Skyportz releases first Australian vertiport design

Sky­portz will release today the design for the first ver­ti­port in Aus­tralia to ser­vice the emerg­ing elec­tric air taxi indus­try at the Aus­tralian Asso­ci­a­tion for Uncrewed Sys­tems (AAUS) annu­al Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty sum­mit in Mel­bourne.

The ver­ti­port will be locat­ed at Caribbean Park in Melbourne’s east, which worked with Con­tr­eras Earl Archi­tects, to70 avi­a­tion, Arup and Microflite to come up with a prac­ti­cal, mod­u­lar design.

Sky­portz CEO Clem New­ton-Brown said: “With the devel­op­ment of a ver­ti­port in a busi­ness park we are break­ing the nexus between avi­a­tion and air­ports.

“How­ev­er com­mu­ni­ty sup­port is going to be the key to the devel­op­ment of these ser­vices, so the Caribbean Park ver­ti­port is the first in a net­work of sites we will estab­lish in advance of the air­craft becom­ing oper­a­tional.”

The Civ­il Avi­a­tion Safe­ty Author­i­ty (CASA) recent­ly released a roadmap for the intro­duc­tion of advanced air mobil­i­ty (AAM) to Aus­tralia, and var­i­ous states are also try­ing to attract invest­ment.

Caribbean Park man­ag­ing direc­tor Ben Spoon­er added: “We are strate­gi­cal­ly and ide­al­ly placed to host the first Sky­portz in Aus­tralia and we hope that in time, a vari­ety of new and emerg­ing busi­ness­es take advan­tage of this lead­ing infra­struc­ture.

to70 senior avi­a­tion con­sul­tant Phil Owen com­ment­ed: “The Caribbean Park site is per­fect­ly sit­u­at­ed on a very large open site with good access and a man­age­able obsta­cle envi­ron­ment that allows approach­es into wind and depar­tures from mul­ti­ple direc­tions.”

Arup avi­a­tion skills leader Ronan Delaney con­tin­ued: “Ver­ti­ports need to be designed to be flex­i­ble for the many poten­tial futures that AAM can bring. Pas­sen­ger expe­ri­ence, bag­gage han­dling, secu­ri­ty screen­ing, fire engi­neer­ing, bat­tery charg­ing infra­struc­ture, trans­port net­work plan­ning, acoustic and envi­ron­men­tal impacts are all exam­ples of what needs to be incor­po­rat­ed into ver­ti­port designs.”

Con­tr­eras Earl Archi­tects direc­tor Rafael Con­tr­eras, said: “We found­ed our com­pa­ny to design orig­i­nal, inno­v­a­tive build­ings like Sky­portz using advanced tech­nol­o­gy with recy­clable alu­mini­um. The sys­tem is light­weight, pre­fab­ri­cat­ed and assem­bled on site, so that it can be adapt­ed and con­fig­ured for a broad range of set­tings and scaled for mass pro­duc­tion.”

Microflite chief oper­at­ing offi­cer Rod­ney Hig­gins con­clud­ed: “Caribbean Park has been used for heli­copter trans­fers for many years and we look for­ward to util­is­ing this facil­i­ty and the broad­er Sky­portz net­work.”

Last month, Sky­portz was announced as ‘Start-up of the Year’ final­ist in the Aus­tralian Avi­a­tion Awards for its work in devel­op­ing the land­ing infra­struc­ture prop­er­ty part­ner­ships in advance of the intro­duc­tion of elec­tric air taxis.

In March, Sky­portz, Sea World Heli­copters, Secure Park­ing and Gold Coast May­or Tom Tate joined forces to make SE Queens­land the cen­tre of the emerg­ing elec­tric air taxi indus­try in Aus­tralia, in time for the Bris­bane Olympics.