SINGAPORE REVISITED: Lilium’s Sebastien Borel adds more detail to its APAC announcements, RAM potential and flight test campaign

The Asia-Pacif­ic region holds a lot of promise for Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty, from the short­er shut­tle ser­vices in cities to the longer routes which con­nect the thou­sands of islands dot­ted around.

Lil­i­um is just one of many com­pa­nies look­ing to launch oper­a­tions here in the near future, so it was a great oppor­tu­ni­ty for eVTOL Insights’ Exec­u­tive Edi­tor Jason Pritchard to sit down with Lil­i­um’s Chief Com­mer­cial Offi­cer, Sebastien Borel, at last mon­th’s Sin­ga­pore Air­show.

Thanks for talk­ing to me, Sebastien. We’re at the Sin­ga­pore Air­show and hot off the heels of two sig­nif­i­cant announce­ments for Lil­i­um, espe­cial­ly in the Asia-Pacif­ic region. Can you tell me more about these, please?

SB: Absolute­ly. What we’re doing in the Philip­pines start­ed with the deci­sion we made last year to open an office in Shen­zhen and the Greater Bay area of Chi­na, which is going to be our APAC head­quar­ters. Asia is a key mar­ket for Lil­i­um with Chi­na alone expect­ed to account for   25 to 30 per cent of the glob­al eVTOL mar­ket. 

 The next log­i­cal step was South­east Asia. If you look at what makes time sav­ings eas­i­er for us in region­al air mobil­i­ty, it’s ter­rain, water and con­ges­tion. You find all of these in South­east Asia.

It’s impor­tant for us to engage with the entire com­mu­ni­ty in the region and the Philip­pines is an ide­al place; the nature of the geog­ra­phy, GDP growth and major invest­ments made in the resort and lux­u­ry hol­i­day des­ti­na­tions. All of this makes it a per­fect fit for Lilium’s deci­sion to grad­u­al­ly go from intro­duc­ing its air­craft to the gen­er­al and busi­ness avi­a­tion world into the com­mer­cial mass mar­ket.

PhilJets owns, oper­ates and man­ages a fleet of both heli­copters and jets and   what we want to do is even­tu­al­ly replace those heli­copters with eVTOL air­craft. 

It’s a very easy first step, but that first step is going to require col­lab­o­ra­tion with the author­i­ties, as well as infra­struc­ture part­ners on the ground. It’s a per­fect set up to start some­thing and even­tu­al­ly make it much big­ger with sched­uled oper­a­tions in the future. It’s real­ly impor­tant to start small and grow from there.”

Can you share more details about the Star Charge announce­ment, espe­cial­ly as this involves air­craft charg­ing and the elec­tri­fi­ca­tion of the Lil­i­um Jet?

SB: It’s quite sim­ple if you think about it. First, we are engaged with the oth­er eVTOL OEMs and want to make sure the stan­dards are uni­ver­sal so that the charg­ers can be used by oth­er eVTOL air­craft.

But we need charg­ers. If you are send­ing your air­craft to cus­tomers, they will be ask­ing for a solu­tion to charge. We looked at a lot of dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies, because what was real­ly impor­tant is the nature of the charg­ing. In cer­tain places you have the FATO (Final Approach and Take-Off) at the same site as car park­ing. So, your charg­ing sta­tion has to be a bit fur­ther from an obsta­cle point of view before you land. The cable has to be longer, which is unique com­pared to the EV sec­tor.

The issue when you have a long cable is that it heats up and so they [Star Charge] have a liq­uid cooled cable which makes the charg­ing real­ly effi­cient. Not every ver­ti­port will need the max­i­mum charg­ing pow­er and there­fore require a liq­uid cooled cable, but those who do will require a long liq­uid cooled cable and will be able to use it. Alto­geth­er, it’s a per­fect match.

Anoth­er point is pro­duc­tion capa­bil­i­ty. They can pro­duce hun­dreds if not thou­sands of charg­ers so there is no bot­tle­neck.

The indus­try-first announce­ment made by Lil­i­um for its POWER-ON organ­i­sa­tion sounds very inter­est­ing. Can you please share more details? 

SB: When you are deploy­ing a new air­craft, we are look­ing at not only the air­craft of course, but cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and how we will be oper­at­ing it. A lot of peo­ple are think­ing about pilots and flight train­ing, which is part of our offer­ing. We need to put a full-blown pack­age togeth­er to make sure peo­ple have the parts avail­able includ­ing the pro­vi­sion of new bat­ter­ies and man­ag­ing the end-of-life bat­ter­ies through recy­cling. So we need to offer some­thing quite com­pre­hen­sive for oper­a­tors of our air­craft tomor­row, it will have every­thing they need to ensure a safe and reli­able oper­a­tion. This inspired our launch of the industry’s first Cus­tomer Ser­vice organ­i­sa­tion, POWER-ON. 

 The POWER-ON ecosys­tem strat­e­gy is to become a provider of all the after­mar­ket solu­tions, with strong part­ners behind the scenes. So Star Charge for the charg­ers and AJW for mate­r­i­al sup­ply and FSI for train­ing, which all have strong indus­try expe­ri­ence and glob­al pres­ence.

