Fascinating think tank conversation talks about the value of Latin America for electric air vehicle OEMs

Varon Vehi­cles’ penul­ti­mate think tank about the imple­men­ta­tion of Urban Air Mobil­i­ty in Latin Amer­i­ca was anoth­er in-depth con­ver­sa­tion which focused on the val­ue of the region for elec­tric air vehi­cle OEMs.

Held last Thurs­day, the pan­el of speak­ers for this ses­sion was David Rot­tblatt, Busi­ness Devel­op­ment Direc­tor of EmbraerX, Jia Xu, Senior Direc­tor of Strat­e­gy for Unmanned Aer­i­al Sys­tems and Urban Air Mobil­i­ty at Hon­ey­well Aero­space.

Also join­ing was Dr. Colleen Reiche, who leads the avi­a­tion busi­ness at Quan­ti­ta­tive Sci­en­tif­ic Solu­tions, Dr. Mikhail Klassen, Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer and Co-Founder of Pal­adin AI, and Bri­an Dun­can, Direc­tor of Strate­gic Cam­paigns and Busi­ness Devel­op­ment at Bell Flight.

Mod­er­at­ing the think tank was Felipe Varon, CEO and Founder of Varon Vehi­cles, and intro­duc­ing the ses­sion he said: “Urban Air Mobil­i­ty is def­i­nite­ly a very inter­est­ing sub­ject, some­thing that has prob­a­bly become an icon of the future of post-moder­ni­ty.

“And we love to poke peo­ple’s imag­i­na­tion by talk­ing about fly­ing cars mov­ing towards cities, going through build­ings, and ser­vic­ing peo­ple’s lives on a dai­ly basis. As fan­tas­tic as that is, and as it pos­es the future towards where we want to go, in this nascent indus­try of Urban Air Mobil­i­ty and Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty, we do have to con­vey the cor­rect mes­sage.

“And part of that com­plete mes­sage is grad­u­al­i­ty: how grad­ual we need to imple­ment our sys­tems, how this is not going to hap­pen all at once but rather in a very paced way which we need to walk a learn­ing curve to acquire know-how.

“One of the most impor­tant ques­tions is how do we start, where do we start, how do we play this game and how do we plan? At Varon Vehi­cles, we have found that an ecosys­tem in Latin Amer­i­ca brings a lot of val­ue to that, because it offers a way to make it sim­pler. And sim­pler means faster, less costs and less strin­gent require­ments for the sys­tems.”

The top­ics dis­cussed dur­ing this hour-long ses­sion includ­ed the Val­ue of the Latam Ecosys­tem for Urban Air Mobil­i­ty; Faster Imple­men­ta­tion and Plac­ing into Ser­vice; Reduced Cost­s/­Post-Covid-19 Bud­get Con­straints; Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and Flight Test­ing, Weath­er Avail­abil­i­ty Advan­tage and the Colombia/US/FAA Rela­tion­ship Val­ue.

Start­ing off the con­ver­sa­tion, Varon asked the pan­el what val­ue they see the region as air vehi­cle OEMs or even­tu­al providers of eVTOL fleets.

Giv­ing his open­ing remarks, Rot­tblatt said: “EmbraerX is very much ded­i­cat­ed to being an ecosys­tem part­ner, we’re obvi­ous­ly very excit­ed about con­tribut­ing a vehi­cle to the Urban Air Mobil­i­ty ecosys­tem as we’re a part­ner to the Uber Ele­vate plat­form, as well as devel­op­ing what we call Urban Air Traf­fic Man­age­ment — a new par­a­digm for man­ag­ing dense low alti­tude air­space for the Urban Air Mobil­i­ty indus­try.

“There’s a lot we can learn with respect to view­ing Urban Air Mobil­i­ty in the lens of Latin Amer­i­can cities and the val­ue propo­si­tion that we hope to build for Latin Amer­i­can economies. Con­sid­er­ing the human geog­ra­phy and how many peo­ple are real­ly con­densed into small­er areas in cities like Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Bogo­ta, there’s a lot that we can learn with so many peo­ple that live in such con­cen­trat­ed areas.

