Read Volocopter’s White Paper on Urban Air Mobility

German air taxi company Volocopter just released its own white paper on the future of Urban Air Mobility.

The latest white paper from Volocopter focuses on how to to overcome barriers to market for urban air mobility, covering issues like development, certification and service launch. Specific sections of the document discuss safety, noise emissions, range & speed, operating costs, capacity, and usability. Read the full white paper here.

According to Volocopter, the main bullet points of its white paper are:

• There is no single “best” eVTOL concept, because mission is paramount when designing electrically powered aircraft. The Volocopter, for instance, is designed for the commercial intra-city urban air mobility mission (UAM) so-called air taxis.

• Air taxis serving the intra-city UAM mission need to cover the most popular high-traffic routes in major cities, offering meaningful time savings and/or allow connections between points that are not well served by current options. The paper shows that a range of 25 to 35 km is viable and a valid starting point to develop the market.

• Pricing is a key factor in making air taxis accessible to a large customer base. Keeping operating costs low to build a scalable business will allow for accessible pricing.

Notably, Volocopter is not the first to release a white paper on UAM. Just two weeks, ago, EmbraerX released its ‘Flight Plan 2030’ vision for urban aviation infrastructure, encompassing everything from manufacturing to air traffic management. In February of this year, Airbus released ‘Airbus Altiscope‘, a blueprint for the company’s roll-out plan for UAM. And, most importantly, Uber Elevate set the stage with its original UAM white paper in 2016. 

Why it’s important: By writing a white paper, Volocopter has signaled to the industry both its depth of research and its readiness to enter the market. Although the Volocopter 2X does not have the range of many other urban aircraft, Volocopter uses this white paper to support its strategy for targeting short but highly trafficked routes. With testing in Singapore coming up later this year, it’s clear that Volocopter is planning on the long-term.