Transport Committee
Oral evidence: Electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles, HC 1154
Wednesday 22 February 2023
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 22 February 2023.
Members present: Iain Stewart (Chair); Mike Amesbury; Mr Ben Bradshaw; Jack Brereton; Karl McCartney; Grahame Morris; Gavin Newlands; Greg Smith.
Questions 1–81
Witnesses
I: Gary Cutts, Future Flight Challenge Director, Innovate UK; Richard Derrett-Smith, Principal Consultant for Aviation, Egis Group; Andrew Macmillan, Chief Strategy Officer, Vertical Aerospace; Brad Miller, Managing Director, UK and EMEA, Ferrovial Vertiports; and Andy Sage, Director of Safety Transformation, NATS.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– [Add names of witnesses and hyperlink to submissions]
Witnesses: Gary Cutts, Richard Derrett-Smith, Andrew Macmillan, Brad Miller and Andy Sage.
Q1 Chair: Welcome to today’s session of the Transport Select Committee. Today we are looking at eVTOL—electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft.
Before I turn to our panel of witnesses—thank you for your time today—I would like to put on record that the Committee recently invited bids for our future of transport inquiry, which we are reviewing. We received a number of proposals to look at eVTOL or, more broadly, advanced air mobility. Some of the bids that we received from organisations such as Skyports, Supernal, ADS Group and Bristow Group will be covered in part by what we are discussing today. I wanted to put that on record.
I now turn to our panel. Before we get into questions, for the purposes of our record, can I ask each of the witnesses to introduce themselves and the organisation they represent?
Gary Cutts: I am Gary Cutts. I am the challenge director for the UK Government’s future flight challenge. I work for Innovate UK, part of UKRI.
Richard Derrett-Smith: I am Richard Derrett-Smith, principal consultant at Egis working in the future air mobility domain.
Andrew Macmillan: I am Andrew Macmillan. I am the chief strategy officer at Vertical Aerospace. We design and build eVTOLs.
Brad Miller: Good morning. I am Brad Miller. I am the managing director for the UK and Europe for Ferrovial Vertiports. We are interested in the ground infrastructure.
Andy Sage: Good morning. I am Andy Sage, the director of safety transformation at NATS, the UK’s largest airspace manager.
Q2 Chair: Thank you all for your time this morning. This is an exciting new bit of technology, which has the potential to transform aspects of our transport network. Of course, any such innovation comes with many challenges in a number of spheres. Before my colleagues and I dig into some of the specific issues, could you give us an overview of what eVTOL is and what benefits you think it can bring?
Gary Cutts: One of the issues is that there are lots of definitions in this space. The terminology is a little confusing. For us, eVTOLs are passenger-carrying electrical vertical take-off and landing vehicles.
The benefits are quite broad. We have taken an industrial strategy view as well. First, there is a large market for the manufacture, the operation and all the support services and infrastructure. It is a global market that is moving quite fast. We think that the UK is potentially significantly positioned, so there is an industrial benefit.
For us, it is really important that there is a benefit on the consumer side, too. It is all about connectivity and speed. There are lots of different market potentials. No doubt we will dig into them in the coming time. There are things like intracity, moving around relatively fast in cities, which is very media friendly. That is the market that most people see. We see enormous potential for other markets as well—somewhat further-flung, remotely connected towns. There is an ability to fly into places that are poorly served by today’s transport links, providing green services.
We could go on. It is an industrial, fast-moving, global market that the UK could play in and it provides critical connectivity services for the public.
Richard Derrett-Smith: Gary has given a great summary of the potential for this part of the aviation industry. I have nothing further to add.
Andrew Macmillan: To build on Gary’s point, an eVTOL, as the name suggests, takes off vertically and flies horizontally. It is like a helicopter this way and like a plane with a wing that way. That has a number of benefits. Like a helicopter, it allows you to access different communities in different places and, therefore, to link them in a different way. You do not need a runway and all the infrastructure.
It has a number of differences from a helicopter. It is inherently a lot safer. We can dig into that. With a wing and being electrically powered, it is about 100 times safer than a helicopter. It is more like an Airbus or a Boeing. We are certifying the same safety standards as a major aircraft.
It is a lot quieter. Of course, one of the big issues with helicopters, particularly coming into built-up communities—urban areas—is the noise. It is quieter because it is electric and because it has smaller propellers.
It should operate a lot more cheaply, which allows a different kind of economic proposition. That is really what has generated the excitement Gary talked about. If we talk just about Vertical, because I know it best, we now have an order book internationally of about $5.6 billion, with about 1,400 pre-orders from around the world. A lot of money is flowing into investing in and developing these now and a lot of people are very interested in flying them, because of the way they will join things up and allow transport that does not currently exist.
Brad Miller: To add to what my colleagues said previously, the ability to shrink catchment areas and to provide connectivity to hard-to-reach areas, as well as intercity and intracity, is particularly interesting. From a UK perspective, there is the ability to export all our IP and expertise. A real collaborative industry has built up, and is continuing to build up, in the UK. If we get this right, we will have the ability to share all that resource and expertise around the world.
Andy Sage: My colleagues have covered the answer very completely, so I will leave this one.
Q3 Chair: Thank you very much. For our purposes and, indeed, for anyone who is watching this session, can you give us a broad idea of what the range of these vehicles will be? I appreciate that technology will constantly evolve, but can you give a broad context? Also, will this be an exclusive mode of transport? Will it be affordable? Where do you see it sitting in the market? Mr Macmillan, would you like to start?
Andrew Macmillan: Absolutely, since it is about the aircraft. Our first aircraft, which is called the VX4, will fly up to 100 miles. That is entirely battery powered. What is happening, and one of the reasons why these vehicles are now topical, is that the technology, particularly the battery technology, has reached the threshold where you can now build and fly a vehicle entirely on batteries. Exactly as you said, we can forecast fairly well how batteries will continue to improve. Over time, range or payload will expand. The VX4 will have a pilot and four passengers to start.
To the question, “Will it be exclusive?”, the answer is no. One of the things that the aircraft allows is that they are cheaper to build and cheaper to operate than a helicopter. They will be multiples cheaper over time. Of course, they will be like all technologies. Think of the first mobile phones. They were big, they were clunky and they looked odd, but they proved the case. Over time, they have improved and become ubiquitous. We believe that, over time, eVTOLs have the potential to become a very widespread form of transport and to offer connectivity that competes quite well in price with what you can currently get in the way of ground transport, for example.
Q4 Chair: To try to put it in a little context, given one of my previous roles, I am familiar with the inter-island transport in, say, Orkney and Shetland, which are small fixed-wing aircraft. Where would you see an eVTOL aircraft sitting price-wise in relation to one of those?
Andrew Macmillan: I don’t know their price point, but we have looked at a number of journeys in the UK. As others have said, they tend to work quite well where there is a gap in the transport network at the moment—where there is congestion, lack of infrastructure or, maybe, a physical barrier. If we look at a journey trans-Pennines, for example—from Manchester to Leeds or even from Hull to Liverpool—the price point there compares very well with rail or a taxi for those kinds of journeys. Maybe that gives you a comparison point on the price.
Q5 Chair: There is one final question from me at the moment, before I turn to my colleagues. I think I heard you say that your intention is to have a pilot in the craft. Is it possible for them to operate autonomously?
Andrew Macmillan: Certainly, the first generation—our VX4—will be piloted. We think that is important, partly to demonstrate safety and to allow entry into service that integrates with the wider airspace and transport system. We think the public will expect that. The technology to move to automation and autonomy is also developing quite quickly. You can imagine autonomy in the more distant future, but we believe that piloted flying will be how eVTOLs are first introduced.
Q6 Chair: Before I turn to my colleagues, does any of the other witnesses want to add anything?
Brad Miller: Yes, if I can. To come back to your point about exclusivity, we think that it cannot be exclusive. Andrew has spoken about the seat economics. We believe that the attractiveness of urban air mobility is the convenience, the speed and the seamlessness for the passenger, so there will be very little dwell time in order to make the journey attractive. The eVTOL has to beat a car journey or a rail journey to your end destination, which means that there will not be lots of dwell time in the vertical or ground infrastructure, to help the passenger to get through the journey really quickly, and that the aircraft will have to be very highly utilised. It means that passengers have to get on and off very quickly and that we have to make it available to as wide a section of the population as we possibly can in order to support the business case for urban air mobility. It is in our interests to make it available to as many people as possible.
Q7 Chair: Thank you. Mr Cutts?
Gary Cutts: You raised the interesting example of Orkney. One of the future flight challenge projects in phase 2—the SATE project—was in Orkney. We have a phase 3 project current right now—SATE 2—based in Orkney. It is a very broad-ranging project, beyond just eVTOL. That is a really interesting case study.
You talked about the price point. A lot of the routes are PSO routes today—taxpayer-subsidised routes, to provide critical connectivity. One of the advantages of eVTOL, away from electric conventional take-off aircraft, which may be the subject of another conversation, is the cost of infrastructure. Obviously, to fly a conventional aircraft, you need some level of complete airport infrastructure. Some of those are relatively simple fields, but some are fully featured, with very long, concrete runways, towers, infrastructure and everything. eVTOL offers the potential that you do not need something nearly so sophisticated in order to land.
To come back to the future flight challenge, one of our other phase 2 activities was to build a demonstration of what we call a vertiport, which is a fully featured airport for vertical aircraft. One of our projects built one of those in the middle of Coventry city centre, right next to the airport, as a demonstration piece. From memory, it went up in something like five weeks, to construct a fully featured airport, so there is an ability to create the infrastructure to let these things land and take off much more quickly and cheaply. It is not just a question of whether we can operate today’s routes with these aircraft more cheaply, but about whether we can open up other routes that would be prohibitive today because we would have to build full airports.
Q8 Chair: Thank you. Mr Derrett-Smith?
Richard Derrett-Smith: I would like to build on Gary’s comments. We have talked about the passenger experience for these types of aircraft, but there are also numerous industrial and commercial use cases for them, which help to support the overall aviation industry, as well as, obviously, finding applications and use cases within the sectors that they serve.
I do not want to dwell on the Orkneys as an example, but there are a lot of rotary-wing helicopter flights that serve both the Orkney islands and the surrounding oil and gas infrastructure in that part of the world. You can see quite clearly how, with an improved commercial proposition through the use of eVTOLs, that sector could grow and be supported by this type of aircraft. Passengers are an important use case, but the industrial and commercial use cases across all of UK industry could also be well served by this type of aircraft.
Q9 Chair: Mr Sage, do you have anything to add?
Andy Sage: No.
