Will the skies ever buzz with eVTOLs?

Will the skies ever buzz with Urban Air Mobility?

Visual of Falcon Aviation Services future air tours over Dubai (Image credit: FAS)

It's now become common place for conversations, media articles and presentations about urban mobility to include Urban Air Mobility (UAM) and this, invariably, means electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, or eVTOLs. 

The UAM concept imagines a world where our urban skies are busy with small, low-altitude, highly automated electric aircraft transporting passengers or cargo across short distances. A little like a city in that famous 1960s TV cartoon series, The Jetsons. Publicity and public policy commitments have increased over the past ten years to a point where, today, the future plans of many cities seem to include a role for eVTOLs - and during this decade.

Therefore, it should be no surprise that Saudi Arabia and the UAE have both been considering Urban Air Mobility plans and the role of eVTOLs. Over the past 5-6 years, we've seen eVTOL's taking test flights, MoUs signed, venture capital investments in eVTOL startups and plans made to introduce eVTOL passenger services.

The latest announcement concerning eVTOLs in the UAE hit the news this week. Abu Dhabi-based Falcon Aviation Services, which currently operates a fleet of helicopters and business jets, plans to use eVTOLs to operate aerial tours of Dubai for tourists from Atlantis, The Palm hotel and resort by the end of 2026.

Falcon has signed a letter of intent to acquire 35 Eve eVTOL aircraft from Eve Urban Air Mobility, a subsidiary of the Brazilian aerospace manufacturer Embraer. Eve UAM is currently working on its first generation of passenger eVTOL, which it hopes will be ready for type certification in late 2025. Falcon Aviation Services sees its future collaboration with Eve as an opportunity to help develop the UAE's urban mobility ecosystem, and co-CEO of Eve, Andre Stein believes the new venture could position Dubai as a UAM leader.

Those of us that have been watching the UAM space for a while, will remember that eVTOL manufacturers Ehang and Volocopter both conducted aircraft test flights in Dubai during 2017 and signed agreements with the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA). In fact, at the time, Dubai's RTA was looking at introducing the first air taxi services this year (i.e. 2022).

In that same year, Uber announced its intention to roll out pilot projects for eVTOL air taxi services in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas and in Dubai, under its Uber Elevate eVTOL business unit by the year 2020. Uber later exhibited a scale model of its prototype air taxi at GITEX 2020, but the ride-sharing giant ended up selling off the whole business unit before the Dubai exhibition had even finished!

Volocopter went on to carry out test flights in Singapore in 2019, also with an aim of introducing commercial air taxi services in 2022. The company opened reservations for its first commercial flights via its website in September 2020. However, to-date no commercial services have yet been launched. Last year, the German eVTOL firm announced that its first air taxi service in Europe will be launched at the Paris Olympics in 2024. It plans to launch services in Singapore during the same year.

Of course, Volocopter and NEOM announced the formation of a new joint venture at the end of 2021. The new venture has a goal to design, implement, and operate the world’s first bespoke public vertical mobility system in NEOM. The mega-city development also confirmed an order for 15 eVTOLs and the intention to commence initial flight operations within 2-3 years, so broadly within the same time-frame as Volocopter's launches in Paris and Singapore.

However, NEOM's wide open spaces are currently perfect for testing eVTOLs without all the complications of launching low flying aircraft in busy urban areas. Flying the electric aircraft over Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Jeddah or Riyadh is an entirely different proposition, with many considerations for cities to take into account, such as licencing, pilot certifications, air traffic control, air corridors, city-wide landing pads, insurance, safety, security and more. 

It's worth noting that no city in Saudi Arabia, or the UAE has yet managed to align policy, aviation ecosystems and infrastructure requirements to allow commercial drone delivery services, which have many of the same needs as air taxis, but without the complication of having passengers onboard.

With hindsight, it's easy to see how reality has fallen behind expectations. eVTOL manufacturers must perform a tricky balancing act between showing momentum in order to attract investors, while managing the expectations of government authorities, joint venture partners and the general public. Cities and transport authorities have a similar challenge, wanting to appear progressive and pioneering, whilst ensuring safety and security for their residents and stakeholders.

However, one can make too much of the delays in Urban Air Mobility plans. For the most part, it seems that we're witnessing delays of 2-5 years in getting commercial eVTOLs off the ground, which isn't that long considering that it is a brand new transport category. 

A 2002 report by consultants Futron and market research firm Zogby International on space tourism, concluded that some 15,700 passengers would be flying into space each year by 2021. Despite all the publicity on new commercial space rockets and space tourism ventures, the number of humans that have ever visited space totals just 628. 

So, we can wait a few more years for air taxis.

Find out more about this story:

• Read the Falcon Aviation Services press release.

• Read the 2021 NEOM-Volocopter announcement.