Lost velocity: Will we still see eVTOLs in Australia?

These announcements appeared to launch an array of local excitement in the air taxi space, and the establishment of the Greenbird initiative – an industry consortium focused on ushering in a safe, functional, and commercialised Australian air taxi industry. Greenbird was formed in recognition that much work is required to be done and many questions are required to be answered before any air taxi vehicle could take flight in a populous Australian city – the vehicles to be used, landing infrastructure, storage and charging facilities, flight path management, the customer experience; were (and remain) just some of the uncertainties to be accounted for.

Founded in February 2022, Greenbird was established by aviation consultancy firms Aviation Projects and AVISTRA, and brought together numerous members of industry, academia, investors, and regulators. A flurry of announcements followed suit as Griffith University, Archerfield Airport, Australian eVTOL maker AMSL Aero, tourism flight operator Nautilus Aviation, and more, joined the Greenbird ranks.

However, less than nine months later, the partnership announcements had come to a halt, and Greenbird quietly shut down operations – with its former members remaining steadfastly tight-lipped about the reason behind the closure.

One could suggest that financial viability had some role to play. Around the world, there is rising trepidation around the viability of eVTOL air taxi markets. In 2018, Morgan Stanley predicted the autonomous eVTOL industry would be worth an eye-watering US$1.5 trillion by 2040 – but revised this figure down by half a trillion dollars just three years later. This year, major investment banks downgraded their investment advice on major eVTOL manufacturers, including market favourites Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation.

Regardless, since the demise of Greenbird, it appeared that interest in a local, thriving air taxi industry had been lost and forgotten, with little activity heard from the sector.

That was until Airservices Australia revealed this year that it had appointed Frequentis Australasia to develop a national digital air traffic management system to integrate crewed and uncrewed aerial systems, in time to showcase the results globally amid the 2032 Olympics.

Together, it begs the question: will we see air taxis flying above Brisbane by 2032? In an attempt to settle such a debate, I sat down with Luke Gumley, Airservices Australia head of transformation uncrewed services, as well as emeritus professor and former head of UNSW Sydney’s School of Aviation, Jason Middleton.

5 years, little progress

In 2019, Middleton penned an op-ed in The Conversation after media reports first floated the idea of air taxis by 2025. At that time, Middleton stated there were simply too many unanswered questions for that to be the case. From landing and charging infrastructure, to safety concerns and air traffic management solutions, Middleton argued that five years was far too ambitious a timeline for technologies such as this.

“There’s been a lot of development in the industry in the last five years, however reality is that all of those issues I addressed in 2019 are still problems today,” Middleton tells Australian Aviation, five years on from his original article. “I think a lot of the companies talking about eVTOLs by 2025 back in 2019, were relying heavily on developments in battery technology,” he says. “Batteries are really inefficient, today at least, because to produce a lot of power, they have to be heavy, which just doesn’t work in aerodynamics. And this fact hasn’t materially changed in the last few years.”

Essentially, today, an electric-powered eVTOL has a flight time upper limit of about 45 minutes, “But CASA requires additional fuel loads above and beyond the required to make a trip, for emergencies, or weather changes, which is going to massively reduce the flights these vehicles are capable of.

“The margin for error is really small. I just don’t see how those regulatory issues are resolved without the dramatic technological advance that I think early adopters were relying on – that might not come”.

Middleton says electric aircraft require such unique infrastructure, that a safe, reliable, and economically viable ecosystem seems near impossible. He says that a full-scale system would see “dozens, maybe hundreds” of vehicles in operation at once – meaning critical landing infrastructure is going to become a hot commodity. “In aviation, we always have to prepare for the worst. If you’re flying an eVTOL vehicle” – or perhaps it’s autonomous which only calls this even further into question – “and the weather changes, or the vehicle becomes damaged in some way, you may need to plan for an emergency landing.”

