Flight Crowd joins Inmarsat’s Velaris Partner Network at Farnborough Airshow 2022

A ‘first-of-its-kind’ glob­al part­ner­ship between Inmarsat and Flight Crowd, announced at the Farn­bor­ough Air­show 2022, aims to improve engage­ment with the indus­try through a series of col­lab­o­ra­tive out­reach projects.

Flight Crowd has joined Inmarsat’s Velaris Part­ner Net­work, launched in 2021 to facil­i­tate safe and secure advanced air mobil­i­ty (AAM) oper­a­tions, build­ing on over 30 years of expe­ri­ence in air traf­fic man­age­ment com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

The long-term ben­e­fits of urban air mobil­i­ty (UAM) will be show­cased through col­lab­o­ra­tive out­reach projects, by improv­ing pub­lic under­stand­ing and sup­port­ing the nascent future flight indus­try.

These projects will show­case the ben­e­fits of this new indus­try, improve edu­ca­tion in decades to come, and reach enthu­si­asts, experts and the pub­lic, includ­ing edu­ca­tion­al set­tings through Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy, Engi­neer­ing, Arts and Math­e­mat­ics (STEAM) activ­i­ties.

Inmarsat Avi­a­tion senior direc­tor of AAM Antho­ny Spounc­er said: “To ensure the adop­tion of UAM is car­ried out in a man­aged and sophis­ti­cat­ed way, oper­a­tors must not only have the back­ing of the indus­try, but also pos­i­tive pub­lic accep­tance.

“This sim­ply will not be pos­si­ble with­out an invest­ment in sus­tained edu­ca­tion pro­grammes that reach com­mu­ni­ties out­side of our sec­tor, and Inmarsat is proud to work with the experts at Flight Crowd to help realise this objec­tive.”

Flight Crowd founder Mariya Tara­banovs­ka added: “It is cru­cial to raise aware­ness of the oper­a­tional ben­e­fits that UAM and AAM tech­nolo­gies offer to help alle­vi­ate any pub­lic con­cerns.

“We are excit­ed to com­bine our exper­tise to improve pub­lic per­cep­tion and desir­abil­i­ty of future flight, and we look for­ward to work­ing along­side Inmarsat to ensure a pos­i­tive and trans­for­ma­tive future for the indus­try.”

The part­ner­ship will high­light the impor­tance of future flight tech­nolo­gies in sup­port­ing the vital mobil­i­ty of peo­ple, goods and oth­er ser­vices to bring resources, events and ini­tia­tives to com­mu­ni­ties world­wide.

With more than ten mil­lion com­mer­cial uncrewed aer­i­al vehi­cles (UAVs) pre­dict­ed to be in flight by 2030, it is vital that the avi­a­tion indus­try improves pub­lic aware­ness and accep­tance of UAM.

In ear­ly May, Bell­wether Indus­tries began col­lab­o­rat­ing with Inmarsat to explore how its Velaris satel­lite com­mu­ni­ca­tions can opti­mise the future of intra-city trans­porta­tion ser­vices, by bring­ing its Volar UAM air­craft for per­son­al and pri­vate mobil­i­ty to mar­ket.

In March, Flight Crowd helped show­case devel­op­ments in the eVTOL air­craft and urban air mobil­i­ty mar­kets after announc­ing a part­ner­ship with Robert Llewelyn’s Ful­ly Charged LIVE, one of the world’s biggest clean ener­gy and elec­tric vehi­cle shows.