Valour Consultancy publishes new report which suggests more than 6,500 electric air taxis will be flying by 2050

A new report pub­lished by Val­our Con­sul­tan­cy has sug­gest­ed near­ly 7,000 elec­tric air taxis will be in oper­a­tion by 2050.

Accord­ing to report author Craig Fos­ter, out­side Chi­na, take-off and land­ing sites are expect­ed to remain heav­i­ly con­cen­trat­ed in megac­i­ties across much of the West­ern world, where high dis­pos­able incomes will enable enough of the afflu­ent pop­u­la­tion to adopt such ser­vices. Valour’s fore­cast expects the fleet to remain pre­dom­i­nant­ly Chi­na-domi­ciled over the course of the next 25 years.

He said: “Land­ing fees are a sig­nif­i­cant com­po­nent of cost per avail­able seat mile (CASM) and, togeth­er with huge­ly expen­sive and fre­quent bat­tery replace­ments, like­ly high insur­ance costs and pilot salaries, the long-tout­ed Uber Black pric­ing mod­el looks a dis­tant prospect.

“Chi­na is already build­ing ver­ti­ports at scale, which is not the case any­where else. This, in addi­tion to its unique­ly cen­tralised, top-down approach, gen­er­ous sub­si­dies sup­port­ing the devel­op­ment of its low-alti­tude econ­o­my, and plat­forms like EHang’s pilot­less EH216‑S being cer­ti­fied well ahead of over­seas rivals, puts it leagues ahead of any oth­er coun­try when it comes to pas­sen­ger eVTOL.”

The report high­lights stronger poten­tial in oth­er advanced air mobil­i­ty (AAM) seg­ments, with Fos­ter iden­ti­fy­ing region­al air mobil­i­ty (RAM) as a par­tic­u­lar­ly com­pelling oppor­tu­ni­ty. 

Car­go drones also present viable near-term oppor­tu­ni­ties, par­tic­u­lar­ly for indus­tri­al resup­ply where the incum­bent option is typ­i­cal­ly a crewed heli­copter that is both expen­sive and risky to oper­ate at low alti­tudes. 

The first deliv­er­ies of AutoFlight’s Car­ryAll sup­port this – with ini­tial cus­tomers order­ing the air­craft for off­shore car­go mis­sions. Deliv­ery to remote and poor­ly con­nect­ed com­mu­ni­ties, along­side grow­ing demand for mid­dle-mile logis­tics, will also dri­ve growth in this seg­ment, as will elec­tric and hybrid elec­tric air­craft deployed on spe­cial­ist mis­sions like emer­gency med­ical ser­vices. 

Fos­ter said: “With more than half of today’s 4,000-strong sub-50-seat fleet expect­ed to retire by 2040, there is a nat­ur­al replace­ment win­dow that aligns well with the entry-into-ser­vice time­lines of lead­ing elec­tric con­ven­tion­al take-off and land­ing (eCTOL) air­craft. 

“As many of these are hybrid-elec­tric designs that can also fly from the tens of thou­sands of under­utilised air­ports that already exist, the require­ment for invest­ment in new on-ground infra­struc­ture is sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­er.”

Tak­en togeth­er, the report tells a sto­ry that extends well beyond the air taxi nar­ra­tive that has attract­ed unprece­dent­ed invest­ment over recent years.

Indeed, Valour’s report fore­casts a glob­al in-ser­vice AAM fleet exceed­ing 19,500 air­craft by 2050 when RAM, car­go and spe­cial­ist mis­sions are added to pas­sen­ger eVTOLs.

Cru­cial­ly, the report’s cen­tral take­away is that these air­craft will large­ly com­ple­ment – not replace – exist­ing modes of trans­port such as heli­copters and light jets. It sug­gests that although there is a gen­uine mar­ket out there, it is much more mod­est in size than the wild­ly opti­mistic pro­jec­tions that defined the ear­ly 2020s SPAC boom. 

You can read the full report by click­ing here.