Q10 Karl McCartney: Andrew, I will come to you in a second, but initially I have a question for all four of the others. What timescales do you envisage for seeing these flying very regularly, whether it is for passenger or industrial uses or to replace rotary-wing services to the Orkneys, oil rigs and so on? I do not care who goes first.
Brad Miller: I am happy to go first. My answer has a part A and a part B. Part A is when we see the initial flights happening. That will be on top of when the aircraft gain their certification. All the manufacturers seem to be progressing really well through that and at speed, some as early as 2024. Some are already there, but the more commercial uses will start to be certified in 2024, 2025 and 2026.
The part B answer is that it is just a matter of time until we get enough eVTOLs manufactured and out into the market for commercial use. We think that from 2026 to 2028 is the window of opportunity to see defined scale and numbers for commercial flights, so that people can actually pay to buy a seat on an eVTOL.
Q11 Karl McCartney: Your view is that it will be roughly three to five years.
Brad Miller: Yes, for the part B answer, certainly. eVTOLs and urban air mobility are going to be thrust into everybody’s consciousness post 2024. One of the manufacturers is looking to use the Paris Olympics as a launch event. Because of the global nature of that sporting event, it will be so well known around the world after that.
Q12 Karl McCartney: Mr Derrett-Smith, Mr Cutts or Mr Sage, do you have anything to add?
Gary Cutts: One of the features of this market is that it has an awful lot of people who are trying to develop aircraft—frankly, way too many. We think that there are north of 300 organisations globally. Honestly, probably not more than 10 to 12 of those are credible. I am pleased to say that Vertical Aerospace, based in the UK, is very clearly one of them, and there is a handful that are sensible and credible, but across such a broad range there are very different views.
On the dates, I agree that the very earliest, very aggressive date is for initial operations by 2024. We would say that 2027 is probably a bit more realistic for that. In all honesty—again, with great respect to Vertical Aerospace—some of the organisations have been very ambitious. As you start to develop an all-new aircraft, the reality of the certification challenge kicks in. My view is that the ones aiming for 2024 will end up going back and that 2025 or 2026 is probably a more realistic date. I think, Andrew, that is probably more in line with where Vertical is.
Q13 Karl McCartney: Okay. Richard, do you have anything to add?
Richard Derrett-Smith: On the growth of eVTOLs and how the public and the wider community see them, understandably, you would expect the operations to be focused initially on the low-risk applications and use cases. From my background in safety and risk, I think the industry needs to build experience and confidence in the use and usability of these types of aircraft. In the short term, certainly, you will see them deployed in specific use cases where it is easier to demonstrate—to the regulator, but also to the public—that the risks associated with this type of aircraft are lower and more manageable. As confidence and experience build, I think you will start to see them deployed across a much wider range of use cases. That is entirely consistent with conventional aviation and how that industry has grown over the last 100 years.
Q14 Karl McCartney: Andy, I know we will be asking you questions about infrastructure and other things later. Very quickly, do you have a timescale you are looking at?
Andy Sage: Over the last 12 months we have seen a big increase in interest. We have been approached by several operators and manufacturers expressing a desire to operate in the UK. As NATS, we are obliged to manage the traffic that is presented to us, so we are busy working out what impact that will have on our network.
Q15 Karl McCartney: Is there any timescale you want to give us? Do you have a ballpark figure?
Andy Sage: No. It is broadly in line with what you have heard already.
Q16 Karl McCartney: Five to seven years.
Andrew, you already have an order book. When are you going to start producing those vehicles? Is your supply chain UK-based or around the world? Those are the questions I wanted to ask you and they lead into the question of how soon you think you will have your vehicles flying.
Andrew Macmillan: We are targeting mid-decade, as others have said. I agree with Gary’s point. There are many projects looking at these around the world, but there is a small group of companies—ourselves, some based in the US, some in Germany and some in Asia—that are the most serious and able to bring commercial aircraft to market.
As others have said, the big step is safety certification by the regulator, which, in our case, will be the UK CAA. We think that we will be the first, or one of the first, full aircraft to be certified in the UK for many decades. That is quite exciting, too, for UK R&D and UK aerospace. It is absolutely the case that the aircraft will come to market and then build out gradually. There will be some use cases first. Then there will be others that expand over time.
One of the things that is very exciting for us here in the UK is that we have the potential to be one of the first adopters in the world, one of the leading markets. There are many uses for these aircraft here. We have a large number of the people in the ecosystem to make it work and some of the most advanced and progressive people working on this anywhere in the world. The fact that we have a leading aerospace and transport industry and that we are bringing it to bear on this new, sustainable form of travel is one of the real opportunities for us here.
If we talk about the supply chain and production ramp-up, which is one of the next challenges, once you can safety-certify, one of the advantages of eVTOLs is that they should be simpler than large aircraft or helicopters. Therefore, we should be able to ramp up manufacture, and rates of manufacture, to a higher level than you see with big planes, for example.
At Vertical, we are very much building on the aerospace industry. It is in the name of the company—Vertical Aerospace—and is one of the reasons that we are based in the UK. It is one of the reasons that we based ourselves down in Bristol, in the heart of the aerospace cluster in the UK. We have partnered with Rolls-Royce to produce our engines; with Honeywell for the avionics system; with Leonardo, which has bought AgustaWestland, to do the fuselage, and with GKN, which does the wings for Airbus, to do the wings, and so forth.
The logic there is twofold. First, it helps with safety. If you are a regulator, you are looking at technology that already flies and that you already know is reliable, produced by people who you know are reliable. Secondly, we believe that it will help with the ramp-up of production and allow us to start producing hundreds of these, possibly even thousands, within a few years of introduction, rather than just the few initial ones that get flown.
Q17 Karl McCartney: Do your engines use blades? Who is producing the blades?
Andrew Macmillan: The engines themselves are electric and, yes, they have propellers on them. In our vehicle, we have eight of those on the wing.
The blades are interesting, because they are not like helicopter blades or aircraft blades. They are one of the things that reduce the noise. One of the bits of technology that we are having to develop is the exact specification of those blades. Again, that is interesting in terms of material science, blade design and so on. A number of bits of the technology are quite well established, but the really interesting new things are the blades, the integration of the whole aircraft and, in particular, the batteries, because it will be the first aircraft that flies entirely on battery power.
Q18 Karl McCartney: Are you working on the blades, or do you have some other company in the—
Andrew Macmillan: We are working on the blades, but we are partnering with a lot of people, including a number of UK research universities and research institutes, which have quite a lot of expertise on this. It is one of the areas of new activity and new development.
Q19 Gavin Newlands: Turning to development, VTOL has been around for quite some time, from before the Harrier, and these days you have the Osprey and even the F-35. eVTOL is quite an exciting new development, so I want to try to get a handle on what we are talking about. I will focus mainly on Andrew and Gary because we will talk about the development of ground infrastructure, regulation and the airspace a little later with colleagues, so forgive me if I don’t ask the other witnesses to comment.
Where are we now? You have already mentioned other developers or mainstream projects, however you want to describe it, in Germany, the US and other places. How much development has actually taken place? Where would you say that the UK currently is in the global race to eVTOL?
Andrew Macmillan: As Gary said, we believe we are in the leading pack—probably the top four or six firms in the world—on development. We have actually built a full-scale prototype of the VX4. You can go and see it in the Cotswolds. Our chief test pilot, who was a test pilot for Harrier and for the F-35 and then worked with one of the US firms that is trying to build eVTOLs as well, flew that last autumn down in the Cotswolds. We believe it is one of the first examples of a piloted, full-scale flight of an eVTOL. That says that we are certainly in the leading group in terms of where we are developing.
There is a huge opportunity for the UK. We should be going after that and making sure that we claim our fair share of this industry. There is a further question about how we scale up and industrialise, and how we take what is a classic UK example of great innovation and clever people coming up with technology and turn it into a real industrial success story. In terms of the vehicles, I think we are well developed.
If you look at the broader group of technologies, firms and capabilities to make this real, the UK is very well placed. Whether on the airspace side, with NATS and others, or on the vertiports and developing the ground infrastructure, there are numerous firms here in the UK that really are world leading. We are in a great position. We just need to grab the opportunity that is in front of us.
Q20 Gavin Newlands: I saw a presentation from Vertical at Glasgow airport before COP26. I do not know whether it has been updated since. Mr McCartney alluded to the fact that you have a fairly substantial order book. If everything else—regulation and so on—falls into place, how much might this sector be worth for the UK as a whole?
Andrew Macmillan: UKRI made an estimate of about 1.8% of GDP by the 2030s from AAM as a whole. There are various estimates of the size of the market; I think ADS is talking about $1.2 trillion by 2050, which is huge. I have seen an estimate of about 900 eVTOLs flying in the UK in the 2030s.
To come back to us, we have over 1,400 pre-orders around the world. That is about $5.6 billion, with customers such as Virgin, one of our launch customers here in the UK, and American Airlines, Japan Airlines and GOL Brazil—big airlines and other people involved in transport. That demonstrates that it is a very real opportunity. There is real demand out there.
Q21 Gavin Newlands: Gary, do you have anything to add on the questions that I asked Mr Macmillan? I do not think that there are, but can you confirm whether any eVTOL aircraft are currently in regular use around the world? Moreover, how many other countries have had successful test flights? Vertical has had one here in the UK. Where is everywhere else?
Gary Cutts: I will answer that question first and then come back to you on some of the broader points. Andrew covered this quite well. A handful of other countries are in a similar position. Germany, in particular, through Volocopter, has flown more flights. They are absolutely not in revenue service yet, but they are in a position where several have flown. There are a number of companies in the US too, such as Joby, which has flown a number of test flights, but absolutely not in certified aircraft. Most people are in a similar space, where aircraft have flown but are not yet ready to go into passenger service. On that, “amongst the leading pack” is the right description. We feel quite proud of that.
It is important to broaden it out, because this is where the future flight challenge plays. This is not solely about the aircraft. The aircraft are very impressive and technologically challenging, but this is an entirely new aviation ecosystem. We have covered a few of the points. We will need new concepts for airports. They are not the airports we know today. These things can fly into those airports, but they will go much wider, so what are the concepts for airports? If they are in dense cities, what are the regulations around them? How do you build them? How do you recharge the aircraft? There is a lot of physical infrastructure.
Because we envisage that these aircraft, along with drones and UASs, will give a much more densely used airspace at lower altitudes, we know that we need new models of air traffic management and airspace concepts. That second part will be critical in the fullness of time; not for initial operation, but scaled to the numbers we are talking about, you will need different concepts. Again, I guess that it is not by coincidence that we have Andy Sage from NATS here. The UK is really well positioned, through NATS and, I have to say, some other start-up air traffic management concept companies. All of that requires a set of digital technologies, which will get into pilot support, to make the pilot workload easier, as well as digital air traffic management. The UK is very well positioned in those things as well.
