The economic potential for advanced air mobility (AAM) manufacturers and operators in the UK is huge, but “reality is setting in” as those who aim to be among the first to bring a service to market approach their demanding deadlines.
That is the view of consultant EA Maven, which has developed a set of analytic tools and techniques to assess the regional air mobility market and applied them to the electric-vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) sector.
“As people are getting close to investing real sums of money in infrastructure and on the vehicles, the detail is coming out,” EA Maven Co-founder Darrell Swanson says.
Alongside his co-founder, Jarek Zych, Swanson has analysed 2019 data from cellphone service providers in the UK that reveals movements of phones—and therefore people—between different locations at different times. There is sufficient granularity in the datasets to identify the transport mode (i.e., road or rail), and to assess not just the numbers of cellphones traveling on particular routes at specific times, but to also determine whether the same phone is making the same journey at the same time each day, thus identifying business and leisure journeys.
From the analysis, Zych and Swanson compiled a list of city pairs—at least 60 mi. apart—that met their thresholds for being commercially viable routes. Identifying the proportion of journeys currently being made by car and train, overlaid with published performance data from the in-development platforms capable of serving the route, allows for time savings of an AAM link to be calculated. Employing a figure used by the UK Transport Department, the team then worked out the economic benefit of the time savings.
“We ended up with a target market of about 4.7 million travelers per week,” Swanson says. “Of that, we figure 390 routes are viable amongst 32 airports with at least 96,000 travelers per year, and 49 of them have over a million people going back and forth between the catchment areas of those airports.
“Jarek calculated that annually, if a reasonable number of those people switched—and we set that threshold quite low—that they would save, collectively, 1,700 years of time, which is just crazy,” he continues. “That would put about another £430 million [$545 million] back into the economy, just through the time saved for those business travelers on those trips.”
But before aircraft developers and operators get too excited, the analysis also uncovered some immediate areas of potential difficulty. The airport that placed second on their list of sites with the highest number of potentially viable routes is Doncaster, which is in the process of being closed by its owner.
“We think that airports and operators are missing a trick,” Swanson says. “Out of the 390 routes that we identified, only 38 had existing commercial services on them, so there are 352 potential routes out there that have serious commercial potential.”
Many of those routes can be served by some of the in-development electric platforms with longer ranges, but a subset of EA Maven’s analysis—which the firm is publishing as its City Air Mobility Index—has identified routes of shorter duration and distance that could be addressed using smaller eVTOLs.
“We’ve analyzed more than 13,000 routes with a total addressable market of almost 10 million travelers per week, and 80.3% travel by car,” Zych says. “We could save 200 years per week by switching to AAM, which gives £46.7 million back to the economy through increased productivity.”
But the AAM industry will have several difficult problems to solve before this potential can be realized.
“There is a real challenge in terms of looking at where you’re going to develop vertiport infrastructure in city centers,” Swanson says. He gained detailed insight into the difficulties when preparing a study of the viability of turning the decommissioned aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal into a heliport moored in the Thames in London.“I don’t think you’re going to have a vertiport on every other rooftop in London. My opinion is it’s probably going to be eight or 10 larger vertiports, but very strategically located—possibly associated with public transport systems.
“That’s actually the hardest part: finding the right location in city centers that are consistent with the existing use of that area, and then getting the public on board with it,” he adds. “We need to get to a volume that helps lower the prices of the average fare so that more of society is able to access this form of transport.”
The cost of failing to do so, Swanson says, could be steep. “If not, we risk falling into a negative feedback loop where it’s just for the rich. The public will voice their opposition to politicians, and the politicians’ only job is to get re-elected. Unless we can get the public really on board early, that’s one of the bigger barriers.”
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