In China, eHang has partnered with DHL to develop an autonomous drone delivery route. In Finland, Wing deliveries are soon to begin in Helsinki. Learn more below:

Chinese comany eHang is most well known for the eHang 184 passenger drone. However, eHang also is the maker of a wide range of commercial drones. DHL will now work with eHang to develop a drone delivery route for an anonymous DHL customer. The route will run about 8km from the DHL fulfillment center in Guangdong to the customer’s premises. The implentation of the fully autonomous route will reduce the 40 minute trip down to 8 minutes, and will cut costs of each delivery by about 80%. Learn more about how the system works here:

Meanwhile, in Finland, Wing has announced that it will soon commence delivery service in Hesinki, the nation’s capital. Although flights will be limited to certain destinations and products, the launch announced for next month aligns with Wing’s original predicted launch date. Beginning next month, people in the densely populated Vuossari District will be able to order deliveries to their homes from Herkku Food Mark and Cafe Monami. Notably, Wing recently attained commercial certification in the United States, and has already begun operating in Australia. According to Wing, the ultimate goal in Hesinki is to solve the city’s congestion’s problems.

“Vuosaari is an inspiring locale for Wing in several ways…The density of Vuosaari’s population makes it a great place to launch our first service to multi-family housing communities as well.” -Wing Medium page

A Wing drone delivery in progress

Why it’s important: The quickening pace of drone delivery services worldwide marks a major step for autonomous urban flight. As these services prove to be economically viable and safe, regulations and social acceptance of larger vehicles carrying passengers will come more quickly. Ultimately, urban drone deliveries pave the way for electric on-demand flight.

Sources // Wing, eHang, TechCrunch, Dronebelow

Ascent Urban Air Mobility, a new company focused on delivering helicopter taxi services to cities around the world, has launched in the Philippines.

Although the helicopter taxi industry is already highly a highly competitive landscape including BLADE Urban Air Mobility, Ascent Urban Air Mobility has made a bold move by designating the Philippines as its initial launch site. The company is headquartered in Singapore, where many UAM companies such as Volocopter and Bell are already planning on entering.

In a recent interview with Vulcan Post, Ascent founders Darren Tng and Lionel Sinai-Sinelnikoff mentioned their reasoning for choosing Manila as Ascend’s launch site. Manila, although it has a complex airspace network already in place, has some of the worst auto traffic of any city in the world, with locals spending as much as 16 days per year in traffic. Additionally, Ascent’s founders name Manila as one of the fastest growing business hubs in Southeast Asia, citing that their initial customers have included time-sensitive business people, leisure travelers, and tourists.

Ascent Urban Air Mobility customers boarding a flight

Ascent Urban Air Mobility isn’t the first company to consider launching in what some might consider a third world country. Varon Vehicles, although headquartered in Delaware, has an entirely Colombian team, which is where the company plans to complete its first flights. Although many urban air mobility companies have chosen to focus on more futuristic cities like Singapore, companies like Varon and Ascent have made a strategic choice by choosing to launch in cities that have some of the worst auto traffic congestion in the world.

Ascent Urban Air Mobility announced its launch in early April, and since then has taken on 50 customers. The company owns three active helicopters so far, and hopes to expand to Bangkok, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur in 2020, with eventual launches in China and Japan. Learn more about Ascent Urban Air Mobility’s Vision on their website.

A part of the Ascent Urban Air Mobility team

Why its important: With multiple new companies like Ascent Urban Air Mobility and BLADE Urban Air Mobility entering into the industry, the lines between certain strategic approaches are becoming more clear. While companies like Uber are choosing to look further into the future with more affordable flights in new eVTOL vehicles, companies like Ascent and BLADE are choosing to use current technology to get their UAM companies in the air immediately. The many different UAM business models already in existence reveal the large scale potential for the industry as a whole.

Sources // Vulcan Post, Ascent Urban Air Mobility

The initial hype about the size of the future Urban Air Mobility market, that reached its peak with the Morgan Stanley’s prediction of a $1.5 trillion potential by 2040, is now fading.

Caution. Delays Ahead!