While I would never feel comfortable, we feel proud of where the UK is. If we look at our airport-building capability, our infrastructure is very solid. We have very well-respected air traffic management and air traffic management technology companies, including a number of start-ups, and a real body of knowledge around cyber-security and digital systems. Technically, a lot of the pieces come together for us.
Our challenge also goes into another really important aspect that I know all our colleagues support as well—the public engagement piece. Eventually, having a technical capability to provide a service is necessary but clearly not sufficient. The public have to give you what CAA used to call social licence. The public have to get comfortable enough that these new forms of aviation are, on balance, a good thing to do. We have engaged a lot on social considerations. We have a social science research director who leads a package of exactly that—social science research. How would the public feel? What are the socioeconomic benefits? How do you spread that value around society at large?
For us, the UK is really well placed. To date, I see no other integrated Government-industry partnership that is looking across the entire aviation ecosystem moving forward. We know that in some of the other countries we talk to that approach is now being copied. It is replicable, I am afraid, but we felt that we were leading the pack in bringing industry together in that way.
Q22 Gavin Newlands: Do you think there should be a new body, or could it be incorporated into Jet Zero or a sub-committee of Jet Zero?
Gary Cutts: One of the 10 points in the Government’s “Flightpath to the Future” document, which was published at the end of the summer, refers to the future of flight. It will probably be better for the DFT to talk in detail about this, but the DFT is establishing a joint Government-industry group within that, which will meet in the coming weeks to drive this activity forward. Because these are clearly clean aircraft, so there are green technologies, it is associated with and has a relationship to Jet Zero, but there is a separate activity coming. The future flight industry group coming from DFT is very important.
Q23 Gavin Newlands: Okay. I hope it meets more regularly than Jet Zero. As a quick follow-up to my colleague Mr McCartney’s question on skilling up, I think you touched on that and mentioned the end of the decade—hundreds or a specific number, potentially—but can I ask all of you where you see the sector in 10 and 20 years’ time? It is Mystic Meg time. With a fair wind, where do you think we will be?
Gary Cutts: I will quote in volume terms from a number of external consultants’ reports. Some of the numbers have been referred to already. On volume, in the report that we published about 18 months ago we talked about a £32 billion market by 2035. If you factor in other numbers—I think, Andrew, you quoted £1.7 trillion—the largest number I have seen is £3.7 trillion by 2050. Once you are into those kinds of numbers, frankly, it doesn’t matter; it is a large number. The consensus view is that there is a real market, which will grow, and that it is substantive and will support a number of manufacturers.
The bit that I would like to share is that the way the market develops, and which markets are important, is not determined yet. We try to stay somewhat agnostic, because that is where you get into what the price points are, the public’s view of the technology, whether you achieve the volume cost reductions that Andrew and colleagues are striving for, and where you end up. That determines the types of people and the routes. Our view of the economics is that these aircraft become more obviously sensible economic things the more you can fill them—four to five or more passengers—and fly a longer range. They become very sensible economic devices then. A lot of the media show very short-range air taxi routes, which could come to pass; to us, longer-range routes seem more obvious. The bit that is Mystic Meg is exactly which segments of the market will develop, and at what speed. That is a little unknown, partly because the technology is still emerging, but also because the markets develop as the public choose to interact with them.
Finally, we have done some level of public dialogue, which was really important. We did that about this time last year, through our research director and Ipsos MORI. That determined that the public have quite different views, but they do not understand this technology at all. You are trying to have a conversation about the public’s views on how we will use the aircraft and what their reservations are, but it does not exist; they do not understand it yet. We are engaging very early, so trying to judge what the mood will be, and what acceptance there will be, is quite tough. There are lots of things to play out yet.
Richard Derrett-Smith: Gary has given a great summary. Where the industry will be in five to 10 years and then 15 to 20 years depends a lot, as Gary said, on public adoption of the technology. As it comes to market and sees its initial operations in use cases, and the public start to engage with and, hopefully, embrace it, that will have a bearing. It is critical in the first five or 10 years. Separate from that, the industrial-commercial use cases will probably come online as well in that five to 10-year window. I think there will be parallel streams of development of the industry, serving those two different markets. In the longer term, I hope that it becomes part of the public consciousness, almost, in selecting transport options to get from A to B, as are rail or road travel or conventional aviation now. The goal has to be that eVTOL travel is a credible option for the public to choose, and one that they are familiar with and comfortable with. That is where the industry should be aiming, from the passenger experience perspective, in the 10 to 15 to 20-year window.
Q24 Gavin Newlands: Okay. Is there anything further to add?
Andrew Macmillan: We have covered most of the statistics and forecasts, but I guess there are just three quick things I would think about, in trying to look forward. The first is that the technology has passed the threshold, and things are therefore happening faster than a lot of people realise. We will start to see the possibility—to see real aircraft—quite soon.
The second thing is that it is quite hard to predict exactly where all this will go, other than that it will be very big and could be very impactful, because it will be so transformative. It will change the kinds of links and transport that we can use, whether that is for people or cargo, or other things. We will quite quickly discover new applications for it that we have not even thought of yet. If you look forward 10 years or so, we will be discovering new things that can be done with the technology that we have not yet thought of. The technology will keep moving on significantly. Range and payload will increase. There may be ways to match electric power with things such as hydrogen fuel cells that will create other opportunities.
The third thing is important for us in the UK: not only do we need to maximise the transformative opportunity, and get public acceptance to allow it, but we have the opportunity to be one of the leading countries making and producing this new, revolutionary industry, which is part of the revolution in flight. Grabbing that bit of the opportunity is part of the challenge for us and, indeed, the upside for us.
Q25 Gavin Newlands: Thanks. Mr Miller.
Brad Miller: I am trying to think about the opportunity in 10 to 20 years’ time, as opposed to “This is what it will look like with a fair wind,” which I think was part of your question. By 2033-ish we are five or six years into full-scale manufacture from a lot of OEMs, a lot of manufacturers, so there is the opportunity for hundreds if not thousands of eVTOLs to be available to airlines and operators to book seats on. From 2030 to the mid-2030s, we could quite easily have a robust network of urban air mobility for people to use. If you fast forward to 2043, and all that manufacturing ability has been built on and scaled up, on the basis that it has been successful—there is no reason why it should not be—you are then looking at widespread use of eVTOLs; but, as Andrew alluded to, it has probably crept into other things as well, which we cannot imagine just yet. How does it integrate with maybe a fully electric aviation network serving the domestic market but with further ranges, and connecting to different infrastructure that we have not yet thought about?
Q26 Gavin Newlands: Mr Sage?
Andy Sage: Initially, we expect to be able to accommodate a limited number of aircraft using existing services and infrastructure; but to achieve within 10 years the sort of scalability and full integration into the airspace that has been described would depend entirely on the delivery of the Government’s refreshed airspace modernisation strategy, which was published last month—alongside many of the other dependencies that you have heard about this morning.
Gavin Newlands: It has been rather slow thus far, but on that note I hand back to the Chair.
Q27 Chair: Thank you. Before I turn to Greg I have a quick supplementary on the point you made, Mr Macmillan, about potential increases in range. I think you said earlier that you are looking at a range of about 100 miles. It is almost an impossible question to answer, but as far as you can see technology evolving, will there be a little bit more range, or will it double or triple from what you currently envisage?
Andrew Macmillan: You can certainly see, with pure batteries, that, yes, you could extend range quite considerably. It could go up to 200 miles or beyond. Another possibility is that, once you have electrified flight, you could, for example, start to integrate in such things as hydrogen-type systems over time, which would give you considerably more range. A London to Paris flight is not unimaginable, by any means.
Chair: Thank you.
Q28 Greg Smith: Good morning, gentlemen. I want to pick up on some of the points that have started to be teased out about the uses and benefits and who is going to use these services. I appreciate from the earlier answers that there is an evolving market, but for pounds, pence, dollars, euros or whatever to have been spent in development, there must be a business plan as to where the launch focus will be. It would be great to hear your views on where that launch will be. Is this just a straightforward takeover of the existing helicopter market, so that when I am in my happy place at Silverstone circuit for the British Grand Prix I will in future, instead of watching a series of helicopters landing, be watching a series of eVTOLs landing, or will the launch be more passenger-focused, away from that more exclusive market, as the Chairman put it in his opening question? Who would like to go first on that?
Andrew Macmillan: I can talk, for example, about our customers and what we are seeing in that initial wave. There are some similarities around the world and, as 90% of our orders are exports from the UK, it is quite an international order book. We see three common use cases for passenger flight. One of them is, indeed, a kind of tourism. Silverstone is probably a good example of, exactly as you describe, people choosing an eVTOL over a helicopter for either particular events or getting to certain places. We talked about the Paris Olympics, and another example might be Japan, which is very focused on trying to fly eVTOLs for the World Expo in 2025. It is those kinds of uses. LA is talking about the 2028 Olympics. Those kinds of tourist connections, whether to a hotel, a resort or an event, are one instance.
A second thing that we see a lot, particularly with airlines, is connecting to other parts of the aviation network, particularly larger airports, possibly initially with more premium passengers but growing that over time. It is about how you do the last connection once you have flown in on, let’s say, a long-haul flight. If you try at the moment to get from Heathrow to somewhere like Cambridge there are two train connections, or you go around the M25, and we know it is the luck of the draw how that will work. This technology would allow people to do that with vastly more predictability, saving a lot of time. Heathrow to Cambridge would be a 20 or 30-minute trip.
The third use case that we see a lot of is the one I was alluding to before, which is connecting two points where there is a gap in the transport network. Maybe there is water in the way, or hills, or maybe there just is not the road or rail connectivity. You can save quite a lot of time making those connections, and from the public point of view there is no need to invest in the road and rail connectivity to link points up. Again, we can see lots of examples, such as the trans-Pennines one, in the UK.
We see those three use cases a lot everywhere. We also see a lot of interest in some of the non-passenger uses. For example, we are working with Babcock in the UK to look at medical uses—medical helicopters and supporting hospital systems and so forth. There are logistics-type uses as well. There are other uses that people are looking at, but those seem to be the ones, based on our customers, that are coming forward around the world.
Q29 Greg Smith: The logistics point makes a lot of sense, particularly for medical purposes—perhaps getting an organ from one hospital to another—but on the wider commercial logistics what sort of weight can the products currently in development take? This is as much for the premium airline passenger as anything; if you get four people in there, how much luggage or freight can they actually lift without the power drain on the battery being so significant that the journey is down to 10 miles rather than 100?
