On the technical side, every vertiport has a few important physical requirements: a stable electrical grid for fast charging, a hangar for maintenance and a system to move vehicles inside, and enough space around the take-off and landing platform for the aircraft to maneuver. Although Urban-Air Port’s design has a moving platform to lift vehicles to the roof of the building, Hermans explains that vertiports require less space than helicopters, which land much less vertically than most of us think – eVTOLs, on the other hand, do. , as the name suggests, actually take off vertically. “That allows you to integrate them into your vertiport design in much denser urban environments where helicopters may not be able to operate,” Hermans says.
While computer renderings of vertiports often put them on top of buildings, passengers should have access to an elevator to the top, and many building managers won’t be keen on letting random members of the public in. Tower roofs also often house construction equipment such as elevator mechanisms and air conditioning ducts, leaving a relatively small footprint to place a vertiport. Sure, it can be fine for a single vehicle, but a financially viable vertiport will likely require space for multiple vehicles.
While some wealthy private companies offer their staff a ride in air taxis as a perk, Hermans predicts that public vertiports are more likely to be placed on lower buildings, such as car parks – which is why Sandhu spent three weeks in a car park in Coventry. to a train station. “The challenge is getting planes into compact, densely populated locations,” he says — and, crucially, as close to other transportation infrastructure as possible.
There’s another reason why lower vertiports have benefits: they take less time to board. Urban-Air placed its OneAir gate in a parking lot next to a train station to make it faster and easier to access. If it had been on top of a building, passengers would add extra time to their journey. On the other hand, the more centrally located vertiports, and the lower to the ground, the greater the risk of accidents and noise.
That’s the physical side of vertiports. On the passenger side, it’s unclear whether security will be comparable to airports or train stations – and reducing time-consuming queues and checks for a market that bets on fast travel. “If you have to go through security for 10 minutes for a flight that only takes five minutes, that’s not such a good idea,” says Hermans.
Of course, airports are not just about travel, whether you like it or not, it is also about shopping. To find out how best to use the available space, Urban-Air Port collaborated with Qatar Airways duty-free experts on the design of the retail areas. “Most importantly, brands were able to showcase some of their products in a very small footprint,” Sandhu says.
It may seem a little early to align the space for lattes and retail — after all, none of the eVTOLs have been approved by regulators yet, let alone mass-produced. But the industry needs to start considering infrastructure before air taxis are ready to fly. “If you’re making an airplane, you don’t have to worry about where it’s going,” said Sergio Cecutta of transportation analyst firm SMG Consulting. “We don’t want to get into a catch-22 situation where there are no vehicles, so there is no infrastructure. We have to do it at the same time.”
