Singapore and Asia: “The Land of Millionaires, The Future of Urban Air Mobility… and Volocopter”

Thank you to webintravel.com for that nifty head­line as well as gain­ing a recent scoop by inter­view­ing Hon Lung Chu, Head of Volocopter’s Sin­ga­pore and South­east Asia Busi­ness Devel­op­ment.

Talk to the dis­cern­ing doyens of the impend­ing elec­tric avi­a­tion rev­o­lu­tion and Asia, in par­tic­u­lar Sin­ga­pore, is viewed as the Num­ber 1 region for Urban Air Mobil­i­ty (UAM) growth dur­ing the next 10 years.

The 2021 ‘Asian Air Pas­sen­ger Urban Air Mobil­i­ty In Per­spec­tive’ report states, “The Asia-Pacif­ic region is a key mar­ket for UAM and for pre­mi­um trans­porta­tion modes in mar­kets like Chi­na, India, Sin­ga­pore, and South Korea that have sig­nif­i­cant con­cen­tra­tions of dol­lar mil­lion­aires and noto­ri­ous­ly heavy road traf­fic.”

webintravel.com writes, “Accord­ing to a recent­ly-released report by glob­al bank HSBC, in eight years, over 13 per­cent of Singapore’s adult pop­u­la­tion will be worth USD1 mil­lion or more, sur­pass­ing the pro­por­tion of mil­lion­aires in the US, Chi­na, and 12 oth­er Asia-Pacif­ic economies.

“By 2030, the bank pre­dicts that only 8.8 per­cent of U.S. adults and 4.4 per­cent of Chi­nese adults will be mil­lion­aires. Among Asian economies, Aus­tralia will come in sec­ond to Sin­ga­pore with around 12.5 per­cent of its adult pop­u­la­tion as mil­lion­aires by that time, and Hong Kong will come in third with 11.1 per­cent.”

It is of no sur­prise that lead­ing eVTOL com­pa­ny, Volo­copter, is plac­ing an ear­ly mark­er on the region. With 500 staff employed cur­rent­ly in Bruch­sal, Munich and Sin­ga­pore, there is a deter­mi­na­tion to gain full and com­mer­cial cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for its three dif­fer­ent air­craft by 2024, ready for launch­es at the Paris Olympic Games and Sin­ga­pore, from where it intends to expand to oth­er Asian mar­kets.

Volo­copter First Flight at Mari­na Bay, Sin­ga­pore

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Jour­nal­ist Yeo Siew Hoon asks the ques­tions.

You’ve announced plans to launch in Sin­ga­pore and the Paris Olympics by 2024. Why did you pick those two cities?

We looked at 200 cities and Paris and Sin­ga­pore appeared in the top 100. Paris, because of the Olympics, a glob­al event and Sin­ga­pore, a prac­ti­cal entry into the APAC mar­ket. A sup­port­ive gov­ern­ment with a for­ward think­ing reg­u­la­tor is a big piece of it. We are work­ing hand in hand with the reg­u­la­tors to enable the ser­vice to launch. They have to work as hard as we do.

Can you give us an update on the progress of test flights so far?

We have done more than 1,500 test flights around the world. We have a test field in the south of Ger­many and are run­ning dai­ly reg­u­lar test flights on the path to cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for the air­craft. We now have 10 staff in Sin­ga­pore and we plan to grow sig­nif­i­cant­ly in the next 12–18 months. We are slow­ly ramp­ing up pub­lic aware­ness.

We’re expect­ing to get cer­ti­fi­ca­tion in 2024, that’s one of the key mile­stones. We are fol­low­ing tra­di­tion­al avi­a­tion rules when it comes to cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, that takes many years to finalise. The good news is, we are locked for cer­ti­fi­ca­tion with EASA (Euro­pean Union). We are the first in the world for cer­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­gramme for the eVTOL.

Hon Lung Chu

What are your plans for the ser­vice in Sin­ga­pore? I under­stand it will be more of touris­tic flights rather than com­mut­ing ser­vices. What’s the think­ing behind this?

We deploy where it cre­ates val­ue. We are not here to repli­cate an exist­ing ser­vice. In Sin­ga­pore, the roads are sel­dom con­gest­ed. We see a lot of tourists com­ing in and our goal is to take that to the next lev­el. Our mar­ket sur­vey in 2020 indi­cat­ed that demand for tourist flights is strong in the local mar­ket and when we did a fol­low-up sur­vey, it showed sig­nif­i­cant inter­est for a new attrac­tion such as a tourist flight that over the Mari­na Bay Sands area, Gar­dens By The Bay.

The eVTOL is capa­ble of fly­ing 30 min­utes but ini­tial­ly we want to be con­ser­v­a­tive – we will fly low­er alti­tude – 100 to 150m – for 15 min­utes. It will give bet­ter views, bet­ter noise pro­file and the pas­sen­gers will have a much nicer expe­ri­ence.

How do you antic­i­pate demand?

Well, two years ago, for the Paris flights, we pre-sold 1,000 tick­ets priced at 300 Euros each and they were sold with­in a week. We expect to launch at a sim­i­lar price here, and we expect sim­i­lar inter­est.

