“From Helicopters to eVTOLs”: NTA, JR-West Innovations Collaborate to Bring Flying Taxis to Japan

The six-month long Osa­ka Expo 2025 is less than two and a half years away, and with the organ­is­ers promis­ing “fleets of air taxis” to fly the pub­lic and exhibitors to and from the event, this is the place to be for the eVTOL Indus­try.

While the major exhi­bi­tion aims to high­light Japan’s indus­try and boost eco­nom­ic growth, many sug­gest this also will be the moment that kick­starts the fly­ing taxi indus­try. Local Sky­Drive will play an impor­tant role along­side oth­ers like Joby, Volo­copter and EHang.

There­fore, it is no sur­prise that Nip­pon Trav­el Agency (NTA), a glob­al leader in all-things trav­el and JR-West Inno­va­tions, a com­pa­ny on the cut­ting-edge of new tech­nolo­gies, are col­lab­o­rat­ing to bring eVTOL flight tourism to Japan, reports akihabaranews.com.

Under the strapline “From Heli­copters to eVTOLs”, the part­ners organ­ised a two-day con­fer­ence last week­end (Novem­ber 11th-12th) high­light­ing a pro­posed flight route between Osa­ka Yao Air­port and Yumebu­tai, locat­ed on the arti­fi­cial­ly cre­at­ed island of Awa­ji. A trip that can take up to 80 min­utes by car (3 pay tolls along the way), but around 15 min­utes by air taxi. Con­fer­ence tick­ets sold out in three weeks.

A spokesper­son for the project com­ment­ed, “Through this ini­tia­tive, we will work to improve social recog­ni­tion and accep­tance so that fly­ing taxis will become an impor­tant means of trans­porta­tion in the future.”

This is not the first col­lab­o­ra­tion.

Back in August, dur­ing the world’s largest vir­tu­al real­i­ty event, held in the Meta­verse, and organ­ised by VR Corps HIKKY, a vir­tu­al-look­ing Osa­ka Sta­tion “Branch” was cre­at­ed.

At this branch, vis­i­tors can expe­ri­ence avatar online cus­tomer ser­vice through “Time Rep,” a remote ser­vice sys­tem, oper­at­ed by UsideU, intro­duced by NTA and cre­at­ed by JR-West Inno­va­tions.

Then, the fol­low­ing month JR-West, as part of a con­sor­tium, received a finan­cial grant from the Osa­ka Pre­fec­tur­al Gov­ern­ment. Oth­er mem­bers include Mit­sui, Japan Aero­space Explo­ration Agency (JAXA), Ogawi Air and Ter­ra Drone.

Japan: Osa­ka Allo­cates Grants for eVTOL Devel­op­ment

Man­dat­ed to cre­ate a plat­form for an air mobil­i­ty inte­grat­ed oper­a­tions man­age­ment sys­tem, it includes assis­tance in the cre­ation of an Osa­ka Kan­sai Expo Flight Coor­di­na­tion Cen­tre, as well as stud­ies and prac­ti­cal exper­i­ments aim­ing to pro­vide a safe envi­ron­ment for eVTOL flights, both under nor­mal con­di­tions and in emer­gen­cies. Mem­bers will share a pool of USD210,000 amongst sev­en oth­er con­sor­tia.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.ntainbound.com/

http://www.jrw-inv.co.jp

(News Source: https://akihabaranews.com/)

(top pic: METI/Ken Okuya­ma Design)