Andrew Macmillan: We are designing the VX4 initially to take four passengers plus 20 kg of luggage, which equates to a payload of about 560 kg—something of that order. You are right; this is not going to be carrying lots of heavy goods around straightaway, but your organ example is very apposite. A lot of people are talking about where there are high-value things that people need to move around, where time matters. A helicopter is an expensive way to do that versus an eVTOL, so there is real opportunity in those applications of logistics, in the first instance.
Q30 Greg Smith: Does anyone else want to speak?
Gary Cutts: I have a couple of quick comments. First, I am trying not to stray into this today, but our programme looks after unmanned air systems, uncrewed air systems and drones as well, which is not what we are reviewing today; these are passenger-carrying vehicles, but they have a lot of applications in the kinds of things that you are talking about. A lot of the UK use cases that we are doing are exactly that; they are medical supplies and samples. Those are important and publicly accepted use cases around the unmanned, and they can do that very cheaply.
I want to give a little example. Andrew talked about connectivity. In the challenge, we never push aviation, much as we like aviation, as a solution to everything. It is a question of what other transport networks you have. There are clearly lots of routes with well-established, and in many cases green, railway networks that provide the volume, so that would not be a particularly sensible place to use it.
We have done a few studies of interesting places where connectivity is not what you might imagine. In one, taken from analysis of mobile phone data, we think that about 8,000 people make the journey between the Manchester-Liverpool conurbation area and the Norwich area weekly. To us that was quite surprising. It feels quite high. These are clearly approximations; they are orders of magnitude, but it is something like four hours of driving, or four and a half on public transport. With the types of vehicle we are talking about it comes to sub two hours. For people for whom time really matters and who have to do the journey twice a day, that becomes quite compelling. It is a good example of established routes that do not have the infrastructure for fast transport today. One of our beliefs is that there are probably many more town pairs in the UK than we realise where there is quite a lot of transport between them without an infrastructure. Again, we are not pushing that all of those should go to a massive, dense urban air transport network, but for some it will be appropriate. We think that is a really interesting market development.
Q31 Greg Smith: This is the last question from me in this section. Let’s say that everything works brilliantly. There is massive take-up of these things, and everybody wants to commute on one, and it leads to mass use. Mr Sage, you are perhaps best placed to answer this. Where would the limits on airspace come before the skies above the UK started looking like “Bladerunner” or something like that, with a constant flow of vehicles in the sky? What would be the limit on how many passenger journeys could be conducted at any one time, assuming that the technology works, everything is marvellous, and everyone could afford to buy a ticket?
Andy Sage: I don’t want to speculate into the long term but, certainly if you look at the way the airspace is managed today, the safety of the skies depends heavily on segregation. The skies are separated into blocks of airspace dominated by a type of user, whether that be commercial airlines, military or general aviation. That is coupled with a set of relevant services and infrastructure, designed to suit the user. To accommodate the new types of aircraft and meet the varied demand that you are hearing described today, which is not as predictable as other types of traffic, we cannot continue to segregate airspace into ever-smaller chunks. It is unsustainable, which is why we have to look to airspace integration and the ability to integrate different types of user in low-level airspace. That is going to be a critical factor in beginning to scale this up to any reasonable extent far beyond the sort of long-term vision that you are suggesting.
Q32 Greg Smith: To bring it back—I promise this is my final question—to Mr Cutts’s example of the 8,000 people who travel from the broad Liverpool-Manchester region to Norfolk, for how many of those 8,000 on a weekly basis would it be conceivable to have four-person aircraft in the sky on that route?
Andy Sage: I don’t think we have that information available yet. I am sorry. It is too early.
Andrew Macmillan: Perhaps I could pick up on one or two thoughts. One is that you may end up with more than four people, by the time of the kind of future you are describing, so that will add capacity. What is interesting in what Andy has just described is that much of the limit on this is about policy regulation and how we set up the system, rather than sheer physics, as it were, or even technology that we can either see now or anticipate already. Part of the opportunity is to make sure that we safely maximise what we can do, rather than restricting ourselves simply because we cannot get the right policy and regulation in place.
Gary Cutts: We covered this a little before, but going back to public perception, which we are working heavily on, it is a little bit unknowable. There are all kinds of reasons why that could become the limiting factor. The public get comfortable that these things are inherently safe; they are certified and they meet the standards, but if you see a large number of them, your perception of safety is quite different. We understand the noise issues, and clearly once you are in level flight at an altitude that is not an issue, but it would be a consideration. Then you get the intangible things like visual pollution. You mentioned “Bladerunner”. What level of aircraft—non-specified—in the sky inherently makes people feel uncomfortable?
Then you get into other things that are somewhere between subjective and honest reservations. Privacy is a big deal so we are thinking of things like privacy. Certainly by the time we add drones, which have a lot of digital imagery sensing, the perception is that not only are they flying near to your place; they are also collecting lots of data. That could become one of the things we have to overcome as a limiting factor. Do the public get comfortable? Is the way they are being flown and the intrusiveness they are giving to your daily lives at an acceptable level? Clearly that is not enumerable. It will evolve with time.
Chair: Before I turn to Mike, Karl, you want to come in quickly.
Q33 Karl McCartney: I do, thank you, Chair. Obviously, I could mention “Bladerunner”, “The Fifth Element” or a number of other films and, Mike, I don’t want to cut across your questions that I know are coming, but I want to delve into the safety aspect, with NATS, of having all these vehicles, whether manned or unmanned, in the air. How many satellites do you think are going to be needed to deal with the capacity issues, rather than humans?
Andy Sage: We are talking about a very different type of aircraft, as has been explained this morning, whether in the way it lands, performs or operates, so inevitably that is going to require changes to our processes and procedures to enable us to operate in support of such aircraft.
Q34 Karl McCartney: But do you foresee that humans will be able to control that safely, or do you think there will be a need for a satellite system?
Andy Sage: Whether it is a satellite system or not I cannot say, but certainly the way in which we and, indeed, the other airspace managers in the UK, anticipate coping with this type of traffic is going to look very different from the way it does today for sure.
Q35 Karl McCartney: Thank you. I could ask you this difficult question, but I’m not going to; I’m going to ask Andrew. As one of the manufacturers, who do you think should pay for such a system, if it is a satellite system?
Andrew Macmillan: I don’t know if it is a satellite system, but at entry into service you would rely largely on existing systems and then, over time, as volume grows, you might move on with technology. We are manufacturing aircraft, not flying them. There will be operators who fly them. If you took an analogy from mainline aviation it would be that the operation of the aircraft paid, in some way, for the air traffic control services. That seems a reasonable kind of approach to take.
Q36 Karl McCartney: Ultimately, the people who use the services are going to end up paying for them. I am just conscious that I do not want taxpayers paying for them.
Andrew Macmillan: Absolutely. Again, as with mainline aviation it seems plausible to set this up as a commercial proposition where, for example, NATS is providing the service and NATS is paid by the operators for use of the service.
Q37 Karl McCartney: Gary, anything to add to that?
Gary Cutts: No, other than your basic premise, I guess, about the taxpayer. One of the reasons we know aviation is looked on favourably is that fundamentally it is much more private industry driven. There are much lower levels of direct tax support, and we imagine it will continue in the same way—on the fundamental principle that the user pays.
The only other thing I would add on the technology of air traffic management in particular—Andy can talk to this—is that there are lots of options, including satellites. At lower altitudes people are looking at mobile telecommunications—5G-type stuff. Some of the telecoms companies are heavily engaged. Participants that we are funding include BT—
Karl McCartney: I will stop you there, Gary, as it is straying into where Mike is going to drill down potentially, so I will cut that. Is that all right, Mike? Thank you.
Chair: Mike, over to you.
Q38 Mike Amesbury: Good morning, gentlemen. eVTOL is very exciting isn’t it? It is not the future; it is the here and now. Gary, how is it going to drive decarbonisation of the transport industry?
Gary Cutts: A couple of things: we have to be really clear here, and this is a conversation that we have had a lot for the last four years in the challenge. The Government’s challenge on future flight is not decarbonising aviation. It is that we are introducing some new forms of aviation that we think are inherently zero carbon. They are on a journey to zero carbon, because clearly the electric power network system in this country is not a zero-carbon network, but it is on that journey. Our view is that the new industry that we are creating is heading towards itself being zero carbon.
There were four or five key objectives in our business plan. The hardest to prove, by the time we finish the challenge, is that we believe that some of the technologies that we are developing, in companies like Andrew’s in particular, will slowly feed into large commercial transport. I absolutely subscribe to the view that, if you set off trying to generate 200-seater electric aircraft, you will wait a long time. That is not coming any time soon; but, clearly, we have an electric four-seater aircraft, and we can imagine a path to an electric 19-seater aircraft in the foreseeable future. Absolutely, we can see the importance of these types of aircraft, which are green, gradually taking away the bottom end of aviation; but we can also see a flow of technologies upwards.
I can give a specific example, not about the aircraft. Again, Andy may be able to talk much more knowledgeably than I can. Air traffic management works today in a well-established, very safe and predictable system, but it fundamentally runs on 1960s technology. For these new aircraft, we will need a different type of air traffic management system that is much more digitally enabled. I have always had the view that the air traffic management technology required to enable these low-altitude aircraft to fly will eventually become the tech that modernises the entire air traffic management system, with more optimum flight paths. From memory, something like 5% to 7% of fuel is wasted by non-optimal routeing by air traffic management. We absolutely see a gradual flow of technology from these markets into large commercial transport.
The final point is that compared with traditional aviation this is very fast moving. It is different in nature. It has the ability to bring and trial technologies much more quickly than we could with large commercial transport. I have always regarded it as an experimental de-risking playground for technologies that will feed through into the jet zero world in the fullness of time.
Q39 Mike Amesbury: Thank you. Richard?
Richard Derrett-Smith: I will add to what Gary said and think about the displacement effect of this new form of transport, if indeed it is adopted at a reasonable scale for passenger-carrying and non-passenger-carrying applications. We do not really know how the wider transport network is going to decarbonise, but if we are taking people out of other forms of transport and putting them into zero-emission, zero-carbon forms of transport, I think that supports the overall decarbonisation agenda for transport as a whole. How that plays out in the fullness of time as other forms of transport move to zero carbon or decarbonise is unknown, but we can see a positive trend, let’s say, as we take people out of more heavily polluting forms of transport and put them into cleaner forms. That, in addition to what Gary said, is an important aspect of the overall decarbonisation impact of this form of aviation.
Q40 Mike Amesbury: Thank you, Richard. Andrew.
Andrew Macmillan: Decarbonisation is a very important point to pick up on. I have three things to add, quickly. One is that decarbonisation of these vehicles is real. We have done the math on a bunch of journeys here in the UK based on the real UK existing grid, and, interestingly, the carbon intensity per mile is lower even than in electric vehicles, on a lot of trips—even an electric car—and certainly much lower than in something like a diesel or petrol car. There are real savings to be had. Even if we just replaced 500 light helicopters in a year, that is, I think, 68,000 tonnes of carbon saved.
