Bauer, Chief Com­mer­cial Offi­cer at Volo­copter, ear­li­er this week ahead of the launch. The pair talked about the sig­nif­i­cance of this test­bed for the indus­try, the impor­tance of the com­pa­nies with­in the part­ner­ship and what the main objec­tives will be in the years to come.

eVTOL Insights: Could you start off by giv­ing us a bit of back­ground to this project ahead of this week’s launch?

Chris­t­ian Bauer: “For me, it’s real­ly a puz­zle that is now form­ing piece by piece. ADP and RATP start­ed in about 2019 when they were think­ing about Urban Air Mobil­i­ty. We met the ADP team in 2020 to work togeth­er on bring­ing urban air mobil­i­ty to the Paris region and to also be part of the Paris Olympic Games in 2024. 

The may­or of Pon­toise was there and we showed our VoloC­i­ty mock­up for the first time in 2021. We con­duct­ed the first test flights that year and also per­formed tests for pub­lic accep­tance and noise. And now the oth­er miss­ing piece of the puz­zle was Sky­ports, which bought its ver­ti­port So, piece by piece, we are try­ing to com­plete the puz­zle and have the full oper­a­tions — from the vehi­cle, to the air­craft book­ing, to the ver­ti­port. 

“At Volo­copter, we’re very open to hav­ing an agnos­tic mod­el with oth­er par­ties join­ing us. So it’s not just us, but also a test­bed for oth­ers to test small­er or heav­ier drones. That’s why this test­bed is so impor­tant.”

Dun­can Walk­er: “We’ve been work­ing close­ly with Volo­copter all the way back in 2019, when we built our first ver­ti­port out in Sin­ga­pore and Volo­copter flew around Mari­na Bay, which was actu­al­ly quite sem­i­nal look­ing back on it for the Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty indus­try. It was the first time any­body had done it any­where; it had built a ver­ti­port and flown in a dense urban envi­ron­ment. 

“That set us large­ly on this jour­ney and Groupe ADP invest­ed into Sky­ports in 2019 to become one of our share­hold­ers. The com­pa­ny has years of avi­a­tion expe­ri­ence and land thou­sands of air­craft a day, but it’s enter­ing a new indus­try with Sky­ports and Volo­copter and try­ing to under­stand the impact of what these types of air­craft have on exist­ing avi­a­tion infra­struc­ture.

“We’re talk­ing to ADP about var­i­ous things, includ­ing Sin­ga­pore and what that looks like for Europe. One of the par­tic­u­lar chal­lenges we’re excit­ed about for this project is doing an air­side out of a live air­field; clear­ly these vehi­cles have got to inte­grate with manned avi­a­tion, future unmanned avi­a­tion and doing this in a live air­port envi­ron­ment in Europe is super impor­tant for cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and our busi­ness­es.

“As Chris­t­ian said, this is about bring­ing in all sorts of dif­fer­ent tech­nol­o­gy and real­ly start­ing to under­stand from a customer’s per­spec­tive, tech inte­gra­tion per­spec­tive, air­space man­agers and reg­u­la­tors: how do we bring all those bits togeth­er?”

eVTOL Insights: How sig­nif­i­cant will this test­bed be for the indus­try and for Europe as a poten­tial launch mar­ket?

DW: ‘There is no sub­sti­tute for doing real-life oper­a­tions. It real­ly allows peo­ple to under­stand, feel and see it. That’s been an incre­men­tal jour­ney and it’s amaz­ing to see people’s feed­back — whether they’re sort of tech­ni­cal, reg­u­la­tors or the gen­er­al pub­lic. You ask some­one what they think about it [Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty] before­hand and they are maybe con­ser­v­a­tive and say they’re not too sure about it, I don’t under­stand or don’t know about it. 

“If you let them see it, feel it and expe­ri­ence it, then every­body changes and says this is fan­tas­tic, excit­ing and qui­et. They can see how this indus­try can impact their life in a pos­i­tive way. The sig­nif­i­cance of this is hav­ing that base in Europe where we can take reg­u­la­tors, investors, school­child­ren and the gen­er­al pub­lic. All of these impor­tant stake­hold­er groups. 

“We can share as many nice Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tions as we want, but until you’ve seen it hap­pen, you real­ly can’t con­vince any­one.”

