Drones carrying people have yet to take off, but they will land
Interest in landing pads underscores how investors see big opportunity despite risks
A small group of entrepreneurs is betting that when the next generation of autonomous, people-carrying drones is ready to take off, they will need a place to land.
Investors from London to Singapore to Melbourne, Australia, are looking to build the landing facilities, often called “vertiports,” that these electric, vertical-takeoff drones will need.
Some investors have acquired lease options on promising sites while others are scouring satellite imagery for helipads. The developer of one building in Miami says even a rooftop pool could one day be converted into a landing pad.
Widespread use of people-carrying drones is at least a decade away from commercial reality. It isn’t clear which drone designs will ultimately fly, making it tricky to design a vertiport that can accommodate them.
Investors say it is important to start securing sites so that landing pads are available when the vehicles are ready. The idea is to charge drone operators to land, replenish batteries and store vehicles overnight, leading to potentially substantial revenue if hundreds of drones use the sites.
The interest in landing pads, even at this early stage, underscores how big an opportunity investors see in drones despite the risks. Some startups are focused on developing air-traffic-control systems necessary for autonomous drones to fly over cities; others are looking to improve batteries. Still others are experimenting with drones to deliver packages to consumers or businesses.
“The missing piece for the puzzle is not technology; it’s simply where can you land these things?” says Clem NewtonBrown, a former lawmaker in Melbourne, who started his own company, Skyportz, to develop landing pads in Australia. “Unless we have a network of sites, then the whole idea isn’t going to take off.” Investing in vertiports, however, won’t be cheap. One vertiport, complete with charging stations and a passenger lounge, could cost more than $1 million to build, and some cities might need hundreds of them. Existing helipads are an option, but many are designed for just one copter.
Some lack space for parking, charging or passenger lounges and might not be in locations where people want to go.
Regulators might also get involved. In the U.S., it hasn’t yet been determined whether the Federal Aviation Administration would approve new vertiports, an FAA spokesman says.
Vertiport investors say they are initially targeting shopping malls and parking garages, which have big, flat roofs, and sports stadiums and concert venues that often have unused parking lots nearby. Office roofs could be suitable, particularly in buildings with express elevators to the top. In future decades, vertiports could even be stand-alone skyscrapers, with thousands of departures a day.
British startup Skyports has secured rights to about 15 sites in London, says Managing Director Duncan Walker. It is joining with Volocopter, a German-based drone designer, on a prototype vertiport in Singapore. It won’t be used for flights, but rather for companies to test design aspects like batteryswapping areas, passenger check-in and security.
Uber Technologies Inc., which plans to offer a transport service using electric vertical-takeoff vehicles by 2023, outlined the scale of the required infrastructure in a 2016 white paper.
It said 83 vertiports, each handling 12 vehicles at a time, would be needed across three or four cities for efficient service. That would cost $121 million to develop.
Uber doesn’t plan to own or build the vertiports, but it is working with developers. At the company’s annual Elevate Summit, which started Tuesday in Washington, D.C., the company unveiled the first international market it selected for the air-transport service— Melbourne.
Uber already plans to offer the service in Dallas and Los Angeles. It also plans a new Uber Copter service in July, offering helicopter rides between Manhattan and John F. Kennedy International Airport.
Nexa Capital Partners, a Washington, D.C.-area investment firm, is studying more than 70 cities to determine where investors interested in vertiports should focus their efforts, says Managing Partner Michael Dyment. The analysis involves, in part, using an artificial-intelligence program to scan Google Earth images for helipads in each city, because public data on helipads isn’t always reliable. The study, in collaboration with other organizations like the Vertical Flight Society, a group for engineers and scientists, is continuing.
Mr. Dyment offered one insight: His team found 400 helipads in Tokyo that weren’t in publicly available data.
“You can turn Tokyo into a phenomenal early market for urban air mobility with quite a small infrastructure investment,” Mr. Dyment says.
In Miami, Dan Kodsi, chief executive at developer Royal Palm Cos., says he talked with drone manufacturers to ensure that a pool on a new 60-story building could technically also serve as a landing pad, should regulations allow it.
Whether to convert the pool will be up to the homeowners association in later years, he says. “We just want to stay ahead of the curve,” Mr. Kodsi says. “Someone in the future hopefully thanks us.”