I’m trying to game out what the end vision of these AAM devices is. If it’s simply about accessibility from tight locations throughout a city, helicopters have existed for a very long time. So, it must be about cost. A Blade flight to JFK from the NYC heliport is about $95. So, we’re shooting for cheaper than $95 for a typical 10-20 mile flight. Ideally, we also want more pickup and dropoff locations (although we don’t currently have heliports everywhere, and there are reasons for that the AAM guys will still need to solve).
For the economics to work out like the investors want it to, there will need to be many aircraft, many flights, and many vertiports. Given the reaction to the Texas Amazon drone delivery facilities, it seems highly unlikely anyone wants these things whizzing over our heads at all hours.
So, we need them completely silent, completely safe, either with way more air traffic control or automated air traffic control systems, we need access to real estate that has never been open before, there must be really cheap flights, and high volume recharging stations along with power infrastructure. This sounds a lot like the VLJ “revolution” we were promised. The Eclipse was supposed to be $800k and we’d all fly private because there’d be so many and they’d be so cheap.
I’m not entirely sure what I’d use this service for. Traveling to the airport would be nice, but Blade does that already. Going to a baseball game would be nice, but how they’d get 50k people into and out of a stadium is just mathematically impossible with AAM. Going to pick up groceries doesn’t really make sense. Going on a road trip doesn’t make sense either. So, what’s the use case?