EHang and Greenland Hong Kong Holdings set up aerial tourism service in China using eVTOL aircraft

EHang has launched its own urban air mobil­i­ty (UAM) ser­vices pro­gramme with strate­gic part­ner Green­land Hong Kong Hold­ings, which will use eVTOL air­craft to con­duct aer­i­al sight­see­ing and media shows.

The tri­al will be rolled out in Green­land Hong Kong Hold­ings’ tourism real estate project, called For­est Lake, in Zhao­qing — a pop­u­lar tour des­ti­na­tion city in Guang­dong, Chi­na. Both com­pa­nies will work togeth­er to offer aer­i­al tourism ser­vices in more cities using EHang’s flag­ship two-seater eVTOL aer­i­al autonomous vehi­cle (AAV).

Edward Xu, Chief Strat­e­gy Offi­cer of EHang, said: “We are excit­ed to part­ner with Green­land Hong Kong to launch tri­al oper­a­tions of the EH216 and bring our safe, green and com­fort­able Urban Air Mobil­i­ty ser­vices to local res­i­dents.  As an AAV tech­nol­o­gy plat­form com­pa­ny and a UAM oper­a­tor, we are steadi­ly rolling out glob­al tri­al oper­a­tions and will fur­ther work with our part­ners to build more UAM net­works.”

The col­lab­o­ra­tion will first start with a flight base in For­est Lake, which will be inde­pen­dent­ly run by EHang to offer aer­i­al sight­see­ing ser­vices to pas­sen­gers. For­est Lake is locat­ed close to the new Zhao­qing-Pearl Riv­er Delta-Hub Air­port, which is cur­rent­ly under con­struc­tion.  

The area offers abun­dant tourism attrac­tions, includ­ing sev­en nat­ur­al lakes and wet­lands cov­er­ing 3 mil­lion square meters. The two par­ties will now work togeth­er to com­mer­cialise EHang’s AAV tech­nolo­gies in var­i­ous use cas­es, includ­ing aer­i­al sight­see­ing. 

Sun Qi, Gen­er­al Man­ag­er of For­est Lake, added: “Our phi­los­o­phy for For­est Lake is focused on enrich­ing res­i­dents’ lives by offer­ing bet­ter cul­tur­al and tourism sup­port. We can help to achieve this goal through our strate­gic part­ner­ship with EHang, which is based on exten­sive research and mutu­al inter­ests.  We intend to work togeth­er to uti­lize our com­ple­men­tary advan­tages to achieve win-win coop­er­a­tion.”

As a spe­cif­ic use case of UAM, aer­i­al sight­see­ing has strong demand and huge mar­ket poten­tial.  In ear­ly 2017, the Chi­nese Min­istry of Trans­port, the Min­istry of Cul­ture and Tourism and the Civ­il Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion joint­ly issued “Sug­ges­tions on Pro­mot­ing the Inte­grat­ed Devel­op­ment of Trans­porta­tion and Tourism.

This direc­tive sup­port­ed the devel­op­ment of aer­i­al sight­see­ing by encour­ag­ing key tourist cities and eli­gi­ble scenic spots to car­ry out pilot pro­grams for civ­il avi­a­tion tourism as well as to open low-alti­tude flight routes. Low-alti­tude tourism in Chi­na could reach 4.2 bil­lion pas­sen­gers in recent years, lead­ing to a mar­ket size of RMB58.5 bil­lion, accord­ing to fore­casts from the Chi­na Air Trans­port Asso­ci­a­tion. 

EHang believes its 216 AAV offers sig­nif­i­cant advan­tages over con­ven­tion­al sin­gle-pro­peller heli­copters, such as high­er safe­ty lev­el, low­er noise lev­el, low­er costs, and zero emis­sions.  The com­pa­ny added that its 216 AAV has the poten­tial to become a new trav­el vehi­cle for low-alti­tude aer­i­al sight­see­ing.