After­mar­ket ser­vices haven’t been dis­cussed much yet at the indus­try lev­el beyond being some­thing you have to do, but it’s a mas­sive oppor­tu­ni­ty for oper­a­tors and essen­tial for cus­tomers. From a mar­gins and recur­ring rev­enue point of view, it takes a bit of time to cre­ate the rev­enue stream men­tioned in the press release we issued about the announce­ment. We are look­ing at approx­i­mate­ly $5 bil­lion rev­enue for Lil­i­um through to 2035.

Are you able to shed any light on what the next 12–18 months have in store for Lil­i­um and its com­pa­ny roadmap?

SB: Num­ber one focus for this year is test­ing. We have bat­tery labs, engine test­ing, com­po­nents and parts test­ing and of course the assem­bly of our first air­craft. So you’ll start to see more and more of that from us as we   lead up to flight test­ing at the end of the year. This also includes ground test­ing, which peo­ple some­times for­get but it is quite excit­ing where­by we’ll have the first pow­er-on of our air­craft in the com­ing months.

In 2025, we will be con­tin­u­ing to build air­craft and will have at least sev­en test mod­els con­struct­ed by then. So next year will involve a lot of test­ing. That’s one big piece.

The sec­ond piece is con­tin­u­ing to com­mer­cialise the air­craft with firm agree­ments. The indus­try has had a lot of LOI and MOUs, and in some places where you’d nev­er imag­ine an eVTOL air­craft fly­ing. So let’s start sell­ing firm orders, which is where Lil­i­um wants to make a dif­fer­ence. 

Now that we have the POWER-ON offer­ing we can offer a holis­tic solu­tion along­side the air­craft and we look for­ward to the first big deals com­ing through

The third stream is con­tin­u­ing the part­ner­ships, ground sup­ply equip­ment and all the oth­er parts of the ecosys­tem so we can real­ly pre­pare the entry into ser­vice of our air­craft.

What are your thoughts on the indus­try at the moment? Any top­ics of inter­est?

SB: Peo­ple are talk­ing a lot about the chal­lenge of intro­duc­ing an air­craft on the infra­struc­ture or air­space side, but I don’t see it as we active­ly designed the air­craft to be a per­fect fit for the turbin pri­vate and busi­ness avi­a­tion mar­ket as well as scale into the mass mar­ket. 

Every­where we go, we find heli­pads that are already suit­able for eVTOL oper­a­tions. We designed the air­craft to be able to fit with­in exist­ing infra­struc­ture, so as a min­i­mum an exist­ing heli­port only requires an elect charge point, and they can wel­come a Lil­i­um Jet to their site. 

I would say the moment of truth in the indus­try is in regard to which com­pa­ny will cer­ti­fy its air­craft soon, with­out firm deals being made. We are look­ing at build­ing that sales momen­tum and I don’t know if every­one is able to do it because you need the whole ecosys­tem. The indus­try is in a good spot, but I think the next two years is when we start to see the ero­sion of some of the play­ers in this space, and then we’ll have the final few enter­ing ser­vice.

Lilium’s busi­ness mod­el is more Region­al Air Mobil­i­ty, than short­er city shut­tle oper­a­tions. How has the response been for this longer mode of trans­port?

SB: The reac­tion has been extreme­ly pos­i­tive. A lot of peo­ple are talk­ing about fly­ing taxis and urban air mobil­i­ty but it’s real­ly dif­fi­cult to devel­op an urban ver­ti­port; if you want to do urban trav­el you do not have one site, but five or 10 in the city, so it becomes quite chal­leng­ing let alone the com­pe­ti­tion with oth­er modes of trans­port with­in a city. 

In some areas of the world urban air mobil­i­ty has its niche but it will hap­pen. But if you think about it, espe­cial­ly in Europe, if you want to fly in an eVTOL air­craft, do you want to go urban first when you have lim­it­ed air­space, reg­u­la­tions and peo­ple com­plain­ing about see­ing the air­craft? The noise would be noth­ing, but see­ing the air­craft is as much as hear­ing the air­craft.

If we were to talk about Lon­don, there would be maybe two or three ver­ti­ports around the city but not in the cen­tre, like in Bat­tersea. You can go from there to the coast, south of Eng­land or up to Oxford and Birm­ing­ham. That is absolute­ly fea­si­ble. 

The author­i­ties are hap­pi­er and it’s also eas­i­er for ATC and the ground too. Oxford to Lon­don is a per­fect jour­ney. I’ve tak­en a train jour­ney between the two cities and it’s not that ide­al.

If we were to intro­duce our air­craft into Lon­don, for the pre­mi­um seg­ment, peo­ple will very quick­ly see the ben­e­fit of being able to trav­el to the coast at the week­end. The jour­ney takes 30 min­utes rather than two hours.

Any final thoughts? 

SB: Our deci­sion to open an office in Chi­na was a very big one. Not only does it cre­ate momen­tum for the mar­ket and peo­ple start talk­ing to us about intro­duc­ing our air­craft into dif­fer­ent areas, but also in tech­nol­o­gy. 

We for­get that in Asia, whether it’s Japan, Chi­na or Korea, there is a lot of good tech­nol­o­gy to grab and we want to be part of their entire ecosys­tem. It’s super excit­ing at Lil­i­um now, because see­ing the air­craft fly­ing this year will be absolute­ly fan­tas­tic. 

A lot of peo­ple stop me and ask when we’re going to see our air­craft fly­ing and they have a lot of good vibes about it. To all our fans, their sup­port is huge so we ask them to be patient as with­in less than a year’s time frame, the air­craft will be up in the air.