INTERVIEW: Duncan Walker of Skyports Infrastructure gives exciting update on company’s role ahead of air taxi launch in Dubai

In Feb­ru­ary, Sky­ports and Joby Avi­a­tion con­firmed it would be launch­ing air taxi oper­a­tions in Dubai by 2026. The news was met with great excite­ment from both the AAM indus­try and those out­side of the space.

eVTOL Insights’ Exec­u­tive Edi­tor Jason Pritchard met up with Sky­ports CEO Dun­can Walk­er at this year’s Sin­ga­pore Air­show, to get more reac­tion and infor­ma­tion.

Q: Thanks for speak­ing to me, Dun­can. How big of an announce­ment is this lat­est news from Dubai for Sky­ports and the indus­try as a whole?

DW: For us [Sky­ports] it’s amaz­ing. This is some­thing we’ve been work­ing on for two years with the Road Trans­port Author­i­ty (RTA) and Joby. I’m excit­ed because it is going to be the first prop­er com­mer­cial net­work any­where in the world.

Dubai is good at iden­ti­fy­ing chal­lenges and solv­ing prob­lems, which we’re not always bril­liant at in oth­er places around the world.

The co-ordi­na­tion and buy-in from senior gov­ern­ment lev­els is amaz­ing, and real­ly val­i­dates the announce­ment. The sign­ing cer­e­mo­ny brought togeth­er key rep­re­sen­ta­tives that are enabling Dubai’s air taxi tran­si­tion; His Excel­len­cy (HE) Mat­tar Al Tay­er, Chair­man of the RTA, HE Mohammed Abdul­la Lengawi, Direc­tor Gen­er­al of the DCAA, Abdul­la Bin Touq Al Mar­ri, Min­is­ter of Econ­o­my and Chair­man of the GCAA, our­selves and Joby Avi­a­tion. The sign­ing was attend­ed by His High­ness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Mak­toum which real­ly demon­strates the sig­nif­i­cance of the project.

Our part­ners in Dubai have been incred­i­bly accom­mo­dat­ing and proac­tive to make it hap­pen. They want to be first, they’re very clear about that. And they can unlock some of those chal­lenges to make it pos­si­ble. So we’re super excit­ed about it.

Q: And what does that say about the region and the fact it is putting the pieces togeth­er for com­pa­nies like Sky­ports and Joby to come to Dubai and set up oper­a­tions. Could it be an area where oth­ers could learn from?

DW: Absolute­ly. And it’s a vir­tu­ous cir­cle they’ve cre­at­ed. They are super proac­tive, for­ward look­ing and bold in their deci­sion mak­ing. They unlock doors to make them­selves first and it requires a lot of courage and vision. 

It also sets a tem­plate for oth­er places around the world. Not only will this be the first air taxi net­work, but it will cre­ate and launch the wider indus­try and dri­ve the econ­o­my. 

We’re cre­at­ing an Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty hub with an enabling ecosys­tem. So there’s going to be pilot train­ing, main­te­nance and repair, oper­a­tions of the ver­ti­ports, the mar­ket devel­op­ment peo­ple. This won’t only be good for Dubai’s domes­tic econ­o­my, but it becomes a har­bour of knowl­edge that can be export­ed else­where around the world. It’s quite a refresh­ing place to work and devel­op at pace.

There are no cor­ners cut, safe­ty is absolute­ly paramount.The Dubai Civ­il Avi­a­tion Author­i­ty (DCAA) and Gen­er­al Civ­il Avi­a­tion Author­i­ty (GCAA), work well with the RTA, as well as with us and Joby on the ground and air­craft oper­at­ing reg­u­la­tions. This cohe­sion means we can get to do every­thing more effi­cient­ly, from secur­ing per­mits to allo­cat­ing sites. 

Infra­struc­ture has a long lead time and to achieve what we’re try­ing to achieve with this indus­try, we need to unlock it now; not with round­ta­bles and dis­cus­sions but with actions.  

It’s hard to intro­duce new solu­tions and inno­va­tions with­out a proof point. My hope is that Dubai becomes that proof point for oth­er coun­tries.

It’s ear­ly days, but what are the next steps lead­ing up to 2026?

DW: So the sites are already allo­cat­ed and secured, which is great. Elec­tri­fi­ca­tion work, which is one of the longer lead times, is ongo­ing. DEWA, which is the elec­tri­fi­ca­tion author­i­ty in Dubai, has been super sup­port­ive. 

The ground sur­veys on the first cou­ple of sites and air­space have been com­plet­ed. Fly­ing air taxis is, in its own right, an incred­i­ble feat and we’re plan­ning to enable it beside next to DXB, one of the busiest air­ports in the world. It requires a lot of coor­di­na­tion, but we’ve found a air­space path that works.

We will be con­struct­ing sites by June this year, ready for oper­a­tions by 2026 – hope­ful­ly soon­er. Test­ing will go into Q3 and Q4 this year.

JoeBen [Bevirt, Founder and CEO of Joby Avi­a­tion] was in Dubai dur­ing the announce­ment and we were talk­ing about how fast we should push the pace. There’s always a fine bal­ance between vehi­cle cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and infra­struc­ture devel­op­ment to ensure they hap­pen in tan­dem, so we’re align­ing close­ly.  

We’re near­ly at the fin­ish line and the start of com­mer­cial oper­a­tions, but can you talk about Sky­ports’ jour­ney? It’s been an incred­i­ble cou­ple of years.

DW: It’s been way longer and way hard­er than we thought it would be! We start­ed the busi­ness six and a half years ago and I think we were a lit­tle bit naive about the pace at which vehi­cles would go through cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. If you recall back then, every­one was say­ing 2021 or 2022 for cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and sur­prise, sur­prise, it took longer.