CB: “We’re see­ing a Euro­pean mind­set in that dif­fer­ent coun­tries and dif­fer­ent regions are work­ing togeth­er and cre­at­ing stan­dards togeth­er with EASA on ver­ti­ports, air­space and the eVTOL air­craft. I think it’s also very impor­tant that it’s not just about pub­lic per­cep­tion, but also the polit­i­cal sphere and cre­at­ing an ecosys­tem of new com­pa­nies such as sup­pli­ers.

“What makes this more excit­ing is that Pon­toise will be a per­ma­nent site where peo­ple can go and test and lat­er on, you will have the oper­a­tions in down­town Paris.

“No-one can do this alone; this is an ecosys­tem effort. This is only going to work if we’re all work­ing hand-in-hand and this is what the test­bed enables.”

eVTOL Insights: Is there any update on the Volocopter’s work to be fly­ing at the Paris Olympics in 2024, Chris­t­ian? 

CB: “I can only tell you that our whole com­pa­ny is work­ing towards that goal. When you see and watch the indus­try very close­ly, every­body talks about the issues. We are very con­fi­dent to go down this route — we have a fixed time­line agree­ment with our part­ners. 

“It’s ambi­tious but we can make it togeth­er if we are laser focused on that. The next steps for us in 2023 is test­ing against the require­ments set by EASA and get­ting the VoloC­i­ty from the test pro­gramme to the high­est safe­ty lev­el. We have to real­ly focus on the time and exe­cu­tion.”

eVTOL Insights: Can you tell us more about the impor­tant work oth­er part­ners in this project are doing, such as île de France, Choose Paris Region, Groupe ADP and Groupe RATP?

DW: “What’s nice about work­ing with Groupe ADP is that it has huge polit­i­cal cap­i­tal and in all of the air­ports around Paris. It is also a half state-owned enti­ty and they cor­ral quite a lot of the senior polit­i­cal fig­ures around this project. RATP is the biggest trans­porta­tion provider in Paris Cen­tral and a huge mul­ti­modal enti­ty; a core part of everybody’s val­ue propo­si­tion is how to con­nect the first and last piece of the jour­ney and the Volo­Port will be an impor­tant part of that.

“If you’ve got to get off a ver­ti­port and walk half a mile to the tram stop, it’s not a viable ser­vice. 

We’re going to have gate bio­met­rics there and that’s real­ly inter­est­ing from our per­spec­tive and also Volo­copter because it’s a point of inte­gra­tion. How do you work out the cus­tomer book­ing through Volocopter’s app through to the ver­ti­port and doing the secu­ri­ty pro­cess­ing to get them out the oth­er side so they can con­tin­ue their jour­ney?”

CB: “Choose Paris Region is an agency from the gov­ern­ment which will sup­port the cre­ation of new busi­ness, jobs and so on. They were very help­ful when it came to con­tribut­ing to the sand­box; whether we need­ed offi­cers on the ground or sup­port on a gov­ern­ment lev­el to make the right con­nec­tions. ADP owns all aero drones around the Paris region, so if we want­ed to con­nect cer­tain sites, it is the one con­trol­ling that. The com­pa­ny also has a good rela­tion­ship with the air traf­fic con­troller. You know where you start and land, but what is the flight route, what will it look like and how is it deemed safe.

“It seems you can draw a sim­ple line, but it’s not like that. That’s why we’re very hap­py to have them on board. For LATP, it’s more for the vision­ary when the ser­vice is there. It is a pub­lic trans­port provider and knows how to inte­grate peo­ple into this ser­vice or bring them some­where else. The com­pa­ny has a big plat­form com­pe­ten­cy in ener­gy man­age­ment, with the huge bus port­fo­lios and that is an inter­est­ing part which will kick in when this test­bed is live. Mean­while, we will also have the first sup­pli­ers com­ing into this con­sor­tium and they might be inter­est­ed in main­te­nance oper­a­tions and so on. So you see, the indus­try is form­ing step-by-step here at Pon­toise.”

eVTOL Insights: What kind of lessons are you hop­ing to learn from this test­bed, or do you have any set objec­tives that you’d like to achieve over the next cou­ple of years? It’d be great to get an idea of what the roadmap looks like.

