Fourth think tank about Urban Air Mobility in Latin America talks about regulations and airspace integration

Inno­va­tion in reg­u­la­tions and air­space inte­gra­tion in Latin Amer­i­ca were the next top­ics dis­cussed dur­ing Varon Vehi­cle’s fourth think tank, which con­tin­ued to focus on key talk­ing points in the indus­try.

Held on Thurs­day, 17th Sep­tem­ber, the pan­el con­sist­ed of Edgar Rivera, Direc­tor of Reg­u­la­tions at Aero­civ­il — Colom­bi­a’s Civ­il Avi­a­tion Author­i­ty, and Mauri­cio Gomez from the Pro­ce­dures Office of Aero­civ­il.

Also join­ing was Amit Gan­joo, Founder and CEO of ANRA Tech­nolo­gies, Avi­a­tion entre­pre­neur and Infra­struc­ture Advi­sor to the Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety, Rex Alexan­der, Peter Shan­non, Founder and Man­ag­ing Direc­tor of Radius Cap­i­tal, and Justin Towles, Senior Pol­i­cy Advi­sor in the Advanced Avi­a­tion Prac­tice at Akin Gump.

Intro­duc­ing this ses­sion, Felipe Varon, Founder and CEO of Varon Vehi­cles, said: “Urban Air Mobil­i­ty is def­i­nite­ly a new type of avi­a­tion, evokes a new type of air­craft and new way of trans­porta­tion. It is an excit­ing moment and as we move for­ward to imple­ment­ing this new type of avi­a­tion into our cities, that brings up a whole set of chal­lenges.

“One of the most impor­tant we need to resolve as an indus­try is how these air vehi­cles will be inte­grat­ed into the air­space; how are we going to orches­trate the traf­fic, make it safe, share that air­space with tra­di­tion­al air­craft like air­planes and heli­copters, and also new types of avi­a­tion such as drones and unmanned sys­tems?

“It’s very impor­tant as an indus­try to work togeth­er with the reg­u­lat­ing enti­ties and avi­a­tion author­i­ties, to inno­vate in every­thing need­ed to do with this new type of reg­u­la­tion that is required and cre­ate a new air­space inte­gra­tion archi­tec­ture — to make all of this hap­pen.”

Varon start­ed by say­ing that when talk­ing about Urban Air Mobil­i­ty, the indus­try needs to shift the mind­set from the aero­nau­ti­cal per­spec­tive in avi­a­tion, to an urban one. He asked Towles how he thinks all the tra­di­tion­al ele­ments of avi­a­tion can cope in an urban set­ting.

“We have to be care­ful that we’re not just build­ing air­craft specif­i­cal­ly from the air­craft and engi­neer­ing per­spec­tive, but from the cus­tomer-in-demand per­spec­tive of both the pas­sen­gers who are going to be fly­ing in these and cities that are going to be inte­grat­ed into them,” Towles said.

“This is a del­i­cate bal­ance of bring­ing things togeth­er to cre­ate a uni­fied mar­ket, and to try and land all of these at the same time while we’re hit­ting the tech­no­log­i­cal bar­ri­ers, air­space inte­gra­tion bar­ri­ers, phys­i­cal infra­struc­ture — while meet­ing pub­lic accep­tance and reg­u­la­to­ry hur­dles that we’re going to hit, not just at region­al but coun­try lev­els.”

While Towles added that this will be a huge chal­lenge, he said the indus­try needs to start crack­ing par­a­digms and social­is­ing its poten­tial with com­mu­ni­ties.

“If we’re just talk­ing among tech­nol­o­gists, vehi­cle man­u­fac­tur­ers and air­space pro­fes­sion­als with­in our imme­di­ate indus­try, this won’t end up work­ing,” he said.

“We real­ly need to engage at a high lev­el and make it a pri­or­i­ty as an indus­try to engage with local and city gov­ern­ments and the pub­lic to fig­ure out how this is going to inte­grate seam­less­ly in the end.”

Shan­non added onto this point, say­ing: “As we go and exploit this appli­ca­tion for Urban Air Mobil­i­ty, we have to be real­ly con­scious of some of the scal­ing fac­tors in the vehi­cle man­u­fac­tur­ing capac­i­ty, as well as the abil­i­ty to bring in the lev­els of tech­nol­o­gy to sup­port the den­si­ty of flight this Urban Air Mobil­i­ty appli­ca­tion real­ly demands, in order for it to be tru­ly cost-effec­tive and serve the lev­el of move­ment demand from peo­ple in that giv­en region.

“It is real­ly pru­dent for us as a com­mu­ni­ty to take those con­sid­er­a­tions into account, right along­side social accep­tance con­sid­er­a­tions, and be pur­pose­ful with craft­ing the types of mis­sions that we want to intro­duce so that we set our­selves up to be successful…so we are com­pat­i­ble with the scal­ing ramp that is going to be required for the aero­space indus­try to pro­duce these vehi­cles at the vol­ume and cost point that this appli­ca­tion demands.”

