Varon Vehicles’ second think tank switches focus to air vehicles in Latin America

Alti­tude and wind con­di­tions, city sizes and pub­lic adop­tion were just a few of the top­ics dis­cussed dur­ing Varon Vehi­cles’ sec­ond think tank about the imple­men­ta­tion of Urban Air Mobil­i­ty in Latin Amer­i­ca.

The com­pa­ny launched its first ses­sion ear­li­er this month, as it aims to bring togeth­er stake­hold­ers from across the indus­try into these con­ver­sa­tions. It will present its con­clu­sions and next steps at a three-day vir­tu­al sum­mit, called Sky­scraper, from 18th-20th Novem­ber.

Pan­el speak­ers for this ses­sion, enti­tled ‘Air Vehi­cles’, were Andre Stein, Head of Strat­e­gy at Embrar­erX, Adam Slepi­an, Glob­al Head of Part­ner­ships of Hyundai Air Mobil­i­ty, Simon Briceno, Head of Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty at Jaunt Air Mobil­i­ty, Chip Down­ing, Senior Mar­ket­ing Devel­op­ment Direc­tor at Real-Time Inno­va­tions (RTI) and UAM Con­sul­tant Mykhay­lo Fil­ipenko. Co-host­ing the ses­sion with Felipe Varon, CEO and Founder of Varon Vehi­cles, was Mario Cruz, Varon Vehi­cles’ Head of Data Sci­ence.

Intro­duc­ing the ses­sion, Varon said: “It’s real­ly excit­ing because the air vehi­cles cap­ture the pub­lic’s imag­i­na­tion and it’s the cool toys we like to talk about.

“Despite the fact Urban Air Mobil­i­ty entails a whole bunch of sys­tems oper­at­ing for it to actu­al­ly hap­pen, it’s the air vehi­cles that attracts our atten­tion. And they will allow, in the end, for Urban Air Mobil­i­ty to hap­pen.

He launched the think tank by focus­ing on two fun­da­men­tal con­ver­sa­tions, which cir­cles around the nature of Latin Amer­i­ca sce­nar­ios where Urban Air Mobil­i­ty will be imple­ment­ed.

“That has to do with the size of cities. Lima, Bogo­ta, Pana­ma City and many oth­ers are actu­al­ly just 16 miles across, when cities in the Unit­ed States are prob­a­bly between 60–100 miles. Here [in Latin Amer­i­ca], those small-size cities actu­al­ly pose a tremen­dous mobil­i­ty prob­lem and it takes a long time to get from one end to the oth­er. In many cas­es, some­times two, three hours in peak times.”

Varon added that the sec­ond point is the typog­ra­phy of Latin Amer­i­ca, and men­tioned Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and Colom­bi­a’s cap­i­tal Bogo­ta, which is more than 8,500ft above sea lev­el.

“How does that range in the expect­ed legs between ver­ti­ports and the alti­tudes which they’ll be oper­at­ing, and how does that affect the types of air vehi­cles we could expect to see in Latin Amer­i­ca?”, he added.

Stein start­ed off the con­ver­sa­tion by say­ing: “Bogo­ta is a chal­lenge for reg­u­lar air­craft in terms of alti­tude. Rio might be sea lev­el, but it is real­ly warm so that makes it a bit hard too.

“How do we com­pen­sate that and find the sweet spot for a glob­al mar­ket. When build­ing a new project, we need to think about that and not cor­ner our­selves into one par­tic­u­lar niche. We need a vehi­cle that works in Bogo­ta, but one that also works in Rio, Dubai, Los Ange­les and Lon­don.

“There is no sil­ver bul­let. It needs to be a vehi­cle which is flex­i­ble enough to work in these dif­fer­ent cities, with­out increas­ing oper­a­tional costs. It’s par­tic­u­lar­ly here [in Latin Amer­i­ca] that we need some­thing that is afford­able. We need to bal­ance the per­for­mance lev­el with afford­abil­i­ty.”

When asked what his per­spec­tive would be on the type of air vehi­cle intro­duced into Latin Amer­i­ca, Slepi­an added: “You have to look at the require­ments, the con­cept design of the vehi­cle that is dri­ven by those require­ments and then you have to look at the cost and scal­a­bil­i­ty.

“The require­ments could be dif­fer­ent from Los Ange­les to Bogo­ta; those are two extremes. Los Ange­les is a mas­sive, sprawl­ing urban envi­ron­ment and Bogo­ta has a lot of peo­ple but is dense­ly com­pact. The require­ments do dri­ve the con­cept of the vehi­cle, and that turns into the cost and scal­a­bil­i­ty.

