It’s the human beings that make it complicated, concluded Luis Carlos Munhoz da Rocha, describing the flights that Brazilian operator Helisul Aviação conducted with helicopters simulating eVTOL flights, as research for the Embraer/Eve-led urban air mobility concept studies for Rio de Janeiro. In a wide-ranging conversation with FutureFlight at the recent Heli XP 2022 trade show in São Paulo, he described some of the human complications that Helisul encountered in the 30-day trial and how the company drew on its 50 years of experience chartering rotorcraft to address them.
Munhoz da Rocha’s perspective fleshes out the outline in Embraer/Eve's concept of operations (Conops), a document that spells out the projected realities of this new mode of transportation regarding battery life, air traffic management, and localized market demand, while also offering technical solutions to address these issues. Some problems, the flight trials discovered, start with the passengers served, and some solutions rely on the people serving them.
Helisul carries 5.5 million passengers per year, mostly on sightseeing flights around Rio de Janeiro. “Tourism people are experienced with problems, [such as] drunken passengers, armed police, etc.,” Munhoz da Rocha explained. In his view, it’s essential for all eVTOL boarding points to have the same security precautions as an airport, including metal detectors.
Six months ago, a helicopter was hijacked from the Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas heliport, where Helisul manages the terminal and leases one of the four landing pads. The hijacker, whose intent was to help prisoners escape from a jail, used another pad and another company, whose procedures didn’t include metal detectors, cameras, or a ban on hand baggage. “It wouldn’t have happened with us,” Munhoz da Rocha concluded.
However, it’s not merely transgressions of clear rules that can cause problems. “Putting on the same flight people not of the same social origin, in close proximity with strangers,” is difficult, he said. “Even we who’ve been in the business a long time learned a lot.”
Not all passengers who pose challenges are ill-behaved. Serving wheelchair users may require adapted flights at designated hours, Munhoz da Rocha suggests.
The 30-day trial was intended as a proof of concept, with three round trips per day in each direction, or six flights, from the prosperous but distant Barra da Tijuca neighborhood to Galeão International Airport. Two routes were plotted, one inland and almost direct (with only 30 to 60 seconds added to avoid overflight of the most hazardous of Rio’s slums) that took about 10 minutes, as opposed to 25 minutes for the more scenic seashore route. Although October and November are bad months for weather in Rio, only three of the 180 flights needed to take the alternate route, with another three canceled altogether.
The helicopters were allowed to land at an airport airside location that is not normally available and were shuttled across a runway to a patio check-in before entering the domestic boarding area. That flexibility was available because the Covid pandemic devastated international traffic, affecting Galeão more than any other major airport in the country, even causing a runway closure. It does show that in attempting to create a premium service, saving time between a curbside drop-off and the boarding gate may be more cost-effective than producing a faster eVTOL.
The concept was to implement a door-to-door airport service, Munhoz da Rocha said, but no last-mile connection via Uber or other ground transport was made for this trial. Eventually, the reservations process should follow an Uber model, with variable pricing to achieve a better median price to fill the aircraft at slower hours. In the case of an airport shuttle, the hours people go to catch a flight aren’t the same as the hours they return home, leaving the legs of each aircraft round trip with imbalanced demand.
The reservation system used for the trial was produced by flight booking platform Flapper, which adapted its existing app. Helisul has its own reservation software, which already accepts sightseeing flight reservations from such sites as Trip Advisor, and which it plans to use in the future. Eve/Embraer also plans to produce a reservation system that all eVTOL vehicles can use, according to Munhoz da Rocha.
The lessons are still being absorbed. “A lot of data was collected that is still being tabulated, and even we haven’t seen yet,” said Munhoz da Rocha, adding that Eve might share the additional information with participants in June. Eve used the flights to test mapping equipment, employing optical and Lidar sensors mounted on the nose and on the ski of a Helisul JetRanger.
Munhoz da Rocha said, though, that choosing routes over Rio’s volatile slums required more than gadgets. He explained that for 15 years Helisul conducted air operations for leading TV network Globo, for a total of 30,000 hours of filming. The company did the aerial reporting for the 2014 FIFA World Cup, and also for the 2016 Olympics, where it had seven helicopters in the air, as well as for Formula 1 races. “We know Rio very well,” he said. “We would film the police drug raids, and the drug dealers hated the Globo helicopters.”
The Eve’s Conops document’s proposal for a vertiport in the Arpoador region, but Munhoz da Rocha is not convinced. “I don’t believe in it,” he responded. “The place suggested was in the Copacabana Fort. It’s under the army’s control, and the commandant changes every two years, and each one has his own ideas.” The location, he said, is sometimes rented out—it was used by the World Cup organizers—and is commonly employed for weekly formations and internal purposes. In his view, this means it can’t be relied upon as a regular eVTOL landing place.
Munhoz da Rocha also said he arranged a meeting with the mayor of Rio that included Eve’s business development vice president David Rothblatt. He said that the mayor showed considerable interest in the urban air mobility plans, asking numerous detailed questions.
Helisul, which has placed a provisional order for up to 50 of Eve's four-passenger eVTOL aircraft, had also hosted a dozen Eve/Embraer engineers at its Curitiba facility for what Munhoz da Rocha called an “inversion,” to allow them to better understand helicopter maintenance and how it differs from fixed-wing aircraft maintenance. While Embraer has certified multiple new aircraft in recent years, none of them was a helicopter.
Other urban air mobility proof-of-concept exercises have involved simulations of eVTOL traffic. Rather than moving data points, in the Rio trial Helisul actually moved people. Munhoz da Rocha’s lively discussion of lessons learned emphasized how the occupants of the aircraft are neither baggage nor obedient robots but people who are not always at their best. Experienced front-line workers, backed by even more experienced management, made the Rio trial work.
