Varon Vehicles’ final think tank concludes with second discussion about vertiports

The eighth and final think tank led by Varon Vehi­cles fin­ished with anoth­er bril­liant con­ver­sa­tion about ver­ti­ports in Latin Amer­i­ca.

Since host­ing its first ses­sion on August 4th, the com­pa­ny has brought indus­try stake­hold­ers into con­ver­sa­tions about the imple­men­ta­tion of Urban Air Mobil­i­ty in the region. Top­ics have includ­ed reg­u­la­tions, insur­ance, air­space inte­gra­tion and city imple­men­ta­tion.

The lat­est one-hour dis­cus­sion on Octo­ber 14th fea­tured Charles Clauser, Senior Direc­tor of Archi­tec­ture and Urban Air Mobil­i­ty Lead at PS&S Inte­grat­ed Ser­vices, Don­ald Berchoff, CEO at TruWeath­er Solu­tions, Daniel Har­ris, who works in the Tur­bo­props Engine Divi­sion at Gen­er­al Elec­tric Avi­a­tion, Ser­gio Cecut­ta, Part­ner at SMG Con­sult­ing and Basil Yap, Vice Pres­i­dent at Hov­e­con.

Top­ics dis­cussed includ­ed Inte­gra­tion of Dif­fer­ent Busi­ness Cas­es, Required Cus­tomer Ser­vices, Real Estate Infra­struc­ture, Weath­er Sys­tems, Ener­gy Self Gen­er­a­tion Sys­tems and City Growth and Land Val­ue Gen­er­a­tion.

Intro­duc­ing the ses­sion, Felipe Varon, CEO and Founder of Varon Vehi­cles, said: “We want to dig more into ver­ti­ports because it’s there where all the mag­ic of Urban Air Mobil­i­ty will hap­pen. Let’s think about what we are try­ing to devel­op. What we are doing at Varon Vehi­cles is infra­struc­ture net­works, and those are a col­lec­tion of ver­ti­ports con­nect­ed with a fleet of air vehi­cles ser­vic­ing between them.

“That’s an inter­est­ing pro­pos­al for cities when you com­pare them to for exam­ple, with metro sys­tems or oth­er exist­ing mobil­i­ty infra­struc­ture, where you have metro sta­tions, rail sys­tems, link­ing them and trains ser­vic­ing between them.

“When you com­pare the cost per mile of those sys­tems and extend­ing that to road sys­tems and oth­er phys­i­cal mobil­i­ty infra­struc­ture, there is tremen­dous poten­tial to break the sta­tus quo because in the case of urban air mobil­i­ty we’re talk­ing about vir­tu­al infra­struc­ture. So it’s real­ly about where we’re going to place our ver­ti­ports.”

Start­ing the con­ver­sa­tion, Varon asked Clauser how we inte­grate all the var­i­ous busi­ness cas­es — from air taxi and pas­sen­ger trans­porta­tion to freight-car­ry­ing logis­tics — into the ver­ti­port idea. And whether we will have dif­fer­ent busi­ness cas­es merg­ing into a sin­gle ver­ti­port, or dif­fer­ent ver­ti­ports for dif­fer­ent pur­pos­es.

Clauser said: “I’ve been think­ing about this for a while and my pro­jec­tion is that we will see both sce­nar­ios, mean­ing that there will be indi­vid­ual ver­ti­ports that serve par­tic­u­lar func­tions that are unique enough that they can stand alone and cer­tain­ly there are going to be oth­er ver­ti­port facil­i­ties that can draw into and draw upon var­i­ous ser­vice sec­tors that can serve the com­mu­ni­ty both near and some­what far with Urban Air Mobil­i­ty.

“The place­ment of these ver­ti­ports, whether indi­vid­ual or shared use, can’t real­ly hap­pen with­out the approval of the com­mu­ni­ties in which they’re to be placed. The munic­i­pal­i­ties have to have the reg­u­la­tions in place them­selves, maybe in the state or in Colom­bia, the var­i­ous depart­ments. On top of that we have to have an active air­space sys­tem that has been thor­ough­ly vet­ted and approved.

“There are so many fac­tors that are involved in the loca­tion and place­ment of a ver­ti­port. It all starts with what is the mis­sion? What is the orig­i­nal intent for the busi­ness enter­prise that one is talk­ing about, and from there we can devel­op a pro­gramme that is mul­ti-faceted and looks at the local and munic­i­pal reg­u­la­to­ry struc­ture, zon­ing, site plan­ning, pub­lic approval.”

Next to talk about the plan­ning of ver­ti­ports around the dif­fer­ent weath­er sys­tems was Berchoff, who said: “One of the things I think about is what has been select­ed due to the infra­struc­ture being there already for a ver­ti­port.

“How does that par­lay itself into weath­er pat­terns in areas…even if you think the weath­er is good, it may not be good in a spe­cif­ic spot to land an asset like this. How well are we plan­ning, look­ing at how wind flow and wind con­di­tions are the mean and where you want to place these things, and try­ing to plan out the weath­er where it makes sense.

“You’re not going to stop the weath­er but it’s all about resilien­cy: it isn’t just stronger engines, bet­ter flight con­trol sys­tems or sen­sors on the air­craft that can mea­sure tur­bu­lence, it’s about man­age­ment of the weath­er.