DW: “The real­ly impor­tant thing about this process is launch­ing and every­one gets engaged, Volo­copter starts fly­ing; all excit­ing stuff. But for us, this is not about the next three or four days, but about the next two years up to per­ma­nent oper­a­tions.

“This test­bed gives us a plat­form to get through loads of oper­a­tional test­ing and inter­faces. We can tri­al all sorts of dif­fer­ent tech­nolo­gies here and things that you don’t want to be doing in pub­lic on day one, like prac­tic­ing an abort­ed land­ing, abort­ed take-off, what hap­pens if you’ve got an air­craft that has bro­ken down on the FATO [Final Approach Take-Off] area and how do you recon­fig­ure the traf­fic around it. 

“So from an oper­a­tional and safe­ty crit­i­cal point, it gives us an envi­ron­ment that is semi-live. It’s an active air­field, but it is very well man­aged. We’ve got space, time and the abil­i­ty to work out how to dri­ve oper­a­tional effi­cien­cy, process pas­sen­gers through the ver­ti­port and get them onto the vehi­cle quick­ly. 

“How do we make sure pas­sen­gers don’t trip over the charge cables and bat­tery swap­ping units — all of these kinds of things. So for us it’s about that jour­ney right up to day one oper­a­tions. There’ll be a long sequence of test­ing and inte­gra­tion which is both human fac­tors, vehi­cle to infra­struc­ture inte­gra­tion; what hap­pens if you get a pow­er cut at the ver­ti­port and you’ve got peo­ple land­ing? 

“Do you stop the land­ing sequence or do you take the air­craft on a dif­fer­ent route? If there’s a soft­ware glitch and we don’t know if we have gate avail­abil­i­ty? All of these things hap­pen in avi­a­tion and have hap­pened for years and in a safe­ty crit­i­cal envi­ron­ment, you’ve got to get through all of those pro­ce­dures to work it out.

“How do you get a VoloC­i­ty which is rotored, fol­lowed by a Pip­istrel elec­tric air­craft which is fol­low­ing a very dif­fer­ent flight tra­jec­to­ry and trav­el­ling at a dif­fer­ent speed? It’s super excit­ing and a real­ly inter­est­ing pro­gramme of test­ing that is acces­si­ble by every­body.

CB: “One impor­tant thing we always under­es­ti­mate is peo­ple. We have built up a real­ly great rela­tion­ship with our col­lab­o­ra­tion part­ners and Sky­ports, but also with the peo­ple from ADP that con­trol the air traf­fic con­trol tow­ers and who will be fun­da­men­tal for oper­a­tions. You have that work­ing mode already, peo­ple know each oth­er and you can quick­ly achieve the things that need to be done in the next two years.

“In the begin­ning it was all about cre­at­ing aware­ness. Com­pa­nies are now com­ing to us and ask­ing if they can join the test­bed which were maybe not so sure in the first instance. But because of the pos­i­tive feed­back from the media and our suc­cess­ful noise test cam­paign, it was also a moment of truth. We want to learn as much as we can.”

eVTOL Insights: What makes Pon­toise a good loca­tion for this test­bed? 

CB: “It’s always good in gen­er­al when you can do tests at an air­port and very eas­i­ly book slots to fly and test. We have flown at busy air­ports like Helsin­ki, where you can have a just five-minute slot to test. This is very impor­tant, and so is the loca­tion. You can dri­ve to Pon­toise and park, which is not always so easy, and it’s secured and safe.

“On the small­er air­ports, there isn’t as much ring fenc­ing so you can have prob­lems with peo­ple walk­ing close to the test site. You need offi­cials stand­ing and watch­ing, which costs more. When you have an up and run­ning envi­ron­ment, and sup­port from the gov­ern­ment and city who say ‘please use it’, then this is great.  

“It’s also valu­able to have the infra­struc­ture there when you start to have oper­a­tions going into towns, because you can store lots of things there that you would not do on the day-to-day oper­a­tions side.”

DW: “We don’t real­ly want lots of test­beds, but more loads of active ver­ti­ports which will be a dri­ver of the indus­try. As Chris­t­ian said, it’s quite good to con­sol­i­date test­ing around these envi­ron­ments because you can bring all the tech­nol­o­gy and get every­body there to do sim­i­lar things at the same time.

