RECAP: eVTOL Insights’ Montreal Conference provides more in-depth industry discussion and additional focus on Canadian efforts (Sessions 1 — 8)

Near­ly 100 peo­ple came togeth­er for eVTOL Insights’ Mon­tre­al con­fer­ence and the first event it has host­ed in Cana­da, as indus­try lead­ers joined togeth­er for more in-depth con­ver­sa­tions about the glob­al Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty mar­ket.

Tak­ing place at Le Mount Stephen hotel in down­town Mon­tre­al on Thurs­day, May 2nd, the event fea­tured 16 ses­sions which were split equal­ly between the morn­ing and after­noon.

Stephane Paquet, CEO and Pres­i­dent of Mon­tre­al Inter­na­tion­al had the hon­our of deliv­er­ing a wel­come address to kick off pro­ceed­ings. As Mon­tre­al is the third biggest aero­space hub in the world, it was a per­fect oppor­tu­ni­ty to remind del­e­gates of why com­pa­nies with­in the indus­try have called the city home. Par­tic­u­lar focus was on the work already been done by the likes of Wisk, BETA Tech­nolo­gies, Dufour Aero­space and Limosa.

The first pan­el dis­cus­sion of the event fea­tured Eric Cote, Pres­i­dent at Jaunt Air Mobil­i­ty Cana­da, Yan­nick Richard, Exec­u­tive Vice Pres­i­dent of Ver­tiko Mobilite and Hasan Shawa, Chair­man of SGI Cap­i­tal Cana­da. Enti­tled on how to ‘inte­grate Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty into wider Infra­struc­ture’, Yan­nick went into detail about Ver­tiko’s part­ner­ship with Jaunt and shared more details about its mis­sion, which is to ‘recon­nect the region of Que­bec with urban cen­ters’.

Hasan then gave an inter­est­ing insight into how real-estate views Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty and the chal­lenges that can be over­come, as well as the cur­rent oppor­tu­ni­ties, before Eric details more about Jaun­t’s Slow Rotor Com­pound (SRC) tech­nol­o­gy and the poten­tial there is in Que­bec for oth­er crit­i­cal mis­sions such as car­go and med­ical emer­gency.

Matheu Parr, Cus­tomer Direc­tor at Rolls-Royce, then gave a detailed overview of the work it is doing to help pow­er the Urban Air Mobil­i­ty mar­ket, by shar­ing more of its cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy for the high per­for­mance propul­sion sys­tems.

The first ses­sion fin­ished with a real­ly inter­est­ing fire­side chat with Guil­laume Beauchamp, Senior Direc­tor of Air­craft Devel­op­ment at Wisk, and Mil­dred Troegel­er, Exec­u­tive Liai­son to ICAO at Boe­ing. While Mil­dred talked about the sus­tain­abil­i­ty and auton­o­my angles — which intrigued Boe­ing the most — Guil­laume pro­vid­ed an update on Wisk’s work in Mon­tre­al, which includes the team’s con­tin­ued growth and recruit­ment efforts.

Guil­laume touched upon the auton­o­my angle as well, giv­ing del­e­gates more insight into why Wisk believes it is the right path to take and the com­pa­ny’s super­vi­so­ry auton­o­my approach.

After the first net­work­ing break, we then dived into anoth­er pan­el dis­cus­sion. In the mod­er­at­ing chair to dis­cuss ‘Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and Reg­u­la­tion’ was Phil Cole, VP of Busi­ness Devel­op­ment at Cert Cen­ter Cana­da, with Kather­ine Ayre, CEO and Founder at CAYRES, Adil Chaudhry, Senior Project Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion Man­ag­er at Trans­port Cana­da and Chris Baczyn­s­ki, CEO and Prin­ci­pal Con­sul­tant, BAC Aero­space.

Ther­mal man­age­ment spe­cial­ists Blueshift then deliv­ered anoth­er inter­est­ing keynote on its tech­nol­o­gy, with com­pa­ny Pres­i­dent Tim Burbey tak­ing to the stage. After this, Pamir Sevin­cel, Man­ag­ing Part­ner of Black­bird, sat in the mod­er­a­tor seat and chaired a pan­el on Region­al Air Mobil­i­ty with Marc Aus­man, Chief Prod­uct Offi­cer at Electra.aero, David Eich­st­edt, VP of Prod­uct Man­age­ment at Verdego Aero and Yanik Doy­on, Busi­ness Devel­op­ment and Sales (Avion­ics) at Thales Group.

The group dis­cussed the RAM vision and how it is dif­fer­ent from the per­spec­tive of mis­sion and tech­nol­o­gy, as well as debat­ing why this form of mobil­i­ty isn’t get­ting as much atten­tion from the wider AAM com­mu­ni­ty and investors? They dis­cuss hybrid-elec­tric propul­sion, with Yanik also talk about the key dif­fer­ences and chal­lenges he is see­ing and how it dif­fers from tra­di­tion­al aero­space. It con­cludes with a dis­cus­sion on new tech­nolo­gies, such as auton­o­my and AI, and how it would change or dis­rupt the way pilots fly their air­craft.

The penul­ti­mate ses­sion before the lunch was a keynote from Bran­don Robin­son, CEO of Hori­zon Air­craft, who talked about the oper­a­tional con­sid­er­a­tions for eVTOL air­craft. He used the time to also talk about the com­pa­ny’s X7 Cavorite air­craft which is cur­rent­ly under­go­ing flight test­ing.