Australia’s only air taxi vertiport infrastructure provider welcomes roadmap by Civil Aviation Safety Authority

Today, Australia’s Civ­il Avi­a­tion Safe­ty Author­i­ty (CASA) released the remote­ly pilot­ed air­craft sys­tems (RPAS) and advanced air mobil­i­ty (AAM) strate­gic reg­u­la­to­ry roadmap with strong pol­i­cy sup­port at Fed­er­al Gov­ern­ment lev­el.

Aus­tralia was the coun­try of choice for Google’s Wing deliv­ery spin off when CASA pro­vid­ed good access to deci­sion mak­ers and a much eas­i­er bureau­crat­ic process than coun­ter­parts else­where.

CASA CEO Pip Spence said: “We brought in RPAS leg­is­la­tion ahead of many oth­er coun­tries and con­tin­ued to sharp­en our focus on emerg­ing tech­nol­o­gy over the years.

“We are com­mit­ted to advanc­ing these pio­neer­ing tech­nolo­gies and see this roadmap as a pri­or­i­ty as we frame the future of Aus­tralian avi­a­tion.”

It comes off the back of a white paper on New and Emerg­ing Avi­a­tion Tech­nolo­gies sup­port­ed by a $32.6M grant fund open to both local and inter­na­tion­al com­pa­nies want­i­ng to tri­al, test and bring their activ­i­ties to Aus­tralia.

Clear time­lines are set out for air­craft sys­tems, oper­a­tions, air­space and traf­fic man­age­ment, infra­struc­ture, peo­ple, and safe­ty and secu­ri­ty.

Sky­portz is the only ver­ti­port infra­struc­ture com­pa­ny in Aus­tralia, work­ing for four years to encour­age the devel­op­ment of AAM pol­i­cy at all lev­els of gov­ern­ment, par­tic­u­lar­ly in essen­tial ver­ti­port infra­struc­ture.

Sky­portz CEO Clem New­ton-Brown added: “We were one of the indus­try play­ers that was invit­ed to con­tribute to this CASA time­line doc­u­ment and we are pleased with the clar­i­ty that this will pro­vide to the indus­try.

“Sky­portz has over 400 poten­tial sites owned by prop­er­ty part­ners and I am par­tic­u­lar­ly pleased that they will soon have the guid­ance they need to enable ver­ti­port oper­a­tions from their sites.

“The key is to break the nexus between avi­a­tion and exist­ing air­ports, and we need to devel­op a net­work of new ver­ti­port sites if the indus­try is to reach its poten­tial with Sky­portz prepar­ing the land­scape to part­ner with infra­struc­ture investors.”

In Sep­tem­ber 2021, the Aus­tralian Asso­ci­a­tion for Unmanned Sys­tems’ (AAUS) AAM Sum­mit 2021 was the first event to be sup­port­ed by key gov­ern­ment and indus­try organ­i­sa­tions in Aus­tralia and across the world.

Com­pa­nies includ­ed Nexa Cap­i­tal Part­ners, Sky­portz, Wisk, AMSL Aero, Eve Air Mobil­i­ty, Civata­Glob­al, Sky­ports, Arup and Airser­vices Aus­tralia.

In June 2021, Air­speed­er, the world’s first rac­ing series for elec­tric fly­ing cars, made his­to­ry with the first full flights of its remote­ly-pilot­ed Alau­da Mk3 at undis­closed test loca­tions in the deserts of South Aus­tralia, under the obser­va­tion of CASA.