Airborne: Reborn / Volume XXIV / March 10th 2021
This week we’ve got drones spraying disinfectant in Florida, delivering parcels in Canada, meals in Chicago and getting automatically authorised in Australia. An Asian low cost carrier’s getting into air taxis, ride sharing and drone delivery whilst in Britain the aerospace old guard and an ambitious start-up have joined forces.
An electric vehicle test range breaks ground in Sweden, a 1MW turbogenerator spools up in America, South Korean companies bag a haul of space contracts, and there are deals for satellites from China and Finland.
With all that - and much more besides - it's Airborne: Reborn XXIV.
Charles Osborne - Founder
Sam Chandra - Asia-Pacific Lead, Aviation
Rolls-Royce Electrical inked their first commercial deal in the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) segment this week. They’ll provide the electrical power system for Vertical Aerospace’s VA-X4 eVTOL air taxi. The partnership is a significant, positive signal for RR - whose shares are still trading at c. 50% of pre-pandemic levels - valuing the aerospace stalwart at less than £10 billion GBP (via Rolls-Royce):
Malaysian low-cost-carrier Air Asia’s CEO Tony Fernandes announced a range of initiatives aimed at diversifying the group. They include a passenger-carrying Urban Air Mobility (UAM) project (to be operational within 18 months), a foray into ground-based ride hailing and an urban drone delivery service backed by the Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre (via The Straits Times):
AFuzion - an avionics certification consultancy - have revealed that they’re supporting no less than five eVTOL manufacturers in a bid to get their platforms ready for commercial operations (via 69 News).
As we predicted last summer eHang confirmed that they’ve been working on a longer-range eVTOL “for years” that will fly “in months” (via eHang):
After we spotted a cheeky tweet from Miami’s mayor in Vol. XXIII - this week Archer Aviation confirmed that they’d added Uber Elevate co-founder Nikhil Goel and ‘NASA Aerospace Ninja’ Dr Mark Moore to their advisory board. They also committed to launching in Miami by 2024 (via GlobeNewswire).
🔋 BATTERY-ELECTRIC ⚡️
Property developer Castellum announced the establishment of the country’s largest test facility for electric vehicles in Säve, Sweden. The three million square metre facility, co-owned by Research Institutes of Sweden and Chalmers University of Technology, will cater to both ground and air vehicles - Heart Aerospace are notable ‘neighbours’ (via Castellum, PR Newswire).
🌱 SUSTAINABLE AVIATION FUEL 🛢
American Airlines and German logistics heavyweight Kuehne + Nagel signed a novel agreement that will see the former “allocate a portion of the emissions reduction benefit the airline generates from its use of sustainable aviation fuel” to the latter. The deal is to the tune of 3m gallons of SAF equivalent (via Business Green).
✈️ OTHER SUSTAINABLE AVIATION NEWS 🌱
Honeywell are developing a 1-MW turbogenerator “the size of a motor scooter” that can run on aviation biofuel, and power multiple electric motors or charge batteries as part of a hybrid-electric system, when teamed with the flight-proven HGT1700 APU used in the Airbus A350 XWB (via Honeywell).
🦠 COVID-19 😷
The Miami Marlins baseball team announced a deal with Rentokil that will see their 37,000-seat stadium disinfected by drones (via MLB).
🚁 DRONE DELIVERY 📦
Canadian same-day delivery marketplace GoFor announced a partnership with Aurora Aerial that will leverage the company’s remotely piloted drones for last-mile deliveries (via Business Wire).
Restaurant tech company Dragontail Systems are partnering with drone delivery startup Valqari from Chicago on a system that will see orders flown from restaurant kitchens to remote landing sites to be picked up by delivery drivers (via FoodOnDemand).
🎮 BVLOS 🔭
Australian regulator CASA announced several new initiatives to accelerate the integration of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) into controlled airspace. Google spin-out Wing revealed in a blog post further details of the automated airspace authorisation features that will be made available in the country (initially to Chief Remote Pilots) through their OpenSky app this Autumn (via CASA, Wing).
🚀 LAUNCH 🌎
South Korea’s Kencoa Aerospace Corporation (a supplier to SpaceX, NASA and Blue Origin) have raised $26.6m USD to expand their Georgia-based subsidiary. The company’s shares are trading at 15,100 KRW at time of writing, having at times doubled from a base of c. 8,000 KRW in Jan - boosted by a string of lucrative deals with US space companies (via Research Interviewer).
The US Space Force have awarded two heavy-lift launch contracts each to SpaceX (for Falcon 9) and ULA (on Vulcan Centaur) with a total value of $385m (via C4ISRNET).
🛰🛰🛰 MEGA-CONSTELLATIONS 🛰🛰🛰
In a $73m USD deal announced on Monday Korea’s Intellian Technologies will provide compact receivers for the OneWeb constellation’s satellites from 2022 (via Capacity).
🌔 SPACE TOURISM 🏝
Virgin Galactic Chairman Chamath Palihapitiya sold his entire $213 million stake in the company against a background of mixed sentiment from market analysts. The company started the year at $23, saw a rally to $62 in Feb and now trades at ~$30 (via CNBC, MarketBeat & Coinspeaker):
🌎 EARTH OBSERVATION 👀
Beijing based Qiansheng Exploration Technology closed a $15 million Series A on Friday. The round was led by the Fuzhou High-Tech Emerging Industry Development Fund. The cash will be used to add to the company’s fleet of 20 imaging sats and construct a new plant (via CX Tech).
Swiss Re have entered into a strategic partnership with Finnish Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) constellation operator ICEYE - to enhance assessment of geo risk. The Swiss company will feed data from the satellites into their platform - CatNet - for faster loss assessment and payouts (via Insurance Journal).
FedEx are test flying two Cessna 208 light cargo aircraft with Reliable Robotics autonomous conversions installed. They are remotely operated and the kit currently costs six figures (and takes weeks) to install. Founder of Reliable Robotics, Robert Rose, envisages routine passenger travel in autonomous aircraft being reality within ten years (via Bloomberg):
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