Secondly, on the point that Gary made, there are technologies that have wider applications. To take batteries as an example, this will be the first aviation propulsion battery system developed. We have an opportunity to do things slightly differently from what we did with cars, where we perhaps let some of the battery technology get away from us a bit in this country, and we are now going to bring in gigafactories and so forth. We can use strength in aerospace to build out the battery technology and apply it to all kinds of aviation uses, some of which we can’t even predict now, over the next couple of decades, and decarbonise that way.
I am involved with the Jet Zero Council, and the third thing is that I find there that some of the technologies that we know are on the pathway to decarbonising aviation are quite hard for people to wrap their head around: changing the fuel, and hydrogen—what is that going to be about? A lot of them are far in the future. These are likely to be the first completely zero-emission in operation flights that any of us get on. That is quite important for people symbolically. It shows that we can move towards taking the carbon out of flying. There is a power there that should not be underestimated.
Q41 Mike Amesbury: At the moment, there are 1,400 pre-orders, and the product is for four people, isn’t it?
Andrew Macmillan: Four passengers and a pilot.
Q42 Mike Amesbury: Four passengers, so in terms of scaling that up, obviously there are efficiencies of scale. That is the direction of travel in the future. Gary referred to the cities and towns of the north, and you can see how this could generally power up the north in terms of transport and respond to the agenda of decarbonisation.
Andrew Macmillan: Absolutely. You have a sustainable way of connecting places that may currently suffer from lack of transport connection. I think we will see all kinds of positive benefits flowing from that. Suddenly, places will have economic propositions. You can suddenly get to these places in 10 or 20 minutes. That is very exciting for a lot of communities that may be poorly connected at the moment in various ways. The fact that you can do it in a sustainable way is a compelling proposition in regional development and economic connectivity.
Q43 Mike Amesbury: Brad, maybe you can focus on the infrastructure as well.
Brad Miller: Yes, I’m happy to get to that. To add very briefly to what the chaps have said, they will simply remove congestion from road and rail immediately, plus the emissions because they are zero emission at the point of operation. If you are on a green tariff with recharging, arguably it is 100% net zero. There are lots of domestic travel benefits. We have to try to think about the very much more distributive network that could be achieved in future, not just point to point as we have between existing airports or larger train stations. There are benefits for existing aviation, particularly from the scope 2 and scope 3 perspective because their passengers will have the ability to travel to the airport on an eVTOL, or indeed their staff who are commuting will be able to travel on an eVTOL. It will help with their scope 2 and scope 3 aspects as well.
Andy Sage: NATS has certainly committed to do whatever we can to decarbonise aviation. We are completely committed to figuring out how we can safely integrate these aircraft into the airspace in a way that minimises the impact on our existing customers and other users.
To pick up some of the points my colleagues have made, we were involved as part of an industry-wide study initiated a couple of years ago within the CAA’s regulatory sandbox. That published a concept of operations and how they might emerge over time, pulling together the different elements of the ecosystem: the aircraft, the airspace, the ground infrastructure and so forth. That illustrates how it might be possible to bring about scalability in this sector. If the Committee is interested, I can make sure that a copy of that concept of operations is made available.
Chair: That would be very helpful. Thank you.
Q44 Greg Smith: I want to continue on the theme of infrastructure and the very practical things that will be needed to facilitate not just the take-off and landing of the product, but check-in and all the facilities you would need for logistics purposes in loading goods on. What proportion of existing ground facilities—heliports and airports—would be used, or are we talking of wholly new facilities being built? Within that, what are the restrictions or road blocks you can foresee coming up in the planning system to get those built? I guess, Mr Miller, this is particularly directed to you.
Brad Miller: Thank you very much. You might have to remind me of parts of your question. On the existing infrastructure, when we think about where we should invest from a ground infrastructure perspective, it is demand, demand, demand—passenger demand. We have invested a lot of time, resource and expertise in understanding where that demand will come from in the early years but also in the future. That allows us to be much more targeted and focused on towns, cities and regions where we think that demand will come from. I do not mean to be glib, but if an existing facility is proximate to where we see that demand, it will make absolute sense to have it as part of an integrated and distributive network.
That suggests, however, that we will need some new non-aerodrome vertiports, whether that be heliports or existing airports, purely because the flying characteristics of the eVTOL lend themselves to a distributive network and, therefore, it is much wider than just going point to point. It drives convenience, so we have to have that network spread across the country as much as we possibly can, but it must be proximate to the demand. We tend to think in terms of a 15-minute travel time, whether that be via surface access in any transport you might think of today, or walking, cycling or an electric scooter. It is the psychological aspect. Anything within 15 minutes of where someone is originating or their end destination will be highly important. If it is anything beyond 15 minutes, we start to erode the benefit of getting on an eVTOL flight; we start to take away that time saving.
Q45 Greg Smith: I am worried that my next question will be a how long is a piece of string question.
Brad Miller: Don’t worry about that.
Q46 Greg Smith: In London, as a city, right now if you ask people where there is a heliport everyone says Battersea, and Battersea is really the only one that has commercial viability and throughput. How many vertiports do you think London as a city would end up needing for this to be—I appreciate the demand-led point—a viable going concern, and how much space would each of those vertiports require to be functional?
Brad Miller: Gosh. It depends on where we take the cross-section in time, in predicting the future. That will vary and that is how long is a piece of string. From a UK, or country, perspective, we tend to look at things in clusters. Andrew has already spoken about the 100‑mile range. Certainly, in our demand modelling we placed an artificial cap on our demand assessment of 100 miles, because we are starting to think about the economics, from an airline’s perspective, of the utilisation of the vehicle and the economic life of the battery.
If you are flying really long sectors, which will probably be the most popular and potentially the most possible, it means that the aircraft will have to spend longer on the ground to recharge. If you are doing that all the time it is a bit like a phone battery; you will start to damage the physics of the battery. By putting an artificial cap on it, we start to think of a mini-network and how that connects, and how the airlines might start to treat the utilisation of the aircraft and whether it is a long sector plus a short sector. That will tie into where they are flying and where they need to recharge. It is likely, and this is my hypothesis only, that when an airline flies into London it will want to be on the ground for the least amount of time, because it is the most in-demand real estate, certainly in the UK, if not Europe and the world. Therefore, the real estate cost will be really high.
I have already said that from our perspective success is based on people getting through the facility expeditiously, which means there is not a lot of opportunity for non-aeronautical income, as there would be at a traditional airport. A lot of our expense and revenue will be made through the tariff. We need to keep that as low as we possibly can in order to be competitive with other modes of transport and encourage as many people as possible to get on an eVTOL. If we are landing in London we are looking at how to shrink the vertiport down as much as we possibly can, but not beyond safety or service levels that we are happy with, to turn the aircraft round quickly and get it back out, in order to make that infrastructure available, so that we work the infrastructure as hard as possible and spread the cost across as many people as possible to remain competitive, not just from an airline’s perspective but against other modes of transport.
To try to come back to your question, we look at London and the south-east, as a cluster as opposed to London specifically, because if it was specifically London we would be looking only at intracity trips. They make sense purely because of the volume of people in London using the city, but London is very well connected from a public transport perspective, so we do not want to rely on just one use case; it is all of the intracity, intercity and connectivity to all the airports.
Q47 Greg Smith: I appreciate that point; it makes total sense, I guess, from your point of view. But given the 15-minute point, we would struggle to get to Battersea in 15 minutes from here, such is the difficulty of traffic in London and tube stops not necessarily being where we want them to be. If this is going to work and you are to have passenger or freight accessibility to get on to an eVTOL, by definition you will need more than something at Heathrow and something at Battersea.
Brad Miller: Good grief, yes.
Q48 Greg Smith: What is the estimated medium-term projection, say, of how many vertiports a city like London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds or Milton Keynes would need for this to be functional?
Brad Miller: If you will forgive me, that is commercially sensitive. I appreciate that we are in a public forum. From a cluster perspective, thinking about London and the south-east, I am happy to answer. We think it is into the 10s. That is a distributive network where they feed each other. Gary’s example of people travelling from the north-west to Norfolk is an interesting route. We see a lot of those interesting routes starting to appear, particularly along the south coast, that we might not have imagined before. The cliché route that a lot of people in the industry use is Oxford to Cambridge. We also have Reading down to Brighton and the like becoming important nodes on a distributive network. With 10s and multiple 10s of vertiports for London and the south-east, you can start to imagine how many London could have potentially as end destinations for people travelling into the city, but also travelling out, connecting them to all the airports that serve London.
The challenge, as Andrew will tell you, is that all the airspace in London is controlled to the ground. There are lots of no-fly zones and restrictive covenants, so the challenge from a real estate perspective is where we can site a vertiport that will be affordable from a real estate perspective, but also satisfy that 15-minute demand. That demand is ours; it is a working assumption. How do we satisfy the 15-minute last mile, first mile type of journey?
Q49 Greg Smith: The last question on this point is specifically to you, Mr Miller, and it feeds off some of the things said earlier about public perception, intrusion and having aircraft above your back garden when you are doing whatever you are doing. What conversations have you already had perhaps with the Local Government Association or individual planning authorities about local community consent when you are looking at building the infrastructure and planning vertiports?
Brad Miller: I know that we are going to get a very negative reception from a planning perspective if we do not do our jobs well enough to demonstrate that this mode of transport could be available to as wide a cross-section of society as possible. That is absolutely imperative. Making sure that we can demonstrate that it will be affordable at the point of scale will be key in that engagement. When we discuss planning, we have to think about it alongside certification and verification of vertiports and the eVTOLs themselves, plus the airspace piece and the economic aspect. It is all intertwined.
When I speak to local authority colleagues and peers, they are educating themselves about urban air mobility. They are just getting up to speed about what an eVTOL is, what urban air mobility is and what it will mean for the local community they serve. Then they are starting to think about how to integrate it into their local development plans. One of the challenges the UK has is that there is no silver bullet for how you can treat or use certain aspects of the national planning policy framework, or local plans as they are written at the moment, and how you can, from a positive perspective, start to integrate urban air mobility into your master plan for your towns and cities. That is certainly absent. There are hooks and some wording we can possibly use. I do not know whether your question is leading to this, but perhaps I can put across that the absolute panacea from the industry’s perspective would be to have positive affirmation that “This is how you can interpret the existing rules today.”
Andrew Macmillan: Among a number of the pieces that need to be put in place from a policy regulation point of view is some guidance for local authorities on when somebody comes to you and says they would like to put in a vertiport or fly in an eVTOL. How do you think about that? What are the guidelines and what are the policy guidelines?