He says eVTOL landing infrastructure will need to be readily available within a large margin of where they operate. “With an electric aircraft, you can’t just land at any airport or field. If you did, you might render that whole vehicle useless, because you can’t transport it anywhere. You need reliable emergency options.”

Clearing airspace

Alternatively, Airservices remains confident that this industry, in some variation, is due to take off over the coming decade – though it might not look exactly like the futuristic intra-city network originally imagined for Brisbane 2032. “Our market research tells us that over the next 20 years, drone flights, which include freight drones and passenger air taxis, are projected to grow an average of 20 per cent per annum, building up to 16 million flights in 2043,” Gumley tells Australian Aviation. The report ultimately suggests of these 16 million flights, passenger transport will account for 1 million flights per year by 2043.

“And we do expect to see the greatest concentration of drones and air taxis in urbanised environments and major city centres, sharing the airspace not just with each other but with existing aircraft as well,” he says.

However, Gumley said Australia is a unique case basis for air taxi and drone operations, given our size and regional distribution. “Air taxis replacing traditional taxis, rideshares and limousines [within cities] are one use-case for these technologies and the traffic management systems we are developing,” he says. “There are other uses for this technology in Australia, like regional air mobility,” he says, connecting “both passenger and larger scale freight movement” from regional hubs to major city centres. “Patient transport is another market for these vehicles, with Australian companies today focused on this specific usage and building those eVTOL vehicles for this use.”

Gumley says the Frequentis contract will account for all such uses of drone and air taxi technologies. “As you can see there are quite broad uses, there are several elements that work within a broader ecosystem … however we know that we will see 60 million flights annually, with significant air traffic density over urbanised environments. That means that we have to have robust and sophisticated air traffic management capabilities, which we have today for traditional crewed aircraft, but we don’t yet have for uncrewed aircraft.”

With that, Gumley admitted that the initial capability of Frequentis’ FIMS system, to be delivered by late 2025, will account for the use of unmanned drone systems for parcel and freight delivery. “We’re developing FIMS primarily to be able to look at air traffic management for drones on day one,” he says.

“But of course, then that scales, we know that air taxis are likely to start to appear in the next few years, but not right now. We want to be able to have capabilities scaled up so that we’ve got drone traffic management well bedded-down and evolved so that we can then start to look at what we need to do to integrate air taxis longer term.”

Settling the debate…?

When asked if he sees a world in which Australia leads air taxi operations globally by the 2032 Olympics, Middleton says: “If it exists, I can see a system that is reliant on existing aircraft, infrastructure and regulation. It will be expensive for passengers and will be out of reach for most spectators of the Olympics. I think we’re still quite far off an eVTOL ecosystem – piloted or autonomous – to risk showcasing that to the world.”

When asked the same, Gumley says: “There are a lot of pieces in the jigsaw puzzle to standing up a fully functioning, commercially viable and sustainable air taxi ecosystem. There is vertiport development and ground-based infrastructure, air taxis need highly specialised areas to be able to take off and land, especially in urban environments.

There has been a bunch of work, perhaps behind the scenes, and it’s been a little bit silent in some respects. But there’s been a lot of work that continues in areas like standards development for vertiports, abroad and here in Australia.” He adds that pilotless flight with passengers onboard adds another layer of complexity that is being worked through in conference rooms around the globe. In air traffic management alone, there is the battle for “finite airspace”, as well as keeping external shareholders – neighbours – happy, in terms of noise and disruption.

While much of the matters above fall outside the realm of Airservices, Gumley says: “Our FIMS system is looking to address those air traffic management issues, to be ready for the likes of the Brisbane Olympics, which we see as a real catalysing event to the implementation of from a global perspective, and in the sense of social acceptance.”

“2032 is probably the inflection point where we start to see more air taxi operations at scale,” he adds. “People will start to see them, become more familiar with operations, understand how they operate, and for us, we’re just making sure we’ve got our systems in place both from a flight path design and a technology perspective to facilitate that”.