What’s next after touris­tic flights?

We will go cross-bor­der to Johor, Malaysia and Batam and Bin­tan, Indone­sia – places where we can add val­ue and offer con­sumers a choice. Our range is 35km, so we are eval­u­at­ing those routes.

How many eVTOLs do you plan to deploy in Sin­ga­pore and what are your plans for the rest of Asia?

We will start with a hand­ful for the tourist flights. We do expect demand to out­strip sup­ply but we believe in safe­ty first. There will be one pilot, one pas­sen­ger per flight. We will move towards full auton­o­my with­in three to four years of ser­vice.

In cities with bad traf­fic, VTOL should be able to address those grid­lock sit­u­a­tions well?

Our belief is that the air­port to city cen­tre route is low hang­ing fruit. Volo­copter is designed for point-to-point intra-city trav­el. Mega cities such as Jakar­ta could ben­e­fit from Volo­copter – it’d be like build­ing a new sub­way in the city. We have a joint ven­ture in Chi­na, as well as in South Korea. Japan Air­lines has pre-ordered 100 of our air­craft and we are work­ing towards a launch in Japan around World Expo in Osa­ka in 2025.

In Dubai, Fal­con Avi­a­tion Ser­vices has signed a let­ter of intent for up to 35 Embraer EVE eVTOL air taxis, with deliv­er­ies begin­ning in four years, and plans to run touris­tic flights too over the Atlantis. Do you forsee more com­pe­ti­tion in this sec­tor in the years ahead?

We are hap­py to see more par­tic­i­pants com­ing in. We start­ed in 2011, when there wasn’t much hap­pen­ing. More entrants is an attest­ment of the seri­ous­ness of the poten­tial. Because we have been around longer, we are clear on design­ing air­craft for a spe­cif­ic pur­pose, we are not design­ing a gener­ic catch-all air­craft, this is one of the key dif­fer­en­tia­tors for us. The mar­ket will be big enough for all play­ers.

What are the biggest chal­lenges of build­ing out such a new ser­vice as this? How are you address­ing infra­struc­ture issues?

With Volo­copter, infra­struc­ture is top of mind. We pub­lished the Volo­port hand­book last year – our own vision with min­i­mal foot­print, envi­ron­men­tal design, high through­put, and can be quick­ly deployed on land, float­ing plat­forms or rooftops – and gave it to part­ners inter­est­ed in build­ing Volo­ports with us. We are an OEM (Orig­i­nal Equip­ment Man­u­fac­tur­er), we do not want to be the air­port as well. We are work­ing with air­ports in Paris and Rome, and in Sin­ga­pore, we worked with Sky­ports to build the first Volo­type pro­to­type on the float, which has since been tak­en down, and now we are work­ing to build a Volo­port near the cruise ter­mi­nal.

The 2021 Asian Air Pas­sen­ger Urban Air Mobil­i­ty In Per­spec­tive report notes, “UAM will cer­tain­ly com­ple­ment oth­er mid-mile trans­porta­tion sys­tems, but will need to be well inte­grat­ed with eScoot­er, ride hail­ing, taxi and oth­er trans­port ser­vices to ensure seam­less inte­gra­tion and a com­plete inter­modal transport/mobility as a ser­vice solu­tion for cities.” What kind of part­ner­ships are you build­ing on to inte­grate your ser­vices with the rest of mobil­i­ty?

In 2019, we worked on a fea­si­bil­i­ty study with Grab to iden­ti­fy the path for­ward. We see part­ners like Grab, sim­i­lar with Kakao in Korea, as valu­able part of our ecosys­tem. We want it to be a seam­less end-to-end expe­ri­ence for the cus­tomer, with our inten­tion to enable an A to B ser­vice.

So one day, I will be able to book a Volo­copter on Grab?

That’s the vision.

Giv­en the air­craft runs on bat­tery life, what steps are being made to ensure it meets sus­tain­abil­i­ty con­cerns giv­en Singapore’s Green Plan of 2030?

As a group, and speak­ing for myself per­son­al­ly, we are very pas­sion­ate about mak­ing an impact. We see this as the chal­lenge of our gen­er­a­tion. Sus­tain­abil­i­ty is built into the work we do. We have designed a swap­pable bat­tery sys­tem – we are able to, with­in five min­utes, take bat­tery packs out of the air­craft, replace with fresh­ly charged and ther­mal­ly cooled ones, to ensure opti­mal per­for­mance and fast turn­around. For the used bat­ter­ies, we will charge and cool them to ensure the life­time is extend­ed, to stretch out the use of each bat­tery to min­imise the impact.

This project def­i­nite­ly calls for heavy invest­ments upfront. How are you going to make it all back?

We believe we have a sound busi­ness mod­el. Yes, there are heavy costs upfront. For the touris­tic routes, we can charge more, beyond the com­mut­ing price. We see the longterm poten­tial. Once it is proven out, we can then scale quick­ly and sig­nif­i­cant­ly – fly point to point and build out the net­work – and bring down the oper­a­tion costs.

(News Source: https://www.webintravel.com/)

(Pics: Volo­copter)