Current forecasts about Urban Air Mobility (UAM) tend to indicate a market volume which can only be possible if flying-cars fill-up the city-skies, landing or taking-off at every corner, operating very close to the pedestrians.

Whereas, the technical experts suggest something akin to today’s heliport based operations, only a bit busier. The experts have a reason for that. The regulatory uncertainties in air traffic management and a “to be defined” certification framework, combined with environmental concerns like noise and green-house-gas emissions, together with existing technical challenges regarding electric propulsion and autonomous flight, force them to limit their imaginations and try to define an implementable concept.

This is both good and bad!

The good part is that it is much easier to implement.

The concepts that the experts mostly promote avoid the regulatory swamps by reducing the routes over city centers, and empowering to fly VFR [1]while concentrating the operations to specific landing spots properly regulated and protected. They plan to increase the number of heliports and propose to start by employing hybrid aircraft until full electric propulsion becomes technically feasible.

This is very logical. But there is a catch over there. They promote exactly what the current helicopter air-taxi services are doing today, albeit with a smaller market share. But flying exotic electric air vehicles instead of helicopters is not Urban Air Mobility. Such an initial move of mimicking the existing practices will not morph into the trillion dollar future that the UAM investors dream of.

Well, maybe it will, but definitely not in the time frame that they hope for…

Underestimated Bottlenecks

Porsche Consulting’s 2018 report titled “The Future of Vertical Mobility”, takes Sao Paulo as an example and suggests a “vertiport (heliport) infrastructure build-up” to achieve “sufficient coverage” of the city. This, the report says, will require some 100 vertiports with around 1000 air-taxis in operation.

But in real life, one should expect that the demand will not be evenly distributed among all vertiports. And the Pareto Principle suggests that 20 percent of vertiports should assume 80 percent of the traffic. This will mean that during the “elaboration phase” (refer to figure above) some 20 vertiports in Sao Paulo may have a continuous demand of over 40 air-taxis, each. This situation will either lead to ridiculous waiting times (either on the ground or in the air) or will force the vertiports to expand and become medium size airports, both of which will highly impede the versatility of the UAM concept.

A more likely scenario is that the expansion will got chocked before fully evolving into the “elaboration phase”. According to Porsche Consulting’s figure above, at the “choking point” there will be almost 400 air-taxis in operation in Sao Paulo. Even if we assume the existing 400 registered helicopters to be still in operation at that time (the report assumes 130), this would indicate a doubling of the market, and no more… 

By the way, I find Uber’s plans of “1,000-plus takeoffs per hour at each vertiport” [2] rather ambitious.

It is, of course, critical to evaluate UAM for specific use cases (e.g. Air Taxi, Air Metro, Last-mile Delivery…) to produce meaningful results. Air-metro, which practically is the “ride-sharing” version of air-taxi concept, is more likely to flourish first. Very probably the air-metro solutions will initially utilize piloted and hybrid aircraft and (by definition [3]) will operate between pre-defined locations like airports and vertiports. So that, they will be able to“avoid the regulatory swamps and reduce the routes over city centers”, while staying competitive against ground transportation solutions.

But even the “easier to certify” piloted solutions will not help to reach optimistic forecast figures. Because for a market volume approaching to trillion dollars “…there’s no way you could put a pilot in every vehicle”, as Robert Pearce from Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate of NASA had neatly put it in August 2018.

Is this the End of Story?

Absolutely not! But we need to see that even the obvious solution of operating piloted services to and from specific controlled points (i.e. vertiports) to circumvent the; regulatory, environmental and social obstacles has two major bottlenecks: 1) the number of pilots required and 2) the traffic volume that any vertiport can handle in a given time interval. Putting it openly: The suggested market volume of trillion dollars is not realistic. Such a market volume cannot be reached through current approaches. It needs the embarking and disembarking points become highly distributed (and unregulated) and the autonomous flight be regulated.Even after then, according to Eduardo Domínguez-Puerta of Airbus, it is more or less “$50 billion accumulated market. Out of that $50 billion, less than half is going to go to the vehicles.”[4] And this is not bad at all! Please note that the current Civil Helicopter Market is fluctuating around just $8 billion/year [5].