Millions of dollars have flown into the nascent electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) sector over the past several years, as investors bet that quiet, emissions-free air taxis will unlock a new wave of demand for urban air mobility (UAM).

While those services are not expected to reach scale until the next decade, air taxi startups are looking toward the airport shuttle mission as an initial launch application in the coming years, promising to shave long trips on congested urban road networks down to 10-20 mins. or less. There are several reasons why the airport shuttle mission is a suitable launch application.

Rather than building out a full UAM network with many distributed nodes, airport shuttles can kick off with just two facilities at the airport and city centre. While air taxi startups ultimately aspire to operate from dedicated vertiports, industry watchers expect it will take years for the scale and level of investment to be sufficient to justify the build-out of greenfield infrastructure.

In the meantime, they plan to go to market using existing aviation infrastructure like heliports and fixed-base operator (FBO) airports. As such, air taxi startups like Archer and Joby have partnered with FBOs like Atlantic Aviation and Signature Aviation to use their facilities located at hundreds of airports across North America. They are also collaborating with infrastructure groups looking to electrify heliport locations in city centres in key US launch markets.

Please follow and like us: