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 groundbreaking 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.
Mike Hirschberg, VFS Executive Director, said, “More than 300 different types of eVTOL aircraft have been proposed and are catalogued in our World eVTOL Aircraft Directory, https://www.eVTOL.news/aircraft. 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.”
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.
Michael Dyment, NEXA Advisors’ Managing Partner, pointed out, “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.”
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.”
The study’s deep city-level analysis of New York City can be explored at https://www.nexa-uam.com.
About UAM Geomatics Inc.: Formed to provide comprehensive geospatial data sets for 75 of the world’s largest cities, UAM Geomatics is the logical starting point for urban planners and urban air mobility development companies. With its focus on the four key supply chains necessary for investment to drive success, UAM Geomatics is now the go-to portal for over 100 companies and organizations.
About VFS: The Vertical Flight Society was founded as the American Helicopter Society in 1943 by the visionaries of the early helicopter industry, who believed that technological cooperation and collaboration were essential to support this new type of aircraft. Today, VFS plays a similar role helping to advance today’s revolutionary VTOL aircraft. It is the world’s oldest and largest vertical flight technology organization. https://www.VTOL.org.
About NEXA Advisors: A division of the investment bank NEXA Capital Partners, LLC, NEXA Advisors provides corporate and strategic financial advisory services, investment banking and business intelligence, to the aerospace, transportation, logistics, and geomatics sectors. https://www.nexaadvisors.com.
