As the worlds focus on the environment becomes sharper, our transport ecosystems are evolving, as they must.
But battery, electric and hybrid power and the nascent technologies they're driving is not the only reason.
Because of the march of technology and the long-term effects of the 2020 and 2021 COVID waves, the airline industry will eventually begin to focus on significant restructuring to repair its balance sheets and adjust to the new realities of travel demand left behind by COVID. It's not all bad news. The airline industry will evolve to be even more customer-centric, and it'll be more efficient. The big news, though, is because of the customer-centric nature of services that will emerge, airline travel will become a part of a growing multimodal transport ecosystem that will take advantage of the conjunction of several developing technologies and opportune timing.
Scenes like this are not as far away as most realise.
The drone industry is racing ahead, developing capability, size, range, technology, and more use cases. Drones (including UAM/AAM) will be the integration platform of the city transport and supply chain networks. In a few years, they're going to arrive, en masse, wanting to do business in your city. Will the city be ready?
The recent NASA Concept of Operations for UAM carries a sense of urgency for cities preparing for drones. It predicts hundreds of simultaneous operations, even at intermediate states of implementation. The infrastructure, systems and preparation required to support operations will be significant. Not all of it will come with the drones.
The needs of the city are just as critical as those of the operators. These need to be identified, articulated and planned for inclusion in industry plans and operating solutions.
The time for considerations about the drone invasion is now.
Utility drones are already delivering small packages in many cities of the world and being used for urgent deliveries in parts of the world where conventional infrastructure is lagging. Other current applications include use in survey, infrastructure inspection, real estate, and delivery of coffee, pizza and toasted sandwiches.
While the real utility and business case behind some of these services may be questionable, it does serve to prove the capability of platforms. At the same time, systems for the management and control of most categories of drones (and Advanced Aerial Vehicles (AAV) like the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) platform above) are in development in many aviation regulatory and control jurisdictions around the globe. These developments focus on technical and regulatory matters about drone operation.
Cities are not, so far, stakeholders in these developments, yet the utility to the end-users and business case success of the drone ecosystem will depend entirely on the city being ready with use-case, infrastructure and statute approvals to facilitate them.