NEXA Advisors and the Vertical Flight Society (VFS) have formed an equity partnership in UAM Geomatics, Inc., whose purpose is to promote the development and utilization of eVTOL aircraft, including accelerated investment into related supply chains.
A key asset of UAM Geomatics is the study Urban Air Mobility–Economics and Global Markets 2020-2040. Updated quarterly, the study provides forecasts for 75 metropolitan areas including costs for vehicles, infrastructure, and urban air mobility (UAM) air traffic management, and cumulative revenue by market: airport shuttles, emergency services, on demand air taxi, business aviation, and more. The interactive online databases offer ArcGIS maps of each city including thousands of geocoded data features (e.g. heliports, hospitals, the power grid, corporate head offices, etc.) and their characteristics. VFS assisted the research for this study in order to support acceleration of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) for UAM and advanced air mobility (AAM) missions.
“More than 300 different types of eVTOL aircraft have been proposed and are catalogued in our World eVTOL Aircraft Directory. We estimate that a billion dollars a year is currently being invested in this sector. The toolsets provided through UAM Geomatics can greatly accelerate the realization of profitable eVTOL operations in metropolitan areas,” said Mike Hirschberg, VFS executive director.
Instantiation of UAM will require a complete picture of a city’s geography, topography, and geospatial features, especially during network design, airspace planning, and, ultimately, UAM operator certification. With the UAM Geomatics tools, city planners can visualize and approve new vertiport nodes and their connections through hypothetical flight corridors, and simulate ground noise signatures along with efficient operations.
“Before VFS members can sell aircraft to operators, sophisticated infrastructure must be in place–not just vertiports but also UTM traffic management systems. UAM Geomatics has modeled the costs of deployment for this infrastructure for all 75 cities,” added Michael Dyment, NEXA Advisors’ managing partner.
UAM Geomatics data sets are benefiting from ongoing improvements. For example, according to Eleanor Herman, UAM Geomatics president, “We are currently adding three-dimensional models of certain cities in our ArcGIS toolsets, created out of stereo-orthophoto satellite maps, to enable 3-D airspace design of new vertiport locations, tunnels in space, and noise acoustics.”