Varon then asked Alexan­der to give his view­point on the mobil­i­ty prob­lem, and how the indus­try recog­nis­es that in parts of the devel­op­ing world, includ­ing Latin Amer­i­ca.

“I think we in the USA, and oth­er coun­tries around the world, take for grant­ed the access we have to trans­porta­tion,” Alexan­der said.

“Oth­er coun­tries do not have that same access, so ven­tur­ing into this third dimen­sion of trav­el is a great way to reduce this ground con­ges­tion and enhance safe­ty and secu­ri­ty for those areas that are a chal­lenge.

“Avi­a­tion trans­porta­tion rep­re­sents longer dis­tances, but Urban Air Mobil­i­ty is going to be con­duct­ed in a dif­fer­ent dimen­sion, so alti­tudes are going to be low­er and flight legs will be short­er. It’s going to need a par­a­digm shift in our thought process and inte­gra­tion is going to be huge. Local pol­i­cy and urban plan­ning is also going to be a major key to suc­cess, as well as proac­tive edu­ca­tion.”

ANRA Tech­nolo­gies is an offi­cial NASA col­lab­o­ra­tor for their Unmanned Aer­i­al Traf­fic Man­age­ment Sys­tem solu­tion, and Gan­joo gave his per­spec­tive on how the indus­try will move for­ward, and men­tioned a crawl-walk-run approach.

“There is a rea­son why the safe­ty stan­dards in avi­a­tion are high­er than any oth­er form of trans­porta­tion. If you are dri­ving your car and some­thing goes wrong, you pull over to the side of the road. But if you are in the sky and fly­ing your UAM air­craft, you can’t do that.

“You have to look at more than just the tech­no­log­i­cal aspects, there is the social accep­tance and reg­u­la­to­ry over­lay required based on the demo­graph­ics, coun­try and geog­ra­phy. What works in North Amer­i­ca and Europe might not work in Latin Amer­i­ca. You have to make those sub­tle changes.”

Gan­joo added though that the indus­try still needs to fac­tor in tran­si­tions which will require mixed-use air­space — such as low-fly­ing air­craft.

“How do you do this inte­gra­tion and ensure the safe­ty of the nation­al air­space sys­tem? How do you min­imise the air risk and also con­sid­er the ground risk at the same time? Doing an oper­a­tion in Man­hat­tan has a high­er risk than doing it in the mid­dle of corn­fields in Iowa.”

Gomez man­ages the UTM sys­tems in Colom­bia on behalf of the coun­try’s civ­il avi­a­tion author­i­ty, and talk­ing from a Latin Amer­i­ca per­spec­tive, he elab­o­rat­ed on the ear­li­er points both Shan­non and Alexan­der raised about edu­ca­tion.

He said the coun­try has begun a process to teach both exter­nal and inter­nal ‘cus­tomers’, which includes the gen­er­al pub­lic and those work­ing with­in the civ­il avi­a­tion author­i­ty, about the aero­nau­ti­cal mar­ket. This includ­ed teach­ing them how the air­space is used with oth­er air­craft, such as drones, at alti­tudes of 400 metres and below.

Gomez also men­tioned that the civ­il avi­a­tion author­i­ty in Colom­bia is already work­ing with Varon Vehi­cles on its Urban Air Mobil­i­ty con­cept.

He said: “We tell him whether it is pos­si­ble or not to do this, with the infra­struc­ture we cur­rent­ly have. The indus­try and author­i­ties shall work step-by-step togeth­er, so that any com­pa­nies which want to devel­op some­thing like this is not going to invent some­thing that can’t be applied in this coun­try.

“At the civ­il avi­a­tion author­i­ty, this step-by-step approach which has been devel­oped by the indus­try will be shown to the dif­fer­ent enti­ties, so they are also aware of how it is mov­ing for­ward and what it wants to do — so the reg­u­la­to­ry bod­ies can get pre­pared in future to imple­ment a great sys­tem.”

Also com­ment­ing on the Urban Air Mobil­i­ty per­spec­tive, Rivera added that urban trans­port in Colom­bi­a’s cap­i­tal city Bogo­ta isn’t as effi­cient as it should be and its road infra­struc­ture has­n’t grown at the same pace as the city.

“The idea would be to put togeth­er the require­ments in terms of reg­u­la­tion so that the urban trans­port can be inte­grat­ed with the reg­u­la­tion ele­ments for the air trans­port or air mobil­i­ty over­all. This would be our first approach,” he said.

The next think tank will be this Thurs­day, 24th Sep­tem­ber from 12noon to 1pm EDT, and focus on Latin Amer­i­can Cities Imple­men­ta­tion.

Fol­low­ing the final ses­sion on 14th Octo­ber, Varon Vehi­cles will host a three-day vir­tu­al sum­mit called Sky­scraper, tak­ing place from 18th-20th Novem­ber. The event will show­case the con­clu­sions and next steps need­ed to imple­ment Urban Air Mobil­i­ty in Latin Amer­i­ca.

To watch this dis­cus­sion in full, and to reg­is­ter for the remain­ing think tanks, vis­it www.varonvehicles.com/skyscraper.