Aviation tech (2024)

1. Will flying cars take off?

   VCs have flung money at electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft, also known as eVTOL. As well as Volocopter, German startup Lilium is also making an electric helicopter — the company went public on Nasdaq in 2021; its share price has dipped since its 2022 pinnacle.

   Sweden’s Jetson raised €14.1m from investors including music artist will.i.am in October 2023 to launch its one-person flying vehicle. This thing won’t fly too high, but it can reach speeds of up to 100 km an hour. It will also set you back around £100k.

   You also see startups popping up along the supply chain. Austria’s CycloTech, for example, makes new propulsion systems to power flying cars and raised €20m earlier this month.

   The flying car contenders are competing for regulatory approval: Volocopter appears to be further along this path than most, though it may fail to gain certification by its Olympics deadline.

   There are multiple challenges for all these startups to overcome: vehicles consume a lot of energy during take-off and landing; they’ll require specific pilot training; they’re noisy, though less so than helicopters; and it may take some convincing for the public to ride in them.

2. Lifting SAF supplies

   The European Commission wants at least 2% of jet fuel to be made from sustainable sources by 2025 — rising to 70% by 2050.

   Airlines promise to blend in a rising volume of SAF to their fuel tanks — but an enormous ramp-up in SAF production will be needed to meet demand as well as to make green fuel more affordable for airlines. There’s also controversy about using fuel made from ethanol: the future of aviation could require lots of corn, and lots of water.

   These concerns are spurring the race to develop new kinds of fuel. University of Oxford spinout Oxccu raised a $23m round in 2023 to explore a class of SAF called e-fuels, which are made by combining captured CO2 with hydrogen.

3. Can airports keep up?

   It’s really hard to introduce changes to an industry that never fully shuts — but airports have little choice but to lean into new technologies.

   UK-based software supplier AeroCloud Systems has developed SaaS tools to help smaller airports collect and store all kinds of data, from flight information to updates on ongoing projects.

   France’s Outsight AI has sold Lidar systems to Paris Charles De Gaulle as a tool to analyse foot traffic and identify bottlenecks faster — the tech works in a similar way to radar and sonar, but using lasers rather than radio or soundwaves.

   Schiphol airport announced last year that it would buy 19 baggage robots from Danish company Cobot Lift. The airport expects that these robots can eventually take on 80-90% of the baggage lifting.

   Schiphol has also said it aims to achieve a fully autonomous ground operation by 2050 — meaning self-driving vehicles for passengers and cargo. UK-based Oxa is one of a number of companies developing software to power autonomous airport vehicles to ferry people or baggage from the gate to the plane.

Who early stage startups are up against