Airbus extends collaboration with Ecocopter for urban air mobility services in Chile, Ecuador and Peru

Air­bus and Eco­copter have signed a Mem­o­ran­dum of Under­stand­ing to col­lab­o­rate on the launch of urban air mobil­i­ty ser­vices across var­i­ous coun­tries in Latin Amer­i­ca, notably in Ecuador, Chile and Peru.

This part­ner­ship is an expan­sion of the Air­bus rela­tion­ship with Eco­copter, which oper­ates a fleet pri­mar­i­ly of Air­bus heli­copters for aer­i­al work mis­sions in var­i­ous indus­tri­al sec­tors.

Eco­copter CEO Marce­lo Rajch­man said: “With already 20 years of expe­ri­ence oper­at­ing heli­copters and five years oper­at­ing drones, the projects we will devel­op togeth­er with Air­bus will bring us clos­er to this goal.”

Air­bus head of UAM part­ner­ships and strat­e­gy Balk­iz Sar­i­han added: “We are excit­ed to extend our long stand­ing rela­tion­ship with Eco­copter and togeth­er we are tak­ing con­crete steps in co-cre­at­ing the UAM ecosys­tem and our decar­bon­i­sa­tion roadmap.”

Estab­lished in 2003, Ecocopter’s fleet of Air­bus heli­copters con­sist of 16 H125s, two H135s, and three H145s, char­ac­terised by their ver­sa­til­i­ty in per­form­ing mis­sions rang­ing from off­shore trans­port, min­ing sup­port, med­ical evac­u­a­tion, fire­fight­ing, and almost the entire range of aer­i­al work mis­sions.

In Sep­tem­ber 2021, Air­bus unveiled its eVTOL pro­to­type CityAir­bus NextGen, to explore advanced air mobil­i­ty tech­nolo­gies and bring urban air mobil­i­ty ser­vices to life. With an oper­a­tional range of 80 km and a cruise speed of 120 km/h, it has been devel­oped to be suit­ed for a range of deploy­ments in urban areas and beyond.

The Com­pa­ny just announced the con­struc­tion of a ded­i­cat­ed cen­tre to test the aircraft’s sys­tems in the lead up to its maid­en flight. Air­bus is also work­ing close­ly with indus­tri­al and insti­tu­tion­al part­ners to lead the devel­op­ment of urban air mobil­i­ty ecosys­tems, as recent­ly announced with ITA Air­ways in Italy, or through the launch of the Air Mobil­i­ty Ini­tia­tive in Ger­many.