Welcome to this smoke on Urban Air Mobility. My name is Marcus May and I'm Managing Director of Airbus Urban Mobility, GmbH. I had the chance to build up the structure a couple of years ago. Today I'm in charge of all the operations linked with Urban Mobility at Airbus. The idea of this module is to give you, first of all a bit of an overview on the motivation of why we are looking into this emerging market, giving you a bit of an assessment how we see the market evolving, and then show you an outline of the subsequent modules that will give you more details on the technology aspects and on the ecosystem. When we started looking into Urban Air Mobility in 2014 and '15, we started seeing that as a bit of a strategic aspects, so we wrote the first strategic papers on the topic, and little by little, over the years we saw more and more initiatives popping up, not only outside but also within our company. That at one moment in this side, we decided, yes, we need to regroup the things, we need to put them together and create a department. The main motivation at the time was to say, if we look what's happening in the world, we see that there is a trend to urbanization. By 2030, we believe that 60 percent of the world population will live in cities, and there are specific challenges associated to that, especially with regards to mobility. We see a lot of things happening in the morbidity field. Here the idea was to see how can we also support that more from an area mobility perspective. That's why at the time, we were looking at running studies and in the end, also in a smaller subsidiary in the Americas, looking into how can we build up an air mobility system of today, operating classical helicopters. That is a bit like the motivation you saw if you look at the city of Sao Paulo, it might take you two hours to go from the airport to the city tender by taxi, but you actually can do that in a 10-minute helicopter ride. The idea at the time was to say, how can we make that more accessible? How can we also make it affordable? Because the idea really behind was to say how can we make that something that citizens can benefit from. We did some testing. We had the chance also to really fly these missions and to use classical helicopters to do so with our subsidiary VOOM that was running in four countries in order to really see how can we operate. It was a great learning for us also to see what are the real constraints. Because for us as Airbus, the urban environment is something that is completely new, also as is the contact to direct passengers in terms of B2C. That's why we've quickly understood the challenge for urban air mobility and the so-called eVTOLs, so the electrical vertical takeoff and landing vehicles is much more than just an aircraft. It is really a basically a whole ecosystem, and if you look at the different value chain blocks on the slide, you see that we have obviously a legacy in terms of aircraft design, in terms of support and services. We are not so much experienced, however, when it comes to passenger solutions, when it comes to ground infrastructure, and we have some context obviously with partners already when it comes to air traffic management or a flight operations. It was very clear from us for the start. The idea here is that this is not something that one company can do alone. Today, if you screen the market, you will probably see four, 500 companies, teams that are working on these concepts. Some of them more serious in terms of vehicle development, but it's also clear that we only can do that as a whole community and to create these in this industry from scratch. That will really be the whole challenge over the next years. If you're able to build all the different bricks of the value chain that are necessary, and if we find a sustainable way so that the different actors in this ecosystem are able to benefit from it. Now, why do we believe that now is the time for urban air mobility? If you see what's happening outside in the world, you see two specific things. You see on the one hand, on the technology side, there are lots of improvements, there are lots of new technologies. Whether it's electric propulsion or motor distributed electric propulsion part of it, whether it's obviously the quest for new lightweight structures or the whole digitalization that is affecting also classical air traffic management. There is a lot of things happening on the pure technology side that partially disrupt the way we're doing things, or partially improve the ways of working we have today. On the other hand, also on the business side. We see more and more how cities grow, but the challenge also of infrastructure investment. We are used to having long development cycles in the aerospace industry, but a city planning cycle is still beyond that. It's an interesting perspective for us also to be confronted with these challenges and also with new partners because we are working together hand in hand with cities, transport providers in entering this. field. It's very clear that there are lots of people out there who have unique skill sets and unique experiences. That is what we will need to build that, especially when it comes down to also how can we make it as service for the passengers? How can we make it that it's easy to book that you have your smartphone app that you are able to really enjoy also the mode of transport. This can become a mass transport. For us, it's really clear when we entered into that field, the motivation was from the start to democratize this service within cities. Because we believe that it's also a great opportunity to open up the sky in cities. We believe that this is a service that should be accessible to everyone. Certainly this will not be the point at the beginning, similar to the first car or the first smartphone. It will rather be a niche market at the beginning. We believe little by little, we will be able to open that up. Please don't quote me on the timeline that you can see on the slide. Clearly we don't have a crystal ball. It's something that will evolve over time and we will also have changes to these timelines that you can see. Nevertheless, I think the logical sequence is the one I would like to illustrate. That makes sense from our perspective. As mentioned before, we have done helicopter operations with a new business model in our subsidiary womb before the pandemic. We saw that these models are working and they drastically lowered the price by one order of magnitude. Offering a more shuttle service instead of really a charter helicopter is something that we have people today who can afford that and who want to pay a ticket price around 160, $180. We see that this is something that becomes tangible. However, it's not enough. We clearly believe that to make this a service to society, we need to have zero emission operation. This is the reason why we are heavily investing into our eVTOL. Because we want to make really a zero emission aircraft. This will help us to gain public acceptance and this will also help us to find the way into urban environments. Still at the beginning, these vehicles, They will be flown with a pilot. On the one hand for certification reasons, because it's much more easier to convince the authorities if you put your own people on board and you have a pilot who's flying an aircraft, whether it's a test aircraft or then later on an operational aircraft. On the other hand, also, because it's a question of trust and today for passengers, it's really important that you have the pilot on board and he is, or she is the one taking care of the aircraft in case of any emergency. But later on, we believe that little by little, we will go towards autonomy. This will then open up the market really because in the end, it will take 4-5 passenger's seat aircraft in order to make a viable business case. That is why we believe autonomy will be a key to grow in this market in the end. Before, at the very end, we probably will find ways to have smart integrations into smart cities, which means that the recharging of batteries or swapping of batteries or even other elements like hydrogen can help us to have a smoother transport system and to have especially a very good connection with other means of transport in the city. This is where I would like to conclude the part on our motivation. Why are we interested into urban air mobility? Gives you a bit of an outlook on the four next modules. In module 2, we will mainly focus on the eVTOL. We will look into what technology demonstrators have we done. We will show you some material from the flight testing that we have performed in California and in Germany. How have we derived basically our product vision for urban air mobility. Module 3 will then go into CityAirbus next-gen. That's the configuration we have unveiled in September 2021. Where's the key characteristics of really being able to fly 95 percent of urban missions. Whether this is from an emergency medical service perspective, it could be some tourists missions. Also some transport, commercial shuttle services between an airport and the city center. But this is the missions that we target. Beyond the vehicle, I said before that we need to build an ecosystem and we are building a first MVP, a minimum viable product of this ecosystem in Germany at the moment. The idea is to see how can we link the technical challenges on the vehicle side, in the airspace and underground infrastructure? How can we afterwards make it accessible to passengers, so that you can offer a safe and secure service, but also a good user experience that counts in the end. To round things up, I would like to give you some insights into the way we've organized our business. As I mentioned at the beginning, we have created a dedicated legal entity, Airbus of mobility for that purpose, to host and as a central entrepreneur for the URM business at Airbus. The ambition here was to see how we can create a startup like an agile entity that is able to perform at the edge of innovation while still benefiting from the corporate environment and the experience and the know-how and the skills that we have at Airbus at large.