To your earlier question about how many of these are needed for commercial viability, both in the UK and worldwide, what we see from customers is that there are commercially viable services with existing infrastructure. It is the potential to capture all of the kinds of exciting things we talked about before that leads you to want to add new vertiports. People are being fairly creative about where they might go, to your point about space. For example, a lot of people are looking at putting them on car parks, rooftops and things of that sort. One of the things that has constrained that kind of operation for helicopters has been concern about safety and noise. If you can address those questions and there is a planning permission framework to do that, I think you have a more constructive conversation that allows a more creative approach.
Gary Cutts: You asked a really good question about how we have engaged so far and been candid. A little while ago, we sat down as the challenge to say, “What are the top 10 things for this year?” Engagement with those communities is in the top 10, so it is absolutely right to be concerned about that. We went along to the Local Government Association annual event last year in Harrogate. We had a stand to try to introduce a whole range of people. That and ongoing conversations show, not surprisingly, that there is a whole range of different knowledge and views around this, so we started that engagement. We have just started early engagement through an organisation called ADEPT, a body that works with local authorities to help set standards and standard approaches. We think that is an important body.
There are a couple of things I want to share. We are about to launch what we call a community integration working group, which we will chair. We tend to do all of the working groups jointly with the CAA, DFT and a few other people. We will have a community integration working group whose prime aim is exactly these things. How do you connect the aviation world with the ground world of communities? It will have local authority and other community representative groups. We think that working group will be the place to work out how to deal with these plans.
I have a little observation. I know nothing about the world of town planning. It is one of many things I have learned a lot about in the last four years, but not nearly enough. There are different views. I took a straw poll of town planners working in local authorities. Some of them said that planners are asked all the time to approve things they have never seen before. There is a standard set of frameworks; it is about social and public benefits and disbenefit. They weigh them up and come to an answer. That is fine. Other people say no and that, frankly, it is a little bit scary because it is an airport that does not look like an existing airport and is much nearer a town. How would they judge that thing? There is a range of views.
For us, there is a need to do a couple of things. One of them, which Andrew referenced, is to get some communication training material. We need to be able to educate planners in an open sense, not to try to give them a particular direct view that we think the market is brilliant, but to say, “These are what the vehicles are; this is how they are used; these are the potential benefits to look for; this is what a vertiport might look like; these are the considerations.” We imagine the community integration working group being, No. 1, a set of training and induction material for planners.
The second point—to be clear, here I am a little out of my depth—is that in my view some level of central guidance is required through DLUHC and the devolved Administrations that says, “This is our presumption; this is how we think you look at it.” What the industry cannot cope with is individual authorities taking completely different views, so you end up with half a network that is sometimes very positive. Perhaps I can name-check Coventry City Council because it was a partner on the vertiport we built in Coventry. They were incredibly supportive, from the chief executive down; they saw the benefits. Others might be very anti.
I do not think the industry would be able to cope with local authorities. A difference in political views is one thing, but different planning views and seeing planning applications in different ways is another. I believe there is a need for Government machinery to create some kind of guidance framework to let people assess the benefits.
Q50 Greg Smith: Richard, it looked like you wanted to come in.
Richard Derrett-Smith: I did and I still do, to talk about the infrastructure question that you raised some minutes ago. We must not forget that there are nearly 1,000 aerodromes in the UK, some of which will serve regional markets very well. It makes sense from a community and regional investment perspective to look at those aerodromes, many of which have been operating for a considerable period of time, are known to the CAA and are within reach of local populations.
There is an opportunity to build the infrastructure that is required for this type of service. While undoubtedly we will need new infrastructure, we must not lose sight of the fact that we have considerable existing aviation infrastructure that covers the whole country. To give an example, I was in the Orkney islands a few weeks ago. I did not realise that there are six airstrips on the islands north of Orkney that are manned and maintained by volunteers, and could easily be used for this sort of activity. The infrastructure is broad, and we would certainly benefit from investment and the use of it for this new type of service.
Greg Smith: That is very helpful. Thank you very much.
Q51 Grahame Morris: I want to touch on certification. This might be the opportunity to raise regulation as well. It is absolutely right that the certification regime is extremely rigorous for the reasons of health and safety that Mr Sage mentioned. Mr Cutts shared his thoughts about the certification regime for NATS and whether it was suitable for these types of eVTOL aircraft operating at low levels. How can we assess the fitness for purpose of the current arrangements in terms of the safety of eVTOL vehicles and flights? Richard, your specialism is health and safety and risk analysis. Mr Cutts mentioned altitude, noise issues and data security. Is that something we should be thinking about?
Richard Derrett-Smith: From a safety perspective?
Grahame Morris: Yes.
Richard Derrett-Smith: The safety question is multi-dimensional. If you look at the system as a whole—remember that the aircraft are just one part of the overall aviation system—there is a certification regime that will deal with the safety of the aircraft to a level that is equivalent to current commercial air transport, as we have discussed. There will be some specifics in that certification airworthiness regime that deal specifically with eVTOLs, but fundamentally the existing certification and airworthiness process will remain as is. The public will expect that and industry certainly expects that.
For me, the biggest safety question is how to integrate these new forms of aircraft into the existing aviation system. A big part of that is around integration to the airspace. If I can be somewhat glib, we quote the figure of 10-9 as the fatality risk value for aircraft. If you think about the likelihood of another aircraft bumping into yours, that is not addressed in the 10-9 certification value against which each aircraft is assessed, so the overall safety and risk management of the entire aviation ecosystem is a significant challenge and one that must be and is being reviewed now.
Airspace is a big part of that, but there are myriad technologies and workstreams that should be supported to enable a safe and expeditious aviation system to accommodate these new forms of aircraft. There are lots of different topics within that. We talk about human performance and how we embrace the expected scale-up in the volume and mix of aircraft and what that means for human performance, whether those humans are in the front seat of the aircraft piloting it, whether they are responsible for the safe management of those aircraft in the airspace, or even whether they are on the ground maintaining the vehicles and the other infrastructure that is required.
Q52 Grahame Morris: I want to ask Mr Sage the same question about certification and the current regime. Earlier, you mentioned briefly the range of different designs. We are looking at Mr Macmillan’s design coming first. That would carry four passengers, but the intention is that there will be a variety of designs that would carry considerably more passengers. What are your views on the existing arrangements and how they should be modified to accommodate that safely?
Andy Sage: We depend principally on the aircraft being certified as the first key milestone. Thereafter, as you would expect, any changes that we make to our airspace, services and systems undergo the most rigorous safety assessment, and the changes we are talking about here will be no different.
On the existing framework and whether it is fit for purpose, perhaps I could return to the issue of the airspace modernisation strategy that I referred to earlier. We were hugely supportive of the refresh strategy and the fact that it now addresses airspace integration, to which I referred earlier. That is absolutely critical in this industry reaching any kind of scale. What we now need critically is a commitment to deliver on that, some clarity around roles and responsibilities, accountability for who delivers what and a new regulatory framework that supports the funding of the necessary infrastructure and services, because today’s framework does not contemplate that type of airspace.
Q53 Grahame Morris: If there is huge potential in this sector for investment, employment, opportunities for decarbonisation and so on—Mr Miller mentioned not just domestic flights but short-hop flights from London to Paris being viable—is there work going on in parallel with the French and German versions of NATS to develop the requisite framework?
Andy Sage: Yes. I think we are describing a global trend. I believe the UK is illustrating its commitment towards airspace integration more firmly through its modernisation strategy. As I explained earlier, I think that is undoubtedly the way to unlock the market, and it is one of the ways in which the UK can take a lead globally.
Q54 Grahame Morris: Mr Macmillan, can you tell us whether the constraints of the certification regime are having adverse impacts on development in the sector? What are your views on international alignment on regulations?
Andrew Macmillan: I will touch mainly on the aircraft and on the supporting system and then briefly on airspace, because we have touched on that. The aircraft will go through the standard regulatory safety certification process that the UK CAA runs. Because it is a new aircraft, they need to define new standards. I am very pleased to say that UK CAA did that last year. They have done a lot of work on this. They have defined a standard called SC-VTOL. It is at the same level of design safety that has been referenced—the 10-9 that a large Airbus or Boeing aircraft would have. I am sure you know this, but to put that in context, it is one of the safest ways you can travel; it is safer than walking.
By contrast, helicopters are one of the more dangerous ways to travel; it is more like being on a motorbike. There is a huge opportunity for improving safety. That is in part inherent to the vehicle. Unlike a helicopter, these vehicles have wings and they can, therefore, glide safely down. They have eight propellers, not one, and there is no single point of failure. You have the ability to move power around electrically very easily, so they are inherently safe and we should capture that safety.
You mentioned international alignment. One of the great successes of aviation safety over the years has been international co‑operation and transparency. The FAA in the United states, EASA in Europe and others—the Brazilians and Japanese—are looking at this a lot. The UK CAA has a very interesting role to play in that as something of a co‑ordinator and leader around the world. There is a debate going on across the Atlantic at the moment about what those standards are. I think the CAA has taken absolutely the right position in focusing on the highest possible safety standards and very transparent ways of demonstrating that. There is a potential role to support the CAA and enable it to make sure we get international standards. That is obviously important to us in terms of exports.
That is a big job for the CAA, not just for the aircraft but for the other enabling bits. We need to make sure that it has the resources, support and enablement from the Department and otherwise to allow it to do that. It will be the first time in decades that it is doing a whole airframe in the UK. That is exciting. It is novel technology, so we need to make sure it has the support to do that. It is not just the aircraft itself; what are the standards going to be for pilots, maintenance people and ground operations? All of that needs to be set out in pieces, because if any one of those pieces is missing, the reality is that we will not get flying, or not nearly as much as we could.
To take pilots, for example, we had pilots from 11 of our customers in Bristol flying the simulator and things a couple of weeks ago. Even I had a go. I am not a pilot, but I managed to get the thing up and down. It should be much safer and easier to fly, but we need the standards in place that allow people to be certified for that. The fact that it is a piloted aircraft helps with the airspace piece. This is not a scenario where we are suddenly going to get up there and start flying around willy-nilly. NATS and the airspace community would never allow us to do that for obvious reasons.
It is how we build that capacity—Andy referred to airspace modernisation—and make sure that we make use of the technology to safely fly these aircraft. This will not succeed unless it is safe and seen to be safe. That is what stopped helicopter flights into cities and urban areas back in the ’60s. When they launched, there were a series of crashes. That is what stopped them. Making sure that the whole system is safe and that we as a country fill in all of the bits of the regulation is really quite important.
