Analytical Tool Assesses New Air Service Markets

Companies and investors exploring new air service business models now have access to an analytical tool intended to assess markets, demand, and costs. UK-based advanced air mobility consultants EA Maven launched the AeroTesseract platform on Wednesday to support clients focused on regional and urban air networks, including aircraft manufacturers, operators, airports, vertiports, and financial groups.

According to the portal’s developers, it addresses questions including how to choose routes for a network, which aircraft—both new and existing models—to deploy, and how much money could be made. It combines market research to highlight suitable point-to-point and hub-and-spoke routes, with demand forecasting, operational scheduling, energy and infrastructure planning, carbon emissions, and financial analysis.

The EA Maven analysts draw on datasets including government transportation statistics covering road, rail, and bus options to assess “baseline mobility flows” alongside journey time metrics based on mapping and transport applications. They have combined this with census and other socioeconomic data on local populations and income levels.

The company’s initial focus has been mainly on the UK and Ireland, but it has been expanding its database to cover locations in Germany, France, Spain, Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands. It also plans to extend the tool to cover U.S. markets.

“Most tools or consultancies only cover one piece of the puzzle,” said EA Maven co-founder Darrell Swanson. “AeroTesseract connects them so the output of one module directly feeds the next, giving you a coherent, end-to-end picture rather than disconnected analyses.”

EA Maven uses a screening mechanism to generate an index of possible locations for air services by filtering out unsuitable options. AeroTesseract also uses an artificial intelligence assistant to help users resolve some specific questions.

Prioritizing New Routes

“The indexing module scores and ranks every possible route against multiple weighted factors: travel demand volumes, time savings versus surface transport, population characteristics, income levels, business travel propensity, existing transport quality,” Swanson told AIN. “What comes out is a prioritized shortlist, the routes most likely to work, which then go into detailed demand modelling. Think of it as a smart filter that separates the viable opportunities from the noise.”

The new analytical tool also factors in potential vertiports and landing sites for new aircraft, including eVTOL air taxis and hybrid-electric fixed-wing models. It has already assessed these factors for prospective start-up operations, including SkyBus across 55 UK locations and for Red Sea Global with a 20-site network in Saudi Arabia.

“AeroTesseract tells you which cities and corridors justify that investment in the first place,” Swanson said. “It's fundamentally a greenfield planning tool, not constrained by what exists today.”

To assess the anticipated revenue streams from the new forms of air mobility, EA Maven assesses demand in terms of what passengers currently pay to make journeys by other modes of transportation, including existing domestic airlines. The new tool also models passengers’ willingness to pay for time savings and convenience. “On the cost side, we build up from direct operating costs per seat mile—energy, maintenance, crew, infrastructure fees—and apply target margins,” Swanson explained. “The platform then lets you run fare sensitivity analysis to find the sweet spot where the fare is commercially viable for the operator while still generating enough mode shift from surface transport. In practice, the market-driven fare and the cost-plus fare need to converge; if they don’t, the route probably doesn’t work.”

AeroTesseract was named after the four-dimensional “hypercube” used to visualize higher mathematical and physical dimensions. EA Maven is offering it to customers on varying subscription terms depending on the scope of the analysis required.

According to Swanson, with new aircraft approaching type certification, the time is right for operators and other stakeholders to be clear on the details of their business case. He and his co-founder, Jarek Zych, who devised the portal, see it as a “full-stack” tool based on comprehensive “bottom-up” data that provides more meaningful insights than the sort of “top-down” econometric “guesses” they feel have been provided by traditional consultants.