Volatus Infrastructure & Energy Solutions is a startup company developing modular, scalable vertiports for electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) vehicles. New Volatus CEO Dan Sloat recently sat down with AAM Report to discuss his business’ approach to building the facilities needed to enable the advanced air mobility (AAM) revolution. A partial transcript follows:
AAM Report: How would you describe Volatus’ approach to building vertiport networks?
Sloat: We’re developing this mantra of ‘start with one.’ The truth is we really have no reliable data to project the speed of adoption rates. So when we say start with one—for any of our customers, even a major airport—we still would advocate that in the beginning they just start with a single TLOF [touch-down-and-liftoff] and get the operations underway. Then you can assess what the demand is. It’s important to ease into it, but also to do so early. Instead of building a 50-TLOF [facility] for 2030, why not start with one now?
Our approach is actually modular. We’ll start with one vertiport in a strategic location and a plan for what direction to build a follow-on TLOF. We take a building-block approach: start with one and grow organically as demand grows. We can build these on as small a footprint as a single acre.
What is the difference between vertiport and vertistop?
The terminology we use is a bit unique. A vertiport is the baseline which includes landing infrastructure, charging infrastructure, terminal building and parking lot to process the passenger. A vertistop is a smaller facility that will be built on the periphery—those tertiary endpoints—that will more closely resemble an aerial bus stop. So we’ll just be there to drop off or pick up someone. They will have a charging station but those are locations where you won’t see the kind of foot traffic that would warrant an actual terminal building.
What is the importance of interoperability?
Transportation is one of those things where the way we win over communities is through efficiency and time savings. And to the extent that we aren’t willing to work together and build this system out in a highly interoperable way, we’re going to cut against and perhaps entirely destroy any kind of time savings just by pushing proprietary solutions.
We want to build all of our facilities to not only be vehicle-agnostic—including all these various eVTOL designs—but also so the charging stations themselves are universal. There’s going to be different adapters with intended use cases; a charging station for eVTOLs, a separate one for conventional TOLs, another for commercial-grade trucks.
So your vertiports are going to be multimodal?
Absolutely. You can imagine a typical commercial truck carrying cargo. They come into a vertiport location, automatically sync up with a charging station, get recharged while cargo is being offloaded and onloaded and onto an eVTOL for expedited routing. But also for vertiports located at a marina, for example, we’ll support yachts. Or those that are sited near new construction will support heavy machinery. So, yes, being multimodal is of the utmost importance when we think about really providing that seamless solution for as wide a range of customers as possible.
Is the FAA doing enough to provide guidance to vertiport companies?
We try to encourage and remind people to show grace to our regulatory bodies any chance we get. Frankly, the FAA was not really designed to handle entirely new types of aircraft from scratch. And they are a government body—historically rather conservative and cautious—but then it’s also the FAA, and they have about as close to a perfect record as you can get. So I completely understand why they want to be methodical about these processes and make sure that everything is as safe as possible. After all, that’s their main job: to keep the public safe.
They are hard at work on the Advisory Circular to get as much straightforward guidance as possible. To be honest, we think there are a number of elements in Engineering Brief 105 that we hope are addressed. For example, the elevated TLOF, which is intended for flood mitigation. What we found is that design can be counter to our approach of starting with one [vertiport] and growing organically, and it complicates things in terms of wheelchair accessibility. And we have key partners that have technology that can mitigate floods just as well, if not better, while maintaining a flat-level surface with the surrounding area.
How does the FAA’s approach compare to the EASA’s?
There is a significant different between the two as far as size requirements, with the EASA [European Union Aviation Safety Agency] requiring a tighter landing approach than the FAA. My sense is the American approach stems from the fact that we have loads more space than most other countries. So we figure if there are larger buffers, greater amounts of leeway, that things will just naturally be safer. But moral hazard teaches us that sometimes when the operator knows there’s more room for a mistake, they are less careful. There may be some wisdom to the EASA approach in it may encourage pilots to be more careful and disciplined.
Has the industry fallen behind in terms of infrastructure development? And how do we spur more investment?
There’s no question this new form of aviation—the quote-on-quote flying car—is much more sexy than discussing infrastructure. But we see very quickly these aircraft aren’t useful at all if we don’t have vertiports and charging infrastructure in place. And from a safety perspective, these locations need to be clear of unauthorized persons, wildlife, birds, even debris.
We think it actually would make a lot of sense for OEMs to start investing and supporting infrastructure because the operations will not happen without places to take off, land and recharge. Obviously the economy is such that capital is not flowing as freely as it was when some of the SPACs [special purpose acquisition companies] were at their height. But we’re hoping to reach the right people who we think would find infrastructure investment a compelling but relatively safe bet.
I like to look at cars as an example. If you were building a new home from scratch, it certainly makes sense you would have a driveway constructed before you bought a car. And that’s kind of the way we see it. A lot of people talk about chicken and egg, but in this case I think it’s pretty obvious which comes first: otherwise your brand new car is sitting in mud.
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