The modular vertiports from Volatus cost around $800,000 to $1 million to build.
Volatus Infrastructure has signed an agreement with Greenport International Airport and Technology Center to build a vertiport at the planned Central Texas airport and innovation complex, marking the latest development project for the maker of modular, scalable vertiports.
Greenport International Airport is a planned private general aviation airport being built on a more than 5,000-ft.2 campus located 17 mi. from downtown Austin. In addition to a 2,600-ft.2 airport, the campus will also house a 2,900-ft.2 Greenport Technology Center dedicated to sustainability and transportation. The site will also be located adjacent to a planned community called Emerald Island that is envisioned to house tens of thousands of people and seamlessly integrate advanced air mobility (AAM) and multimodal transportation into the rhythm of everyday life there.
As part of the agreement with Volatus, announced in a letter of intent on July 11, the Wisconsin-based vertiport startup will provide one of its base package modular terminal buildings with a single landing pad and vehicle-agnostic charging station to the upstart airport, with plans to break ground this year and launch operations in 2024. The vertiport is to serve as the first node in an eventual network of sites that Volatus plans to build in the area, co-founder Grant Fisk said.
“It’s going to be just enough to enable us to support eVTOL [electric-vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles],” Fisk tells the AAM Report. “Our product offers Greenport a reasonable, flexible, scalable way to grow organically and support the industry without the need for a massive, upfront investment. This first vertiport is our basic package, but we’re already in discussions for multiple additional sites which are going to house multiple FATOs [final approach and takeoff areas] each.”
The Greenport site is the third vertiport location that Wisconsin-based Volatus has committed to build in the U.S. In February, the company announced plans to build a vertiport at Bellefonte Airport in rural Central Pennsylvania, located just 10 mi. from Penn State University. Similar to Greenport, that vertiport will launch with a single landing pad and a charging station, although Fisk says it will also eventually be scaled up.
Previously, in April 2022, Volatus announced plans to build a vertiport at Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
“Oshkosh and Bellefonte are two very interesting use cases that showcase how vertiports are going to look in a regional airport environment,” Fisk says. “We want to show the world that if this can work in Oshkosh, it can work anywhere.”
The modular vertiports cost around $800,000 to $1 million to build, depending on variables like land and material cost. Fisk says the vast majority of vertiports to be built in the coming years will likely be small facilities with just a small passenger terminal and one or two FATOs and charging stations, although he does think there will eventually be a need for larger vertiport hubs.
“It’s a huge ask for a community or an individual or a private enterprise to spend $10 or $20 million up front on infrastructure, especially when it may be a decade yet before we really see operational density,” Fisk says. “What we need to be able to do is offer a solution that can handle a dozen or 20 flights per day. This is all you need, and you don’t have to spend millions of bucks.”
With the first eVTOL air taxis expected to launch U.S. service in 2025, Fisk said that he “cannot overemphasize” how underfunded the state of vertiport infrastructure is, noting that it is going to “require a multitrillion-dollar” effort to support AAM in the coming years. He also pointed to Japanese government estimates for 100,000 vertiports in the country by 2030 to illustrate the scale of the challenge facing the industry.
“Japan is calling for 100,000 vertiports by 2030, and when you expand that, what does it mean for the world? We’re talking tens of millions of vertiports to support this technology properly,” Fisk says. “Even if it’s only half that number, in reality, we’re still talking about an extraordinary number which is going to require investment on a scale that hasn’t been seen before—and it’s going to have to come from the private sector.”
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