Australian Government supports Skyportz with $250,000 grant to develop air taxi Aeroberm™ vertipad

The Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ment has award­ed Sky­portz a grant of $250,000 to advance the devel­op­ment of its rev­o­lu­tion­ary patent­ed ele­vat­ed Aer­oberm™ ver­ti­pad.

Aer­oberm is designed to enable safe and scal­able oper­a­tions for elec­tric air taxis in urban and region­al envi­ron­ments. Sky­portz says the mod­u­lar ver­ti­pad sys­tem can be installed on rooftops, carparks or bespoke struc­tures to sup­port the emerg­ing Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty (AAM) indus­try.

This project, sup­port­ed under the Aus­tralian Government’s Indus­try Growth Pro­gram, will devel­op a min­i­mum viable prod­uct to address three of the most sig­nif­i­cant infra­struc­ture chal­lenges fac­ing the indus­try; down­wash and out­wash man­age­ment, noise mit­i­ga­tion, and fire sup­pres­sion.

The funds will be matched by Sky­portz to cre­ate a $500,000 research and devel­op­ment pool to engage researchers, patent spe­cial­ists and indus­tri­al design­ers to bring the prod­uct to the pro­to­type phase.

Speak­ing at last week’s Sin­ga­pore Air­show, Clem New­ton-Brown, Sky­portz CEO, said: “This grant will help us take our patent­ed ver­ti­pad tech­nol­o­gy from con­cept to pro­to­type.

“We’re focused on deliv­er­ing a safe, afford­able and deploy­able solu­tion that will enable prop­er­ty own­ers and devel­op­ers to future-proof their sites for the com­ing era of elec­tric air taxis.”

The Aer­oberm™ patent cov­ers a mod­u­lar, ele­vat­ed land­ing plat­form that incor­po­rates inte­grat­ed air man­age­ment chan­nels, acoustic damp­en­ing, and a built-in fire sup­pres­sion sys­tem. 

These inno­va­tions are designed to address the key oper­a­tional and safe­ty issues that will pre­vent eVTOL air­craft from oper­at­ing in built envi­ron­ments.

The Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ment has demon­strat­ed a strong com­mit­ment to posi­tion­ing Aus­tralia as a leader in Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty.

It has been shown through its oth­er fund­ing ini­tia­tives such as the New and Emerg­ing Avi­a­tion Tech­nolo­gies (NEAT) Pro­gram and the reg­u­la­to­ry readi­ness work under­way by agen­cies such as the Civ­il Avi­a­tion Safe­ty Author­i­ty (CASA) and Airser­vices Aus­tralia, which are both devel­op­ing ver­ti­port stan­dards and air­space inte­gra­tion frame­works for AAM oper­a­tions.

With inter­na­tion­al research part­ner­ships in USA, UK, India and Chi­na, and grow­ing glob­al inter­est in its patent­ed design, Sky­portz says it is posi­tion­ing Aus­tralia to play a lead­ing role in the roll­out of Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty infra­struc­ture world­wide with the Aer­oberm™