Urban Air Mobility: Innovation takes time and burns money — February 2025

It takes a long time, much effort, and a lot of money to design and build a new aircraft from scratch, and bring it into commercial service. The problems escalate when the propulsion system is unconventionally innovative.

In the last decade a lot of effort has been put into developing electrical vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. There was a splurge of pandemic-induced investment activity four years ago, all in the interest of Urban Air Mobility (see Aviation Strategy, Feb 2022), with a bundle of players coming to the stock-market through (then fashionable) SPAC deals.