Eve Air Mobility and Flexjet conduct initial software simulation of Eve’s Urban ATM solution

Eve Air Mobil­i­ty has achieved a key mile­stone in the pro­gres­sion of Urban Air Mobil­i­ty (UAM), through a col­lab­o­ra­tive part­ner­ship with glob­al pri­vate avi­a­tion leader Flex­jet. 

The com­pa­nies have con­duct­ed an ini­tial soft­ware sim­u­la­tion of Eve’s Urban Air Traf­fic Man­age­ment (Urban ATM) solu­tion. The ini­tia­tive val­i­dat­ed and refined the soft­ware through user test­ing and feed­back on its inter­face and indus­try val­ue.

With Lon­don being one of the world’s fore­most heli­copter mar­kets and a key focus for future eVTOL oper­a­tions, the sim­u­la­tion took place over four days this month at Flexjet’s Tac­ti­cal Con­trol Cen­tre at Farn­bor­ough Air­port in the UK.

It saw Eve’s Urban ATM soft­ware shad­ow­ing live heli­copter flights oper­at­ed by Flexjet’s UK heli­copter divi­sion, per­form­ing the kind of ser­vices that will be essen­tial to enabling future UAM oper­a­tions.

Johann Bor­dais, CEO of Eve, said: “This col­lab­o­ra­tion with Flex­jet rep­re­sents a sig­nif­i­cant step for­ward in our efforts to advance urban air mobil­i­ty. We are com­mit­ted to explor­ing inno­v­a­tive solu­tions that will enhance cur­rent oper­a­tions and con­tribute to the future of urban flights.”

Flex­jet pro­vid­ed its heli­copter fleet to per­form flights, col­lab­o­rat­ing close­ly with Eve’s Urban ATM team. NATS and Lon­don Heli­port sup­port­ed the ini­tia­tive by pro­vid­ing addi­tion­al feed­back to help ensure Eve’s solu­tion will pro­vide the great­est val­ue to all UAM ecosys­tem par­tic­i­pants.

The ini­tia­tive encom­passed var­i­ous aspects of oper­a­tions, includ­ing reg­u­lar busi­ness oper­a­tions, atyp­i­cal sce­nar­ios and flights tai­lored to an eVTOL aircraft’s spe­cif­ic needs, enabling the demon­stra­tion of prod­uct behav­ior in var­i­ous real-world sce­nar­ios.

The inte­gra­tion of ver­ti­ports to effi­cient­ly man­age resources was the pri­ma­ry focus of the test, in addi­tion to ver­i­fy­ing and val­i­dat­ing a sub­set of the Urban ATM prod­uct capa­bil­i­ties, with a spe­cif­ic empha­sis on the UAM fleet oper­a­tor sup­port tool.

Eli Flint, Flex­jet Pres­i­dent of Glob­al Heli­copter Oper­a­tions, added: “We were delight­ed to pro­vide Flexjet’s UK heli­copter exper­tise and to play a key role in forg­ing the UAM ecosys­tem of tomor­row, help­ing to inform the move­ments of the next gen­er­a­tion of ver­ti­cal air­craft.

“Flex­jet is ded­i­cat­ed to advanc­ing the avi­a­tion solu­tions that will meet our cus­tomers’ needs over the com­ing years, and we are excit­ed by the poten­tial of eVTOLs for seam­less and sus­tain­able elec­tric short-range flights.”

Eve’s objec­tive with this col­lab­o­ra­tion was to pro­vide insights into the ser­vices required to sup­port future eVTOL oper­a­tions safe­ly and effi­cient­ly. Anoth­er aim was to inves­ti­gate whether these new ser­vices may have imme­di­ate val­ue for exist­ing heli­copter oper­a­tions.

Fol­low­ing the sim­u­la­tion, Eve and Flex­jet will review the find­ings and dis­cuss rec­om­men­da­tions for improve­ments, changes, and poten­tial inte­gra­tion require­ments. The com­pa­nies will also con­tin­ue to explore oppor­tu­ni­ties for fur­ther inte­gra­tion of exist­ing soft­ware tools, enhanc­ing the poten­tial of the Urban ATM solu­tion.