Jaunt Air Mobility sets up Access Skyways to support advanced air mobility and announces first partners

eVTOL air­craft devel­op­er Jaunt Air Mobil­i­ty has estab­lished Access Sky­ways, a group of part­ner com­pa­nies which will help pro­vide exper­tise around the inte­gra­tion of Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty (AAM).

The com­pa­ny has ini­tial­ly signed Mem­o­ran­dums of Under­stand­ings with archi­tec­tur­al and engi­neer­ing firm PS&S Inte­grat­ed Ser­vices, and PRICE® Sys­tems, which spe­cialis­es in pre­dic­tive cost mod­el­ling and has the capa­bil­i­ty to cal­cu­late pas­sen­ger demand for air taxi ser­vices.

Jaun­t’s Chief Com­mer­cial Offi­cer Simon Briceno revealed details at Urban Air Mobil­i­ty 2020: Future of Aer­i­al Trans­port and Logis­tics — a vir­tu­al half-day con­fer­ence which took place last Thurs­day.

He said: “In the very near future, peo­ple will have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to take an air taxi to reduce com­mute time to city cen­tres, air­ports, and to con­nect with mass tran­sit sys­tems.

“As a com­pa­ny, we recog­nise the impor­tance of devel­op­ing oper­a­tional require­ments to design safe and acces­si­ble ver­ti­ports.  Our Access Sky­ways part­ners bring sig­nif­i­cant expe­ri­ence to the process – from con­cept to oper­a­tions.”

Access Sky­ways will help organ­i­sa­tions nav­i­gate the com­plex­i­ty of intro­duc­ing a new sys­tem of tran­sit or ver­ti­ports to air oper­a­tions. It will address key fac­tors along the AAM ecosys­tem with fact-based data and ana­lyt­ics, such as infra­struc­ture design, sup­ply and demand cost analy­sis, flight oper­a­tions, elec­tri­fi­ca­tion, exist­ing air­ports and heli­ports, and main­te­nance and repair.

Jaunt is one of 10 OEMs which are part of Uber Ele­vate’s grow­ing ecosys­tem and the com­pa­ny is cur­rent­ly devel­op­ing its Jour­ney Air Taxi, which is a Reduced rotor Oper­at­ing Speed air­craft and per­forms like an air­plane but takes off and lands like a heli­copter.

Weigh­ing 980lbs, the air­craft has a range of 80 miles and will be able to trav­el at speeds of up to 175mph. Jaunt has also said the air­craft is 100 times qui­eter than a con­ven­tion­al heli­copter.

Accord­ing to the com­pa­ny’s time­line, Jaunt plans to cer­ti­fy under Part 29, sin­gle pilot instru­ment flight rules (IFR), from 2023.

Mar­tin Peryea, Jaunt Air Mobil­i­ty’s CEO, added: “As a man­u­fac­tur­er of the Jaunt Jour­ney, eVTOL (elec­tric Ver­ti­cal Take­off and Land­ing) air­craft, we are com­mit­ted to sup­port­ing oper­a­tors in address­ing the require­ments to facil­i­tate the inte­gra­tion of this gen­er­a­tion of envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly air­craft.”

Since the con­cept of air taxis and AAM began, PRICE^® Sys­tems has been an inte­gral part of unit­ing the air vehi­cle inno­va­tors and AAM ser­vice providers, pro­vid­ing mod­el-based cost engi­neer­ing tech­nol­o­gy and con­sult­ing to pre­dict total life­cy­cle costs (PRICE Cost Ana­lyt­ics™) – down to the elec­tric com­po­nents and trans­porta­tion infra­struc­ture.

“The future of flight is real and we are excit­ed to bring our aero­nau­tics cost esti­mat­ing expe­ri­ence to the table and join a strong group of com­pa­nies whose paths have crossed before,” said Antho­ny DeMar­co, CEO at PRICE^® Sys­tems.

Nate Siriro­jvi­suth, PhD, Sr. Cost Research Ana­lyst at PRICE^® Sys­tems, recent­ly pub­lished a mar­ket study on eVTOL taxi ser­vices in coop­er­a­tion with Jaunt and Geor­gia Tech that was pre­sent­ed at the Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety Forum.

He added: “We have great eVTOL tech­nol­o­gy, but we need to opti­mise it for the mar­ket, not just per­for­mance.”

We’ll be speak­ing to Briceno in more detail about Access Sky­ways this week, so keep an eye on our web­site for more infor­ma­tion.