Paris names 30 firms for its new urban air mobility hub

Last October we covered here the launch of an initiative to develop an underused airport in the outskirts of Paris, turning it into one of Europe’s largest hubs for new air transportation technologies.

Volocopter was the first company to be announced as the first participant in this project and the promoters - namely Aeroports de Paris, the company that manages the French capital’s airports, and RATP, which manages its public transportation system - have made public another 29 firms and institutions that are joining in (out of a total of 150 applications) .

The whole list can be found here and it covers a broad array of segments within the aviation ecosystem, in areas such as vehicle development, operations, airspace integration, public acceptance (which is the area of the industry dealing with the social and environmental aspects of the industry) and urban infrastructure.

Some of the big names of the new air mobility sector are there, such as Ehang, Pipistrel and Volocopter, of course, together with some of the “old” world firms, that nevertheless are investing in new air travel technologies, such as Airbus, Safran and Dassault.

Education and research institutions are also well represented, with the likes of ENAC, École Polythecnique, the UC Berkeley Institute of Transportation studies, NEXTOR, and the Royal Netherlands Aerospace Centre, to name but a few.

The area will start to be used for tests and flight experiments already this coming June.