NEXA Advisors and Vertical Flight Society set up partnership in UAM Geomatics

NEXA Advi­sors and the Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety (VFS) have formed an equi­ty part­ner­ship in UAM Geo­mat­ics, a com­pa­ny which is help­ing to pro­mote the devel­op­ment and util­i­sa­tion of eVTOL air­craft.

UAM Geo­mat­ics released its ground­break­ing study, Urban Air Mobility—Economics and Glob­al Mar­kets 2020–2040 last year and updat­ed quar­ter­ly, it pro­vides fore­casts for 75 met­ro­pol­i­tan areas in the USA.

These include costs for vehi­cles, infra­struc­ture, and urban air mobil­i­ty (UAM) air traf­fic man­age­ment, cumu­la­tive rev­enue by mar­ket: air­port shut­tles, emer­gency ser­vices, on demand air taxi and busi­ness avi­a­tion.

The inter­ac­tive online data­bas­es offer ArcGIS maps of each city, includ­ing thou­sands of geocod­ed data fea­tures — such as heli­ports, hos­pi­tals, pow­er grids, cor­po­rate head offices and their char­ac­ter­is­tics. VFS assist­ed the research for this study in order to sup­port accel­er­a­tion of eVTOL for UAM and advanced air mobil­i­ty (AAM) mis­sions.

Mike Hirschberg, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor at VFS, said: “More than 300 dif­fer­ent types of eVTOL air­craft have been pro­posed and are cat­a­logued in our World eVTOL Air­craft Direc­to­ry. We esti­mate that a bil­lion dol­lars a year is cur­rent­ly being invest­ed in this sec­tor.

“The toolsets pro­vid­ed through UAM Geo­mat­ics can great­ly accel­er­ate the real­i­sa­tion of prof­itable eVTOL oper­a­tions in met­ro­pol­i­tan areas.”

With the UAM Geo­mat­ics tools, city plan­ners can visu­alise and approve new ver­ti­port nodes and their con­nec­tions through hypo­thet­i­cal flight cor­ri­dors, and sim­u­late ground noise sig­na­tures along with effi­cient oper­a­tions.

But Michael Dyment, NEXA Advi­sors’ Man­ag­ing Part­ner, point­ed out: “Before VFS mem­bers can sell air­craft to oper­a­tors, sophis­ti­cat­ed infra­struc­ture must be in place — not just ver­ti­ports but also UTM traf­fic man­age­ment sys­tems. UAM Geo­mat­ics has mod­eled the costs of deploy­ment for this infra­struc­ture for all 75 cities.”

UAM Geo­mat­ics data sets are also ben­e­fit­ing from ongo­ing improve­ments. For exam­ple, accord­ing to Eleanor Her­man, UAM Geo­mat­ics Pres­i­dent: “We are cur­rent­ly adding three-dimen­sion­al mod­els of cer­tain cities in our ArcGIS toolsets, cre­at­ed out of stereo-orthopho­to satel­lite maps, to enable 3D air­space design of new ver­ti­port loca­tions, tun­nels in space, and noise acoustics.”

The study’s deep city-lev­el analy­sis of New York City can be explored at www.nexa-uam.com