Urban-Air Port and BAI Energy to redevelop three aerodromes into vertiports in northern Italy regions

Urban-Air Port and sus­tain­able infra­struc­ture com­pa­ny, BAI Ener­gy (BAI) will work to reju­ve­nate and mod­ernise avi­a­tion infra­struc­ture in Italy, by rede­vel­op­ing a trio of dis­used aero­dromes to sup­port the roll­out of next-gen­er­a­tion ver­ti­ports.

The announce­ment made today (Mon­day) is part of BAI Ener­gy’s strate­gic vision, with the first three loca­tions under nego­ti­a­tions in Venice, Pied­mont and Tri­este. 

This col­lab­o­ra­tion will pro­vide BAI access to Urban-Air Port (UAP) tech­nol­o­gy and ser­vices, includ­ing design, plan­ning, infra­struc­ture-sup­ply and abil­i­ty to lever­age UAP’s cut­ting-edge pro­pri­etary solu­tions to equip aero­dromes with state-of-the-art facil­i­ties and sys­tems.  

Nathaniel Mil­ner, CEO of BAI Ener­gy, said: “We’re thrilled to join forces with Urban-Air Port on an exclu­sive basis to trans­form under­utilised aero­dromes into state-of-the-art hubs for urban air mobil­i­ty across these first three loca­tions.

“Their ver­ti­port solu­tion is the most advanced we have seen and we have been very impressed by their approach, tech­ni­cal and com­mer­cial exper­tise – which per­fect­ly aligns with our own goals when it comes to mod­ernising and elec­tri­fy­ing Italy’s trans­porta­tion infra­struc­ture.”

Sup­port­ed by Invest Italia and the UK For­eign Com­mon­wealth & Devel­op­ment Office, BAI & UAP are already work­ing to iden­ti­fy fur­ther com­ple­men­tary sites for Phase Two, which will form the basis of a ful­ly con­nect­ed net­work sup­port­ing pas­sen­ger and car­go flights.  BAI and UAP are cur­rent­ly in dis­cus­sions with a num­ber of pre­ferred eVTOL air­craft man­u­fac­tur­ers and oper­a­tors.

Urban-Air Port’s first over­seas office in the EU is cur­rent­ly sup­port­ing BAI in the ongo­ing dis­cus­sions with the local gov­ern­ments across the launch regions. In April 2022, the com­pa­ny suc­cess­ful­ly built and oper­at­ed a ful­ly func­tion­al ver­ti­port in the cen­tre of Coven­try, UK. Click here to read Part One and Part Two of our inter­view with Ricky Sand­hu, Urban-Air Port’s founder.

Andrea Wu, CEO of Urban-Air Port, said: “We’re delight­ed that BAI Ener­gy have cho­sen us to join them on this ground break­ing & real­is­tic approach to inte­grat­ing advanced air mobil­i­ty into this stun­ning region. Our mod­u­lar ver­ti­ports are unri­valled and designed to inte­grate seam­less­ly into a vari­ety of nat­ur­al and built envi­ron­ments — that’s been our approach from the very begin­ning – a solu­tion that is designed to fit in, and we can’t wait to get start­ed in Italy.”

Com­ment­ing on this lat­est part­ner­ship, Sand­hu added: “This is an excit­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty to revi­talise under­utilised aero­dromes with poten­tial to trans­form them into world class mul­ti-modal ver­ti­ports — pro­vid­ing a new dimen­sion of con­nec­tiv­i­ty across this chal­leng­ing North­ern Italy geog­ra­phy. North­ern Italy is just the begin­ning.”

Pic­ture cred­it: Urban-Air Port.