Sky­ports Drone Ser­vices has been a good accel­er­a­tor for us, and brings invalu­able learn­ings from real life flight oper­a­tions. 

In the infra­struc­ture busi­ness, we’ve focused on refin­ing our ver­ti­port prod­uct – and demon­strat­ing to indus­try what this will look like and why it is essen­tial. We built our first ver­ti­port pro­to­type here in Sin­ga­pore in 2019. 

This was fol­lowed in 2022 by our Paris and Mari­na, Cal­i­for­nia facil­i­ties. In addi­tion, we also acquired the Sky­ports Lon­don Heli­port which has been an invalu­able tool for test­ing our ver­ti­port tech­nolo­gies. So we’ve been going through this test­ing iter­a­tion stage for what feels like a long time and now I feel we’re final­ly at the end point. 

We’ve still got a huge jour­ney ahead and Dubai is super excit­ing as the first, but our aspi­ra­tion isn’t just Dubai; we’ve got a mar­ket which is incred­i­bly scal­able and turn­ing it from the the­o­ret­i­cal to the actu­al is this year and next year’s job. It’s much more excit­ing than paper­work! 

Any ideas as to where Sky­ports might set up oper­a­tions next? 

DW: Ulti­mate­ly, we’ll go any­where where oper­a­tors want to fly and where reg­u­la­tors and gov­ern­ments will let us do it. That’s changed and con­tin­ues to change a lit­tle bit. 

We love the Asia Pacif­ic region and the mar­ket is amaz­ing, we just haven’t seen the pace of move­ment we’ve seen else­where. From my per­spec­tive, it’s Dubai and the wider Mid­dle East. 

As you know, we’re active in Sau­di Ara­bia and oth­er Emi­rates that are super excit­ed and can unlock doors in a sim­i­lar fash­ion to Dubai. In fact, when you start con­nect­ing some of those Emi­rates up there’s a big use case there. So we love that. 

London’s my pas­sion because it’s home, but it’s tak­ing a lit­tle bit longer. 

For the US mar­ket, I’ve actu­al­ly been sur­prised it hasn’t had more atten­tion. There was a lot of chat around two years ago with Mia­mi, New York and Los Ange­les. We have had a team over there for many years and I am sur­prised the OEMs and oper­a­tors haven’t been more proac­tive about which mar­kets they want to go to. I think that’s part­ly a reg­u­la­to­ry thing.

I think south Flori­da is the nat­ur­al choice out of the three. LA is very, very hard to solve as there is a mas­sive stake­hold­er group. New York is inter­est­ing but it has infra­struc­ture that exists so ‘day one’ oper­a­tions might be cov­ered already.  I don’t think that solves the prob­lem in the medi­um term, because the pur­pose of elec­tri­fi­ca­tion isn’t just to replace heli­copters; it’s there to enhance con­nec­tiv­i­ty through a much wider net­work, but as a start­ing point it works. It will build out over time. 

For south Flori­da, you look at the weath­er, space between the cities, the reg­u­la­to­ry envi­ron­ment, topog­ra­phy – it makes sense for AAM. 

So where will we be? My bet is the Mid­dle East, one of the ear­ly movers in the US mar­ket and then Asia and Europe.

In Asia, it’s still a bit of a race between Japan and Korea, then maybe Sin­ga­pore. But for Sin­ga­pore, you’ve got to unlock the cross bor­der because that’s the chal­lenge here rather than domes­tic trav­el. I don’t know who wins that race. 

A lot of talk is about the vehi­cles, but can you paint a pic­ture of ver­ti­ports and the infra­struc­ture per­spec­tive?

DW: Ver­ti­ports aren’t that com­pli­cat­ed them­selves. The eas­i­est piece about the ver­ti­port is the ter­mi­nal itself. The real­ly com­pli­cat­ed things about them are air­field lay­out and design because you’re always oper­at­ing in space con­strained, pop­u­lous areas.  

But, if they weren’t space con­strained, busy places, they prob­a­bly wouldn’t be places that pas­sen­gers want­ed to trav­el to – so the chal­lenge also rep­re­sents an oppor­tu­ni­ty. 

The oth­er chal­lenge is air­space and try­ing to inte­grate the exist­ing air traf­fic with­out rewrit­ing the entire rule­book which would be many, many years of work. There are two com­pli­cat­ed things we try to solve. 

The sched­ul­ing and resource man­age­ment and sit­u­a­tion­al aware­ness are the two bits we’re real­ly focus­ing on and the team imple­ment­ed that at our Lon­don heli­port and our test­ing facil­i­ty in Paris, so I think that’s going to be an excit­ing piece of the jig­saw too.

Any final thoughts?

DW: What’s going to be inter­est­ing for me this year is that we saw a load of mon­ey fly­ing into the OEM world, a lot of SPACs. They need a lot of mon­ey to cer­ti­fy vehi­cles, but they raise a lot of mon­ey too. What we haven’t seen yet is lots of mon­ey flow­ing into the enabling ecosys­tem.  

I think we will see that this year – and we need to see it. It’s cer­tain­ly going to be inter­est­ing to see how it plays out.

We’ve already seen some extent of con­sol­i­da­tion. Loads of mar­kets say­ing ‘we want to do it’, but the real­i­ty is that only a few mar­kets can. So I think we’ll see more and more focus on few­er and few­er mar­kets, not as the end game but as a start­ing point. 

You can’t real­ly launch four mar­kets at the same time, no mat­ter how much you might want to. When the indus­try is more mature you might be able to. But you’ve got to do it some­where first and then build from that.