Eve Air Mobility and Flapper form new partnership to help develop urban air mobility services in Latin America

Eve Urban Air Mobil­i­ty Solu­tions is work­ing with on-demand pri­vate avi­a­tion firm Flap­per to intro­duce urban air mobil­i­ty ser­vices in Latin Amer­i­ca, which has the poten­tial to bring up to 25 of Eve’s eVTOL air­craft onto Flap­per’s plat­form.

The part­ner­ship will serve as a proof-of-con­cept (POC) for future region­al oper­a­tions, with Eve expect­ing to pro­vide Flap­per with up to 25,000 hours of flight time per year across key cities in South Amer­i­ca, includ­ing São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Hor­i­zonte, San­ti­a­go, Bogotá and Mex­i­co City.

Andre Stein, Pres­i­dent & CEO of Eve, said: “Flapper’s region­al reach com­bined with its dis­rup­tive on-demand tech­nol­o­gy make it an ide­al part­ner for the future expan­sion of our oper­a­tions in Latin Amer­i­ca.

“Deploy­ing Eve’s zero-emis­sion air­craft will enable the com­pa­ny to democ­ra­tise UAM to new stake­hold­ers and key mar­kets, such as Brazil, Mex­i­co, Colom­bia, and Chile. This is an impor­tant build­ing block to extend Eve’s glob­al lead­er­ship in the UAM space.”

The par­ties plan to fos­ter a cul­ture of on-demand UAM book­ing using heli­copters to serve as data col­lec­tion for the future devel­op­ment of the EVA.

Launched in 2016, Flap­per is the first on-demand pri­vate avi­a­tion com­pa­ny in Latin Amer­i­ca. The com­pa­ny com­mer­cialised sched­uled flights in Brazil and boasts more than 730 safe­ty-vet­ted char­ter air­craft on its region­al mar­ket­place plat­form. Flap­per reports more than 250,000 users of its mobile app and is both ARGUS- and Wyvern-cer­ti­fied.

Paul Mal­ic­ki, CEO of Flap­per, said: “Six out of the ten largest urban heli­copter fleets are in Latin Amer­i­ca and the region cur­rent­ly boasts the dens­est heli­copter infra­struc­ture in the world. Togeth­er with a tra­di­tion­al­ly high accep­tance of UAM in our oper­at­ing mar­kets makes us per­fect­ly posi­tioned to lead the aer­i­al mobil­i­ty rev­o­lu­tion in the sec­tor

“Thanks to our part­ner­ship with Eve, we hope to expand our cur­rent pay-per-seat net­work and imple­ment a smooth tran­si­tion towards more agile and effi­cient sup­ply types. We believe that the Eve team’s track record of pro­vid­ing reli­able AAM solu­tions at record speeds is of utmost impor­tance to the suc­cess of sim­i­lar projects any­where in the world.”

Eve con­tin­ues to reach devel­op­ment mile­stones, includ­ing the first flight of the engi­neer­ing sim­u­la­tor in July 2020, and a proof of con­cept in Octo­ber 2020.

In par­al­lel, Eve’s Urban Air Traf­fic Man­age­ment (UATM) project reached a new mile­stone in its col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Unit­ed Kingdom’s Civ­il Avi­a­tion Author­i­ty (CAA) to devel­op a scal­able envi­ron­ment need­ed to host UAM flights.

This agree­ment with Flap­per adds to the oth­er agree­ment Eve has in Latin Amer­i­ca with Helisul Avi­a­tion, which includes an ini­tial order of 50 eVTOL air­craft. Deliv­er­ies are expect­ed to start by 2026.