Demand for urban air transport solutions in the world’s most congested cities could be worth more than $50 billion per year, Airbus estimates.
In an interview with Airfinance Journal, Darcy Olmos Mancilla, Airbus’s head of urban air mobility, Latin America, said that even capturing just 50% of the demand from people travelling from airports to the centres of the world’s most gridlocked cities could represent a market of approximately $50 billion or more.
Urban congestion is major global issue, accounting for the loss of 1-2% of GDP in Europe and 150 hours of lost time per year, Olmos Mancilla notes.
“As far as the case of Latin America it might be even worse, because in Latin American you have a lot of mega-cities like Sao Paulo and Mexico City, which are already above 20 million people. In these cities you can spend a lot of time in traffic jams,” he says.
Pollution and environmental impact are other problems associated with congestion, with Olmos Mancilla stating that while cities generate 80% of global GDP they consume 78% of the world’s energy and create 60% of total greenhouse gases.
Airbus’s solution is to develop electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles which will use an “eco-system” consisting of digital technology and advances in air traffic management to get passengers from point a to point safely, efficiently and in an environmentally friendly way.
Airbus is currently testing two vehicle demonstrators – Vahana and CityAirbus. Olmos Mancilla says Airbus is using these aircraft to “advance our relationship with regulators and understand the key technologies” as well as “learn as much as we can to decide on future applications”.
Airbus is still working on the platforms that will be used by passengers wishing to book the new travel solutions, he adds.
Olmos Mancilla stresses that the urban air mobility concept Airbus is developing is intended to be complementary and used alongside existing modes of transport such as cars, trains and metro systems, rather than “replacing them”.
He says that Airbus is working “very closely” with authorities and regulators to develop its new urban mobility concepts and work with a common understanding to develop the “airspace of tomorrow”.
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