Literal flying cars, an interview w/Volotea's founder & more (The Allplane Newsletter #185)
Picture: PAL-V
Advanced Air Mobility
The advanced air mobility industry often tries to avoid the talk of “flying cars”, but some startups are actually developing a literal flying car!
This is the case of Dutch startup PAL-V, which is advancing on its path towards certification with a “No Technical Objection” by EASA.
Btw, you can learn more about this rather unique concept, here.
And another eVTOL developer that has road-air modularity built in is XPeng’s. The Chinese company has raised the equivalent of $174M through a syndicated loan. Huge.
EHang received an AOC to operate commercially in two Chinese cities. This is allegedly the first certificate of this sort in the world.
This has started some sort of “panic”, so to speak, among observers and commentators in the US and Europe, which take it as (one more) example of the West lagging behind in innovation. But, as the China eVTOL expert Jennifer Meszaros explains here, these AOCs come with quite a few limitations, starting by the fact that they are only for tourism uses and can’t be used, for now, to operate over populated areas.
Vertical Aerospace is joining the likes of BETA and Archer in adopting Combined Charging Standard (CCS) for electrical charging. We are at that interesting moment in which industry standards are getting defined…
Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF)
LanzaJet to invest in a SAF plant in Kazakhstan? Interesting…
What appears to be going ahead is a $500M SAF plant in Colombia, which is going to be built by the national oil company Ecopetrol.
Other sustainable aviation stories
NATS, the UK air traffic control organization, plans to cut between 11,000 and 19,000 tonnes of CO2 a year in emissions from planes landing at London Gatwick airport (LGW) by changing the way it separates approaching aircraft, from a distance-based to a time-based system.
What else in aviation?
Picture: Volotea
My Executive Spotlight interview with the founder of Volotea and Vueling, Carlos Muñoz. This was a fun and very interesting one to do. You can read it on AeroTime.
Wizz Air announced a plan to optimize its operations and customer experience. It quantifies the plan at €14B over three years, although I imagine this number includes also the value of the new aircraft that it is planning to add.
And Wizz Air is the main operator at one of the airports in Europe that has possibly the most ambitious (in relative terms) growth plans for the very short term: Cluj-Napoca Avram Iancu International Airport (CLJ), Romania. Here is a video of the airport’s CEO explaining it during the recent Aviation-Event CLJ conference.
Interesting thread about the Concorde passenger experience and how it compares to the one being designed by Boom Supersonic.
Last but not least, it was aired quite some time ago (2022), but I came across this episode of Nicolai Tangen’s “In Good Company” podcast hosting the legendary Michael O’Leary, of Ryanair fame talking about the story of the airline. Nothing that you don’t know already, but always interesting to listen to the man talking!