Advanced Air Mobility on its way to take-off

Advanced Air Mobility on its way to take-off

The Advanced Air Mobility market is continuing to progress at pace, with exhibitors at this year’s Farnborough Airshow demonstrating new and more advanced concepts in the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) and Regional Air Mobility (RAM) spaces.

We caught up with Dr Stefan Breunig, Head of Strategy & Products for Advanced Air Mobility at Rolls-Royce to get his take on where the industry is heading and how Rolls-Royce is working to support it.

What does the global Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) market look like today?

Today, there’s a lot of industry collaboration to create the required ecosystem for eVTOL and commuter aircraft once they’re in operation. While progress is being made, there’s still further to go in terms of building public acceptance, defining operational rules, and harmonising regulations.


For the UAM market, the next two years will be extremely exciting as we start to see the first eVTOL aircraft in commercial operation. From a geographic perspective, we expect to see the Middle East and APAC as leading markets, with the Americas and Europe following. We’re already working with eVTOL OEMs that are set to enter the market with the second wave of aircraft that satisfy highest safety requirements.

We are a strong believer in the RAM market, which in our view is often underestimated. Here, we see the first nine-passenger platforms entering into service towards the end of this decade. While there are some thin-haul use cases that are already possible with pure battery electric configurations, hybrid systems using fuel cells or turbogenerators will be crucial to unlock the full potential of this market.

At Berlin Airshow in June, we announced our collaboration with MD Aircraft, a German aircraft manufacturer with extensive experience, that is working on a nine-passenger commuter aircraft. Our electric propulsion unit (EPU) specifically designed for RAM will be ideally suited to power such platforms.

How will the industry scale as demand starts to increase?

Estimates show that up to 25,000 eVTOL aircraft could be deployed globally by 2035. This is more than 60% of today’s global civil helicopter fleet. As OEMs achieve certification and the industry starts to scale up, there will still be a range of limiting factors that will need to be addressed, from air traffic management and pilot availability to the implementation of vertiport networks.

But it will also be a challenge for eVTOL OEMs to master the serial production and volume ramp-up needed. Despite lots of demand from end users, we could see the market constrained until 2030.

What is Rolls-Royce doing to help address these challenges in the AAM market?

First of all, to enable the AAM market to quite literally take-off, we are developing a modular and scalable propulsion portfolio. At the core we are developing a propulsion unit for UAM (150kW) and RAM (320 kW). These units are designed to meet the specific requirements of UAM and RAM applications. What they have in common is that they are enabled by our proprietary inverter platform. Furthermore, they can be integrated into full power and propulsion systems using our Electrical Distribution System. Our solutions are energy source agnostic which means they can be used in battery-electric or hybrid-electric configurations.

Besides the fundamental technology, manufacturing and supply chain are two key enablers that will be crucial to bring these products to market.

With the demand we see for these new types of aircraft, we will quickly exceed the volumes that are common in aerospace. This is as a challenge for manufacturing, but we also see this as an opportunity to introduce new concepts and a higher degree of automation to aerospace manufacturing.

Finally, we will only be successful when working closely with partners and suppliers. Today there is no established aerospace-electrical supply chain for the required volumes. So, we need to find partners that can embark on this journey with us.

Once we are in the market, we need to enable safe and economic operations of these aircraft. Otherwise, we will not be able to scale operations and grow the overall market. Our contribution will be the provision of digitally enabled maintenance services for the operators of such aircraft. For us as an electric ‘engine’ provider we are very conscious of the challenges and the responsibility connected to having equipment flying in markets across the globe.

What can we say about our latest focuses?

Since having technology demonstrators for our complete portfolio including electric machines for UAM and RAM, power electronics and electric distribution system on test over the last few months, we’re now progressing to the next iterations and integration of the individual components.

We’re working to deliver technology to a partner’s eVTOL demonstrator aircraft this year. With other industry partners, such as MD Aircraft in the RAM space, we’re working on integrating our solution into their aircraft. Our designs are modular and scalable to fit a variety of airframes, and our engineers work closely with our customers’ engineering teams to get to the optimal solution. 

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