Your first thought might be that they don’t, but this article will discuss two examples of how this is taking place on both sides of the Atlantic. Global Airspace Radar recently had the opportunity to speak with Dan Sloat from the Advanced Air Mobility Institute in the US and Russell Vickers from the Future Mobility Campus Ireland. Both of these organisations have been around for a while, although you may not be familiar with their work.
Advanced Air Mobility Institute
This non-profit research centre was launched in 2022 at a time when eVTOLs were at the height of their investment cycle and there were more than 1,000 eVTOL designs in various levels of progress globally. Their stated vision is an international non-profit research centre dedicated to educating and advocating for the broadest public benefit through the aviation ecosystem globally. Ultimately, the AAM Institute is committed to protecting people, their rights, and the systems we rely on. They seek to accelerate access to these new technologies in an ethical and responsible way. Three key areas of focus are safety, dignity, and resilience.
Their initial definition of the purpose of AAM came from NASA’s goal of using AAM in support of underserved communities to enable improved access to healthcare, jobs, and services.
As part of their commitment to education and advocacy they believe that public safety use of AAM will help to bring about public acceptance of eVTOLs flying overhead. If the technology is just viewed as a helicopter replacement or something only the rich can use, then the public acceptance will not come.
Although the Institute is located in the US, they have liasons in 80 countries that represent different cultures and interests. Within this group there are people who play many different roles – city planners, economists, psychologists, and technology experts as a few examples. Through broadcasting the public benefit of AAM, such as first responder case studies, they can bring the topic to a wider audience.
There is a semi-annual meeting of the members to share trends in their regions and as a result they are able to develop region heatmaps of AAM activity globally. When conducting surveys of the different regions the top two priorities for eVTOL are currently emergency response and medical transport. They look at the entire ecosystem for autnomous aviation solutions including UAS. This incorporates smart infrastructure, vertiports, UTM solutions, runways and sustainable propulsion options.
Future Mobility Institute – Ireland
Launched in 2020, the campus was developed to look at automotive autonomy, smart cities and AAM. The non-profit is funded to grow the ecosystem required to support these topics. They offer a future mobility testbed for research, development, and innovation in the area of Autonomous Connected Electric Shared Vehicles (ACES), Air Mobility, and Smart City infrastructure located in the Limerick-Shannon metropolitan area at Shannon Free Zone, Shannon, Co. Clare, Ireland.
In 2021, they built the DronePort. This is Ireland’s first dedicated facility for testing and developing unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and innovative air mobility (IAM) solutions. Located adjacent to Shannon Airport, the testing facility supports BVLOS operations, U-space air traffic management trials, and real-time data capture for a wide range of applications. Use cases span from drone delivery and aerial inspections to medical logistics and urban air mobility.
The Institute is part of the EALU-AER consortium to demonstrate U-space architecture operations (U1 and U2 services) and the integration with ATM, establishing Ireland’s first Digital Sky Demonstrator. EALU-AER is tasked with building an infrastructure platform using drone traffic management technology solutions, including a fully functioning vertiport, a U-space platform, a backhaul network, communications and surveillance equipment, and advanced three-dimensional phased array radar.
Currently they are raising funding to build a vertiport/vertihub with the goal of completion by the end of 2026. This would be used for airside testing and R&D. When you think of Ireland, you don’t think of multiple busy cities needing AAM for transportation, but where there is a big challenge is with the highway infrastructure across the country. Think of it as ‘all roads lead to Dublin’. The challenge comes in to play if you want to move between other locations without going through Dublin, the trip gets very long. This is where regional air mobility could play a big role in this region. There is also work being done related to a potential trial for the upcoming Ryder Cup in 2027 to alleviate the same challenge previously mentioned about the road infrastructure.
Other challenges to be addressed include construction of the charging infrastructure for eVTOLs. Unlike electric vehicles where pre-cooling/heating equipment is within the vehicle, this doesn’t really work for an eVTOL due to weight constraints. This results in the need for charging stations that will be substantially more expensive to construct that what you see for cars today.
The most important challenge we discussed, was the lack of an operator. Today there isn’t an airline or other organisation who has expressed an interest in this business model, so it appears there’s still some work to do.
It was very interesting to learn about the efforts of these two organisations and it makes you think about where innovation and forward momentum comes from. The lesson learned here is that we shouldn’t overlook the impact of non-profit research organisations, it isn’t all about the work of companies trying to sell a product.
