Investors and aerospace executives, focus on regional air mobility. There are a lot of great places to invest that will start returning profits this decade, and profits for the decades to come.
United Airlines and ZeroAvia are teaming up to bring the dream of zero emission hydrogen fuel cell flight down to Earth.
If you are an urban planner or policy maker engaged with urban air mobility, be aware that the bloom is distinctly off this rose, cut your losses, and pivot to regional air mobility.
Policy makers and investors take note: regional air mobility is vastly more scalable, an actual path to a decarbonized future and much lower risk.
Some of the eVTOLs will end up in billionaire’s stables, along with their other rarely used toys such as Bugattis, but they can afford to be frivolous.
There’s a deep disconnect between the purported urban taxi business models and most of the graphics these eVTOL companies use, which hides a yawning chasm of reality.
Battery-electric aviation will be over 50% of flights by 2070, and approaching 100% by 2100. Aviation-related warming will be under a third of 2019 levels by 2060, and drop to close to zero by 2100. In 80 years, flygskam will be a thing of the past.
For commodities traders, businesses, strategists, and policy makers, I would recommend being very leery of most of the market analyses currently extant for aviation fuels.
Aluminum air batteries don’t get within an intercontinental flight of being a viable choice, and certainly not by Wright’s 2024 target date for first flight with one engine running on the new fuel.
Hydrogen is a very expensive alternative, so other options that are less expensive and have equal or better characteristics are going to dominate.
