Supernal and Korean Air to develop advanced air mobility vehicles and operational ecosystem

Super­nal has announced a strate­gic part­ner­ship with Kore­an Air to help accel­er­ate the design of an eVTOL vehi­cle and devel­op the AAM ecosys­tem in Korea, includ­ing exchang­ing tech­ni­cal data and joint­ly par­tic­i­pat­ing in work­shops and pro­grams to help devel­op an AAM ecosys­tem.

Kore­an Air will pro­vide insights about Kore­an-mar­ket require­ments and AAM air­craft spec­i­fi­ca­tions. The com­pa­nies will also explore ways to effec­tive­ly test the oper­a­tion of Supernal’s eVTOL vehi­cle and AAM infra­struc­ture net­works.

“A core part of our strat­e­gy to advance Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty is the need for robust col­lab­o­ra­tion and part­ner­ships with indus­try lead­ers like Kore­an Air,” said Jai­won Shin, pres­i­dent of Hyundai Motor Group and CEO of Super­nal. “Kore­an Air’s exper­tise in build­ing scal­able avi­a­tion sys­tems, togeth­er with Supernal’s vision for mobil­i­ty, will help ush­er in this excit­ing new era of air trav­el.”

The Kore­an gov­ern­ment plans to utilise 5G and LTE mobile com­mu­ni­ca­tion capa­bil­i­ties to enable the seam­less flow of infor­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion by pilots. The Kore­an gov­ern­ment also plans to cre­ate ded­i­cat­ed AAM oper­at­ing cor­ri­dors sep­a­rate from heli­copters and oth­er low-lev­el air­space users.

These cor­ri­dors will be cus­tomised for safe and effi­cient flight between ver­ti­ports, max­imis­ing the effi­cien­cy of AAM routes and min­imis­ing any inter­ac­tion between eVTOL and oth­er air­craft types.

Kore­an Air CEO Kee­hong Woo added: “We will coop­er­ate in deriv­ing require­ments for eVTOL air­craft opti­mised for UAM oper­a­tions based on Kore­an Air’s accu­mu­lat­ed data on air­craft oper­a­tion and cus­tomer board­ing expe­ri­ence. Based on this, we will devel­op a busi­ness mod­el and build an oper­at­ing ecosys­tem suit­able for Korea’s envi­ron­ment.”

Ele­ments that Super­nal plans to devel­op include after­mar­ket prod­ucts and ser­vices, inter­con­nect­ed mobil­i­ty solu­tions, phys­i­cal and dig­i­tal infra­struc­ture net­works, and solu­tions for estab­lish­ing and expand­ing an indus­try work­force.

The com­pa­ny is focused on build­ing a robust AAM ecosys­tem that will enable the indus­try to reach expect­ed demand in the com­ing decades, with a goal to inte­grate eVTOL vehi­cles into exist­ing trans­porta­tion net­works.

Last month, Super­nal opened its pri­ma­ry R&D facil­i­ty in Fre­mont, Cal­i­for­nia, mark­ing the third site to open this year, fol­low­ing announce­ments of its engi­neer­ing head­quar­ters in Irvine, Cal­i­for­nia, and a pol­i­cy and com­mer­cial hub in Wash­ing­ton, DC.

Super­nal opens new R&D site in Cal­i­for­nia, the company’s third facil­i­ty open­ing this year