Q55 Grahame Morris: It might be opportune to ask this. The Committee recently did an inquiry about autonomous vehicles, again a very exciting sector for developments and potential benefits to the economy, employment and so on. The proponents of autonomous vehicles were at pains to point out the need to amend the legislative framework, and there are a number of issues that we have with the Government and the Department of Transport. We are pushing for a transport Bill, but Government time managers say they do not have time for it.
Is this another area where there is general consensus of the need for a change in the legislation to permit the progression of the sector? Is this another area that we should be flagging up with Ministers in the DFT and that we need to address?
Andrew Macmillan: I am not a legislative expert. My understanding is that primary legislation is not needed. There may be areas of secondary legislation and regulation. What is needed—you are absolutely right to flag it—is a sense of co-ordination and urgency that is pan-Government. There is fantastic work being done by the CAA, future flight and so forth.
What we could really use is a deadline. I look at what is happening with the Paris Olympics. I look at what is happening with the Expo in Japan. I look at what is happening in the United States. One of the things they have is a galvanising deadline: “We’re going to get this happening by such and such.” That forces us across the range of policy in Government to think about what we need in place and to do that with some sense of co-ordination and urgency. Helpfully, and luckily, given the time constraints, I do not think we need primary legislation per se, but some kind of galvanising force would definitely be helpful to make sure that we do not miss something or something does not land in time.
Q56 Grahame Morris: That is useful. Mr Cutts, do you have a view on the timeframe, the CAA and so on?
Gary Cutts: There are a couple of things. I will go back a couple of questions. Regarding the broader safety concern, I echo what Andrew said. The way that Vertical and others are approaching it is that the initial aircraft, as far as possible, will look like an existing aircraft in the system. It clearly is not, but it will be certified with set rules, with an authority that knows how to certify aircraft with a pilot, and it will operate in the current air traffic management system.
To me, the big challenge comes at some point downstream, whether that be five or 10 years. It is the real scale piece where, as I said before, you will need a different airspace air traffic management concept, which in the UK, hopefully, will be born out of the airspace modernisation strategy itself, and NATS will be intimately involved.
We touched on this right at the very start. Eventually, some level of autonomy, to be decided with public consultation, is inevitable in these spaces. When you get to that point and you want a differently trained pilot because the vehicle is doing a lot more, how do you transition to the pilots in a supervisory role, and do you eventually get to the point where it is autonomous? Those become the really big challenges—the systemic change. What the industry is doing is pretty sensible. It is saying, “Well, if we go in and try to do that on day 1, that is far too big a change technically, in the risk associated with it, and from a public point of view.” I think it is downstream, but we cannot stress enough that there will be some big challenges in that.
The other thing I stress is this, and I am going to emphasise Andrew’s point again. I keep talking about this as an aviation ecosystem, and we have covered a lot of it today. It covers planning. Are the legislative requirements around autonomy right? What are the security implications? You end up touching multiple Government Departments. In the four years I have been here, we have some kind of relationship. I can probably name-check almost all of them. It becomes really important that cross-Government working works properly and that Governments understand that. I am absolutely with you, Andrew; I hope that one of the things the new future of flight industry group does early on is to state a joint Government-industry set of objectives and milestones that we are driving towards.
Q57 Grahame Morris: I think that is quite an important point. I wonder if Richard has a view. I know we are just talking about passengers, but if we are looking at the potential of the sector and we are looking at logistics as well, is the autonomous nature of it the key element that will require legislative change? These seem to be quite radical designs. Andrew said that in the medium term we do not need legislative change, but we should have a road map or a timetable. How can we use this Committee to apply pressure on Government to do what is required within the timeframe to maximise any benefits?
Gary Cutts: Could I tee Richard up, if that is okay, Richard? We know each other. Richard did some really important safety casework for us very early in the challenge. The way that Richard’s team led it out—I will pass to you, Richard, if I can—was short term, medium term and long term, and the different things happening in those horizons. Yes, in the longer range, we see every aspect, from degree of autonomy to airspace concepts, looking radically different and allowing much greater volume of different vehicles. That change is really important.
The 20-year vision is not laid out yet in everybody’s objectives. We as a challenge laid out with industry a vision and a road map that covers the entire range of our challenge, which is these types of aircraft—electric passenger-carrying aircraft and, colloquially, drones. We see them as part of a continuum. You are absolutely right; they will get to distributed operation, remote operation and autonomous operation much quicker, and they need to, so as to make the economics work. We see that feeding the technology journey to eventually feed into these things.
Yes, there is a complicated road map that we published because it is a complicated field. It would be really good for Government to endorse that broader road map and direction. Richard, I don’t know whether it is worth laying out your three-stage view of the future.
Richard Derrett-Smith: Building on what Gary has just said, the work we did for the future flight challenge looked at the short, medium and long term. We did not fix dates to those. We did not commit anyone to specific dates with those. Working back from the long-term vision, we talk about an integrated airspace management system and an integrated aviation operation where the roles and responsibilities are clear, the safety accountabilities are clear, and the technology that supports it is established and mature and the stakeholders have confidence in it. That technology is radically different from what we have today.
You mentioned autonomy. That is an important building block in the development of the technology of the future. Undoubtedly, we cannot achieve the volume and diversity of airspace use with the current human-based methods for controlling traffic. It is simply not possible, so there will have to be a digitally based autonomous system that manages it. Quite how that is shaped is not yet defined. We talk about humans being in the loop at the moment in terms of control of these systems, whereas in the future we talk about humans on the loop; they are sitting there in a different role—a supervisory role—that monitors the operation of what is otherwise an autonomous system.
From a safety perspective, the current regulations that exist in the CAA’s suite of regulations and policy will need to be adapted. There is no question about that. I am sure the CAA would agree. There needs to be a review to understand what regulations need to be adapted, and that review needs to be synchronised with the overall road map to achieve the vision that we want to achieve. We talked about setting some deadlines for that, and I think that is key.
Coming back to the regulation and policy, the CAA needs to get ahead of the curve because regulation and policy typically lag the development of the industry, and this is a fast-moving industry, as we have already described and discussed, across all aspects of it—airframe and infrastructure. The CAA needs to be resourced and enabled to move quickly in the development of regulation so that it can keep pace with the development of the industry and we do not lose the opportunity that we are now presented with. That specifically covers autonomy, which is the piece that you raised.
Grahame Morris: I am grateful for that. Conscious of time, I will hand back, Chair.
Chair: Thank you, Grahame. Before I turn to Ben and then Jack, Gavin has a very quick supplementary.
Q58 Gavin Newlands: It was touched on at the end and is a point of clarification. I take your point, Mr Macmillan, that there may not be a requirement for primary legislation, but you have all outlined the potential benefits, into the billions, perhaps even trillions, in the relatively near future for the UK. We all know that civil servants at times can be risk averse and perhaps proceed with caution, to say the least. You spoke of co-ordination and urgency being required. Would it be fair to say that, with the regulation and certification that are required, if the UK proceeds with ultra-caution it might lose its leading role in the world and lose the financial benefit?
Andrew Macmillan: Yes, we could miss something in what we need to enable this to fly and be too slow to bring it in, and that absolutely could slow us down in other places. I was in Washington last week, where there is huge momentum behind this and, of course, the huge resources in the US. In Japan, where I also spent a chunk of time, I presented at a Japanese Government committee that meets every month on this. It is opened by a Minister and closed by a Minister, and there were 450 people on the call. It is the level of focus and attention on, “We are going to fly by the Expo 2025.”
Risk aversion is important in some of this. In safety, we need to be risk averse. Too right. I want the regulator to be risk averse and check everything twice and thrice, but I think that the piece we could use is a focus that makes sure that all the pieces of the puzzle come together across Government, as you say, and that we have the resource and attention we need to make what is a huge opportunity, and one we are very well-placed for, come good. That would be really useful.
I remember talking to people who had been involved in the 2012 Olympics, and they said the great thing about that was that you could not move the date, so everything had to get done in the end. I am not sure we have an Olympics to tie it to, but something that would really drive it could be quite powerful.
Q59 Gavin Newlands: Does anybody else have anything to add?
Brad Miller: This is on the regulation and certification piece, to highlight that and then really underline it. From a UK perspective, when we are looked at internationally, it is highly regarded. It is also the industry’s platform for acceptance. If you speak to anybody in this emerging industry, they all love regulation and certification because it is the thing that gives us the seat at the table. It is our permission to fly. It is our permission to engage. That was underlined by a societal acceptance survey that EASA did in 2021. Lots of interesting things came out of that. They did it across six cities in continental Europe. One of the overwhelming majority answers was, “If you follow the same regulation that you do for commercial aircraft, we will trust eVTOLs,” so it is in the industry’s best interest to make sure that we adopt and use the certification and regulation that exists today and adapt it where appropriate.
Where we are losing our competitive edge as a nation is our regulators and our policymakers. They do not have the resource to sit alongside the industry and interact, iterate and work out what can be adjusted and what are the little gaps that need to be written anew. That is where we are struggling. We get asked to fund that ourselves. From a pure investor’s perspective, when you step back, why would you take the gamble in a certain country to research and adjust regulation when another country is saying, “We will do that for you”? That as an environment is so much more inviting when you are talking to organisations that are, by their nature, very international.
Gavin Newlands: Thank you.
Q60 Mr Bradshaw: My questions were on safety in comparison with traditional aircraft, which you have pretty much covered. I just have a few tidying-up questions. Paint me a picture of how these aircraft work. Do they take off vertically and then fly horizontally, or do they take off at an angle, and at what height?
Andrew Macmillan: I will talk about our aircraft. The standard flight would be to take off vertically like a helicopter, to hover up. Then it goes through what is called transition. In our case, we have eight propellers. The ones at the front tilt forward. The ones at the back stow. You fly on the wing then, and you look more like a propeller plane. When you come in to land, you go through the reverse; the propellers turn back up, the back ones start turning again, and then you hover back and land. You would be able to land on a rolling landing, or indeed take off on a rolling take-off, but the classic one would be doing it that way.
Q61 Mr Bradshaw: Are they silent?
Andrew Macmillan: They are not absolutely silent, but they are very quiet.
Q62 Mr Bradshaw: As quiet as what, for example?
Andrew Macmillan: To try to give you a sense of that, in cruise we think they will be less than 50 decibels, which is less than the sound of a suburban street. They will fly at 2,000 feet or 3,000 feet, so you will not hear them on a suburban street. You literally cannot hear them.
Q63 Mr Bradshaw: No noise pollution if you are sitting in your garden.
Andrew Macmillan: No. If you are sitting in your garden, you should not hear them going overhead.
Q64 Mr Bradshaw: What size are they? What is the wingspan?
Andrew Macmillan: Ours is 15 metres wingspan and 13 metres long. It looks like a small plane. If you have seen a Cessna or something like that, it is that sort of size.
