Middle East: Sky Alliance Launches Advanced Air Mobility Test Site in Riyadh

SALAAM.earth (Sky Alliance for Auto­mat­ed Air Mobil­i­ty) has announced the launch of its first AAM test site in Sau­di Ara­bia, with oper­a­tions sched­uled to begin in Q1 2026 in Riyadh.

The test site will serve as a con­trolled real-world val­i­da­tion envi­ron­ment (Sand­box) designed to eval­u­ate air­craft oper­a­tions along­side the sup­port­ing sys­tems required for safe AAM deploy­ment, includ­ing ver­ti­ports, dig­i­tal air traf­fic man­age­ment and secure com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tems.

The first air­craft to par­tic­i­pate will be the Fly­Now eCopter, an elec­tric unmanned air taxi capa­ble of fly­ing up to 50 km at speeds of 130 km/h and car­ry­ing up to two pas­sen­gers or 200 kg of car­go.

The site will assess mul­ti­ple oper­a­tional use cas­es, includ­ing urban pas­sen­ger trans­port, logis­tics, and emer­gency response appli­ca­tions such as fire­fight­ing and med­ical evac­u­a­tion, eval­u­at­ing how elec­tric ver­ti­cal mobil­i­ty plat­forms per­form across real-world oper­a­tional sce­nar­ios.

The sand­box was ini­ti­at­ed by Fly­Now Ara­bia Ltd., a Sau­di-head­quatered com­pa­ny estab­lished to local­ize the pro­duc­tion, deploy­ment, and com­mer­cial­iza­tion of the eCopter devel­oped by Fly­Now Avi­a­tion GmbH (Aus­tria).

As the first oper­a­tional imple­men­ta­tion of the SALAAM.earth frame­work in Sau­di Ara­bia, the
test site brings togeth­er mem­ber orga­ni­za­tions across the AAM val­ue chain:

• Fly­Now Avi­a­tion pro­vides the eCopter plat­form
• Sky­roads deliv­ers dig­i­tal air traf­fic man­age­ment and auto­mat­ed flight coor­di­na­tion
• Uni­fied Avi­a­tion pro­vides ver­ti­port and land­ing infra­struc­ture solu­tions
• Quadron con­tributes cyber­se­cu­ri­ty exper­tise for safe­ty-crit­i­cal sys­tems
• Mako­nis deliv­ers secure dig­i­tal infra­struc­ture and sys­tem inte­gra­tion
• GEME-Avi­a­tion pro­vides avi­a­tion oper­a­tions exper­tise and project coor­di­na­tion
• Inter­na­tion­al Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty Trust (IAAM.Trust) pro­vides a frame­work for ver­i­fi­ca­tion and com­pli­ance of AAM vehi­cles oper­at­ing in low-alti­tude air­space

Yvonne Win­ter, Pres­i­dent of SALAAM.earth, said: “We are not just test­ing the eCopter. Our goal is to estab­lish a com­plete envi­ron­ment where next-gen­er­a­tion air­craft, includ­ing those from oth­er devel­op­ers, can be test­ed and inte­grat­ed into real-world infra­struc­ture.”

The sand­box sup­ports Sau­di Arabia’s Vision 2030 objec­tives by fos­ter­ing inno­va­tion and strength­en­ing advanced tech­nol­o­gy capa­bil­i­ties, while rein­forc­ing the Kingdom’s role as an ear­ly adopter of next-gen­er­a­tion mobil­i­ty.

SALAAM.earth (Sky Alliance for Auto­mat­ed Air Mobil­i­ty) is a non-prof­it asso­ci­a­tion found­ed in 2024 to do the coor­di­nat­ed devel­op­ment and oper­a­tional inte­gra­tion of Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty (AAM) ecosys­tems.

The alliance brings togeth­er air­craft devel­op­ers, infra­struc­ture providers, dig­i­tal air­space oper­a­tors, and tech­nol­o­gy part­ners to enable struc­tured imple­men­ta­tion of low-alti­tude
auto­mat­ed air mobil­i­ty.

Through a turnkey frame­work that aligns air­craft plat­forms, ver­ti­port infra­struc­ture, air traf­fic man­age­ment sys­tems, cyber­se­cu­ri­ty, and dig­i­tal inte­gra­tion, SALAAM.earth aims to reduce com­plex­i­ty and sup­port scal­able, safe deploy­ment of AAM envi­ron­ments across inter­na­tion­al mar­kets.