“When I look at Latin Amer­i­ca and see how much we can learn, I think there’s a lot to gain from look­ing at the expe­ri­ence the Voom prod­uct had in Sao Paulo and Mex­i­co City for exam­ple, or that Uber­copter had in cities such as Dubai. Where we start­ed with con­ven­tion­al forms of trans­porta­tion that seeks to build on top of exist­ing infra­struc­ture pro­ce­dures that have already been around for many years.

That has allowed Urban Air Mobil­i­ty to achieve its lev­el of matu­ri­ty that we’re at today. Now we’re sim­ply talk­ing about the next chap­ter of what I think is a very excit­ing and suc­cess­ful sto­ry, but one that seeks to bring a new lev­el of acces­si­bil­i­ty and afford­abil­i­ty to a broad­er swath of the pop­u­la­tion.”

Varon then asked Xu if he could expand on Rot­tblat­t’s points about infra­struc­ture, from Hon­ey­well’s per­spec­tive.

“I agree with what you and David have said in that we need an ear­ly mar­ket val­i­da­tion of the UAM promise. In Latin Amer­i­ca, among oth­er places, it is a real­ly amaz­ing place to do this because of the exist­ing tele­port infra­struc­ture that’s in place, the com­fort the exist­ing peo­ple have in the helifleet busi­ness mod­el and the empir­i­cal test cas­es that was pio­neered by Voom for exam­ple. I’m very buoyed by those prospects, and we do need con­tin­ued proof cas­es and incre­men­tal advances in this domain to sus­tain invest­ment and efforts.

“From a com­po­nent and sys­tems inte­gra­tor per­spec­tive, tim­ing is extreme­ly impor­tant because by the time an OEM comes to us, our sys­tems have to be pret­ty far along so that we can sup­port their mis­sion and make sure their sys­tem will meet the time­line they have set out. That’s why col­lab­o­rat­ing with the teams here is real­ly impor­tant to get that ear­ly social­i­sa­tion of the ecosys­tem.”

As well as get­ting Dr. Reiche’s com­ments about what val­ue the Latin Amer­i­ca region can bring to air vehi­cle OEMs, Varon also asked for her insight on weath­er, and what advan­tages they could see in a part of the world where weath­er avail­abil­i­ty is an added val­ue.

“This crawl-walk-run approach is real­ly crit­i­cal, not only for all the oth­er ele­ments we talked about, but specif­i­cal­ly for the weath­er,” she said.

“It is going to impact many if not all of the com­po­nents of the over­all Urban Air Mobil­i­ty ecosys­tem, so it’s going to be real­ly crit­i­cal for some of the ini­tial test cas­es, demon­stra­tions and low­er scaled oper­a­tions to be con­duct­ed in ‘fair’ weath­er loca­tions.”

Dr Reiche men­tioned that pri­or to join­ing Quan­ti­ta­tive Sci­en­tif­ic Solu­tions, she led an Urban Air Mobil­i­ty mar­ket study for NASA’s Air­craft Man­age­ment Divi­sion, which includ­ed a quan­ti­ta­tive assess­ment of his­toric weath­er con­di­tions in 10 cities in the USA.

“Essen­tial­ly, we were look­ing at the poten­tial impacts just due to weath­er could be on Urban Air Mobil­i­ty oper­a­tions,” she said. “We found that in many of these cities, weath­er could poten­tial­ly dis­rupt oper­a­tions for most than half of the oper­a­tional day, and that could include all types of weath­er phe­nom­e­na.

“That analy­sis real­ly under­scored the need for focus­ing some of these ear­ly efforts on loca­tions where there is min­i­mal adverse weath­er, most­ly clear skies, min­i­mal thun­der­storms, snow, icing — exact­ly what we would find in Latin Amer­i­ca.”

Adding his points to the dis­cus­sion, Klassen added onto Dr. Reiche’s points. He said: “If you look at a lot of where the flight schools are locat­ed, like Flori­da and Spain, these are fair weath­er cli­mates that are ide­al for train­ing pilots all year round, and at Pal­adin AI, we’re con­cerned about the issues involved in pilot train­ing.

