Lyte Aviation and AAM Institute launch Seattle ferry alternatives with SkyBus LA-44

UK-based Lyte Avi­a­tion has signed a new­ly rat­i­fied part­ner­ship with the Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty (AAM) Insti­tute for its Sky­Bus LA-44 40-seater eVTOL. It is also design­ing a car­go vari­ant, SkyTruck LA-44C, offer­ing a pay­load capac­i­ty of 4.5 tons.

The air­craft is designed to be five times more fuel effi­cient than a heli­copter and 10 times less noise pol­lut­ing, with con­sid­er­ably few­er main­te­nance, repair and oper­a­tions (MRO) costs. With its tan­dem tilt-wing tech­nol­o­gy, pow­er will come from hybrid hydro­gen elec­tric tur­bo­props and elec­tric engines.

Lyte Avi­a­tion founder and CEO Fresh­ta Farzam said: “Our future Sky­Bus is an ide­al propo­si­tion for the Bain­bridge Island-Seat­tle-Red­mond con­nec­tion, and will pro­vide a safe, con­ve­nient, afford­able, sus­tain­able and much faster trans­porta­tion option.

“The Sky­Bus is an ide­al solu­tion to extend cur­rent fer­ry trans­port solu­tions on water­ways in the near future for pas­sen­ger mass and car­go tran­sit. We decid­ed to start this project with Dan Sloat, AAM Insti­tute pres­i­dent and his team.”

The com­pa­ny plans to enter the mar­ket with­in five to six years, hav­ing entered a part­ner­ship with the AAM Insti­tute, an Amer­i­can non-prof­it cor­po­ra­tion, ded­i­cat­ed to edu­cat­ing and advo­cat­ing for the broad­est pub­lic ben­e­fit through the AAM ecosys­tem glob­al­ly.

Sloat com­ment­ed: “Lyte Aviation’s LA-44 Sky­Bus is a very promis­ing eVTOL design and with a pas­sen­ger capac­i­ty 10 times that of most com­peti­tors, we are con­fi­dent Lyte can bring about mean­ing­ful change in trans­porta­tion in terms of greater equi­ty, inclu­sion, and acces­si­bil­i­ty.”

Fresh­ta added: “We chose to design an alter­na­tive to the fer­ry route from Bain­bridge Island to Seat­tle, plus the ground traf­fic from Seat­tle to Red­mond, to sup­port the employ­ees of the cor­po­rate head­quar­ters of Microsoft. There are almost 53,000 employ­ees trav­el­ling each day over water­ways and con­gest­ed road­ways.

“Soon, after a long work­ing day, the dai­ly com­mute of around 40km will take only ten min­utes instead of 90. Sky­Bus can take off from a ver­ti­port at the Microsoft cam­pus straight and land at a ver­ti­port pad on the island.”