“The sec­ond thing I think about is the lack of data. Most of the instru­ments we use are at air­ports; they’re cer­ti­fied and expen­sive. We’ve got to fig­ure out a way to change the par­a­digm on how you cer­ti­fy weath­er data. If you get the place­ment right, you’re still going to have the weath­er. Then you wor­ry about the gen­er­al routes that you want to take, which we need to think about how they will be affect­ed by tur­bu­lence.

“Are you going to have that pre­dictabil­i­ty five hours in advance if the weath­er isn’t behav­ing?”

Giv­ing his per­spec­tive from a tur­bine point of view, Har­ris said: “Hav­ing autonomous air­craft in flight con­trols has become a very sig­nif­i­cant cer­ti­fi­ca­tion chal­lenge as look at next-gen air traf­fic con­trol in FAA and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tems for the nav­i­ga­tion and con­trol sys­tems on the air­craft, and the propul­sion sys­tems that integrate.Autonomy is a big aspect that we’re fol­low­ing, the OEMs which are study­ing that and we’re very inter­est­ed in under­stand­ing those solu­tions.

“As we get into some of the tur­bine aspects, many of us are fol­low­ing the lead of some of the gov­ern­ment ini­tia­tives in Europe and the US for going car­bon neu­tral. And there’s a cer­tain sense of whether the con­ser­va­tion require­ments are going to be dri­ving whole­sale changes in propul­sion sys­tems and air­craft that dri­ve us to be more elec­tric.

“In the indus­try, there are many dis­cus­sions and it’s not a clear road map. It’s a very open dis­cus­sion. Near term, I see in the next five years using jet fuel and hydro­car­bons, and using elec­tri­fi­ca­tion, bat­tery sys­tems, to make air­craft 30 per cent more effi­cient. That’s what the indus­try seems to be point­ing us to do.”

Cecut­ta spoke about his per­spec­tive on the ver­ti­port solu­tion, and said: “I think it’s very impor­tant to think about the city in which the ver­ti­port goes as well. Sit­ting in the USA, we have a very US-cen­tric view of the world. We wrote a note about the type of vehi­cles that might suit emerg­ing coun­tries in Latin Amer­i­ca and how they might be dif­fer­ent from the ones they were design­ing for the US. That will also dic­tate the shape of the ver­ti­ports.

“What kind of ener­gy sources will we need to have there? Might it be bet­ter not to have ful­ly elec­tric because of the impact on the grid? What is the com­mu­ni­ty accep­tance, is it going to be a mod­ern build­ing or some­thing that merges more with the rest of the city? And where will it go, will be in the mid­dle of the city or put on a free­way, and is noise impor­tant?

“We also need to under­stand the busi­ness mod­el. How are these ver­ti­ports going to live? Is it going to be a land­ing spot, part of a shop­ping mall, and whether we like it or not, COVID-19 has had a last­ing impact and it all depends on how long it takes to get a vac­cine.

“I see a pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive point: work­ing remote­ly can lead to peo­ple liv­ing fur­ther away from where they work if there is no con­ges­tion, but at the same time, if they don’t need to go to the office, would this need for trans­porta­tion be reduced? We see a lot of dif­fer­ent mov­ing pieces, but the most impor­tant thing is when we think about these ver­ti­ports, let’s be clear that their design needs to be spe­cif­ic to the city spe­cif­ic to the ecosys­tem.”

Fin­ish­ing off the first part of the con­ver­sa­tion, Yap said: “If we’re look­ing at this dig­i­tal net­work and high­ways in the sky, what’s real­ly excit­ing is that you can manip­u­late those to reduce the impact to the city. So you can move routes based on things like weath­er, com­mu­ni­ty accep­tance and engage­ment.

“Do we want these routes con­sis­tent­ly over dis­ad­van­taged neigh­bour­hoods? No, we’d prob­a­bly want to make sure there’s equi­ty in the impacts. What we’re hear­ing about noise impact is that it’s not as bad as tra­di­tion­al avi­a­tion.”

“What we have found is that with these drone oper­a­tions we’ve start­ed in cities, they’re very qui­et as well espe­cial­ly with all the oth­er nois­es going on. We have hos­pi­tal and health­care cam­pus­es where drones are fly­ing in between now, and no-one even looks up unless a heli­copter flies in and is deliv­er­ing a patient, because that is a much loud­er noise.”

“The ver­ti­ports are the con­nec­tion points and one thing which is impor­tant for trans­porta­tion organ­i­sa­tions to think about is that con­nec­tiv­i­ty. So once I get off an air taxi and I need to get to my final des­ti­na­tion, what is my next con­nec­tion point? Is that a ride share, micro mobil­i­ty such as a scoot­er, or am I walk­ing? So you need to ensure that the ver­ti­ports are in close prox­im­i­ty to high trav­el areas.

“Anoth­er impor­tant point is pro­tect­ing them. So if we have a ver­ti­port that is close to the ground or in some ele­vat­ed area, we don’t need to pro­tect that through zon­ing and build­ing codes to ensure no-one builds a 70-storey hotel next to it, which would make that ver­ti­port use­less. There are some unique oppor­tu­ni­ties, but we also need to look at these oth­er ques­tions which are going to rise about pro­tect­ing that infra­struc­ture and ver­ti­ports once they’re estab­lished.”

Varon Vehi­cles will be shar­ing its next steps with the indus­try, as part of a three-day vir­tu­al sum­mit called Sky­scraper. It will take place from Novem­ber 18th-20.

You can watch this think tank, and the rest of the ses­sions, by vis­it­ing www.varonvehicles.com/skyscraper.