With electric air taxi services on the horizon, operators are already flying in to secure landing sites in Los Angeles.
Traffic-dodging aerial hops across big cities could happen as soon as next year, pending approval by the Federal Aviation Administration, and one of the country’s largest operators of airplane and helicopter landing sites is now on the hunt for L.A. locations that can handle the comings and goings of air taxis.
The vertiports, as they are called, might be built on open land next to an airport or university, or also on a parking garage or other building rooftop in downtown areas, said Kevin Cox, chief executive of VertiPorts by Atlantic. The company wants to build the infrastructure needed to integrate air travel into congested urban centers as an alternative to stop-and-go car trips.
In its search for vertiports, the company is looking for busy surface routes “where it should take 30 minutes to get from point A to point B, but it takes an hour and a half,” Cox said.
“Southern California area has got a lot of challenges in terms of congestion on the roadway,” he said.
California has several startups working on electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, which were designed to bring the benefits of helicopter travel to the masses, with a significantly lower noise level than conventional helicopters, a highly anticipated technological advancement for many.
LA28, the committee charged with planning L.A.’s third Summer Games, is partnering with San José-based aerospace company Archer Aviation to assemble a fleet of electric air taxis designed in the hope of diverting even a tiny slice of Olympics traffic to the sky, Archer said in May.
Archer hopes its air taxis will offer 10- to 20-minute flights using a network of vertiports throughout the city, including at SoFi Stadium, LAX and other hubs from Santa Monica to Orange County.
Cox declined to specify potential vertiport locations the company is considering in Southern California for competitive reasons. Still, he expects “two or three dozen scattered around the market that will truly transform how people move through and between cities.”
Ideal locations would be in urban centers where there are clusters of offices and stores in close proximity to dense residential neighborhoods, all surrounded by heavy traffic year-round. The Los Angeles region has several busy centers that fit that description, such as Santa Monica, downtown L.A. and Culver City.
Vertiports by Atlantic has hired real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield to find sites to lease in some of the nation’s largest markets, including California, New York, New Jersey and Florida.
Targets include the Greater Los Angeles area, the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City and its outer boroughs, Long Island, Newark, Broward and Miami-Dade counties, Orlando and Tampa.
The company plans to start securing sites by the end of the year.
“Basically, we’re trying to find the bus stops for flying taxis,” commercial property broker Mike Condon Jr. said. “This is George Jetson-esque. This is the future here, now.”
The flying cars of “The Jetsons,” a futuristic animated sitcom that enchanted television audiences in the early 1960s, are “not a bad analogy,” Cox said. However, the taxis will be flown by professional pilots instead of heads of households like George Jetson. “It’s that kind of leap in technology.”
That also means cities haven’t got regulations on the books about how they can be used.
“The real challenge for these is getting local land use entitlements,” Condon said. “There’s nowhere in zoning codes that says how flying taxis can take off.”
VertiPorts by Atlantic is a subsidiary of Atlantic Aviation, which already operates a network of private plane terminals at airports that could also be used by eVTOLs. It has more than 100 locations in North America, including at Los Angeles International Airport and airports in Santa Monica, Burbank and Long Beach.
“We expect a lot of travel will start from those,” Condon said. “Leave from the airport and don’t fight traffic.”
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