Elire Infra’s Blue and Green vertiport hubs

Sim­ple Fly­ing has report­ed that Elire wants to cre­ate a mod­u­lar elec­tric avi­a­tion and trans­porta­tion ecosys­tem on land and on water, cre­at­ing an ecosys­tem of a new form of mul­ti­modal advanced air mobil­i­ty port.

The infra­struc­ture aspect is a mis­sion to cre­ate zero-emis­sion elec­tric air trans­porta­tion float­ing on the water and built along­side sea­ports and har­bors to cre­ate the next trans­port ecosys­tem with 2000+ mobil­i­ty hubs by 2040.

Mov­ing such facil­i­ties off­shore with what Elire calls ‘Blue Hubs’ would also elim­i­nate the dan­gers of cli­mate impact on new infra­struc­ture in loca­tions vul­ner­a­ble to the rise of sea lev­els.

They would also allow for the elec­tri­fi­ca­tion of pas­sen­ger sea ves­sels, and, as they are only anchored down, they can be moved accord­ing to demand. The design of the hubs and super­struc­ture will inte­grate cur­rent smart build­ing tech­nol­o­gy and allow for future tech­nol­o­gy inte­gra­tion.

How­ev­er, there are also solu­tions for scaleable and inter­op­er­a­ble on-land con­struc­tion as both the off­shore and on-land hubs can be turned into clus­ters with sev­er­al hexag­o­nal­ly shaped units, for instance as pas­sen­ger ter­mi­nals or ener­gy stor­age spaces.

Hydro­gen fuel-cell tech­nol­o­gy will pow­er the site with renew­able ener­gy, and the solu­tion for stor­ing the hydro­gen will also be imple­ment­ed into a refu­el­ing sys­tem for vehi­cles, air­craft and ves­sels. The solu­tions cur­rent­ly under devel­op­ment are designed to func­tion entire­ly off-grid.

Mean­while, the com­pa­ny’s oth­er branch, Elire Aero, wants to have a cer­ti­fied air taxi air­craft ready for dis­tri­b­u­tion by 2024, and dif­fers from oth­er UAM star­tups in that it is look­ing to retro­fit con­ven­tion­al take­off and land­ing vehi­cles (CTOL) and short take­off and land­ing vehi­cles (STOL) with elec­tric propul­sion sys­tems.

Elire is look­ing to cer­ti­fy a retro­fit­ted elec­tric con­ven­tion­al take­off and land­ing (eCTOL) vehi­cle as ear­ly as late next year with the first unit sched­uled to roll out from the pro­duc­tion line towards the end of 2024.

Sim­ple Fly­ing con­cludes: “As far as we are aware, the only oth­er amphibi­ous eVTOL projects cur­rent­ly out there are US Air Force-backed Reno-based Valkyrie Sys­tem Aero­space Hov­er­Jet Guardian con­cept, and a vari­ant of the Wave air­craft from New Zealand’s Wick­ers.”