Following the Money in the Air-Taxi Craze

Are eVTOLs the “mother of all aerospace bubbles”?

Article Summary

1. eVTOL startups are counting on mass-manufacturing techniques to reduce the costs of these exotic aircraft, but such techniques have never been applied to producing aircraft on the scale specified in the projections. Even the anticipated lower operating costs, Aboulafia adds, won’t compensate.?“If I started a car service here in Washington, D.C., using Rolls Royces, you’d think I was out of my mind, right?,” he asks. “But if I put batteries in those Rolls Royces, would you think I was any less crazy?”
2. What everyone agrees on is that achieving even a modest amount of success for eVTOLs will require surmounting entire categories of challenges, including regulations and certification, technology development, and the operational considerations of safely flying large numbers of aircraft in small airspace.
3. For certification of eVTOL aircraft, three agencies are cited - FAA (US), EASA (EU), and CAAC (China). Of the three, the FAA is considered the most challenging, for several reasons. One is that to deal with eVTOLs, the agency has chosen to adapt its existing certification rules. That gives some observers pause because the FAA does not have a body of knowledge and experience for certifying aircraft that fly by means of battery systems and electric motors. The EASA, on the other hand, has created an entirely new set of regulations tailored for eVTOL aircraft and related technology
4. To clear an aircraft for commercial flight, the FAA actually requires three certifications: one for the aircraft itself, one for its operations, and one for its manufacturing. The certification process itself is performance-based, meaning that the FAA establishes performance criteria that an aircraft must meet, but does not specify how it must meet them.
5. Because eVTOLs are so novel, the FAA is expected to lean on industry-developed standards referred to as Means of Compliance (MOC). Through a certification scheme known as the “issue paper process,” the applicant begins by submitting what’s known as a G1 proposal, which specifies the applicable certification standards and special conditions that must be met to achieve certification. The FAA reviews and then either approves or rejects the proposal. If it’s rejected, the applicant revises the proposal to address the FAA’s concerns and tries again.
6. Nobody knows how many eVTOL startups have started the certification process with the FAA, although a good guess seems to be one or two dozen.
7. They foresee an initial period in which the eVTOLs largely replace helicopters in a few niche applications, such as linking downtown transportation depots to airports for those who can afford it, taking tourists on sightseeing tours, and transporting organs, and high-risk patients among hospitals. There’s less agreement on whether middle-class people will ever be routinely whisked around cities for pennies a mile. Even some advocates think that’s more than 10 years away if it happens at all.
8. If it does happen, a few studies have predicted that travel times and greenhouse-gas and pollutant emissions could all be reduced.
9. “Vertiport” scheduling and capacity may become bottlenecks.