“We have a test facil­i­ty in the US, we now have one in Europe which is great as well as our heli­port in Lon­don. We don’t want to repli­cate these things because it dilutes the learn­ing; what you real­ly want is all of the peo­ple in the same place at the same time, hav­ing that dense hub of skillset. It’s an easy lift to test what­ev­er you want on that day, with­out hav­ing to drag every­body from hun­dreds of miles away. 

“I don’t see loads more test­beds in Europe, but what’s excit­ing about Pon­toise is that it is the Euro­pean hub now for this inte­grat­ed test­ing. Hope­ful­ly that could be trans­lat­ed across lots of envi­ron­ments.”

eVTOL Insights: I’d love to get your thoughts on the impor­tance gov­ern­ment offi­cials and polit­i­cal fig­ures have on imple­ment­ing Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty in regions, espe­cial­ly as the French min­is­ter for Trans­porta­tion, Clement Bre­une, is expect­ed to be in atten­dance this week.

DW: ‘It’s super impor­tant to get that high lev­el polit­i­cal lead­er­ship. When we are look­ing at large mar­kets any­where in the world, one of the absolute key cri­te­ria is exact­ly this. If you don’t have that spon­sor on your side, it becomes an incred­i­bly heavy lift to make any­thing hap­pen.

“If you look at Sin­ga­pore, we were lucky in that we got very senior buy­ing from lots of dif­fer­ent aspects of gov­ern­ment, which is well man­aged. That’s fan­tas­tic because it can align a lot of the var­i­ous parts of the indus­try to come togeth­er. That’s why that polit­i­cal lead­er­ship is so impor­tant. If you don’t have that, you real­ly are hav­ing to work very hard to get any trac­tion.

“Senior min­is­ters and politi­cians care about what the impact of this tech­nol­o­gy will have on their region, so it’s a great habit for them to see it in their own back­yard and get a bit of momen­tum behind it.”

CB: “This has always been our theme. Before we go into any coun­try or region, we always speak with the min­is­ter of trans­port or avi­a­tion. With­out that, you don’t have the famil­iari­sa­tion of the enti­ties and you know it’s not ready. The pre­vi­ous min­is­ter of trans­port sat in our mock­up of the VoloC­i­ty, so we hope this new min­is­ter will have a good feel­ing about this new indus­try and believe that it can bring val­ue to the coun­try.”

eVTOL Insights: Any final thoughts you like to add?

DW: “I think this is the most tech-enabled piece of ground infra­struc­ture we’ve ever built; in the heli­copter and eVTOL world, it’s as tech-enabled as it comes. What’s real­ly excit­ing is prob­a­bly some­thing you can’t see, as we’re inte­grat­ing VoloIQ and the ground stuff which is great.

“You can see the infra­struc­ture and the air­craft fly­ing around, but for this indus­try to be scal­able and cost effec­tive, there’s got to be a lot that is auto­mat­ed. We’ll be doing that ini­tial test­ing and inte­gra­tion, which sets the path­way for a whole heap of stuff like auton­o­my and scaled oper­a­tions, on-demand oper­a­tions. These kinds of things are going to be inte­gral and super impor­tant for the effec­tive­ness of this indus­try.”

CB: “We’re now get­ting close to the com­plete step-by-step jour­ney of the cus­tomer. Every­body could say you need a heli­pad, build­ing and air­craft, now go. But when you go to cities, every­body asks ‘how do I do it and what do I have to do?’

“Like Dun­can said, these things are hid­den and we don’t know yet, but the guide­lines have to be writ­ten after the first test. I’m real­ly look­ing for­ward to sit­ting in a ver­ti­port build­ing, and see­ing if we can build some­thing bet­ter for the future.”

Avatar photo

Jason Pritchard

Jason Pritchard is the Editor of eVTOL Insights. He holds a BA from Leicester's De Montfort University and has worked in Journalism and Public Relations for more than a decade. Outside of work, Jason enjoys playing and watching football and golf. He also has a keen interest in Ancient Egypt.

eVTOL Insights is part of the Industry Insights Group. Registered in the UK. Company No: 14395769