Q65 Mr Bradshaw: I still don’t have a clear picture of how big the vertiports would need to be. Are we talking about a tennis court, two tennis courts, a squash court, or a football pitch?
Brad Miller: I don’t know how big a tennis court is. It is a good way to frame it in terms of reference. Depending on the size—it comes back to demand; we will not go into all that again—anywhere between circa 1 acre and 3 acres. There are not huge bits of infrastructure to make this happen.
Q66 Mr Bradshaw: An acre or 3 acres? If you are talking about having one every 15 minutes by e-bike or e-scooter to reach, in the optimal scenario—
Brad Miller: Or by public transport, yes.
Q67 Mr Bradshaw: If we talk about 15-minute cities, you will get the far-right conspiracy theorists turning up at your offices, I am afraid, but we are going to have to, aren’t we? That is going to be a lot of tennis courts or football pitches dotted all over London.
Brad Miller: Across the network, yes. London is a very specific use case because that 15-minute travel time can be achieved in a manner of different ways.
Q68 Mr Bradshaw: I could get to Battersea from here on an e-bike in 15 minutes, but you are going to need quite a lot of these in London to optimise the economy of their use.
Brad Miller: Potentially, yes. From a demand perspective, if there is unconstrained demand, yes, but the economic factors start to restrict that, such as the cost of real estate and the availability of sites. There are lots of competing needs for real estate in London. The airspace and the regulatory piece are also going to limit that number.
Q69 Mr Bradshaw: What speed do they fly at?
Andrew Macmillan: In cruise, they will fly at about 150 mph, which gives you those 15, 20, 30-minute journey times.
Q70 Mr Bradshaw: I was trying to get my head around the economics of it when you said it would be equivalent to the cost of a train journey or taxi ride. The average person would not generally take a taxi from the midlands to Norfolk. I do not see how this mode of transport is not going to be restricted to seriously rich people to start with, a bit like conventional air travel was. How are the economics of it going to work for ordinary people for a mass transport mode?
Andrew Macmillan: Undoubtedly, there will be an adoption curve, as has happened with every technology. You are right. When flying started, it started off with daredevils, then it became a thing that only a few people did, and then it became more mass transit. That will undoubtedly happen, if for no other reason than initially we will only be able to produce a certain number of the aircraft and it will take a while to build up the networks, which will also be true of ground infrastructure and things.
I certainly cannot imagine a world where, come mid-decade, we suddenly turn on 30 vertiports across London. That is not going to happen. They are cheaper to build than something like a helicopter. You will probably get high utilisation, with more passengers per trip than you would in a car. I think the average is something like 1.5 people per car. The people operating aviation have become very good at getting quite high percentages of people on to aircraft. The standard aircraft is over 80% full. Your cost of operation is less because they are very energy efficient in the way they operate and the maintenance is much less.
You have electric power trains that are like an electric car. If you think of an electric car, you do not take it into the garage as much. You do not have as many things that break down. That brings down the cost of operation considerably, particularly once you start to get a bit of scale. If you go further into the future and you start to talk about things like having more than four passengers, bigger payloads and so forth, you can start to see the costs really coming down.
Q71 Mr Bradshaw: Is the vision that this will be completely commercially developed, or are you expecting Governments to put in public money? Our Government have already put in public money. Why would a Government put significant amounts of public money into a system that, initially at least, is only going to benefit wealthy people and will not address some of the big transport challenges that we face, particularly in straitened economic circumstances?
Andrew Macmillan: We believe this is a commercially viable product, which is what we certainly see around the world. Is there a role for Government in some of the very core R&D? Yes, there has been a little bit of that. There is certainly lots of that around the world. Is there a role in thinking through how the ecosystem comes together in programmes like Gary’s? Absolutely. Is there a role for the UK to think about ways that are not direct taxpayer subsidy but help the scale-up and the industrialisation? Yes, it is one of the things that we have struggled with.
We often come up with the ideas here and then someone else builds them and builds the manufacturing industry. Is there that kind of thing? Yes, and, again, you see a lot of that competition around the world. My email inbox is filled every day with two or three people around the world saying, “Come and build this eVTOL factory where we are,” in such and such a state in the US. There is that conversation to have as an industrial policy conversation. I certainly do not see this as being like public transport rail or something where you are saying the taxpayer should be funding the operation of it.
Mr Bradshaw: Great, thanks.
Q72 Jack Brereton: A number of you have already touched on airspace management and some of the changes that might be required, but I particularly want to ask a bit more about the airspace modernisation strategy. Andy, what are your thoughts about that and whether it will help to facilitate some of these future vehicles?
Andy Sage: I think it will not just facilitate, but it will be, as I said earlier, critical to the market appearing at scale. We simply cannot, as I said earlier, keep segregating the airspace. It is not just these vehicles, but a plethora of other new types of vehicles that rely on moving towards a more integrated concept of airspace. I believe the Government and the regulator understand the key issues that stand in the way.
Only last year, the CAA published some guidance material summarising the key considerations for airspace integration in an urban air mobility landscape, CAP2272, and that outlines many of the right issues. What we now need is a commitment to deliver it. The overall vision is very clear, but what does not exist, as other people have said, is a clear allocation of roles and responsibilities and how the infrastructure is to be funded. Today, that means commercial airlines. We need a different type of regulatory framework to make sure that we follow the user pays principle that others on the panel today or in government would all agree with.
Q73 Jack Brereton: Are there any particular concerns or concerns about how progress is being made?
Andy Sage: Bearing in mind the speed of the market that we are talking about and the time that these things take, yes, time is of the essence in establishing a regulatory framework.
Q74 Jack Brereton: We have seen with wider airspace modernisation quite a stalled and delayed process. In some ways, it may be an opportunity because it will enable some of the technology to be factored in, but in other respects it is not developing quick enough.
Andy Sage: The technology in some ways is not the issue. It is the wider framework that gives us the confidence to make the investments in the technology, new services and airspace changes that will ultimately be necessary. To give you an example of the existing airspace change process that is used—this market will be no different from any other in following that process—it is a process that ultimately was designed to accommodate airspace changes at major airports by commercial airlines. The same way that we need guidance material on how other elements of regulation are applied needs to apply to that particular process as well, so that local communities and airspace managers can be confident and transparent about how the guidance applies.
Q75 Jack Brereton: Do any of our other panellists have any comments or concerns about this?
Brad Miller: I don’t know that I have concerns. If I put myself in the shoes of regulatory and Department of Transport peers and colleagues, their focus, if we are thinking about aviation, is trying to stand back up the traditional aviation industry post pandemic. The airlines and the airports and the supply chains—
Q76 Jack Brereton: Do you think they are too narrowly focused?
Brad Miller: It is not fair to say “narrowly” because a huge industry and all the people they interact with—the airlines, the airports, the ground handlers, the supply chain—are trying to repair their balance sheets, as well as recruiting people back to the industry, with all of the challenges that we saw across multiple airports not just in the UK but across the world during the summer. The resources, capacity, bandwidth and thinking time they have available is trying to stand that industry back up, and it is proven. It has revenues. If you get back there, it is very worth while from a tax revenue perspective.
Q77 Jack Brereton: A lot of the changes there are being directly funded by the existing industries, so is there actually a need for you and those who are developing this technology to fund some of the modernisation, because at the moment existing stakeholders and airports are funding it?
Brad Miller: We are seeing that investment anyway in some of the things we have spoken about, whether it be the development of the vehicle, the design of the vertiports, the demand analysis working with people, and thinking about analysing the existing regulation and what might and might not be appropriate.
The reciprocal conversation that, certainly from my perspective, is needed is the one with the regulator. It is that early conversation about how we adjust what we have today and shift it into something that is appropriate and focused on urban air mobility/advanced air mobility, and that, in my view, is the piece that is missing, not because there is not a want but purely because there is a massive fire that people are trying to battle in standing traditional aviation back up, and it has massive revenues attached to it. You can see the benefit because it was there pre-pandemic. How do we get back to that quickly? We then come along and say, “There is this really exciting industry,” which there is, “and it has massive upside potential, but it cannot demonstrate any past revenues at the moment.”
Andrew alluded to it; a lot of the IP has been developed in the UK. We have brought ourselves a long way. We are in a medal-winning position on the podium internationally from an urban air mobility perspective. We will give that up as other countries are willing to invest in their regulators. We are talking about investing in subject matter experts to have that iterative conversation with various parts of the industry. That’s it. It is not investing in the infrastructure itself or the actual airspace; it is having someone on the other side of the table to talk to as a regulator.
Q78 Jack Brereton: Is there a risk that, because of that, this will not be effectively considered as part of the programme of modernisation?
Brad Miller: Potentially. It is an anecdotal thing. It manifests in practical senses. Andrew mentioned the CAP1616 airspace change management programme. That is being consulted on at the moment. You had to get to page 47 in that consultation document before urban air mobility was mentioned. That is not anybody’s fault.
Jack Brereton: It is an afterthought.
Brad Miller: I do not want to lay the blame at anybody’s door. It is a focus. Traditional aviation is so huge and it is an important industry for us, and the focus quite rightly is to try to stand it back up, but the focus should also be, as opposed to an instead of, on how we make urban air mobility successful.
Gary Cutts: I have a small point. I am going to leave us on a positive. I have been in this role almost four years. The original airspace modernisation strategy did not include lower airspace. I think that is right; there was no mention of it all. I bet everyone on this panel has been engaged in trying to influence that, and now it is absolutely core and it is in there.
Q79 Jack Brereton: It has been a beneficiary of the delays.
Gary Cutts: Yes. Now it is in there. If you look at where the Civil Aviation Authority is, it is really challenging for them. There is lots of change, but they are pushing forward and they are strategically right. Now we are about to have the future of flight industry group through DFT. In the four years, a lot of the levers of Government have aligned. My plea would be that it is all constancy of purpose. Now those things need to be delivered and not deviated from, and they do not need to be de-prioritised by other arisings. It is just seeing those things through with energy. Most of the big levers have been pulled in the right direction.
Q80 Chair: Thank you all for your time and evidence this morning. It has been a really interesting discussion. Before I conclude this session, have we covered all the different aspects of the issue? Is there anything else we have not asked about today that we ought to include, or have we covered it all, from your perspective?
Brad Miller: The one aspect you might benefit from in the future is getting the view of an airline or a potential operator.
Q81 Chair: Okay, that is helpful. Thank you.
Andrew Macmillan: Might I briefly flag this? We have only touched on it to some degree, but there is a piece, which may be less Transport and more Business, about how we capture the maximum aerospace benefit of this going forward, which is interesting for public policy.
Chair: That is very helpful. Thank you all again for your time today.