FutureFlight

The 2019 UP summit meeting brought together a self-defining elite of aviation entrepreneurs and prospective investors at ranch of Ross Perot Jr. in Westlake, Texas. Ben Marcus and Cyrus Sigari, founders of private jet broker JetAviva, jointly organized the third annual summit, claiming that this year's gathering included around $100 billion of investable capital among the attendees. This lured start-ups such as Beta Technologies and Lift Aircraft, joining senior executives from aerospace giants like Bell, Boeing, and Airbus.

How do non-believers view eVTOL aircraft and the self-styled urban air mobility revolution? This report by Alexis Ong for The Verge about Volocopter's recent unveiling in Singapore of its VoloPort concept and flight demonstration of the 2X prototype aircraft gives us some idea.

Danny in the Valley—aka Danny Fortson, West Coast correspondent for the UK's Sunday Times—did a good job getting Lilium founder and CEO Daniel Wiegand to open up about the eVTOL start-up's business plan in this recent podcast. He talks about how the German company got launched and how the science drives everything. 

There are places in the podcast where I found myself yelling out questions and wishing Danny in the Valley had pushed Danny in the Black Forest a bit harder, such as:

Lilium Jet has been very measured and selective about how it communicates its plans to develop distinctive its ducted-fan eVTOL aircraft. For months, it seemed the German company could not be comment publicly on its plans. Then rivals like Volocopter and EHang started getting extensive media coverage and a few drips of information were released to the media. So when I saw the link below to a presentation given in the first week of November 2019 at the Web Summit in Portugal's capital Lisbon, I was eager to hear how illuminating Lilium Jet CEO Daniel Wiegand might be.

A new report called Urban Air Mobility: Economics and Global Markets, jointly published by NEXA Advisors and the Vertical Flight Society, gives a clear summary of the potentially massive opportunities but equally massive challenges presented by the nascent market for eVTOL aircraft.

Ten aviation industry groups, led by the Vertical Flight Society, have jointly written to the U.S. government, urging it to continue its support for development of eVTOL aircraft and urban air mobility (UAM) initiatives. In a letter sent on November 13, 2019, the groups praise the Trump Administration for including the sector in a White House Policy Memorandum called Fiscal Year 2021 Administration Research and Development Budget Priorities. The letter promotes the opportunity for U.S.

With the green agenda rising in the UK's 2019 general election campaign, the UK Labour Party has indicated it would consider a ban on fossil-fuel powered private aircraft flights from 2025. The November 4 statement by shadow transport secretary Andy McDonald was in response to a new report calling for electric-only private aircraft flights published by environmental and economic pressure groups Fellow Travellers and Commonwealth. 

On October 31, EHang filed an F1 form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to prepare its planned Initial Public Offering (IPO) before the end of 2019. The company is aiming to raise $100 million from the IPO.