UK Regional Air Mobility Index identifies up to 390 potential routes
According to EAMaven, there are 390 potential routes for advanced air mobility (AAM) services in the UK split between 32 regional airports excluding the London and large regional airports.
Only 38 of these routes overlap with commercial services offered in 2019 so there are 358 unique routes that operators are not looking at. The total addressable market is 5 million travellers in one week who are making journeys greater than 60 nautical miles.
The top airport has 28 routes where the next has 27 but has been in the press recently for all the wrong reasons. If a reasonable number of those travellers switched to AAM services they would collectively save over 1700 years of time over travelling on other surface modes of transport. These travellers would then increase economic activity by around £430 million just by having more time in a day to be productive.
EAMaven partner and co-founder Darrell Swanson explained: “It was fortuitous that the same day that we published our paper on distributed aviation, NASA published its paper on regional air mobility (RAM).
“UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) engaged us to look at 20 potential routes across the UK as a demonstration of what is possible, so we looked at 14 eCTOL routes and six eVTOL routes, where a total of 224 aircraft are needed of which 160 are eVTOL and 64 19-seat fixed-wing electric aircraft, saving 9,000 tons of carbon emissions.
“In terms of economic stimulation, we are looking at about 11 person years per week or 528 years on an annualised basis, generating about 3.1 million per aircraft or 704 million altogether. In terms of aircraft utilisation, we are looking at about 1854 hours depending on whether it is an eVTOL or eCTOL aircraft.”
Co-founder Jarek Zych continued: “When we started working on the ram index
and the methodology, we were wondering what type of data sets would best describe our analysis to find out how travellers travel between certain places.
“Traditional Aviation data does not necessarily give any insights on travellers that travel from places not covered by traditional aviation services, so we thought that the best use of data and analysis would be with mobility data.
“It covers all modes of transport, so we use this data to analyse all kinds of movements within the UK. We analysed all 36 regional airports and how people travel between those places and used several factors for our indexing methodology.
“Out of this analysis we identified 390 routes that could be utilised from those Regional and Business Airports (RABA) airports. We analysed more than 1,000 routes based on certain distance thresholds, so the total addressable market for this assignment was more than five million travellers per week, or more than 242 million annually.
“Our analysis indicated that more than 80 percent of travellers travel by car, producing significant carbon emissions, and more than 20 are business travellers.”
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) engaged EAMaven to analyse 20 potential routes across the UK to assess the viability of advanced air mobility (AAM) in the UK, and chose 14 electric conventional take-off and landing (eCTOL) and six eVTOL routes.
