Middle East: “India’s ePlane to Collaborate with Dubai-based Empire Aviation”

IIT-Madras incu­bat­ed elec­tric air­craft start­up, ePlane, announced last week a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Dubai-based Empire Avi­a­tion Group to inte­grate busi­ness avi­a­tion solu­tions and take its eVTOL inter­na­tion­al, reports msn.com. The part­ner­ship aims to fast-track the deploy­ment of pas­sen­ger-car­ry­ing air taxis and elec­tric air-ambu­lances across India, UAE, Thai­land and Indone­sia.

The Empire group is to pro­vide exper­tise in avi­a­tion oper­a­tions, includ­ing safe­ty pro­to­cols, SOPs and fleet man­age­ment, so as to ensure a suc­cess­ful mar­ket entry for ePlane’s air­craft. Empire is also con­sid­er­ing an invest­ment in the com­pa­ny dur­ing the next round of fund­ing.

Prof. Satya Chakravarthy, CEO of ePlane and an aero­space engi­neer­ing pro­fes­sor at IIT Madras, com­ment­ed, “Empire is very good at oper­at­ing air­craft. They have been doing this suc­cess­ful­ly across var­i­ous dif­fer­ent coun­tries. So they are get­ting into a part­ner­ship with us to glob­alise our air­craft and take it through com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion and reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work for oth­er coun­tries.”

Chakravarthy con­tin­ued, “One of our vari­ants will go into the mar­ket by the end of 2026. The oth­er could fol­low, depend­ing on addi­tion­al cer­ti­fi­ca­tion require­ments and flight test­ing.”

Inter­view with Prof Satya Chakravarthy

The Chen­nai start­up recent­ly signed a deal to sup­ply 788 air ambu­lances at a cost of more than USD1 bil­lion to Inter­na­tion­al Crit­i­cal-Care Air Trans­fer Team (ICATT) which plans to deploy them across all dis­tricts in India. It has also signed a strate­gic deal with TCS for bat­tery life cycle mod­el­ling, demand esti­ma­tion, and oper­a­tional opti­mi­sa­tion.

The media out­let writes, “On deliv­er­ing these air­craft the CEO said the start­up will first set up a lim­it­ed series pro­duc­tion to opti­mise pro­duc­tion para­me­ters and then look for a pro­duc­tion part­ner. On where the start­up will set up the pro­duc­tion line, Chakravarthy said it is in talks with dif­fer­ent state gov­ern­ments to iden­ti­fy places.”

ePlane’s CEO remarked, “There will be para­medic jobs, ground staff, charg­ing infra­struc­ture peo­ple, main­te­nance of the ver­ti­ports and Main­te­nance, Repair, and Oper­a­tions (MRO) for the air­craft. As an OEM, we may have to either pro­duce the air­craft our­selves or have pro­duc­tion part­ners, which will also cre­ate jobs.”

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.eplane.ai

News Source: https://www.msn.com/en-gb

(Images: ePlane)

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