Australia: Skyportz secures orders in excess of 1,000 vertipad units following patent release at Farnborough Airshow

Sky­portz CEO Clem New­ton-Brown has giv­en an update fol­low­ing last mon­th’s Farn­bor­ough Air­show, as it has announced three orders totalling in excess of 1,000 ver­ti­port units to sup­port the emerg­ing elec­tric air taxi indus­try.

The patent­ed mod­u­lar ver­ti­pad solu­tion address­es a mul­ti­tude of issues includ­ing pas­sen­ger safe­ty, down­wash, out­wash, bat­tery fires, pow­er gen­er­a­tion, pow­er stor­age, debris cap­ture, noise, envi­ron­men­tal impacts, insur­ance risks and more — all in an afford­able pack­age that can be placed on air­port tar­ma­cs or on new ver­ti­port sites.

While no offi­cial announce­ment has been made, Sky­portz has said ini­tial orders have come in from an air­craft OEM and infra­struc­ture investors.

The com­pa­ny expects in addi­tion to avi­a­tion, prop­er­ty and infra­struc­ture investors, it will be a sup­pli­er to oth­er ver­ti­port com­pa­nies look­ing for a way to increase safe­ty and com­ply with the per­for­mance-based stan­dards of air reg­u­la­tors.

New­ton-Brown said: “The patent­ed design has not been released pub­licly as we are still tweak­ing our pro­to­type. How­ev­er, we have been hap­py to share the design with indus­try col­leagues under Non-Dis­clo­sure Agree­ment and the response has been incred­i­ble.

“You can actu­al­ly see the light bulbs going on as peo­ple realise we have cracked the nut of mass pro­duc­tion of a ver­ti­pad prod­uct that is a vast improve­ment on a cir­cle paint­ed on a slab of con­crete”.

Sky­portz is still offer­ing their impres­sive ter­mi­nal designs with Con­tr­eras Earl Archi­tec­ture, but it also want­ed to cre­ate an entry lev­el pack­age to enable them to break the nexus between avi­a­tion and air­ports with their prop­er­ty part­ners.

It added the inno­v­a­tive design will enable oper­a­tions from small­er foot­prints and that will have a sig­nif­i­cant and quan­tifi­able ben­e­fit for both air­ports and prop­er­ty own­ers who are plan­ning for ver­ti­ports.

Sky­portz is in dis­cus­sions with investors seek­ing to licence and pro­duce the prod­uct glob­al­ly.

New­ton-Brown added: “With our prod­uct you will be able to estab­lish oper­a­tions safe­ly on tighter sites or on larg­er sites, fit more land­ing pads. Prof­itable oper­a­tions are going to need low cap­i­tal costs and high through­put. You can do the sums on any site to cal­cu­late the capex sav­ings util­is­ing our prod­uct.”

“The mass ver­ti­port infra­struc­ture is the miss­ing piece of the puz­zle for this indus­try. With­out new ver­ti­port land­ing sites in places peo­ple want to go, the air­craft will nev­er ful­fil their poten­tial. The ele­phant in the room is that no-one wants to pay mil­lions of dol­lars for each ver­ti­port. We have got the mes­sage and respond­ed with this patent.”