“We saw in civ­il avi­a­tion, an enor­mous short­age of qual­i­fied pilots, and then Covid-19 hap­pened, so many of those pilots were fur­loughed. Some are going to choose to retire ear­ly, look for oth­er work and then decide they are not going to return to avi­a­tion when the indus­try picks up again in two or three years. The short­age that was bad before, is going to be even worse when avi­a­tion recov­ers.

“How do you cre­ate learn­ing envi­ron­ments that can bring down the cost of train­ing, accel­er­ate a pilot from zero to first offi­cer, and do that as effec­tive­ly as pos­si­ble? What we’re doing at Pal­adin AI, is cre­at­ing machine learn­ing soft­ware that inter­faces with the train­ing devices and pro­vides instruc­tors tools to auto­mate as much of that process as pos­si­ble, to get com­pe­ten­cy met­rics for that pilot.

“What a lot of peo­ple in the Urban Air Mobil­i­ty mar­ket haven’t said very much about is where are the pilots going to come from, the oper­a­tors of all these air­craft, what is the train­ing infra­struc­ture going to look like?

Klassen added that Pal­adin AI has already spo­ken to elec­tric air vehi­cle OEMs about this, ask­ing them what they imag­ine their train­ing solu­tions are going to look like, who is going to sup­ply their flight sim­u­la­tors and what lev­el of fideli­ty those sim­u­la­tors need to have.

“Is it going to be a full flight sim­u­la­tor? Those are very expen­sive. Do we need to train on full flight sim­u­la­tors to get that full lev­el of pro­fi­cien­cy, or can we do a lot more on low­er lev­el devices — pan­el train­ers or fixed-based sim­u­la­tors. And how do you qual­i­fy a pilot to be ready to fly an air taxi?

“We’d like to see ana­lyt­ics used in that process, to be able to objec­tive­ly qual­i­fy that pilot so they can enter into this bur­geon­ing new mar­ket which is going to sup­ply many new jobs in Latin Amer­i­ca and cre­ate a whole new ecosys­tem that’s going to be very excit­ing, and I think it is hap­pen­ing much faster than peo­ple appre­ci­ate.”

Fin­ish­ing the first part of the dis­cus­sion, Dun­can explained he grew up in Latin Amer­i­ca — includ­ing Argenti­na, Brazil, Colom­bia and Mex­i­co. He said that when work­ing for a com­pa­ny in Sao Paulo, if they had a VIP guest, the only way they would have two or three meet­ings is to get a taxi to a heli­port.

“It cost a lot of mon­ey, and only a very few peo­ple had access where you could save three to four hours. From north to south, or east to west, the only way you could get to those meet­ings was through the air.

“But one of the beau­ti­ful things that I see here, and every­body’s in accor­dance is the acces­si­bil­i­ty. We’re not mak­ing this for the VIPs any­more, this is going to be acces­si­ble to the mass­es. It may be a ser­vice where only a few are going to have access to as the economies of scale, but the end point is hav­ing a typ­i­cal Colom­bian use this. How do we ben­e­fit every­body, give them back time and how do we mea­sure that?

“The labour rates in Colom­bia are also going to be much low­er than oth­er parts in Latin Amer­i­ca and parts of the world, but also most impor­tant­ly, very capa­ble tal­ent. There are peo­ple who are doc­tors, that unfor­tu­nate­ly due to the socio-eco­nom­ic devel­op­ments, are taxi dri­vers or bus dri­vers.

“There’s noth­ing wrong with that, but hav­ing capa­ble tal­ent and putting it to good use, that’s how you advance soci­ety. There’s a lot of that in Latin Amer­i­ca.”

Dun­can also added onto Klassen’s point about pilots, say­ing: “My Dad is a fixed-wing pilot and we pay them a lot; they’re cer­ti­fied and have a very spe­cif­ic mis­sion, but where are we get­ting the tal­ents? For UAVs, it’s a very dif­fer­ent tal­ent pool.”

The final think tank will take place on Wednes­day, 14th Octo­ber from 12noon to 1pm EDT, which will be anoth­er con­ver­sa­tion about ver­ti­ports. To watch this dis­cus­sion in full, and reg­is­ter for the final ses­sion vis­it www.varonvehicles.com/skyscraper.