Skyportz wants industrial property for air taxi vertiports

Sky­portz CEO Clem New­ton-Brown called on indus­tri­al and com­mer­cial prop­er­ty own­ers to sign up to his sta­ble of poten­tial land­ing sites to sup­port elec­tric air taxis and drone deliv­ery ser­vices.

At yes­ter­day’s Sup­ply Chain & Indus­tri­al Ware­house sum­mit in Mel­bourne, he high­light­ed the impor­tant role that indus­tri­al and com­mer­cial prop­er­ty will have in devel­op­ing this indus­try.

He said: “There is no doubt the air­craft are com­ing, but if all they do is replace heli­copters on exist­ing routes then all we have achieved is a qui­eter, green­er replace­ment for heli­copters.

“This is undoubt­ed­ly good, but the true poten­tial for this indus­try will only come about if we break the nexus between avi­a­tion and air­ports, and the eas­i­est place to do this is not on city rooftops but in indus­tri­al and com­mer­cial areas.”

In August, Sky­portz released a con­cept plan for a ver­ti­port in the Caribbean Park com­mer­cial estate on the out­skirts of Mel­bourne.

Sky­portz releas­es first Aus­tralian ver­ti­port design

Sky­portz has been accu­mu­lat­ing sites in Aus­tralia since 2018 and now has over 400 prop­er­ty part­ners ready to build out a Sky­portz net­work.

New­ton-Brown con­tin­ued: “The low hang­ing fruit is indus­tri­al and com­mer­cial prop­er­ty and we are par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in part­ner­ing with com­pa­nies that have mul­ti­ple freight and logis­tics hubs.

“We could estab­lish a drone freight ser­vice in the short term with a view to these sites becom­ing the first ‘mini air­ports’ when the pas­sen­ger air­craft are approved for oper­a­tions.

“There is strong polit­i­cal sup­port to devel­op a new era in clean, green elec­tric avi­a­tion in Aus­tralia and we were so pleased to hear of the sup­port of our air reg­u­la­tor the Civ­il Avi­a­tion and Safe­ty Author­i­ty (CASA) this week.”

CASA direc­tor of avi­a­tion safe­ty Pip Spence added: “You can’t have a fly­ing taxi ser­vice until you have the ver­ti­ports at which eVTOLs can safe­ly land and take off. Aus­tralia is part of the glob­al effort to intro­duce this excit­ing new tech­nol­o­gy and we see indus­try col­lab­o­ra­tion as a key to its suc­cess­ful imple­men­ta­tion.”

He not­ed that with­in a month, CASA would be releas­ing a draft advi­so­ry cir­cu­lar on the design require­ments of ver­ti­ports. Fol­low­ing three months of con­sul­ta­tion a reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work for Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty will be devel­oped.

In Jan­u­ary, Sky­portz announced a part­ner­ship with Secure Park­ing, which could deliv­er up to 400 land­ing sites for eVTOL air­craft in Aus­tralia.

Sky­portz to work with Secure Park­ing in Aus­tralia and help deliv­er up to 400 poten­tial land­ing sites for eVTOL air­craft