“Incor­po­rat­ing the right tech­nol­o­gy to dri­ve scale is going to be real­ly impor­tant, because it comes down to a cost-ben­e­fit analy­sis and how do we make it afford­able for the OEMs to man­u­fac­ture and for pas­sen­gers to take a ride. Our goal for air mobil­i­ty is not some­thing for the elite, wealthy or busi­ness trav­eller. It’s for con­sump­tion by every­body with­in an urban envi­ron­ment to be able to take a ride.”

Slepi­an added that the indus­try also needs to look long-term, say­ing that it can’t nec­es­sar­i­ly adapt the vehi­cles year-on-year and put out a new mod­el.

“We need to look where the tech­nol­o­gy is going to be in the future, and also mar­ry that up with where the city is too. Does it change the dynam­ics and how does it change the mul­ti-modal trans­porta­tion sys­tem to allow for that expan­sion by 2030 or 2040?”

Adding onto the ear­li­er points raised, Briceno said: “You want to try and build a plat­form that has the poten­tial and the abil­i­ty to sat­is­fy many mar­kets, but allows you to maybe lever­age it for oth­er appli­ca­tions, such as air ambu­lance and car­go or freight.

“It would apply when expand­ing into cities in Latin Amer­i­ca too, where the phys­i­cal require­ments in terms of alti­tude real­ly have an impact on design.”

When talk­ing about Bogo­ta, Briceno added that the change in alti­tude is very impor­tant in terms of air­craft per­for­mance. “High den­si­ty alti­tude is where the air is thin­ner and real­ly reduces air­craft per­for­mance and as a result, pro­peller effi­cien­cy and reduc­ing its thrust capa­bil­i­ty the fur­ther you go up.

“Those are per­for­mance chal­lenges that you have to bake into the oper­a­tional analy­sis. It’s not impos­si­ble, you’ll just have to make adjust­ments to your pay­load and range.”

Varon then asked Down­ing what his thoughts were on the types of air­space inte­gra­tion and the per­for­mance require­ments from the air vehi­cles, and whether it would be an advan­tage or dis­ad­van­tage from a sys­tems or air­space inte­gra­tion per­spec­tive.

“We may need to lim­it the air vehi­cles around Bogo­ta to be lighter, so they’ll address the [alti­tude] den­si­ty chal­lenge. Because of the vol­umes in this indus­try, we’re going to have a wide range of vehi­cles and it will be a very com­pet­i­tive envi­ron­ment.

“I see a very rich ecosys­tem of vehi­cles address­ing emer­gency ser­vices, freight or pas­sen­ger-car­ry­ing envi­ron­ments. And that’s very impor­tant; we’re not just going to do Colom­bia; we’re going to do the world over time and so this mar­ket will mature. I think in Colom­bia we will pave the way to show how you can make dif­fer­ent types of vehi­cles work around these dif­fer­ent cities, and then have an air traf­fic com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tem that actu­al­ly man­ages those vehi­cles very well.”

With Fil­ipenko’s vast expe­ri­ence in elec­tric flight and VTOL tech­nol­o­gy, Varon asked him about wind con­di­tions. From Bogo­ta, which has pre­dictable fore­casts, to Carta­ge­na and Pana­ma City — which are coastal cities and have much stronger con­di­tions, Varon posed the ques­tion of how this would affect the per­for­mance require­ments of VTOL air­craft.

Fil­ipenko said: “It will impact from a struc­tur­al design and on build­ing the pro­pellers and motors, but land­ing in harsh wind con­di­tions is noth­ing new for the indus­try. We see many videos on YouTube of pilots doing land­ings in the most crazy of con­di­tions. It think it will be doable.”

He also made the point about com­mer­cial avi­a­tion OEMs design­ing air­craft which can do up 2,500 nau­ti­cal miles, but are used by air­lin­ers for jour­neys between 600–800 miles — in an attempt to low­er oper­a­tional costs by using one type of air­craft.

Fil­ipenko added: “Con­cern­ing Urban Air Mobil­i­ty and espe­cial­ly elec­tric and hybrid-elec­tric sys­tems, this real­ly allows us to build a flex­i­ble kind of plat­form; one type of vehi­cle that can be opti­mised because of its dri­ve­train to dif­fer­ent things.

“Like a mul­ti­copter that has a bat­tery — which would be good for Bogo­ta where you have short dis­tances — or we can replace it with a fuel cell sys­tem or hydro­gen tur­bine, so the vehi­cle could serve for longer ranges in region­al trans­porta­tion.”

The third think tank will be on Fri­day, 11th Sep­tem­ber from 12noon to 1pm EDT, where the dis­cus­sion will focus on ver­ti­ports.

To watch this ses­sion, and reg­is­ter for the remain­ing think tanks, vis­it www.varonvehicles.com/skyscraper.