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The nascent Urban Air Mobility industry is T booming. But before it becomes an integral part of our lives, there are quite a few challenges that we must overcome. From regulatory challenges to overwhelming cost barriers, Varon Vehicles is doing a fabulous job at making the technology a reality with their unique approach. With a career spanning across two decades, Felipe Varon, CEO at Varon Vehicles, shares how they are overcoming barriers in the emerging UAM market by bringing together global talents from the aviation and urban air mobility industries for implementation in Latin America

What is Varon Vehicles’ view on Urban Air Mobility (UAM)?

We view UAM as infrastructure – not just meaning our vertiports. It means the network of vertiports connected to each other with a fleet of new generation air vehicles servicing between them and all the subsystems required for the operation.
We see this as infrastructure that allows tackling not only the mobility problem, but also the  city growth problem by providing transportation means without the need to build physical mobility infrastructure.

What is your company focused on?

Varon Vehicles is leading an ecosystem of global urban air mobility stakeholders targeted towards implementing its first transportation system network in Latin America, starting at a chosen location in Colombia

It will probably consist of 2 to 4 vertiports connected to each other via permanently reserved airspace volumes and a fleet of new generation Vertical Take-Off and Landing air vehicles (VTOL) servicing between them, with all the required subsystems for the operation, to offer  freight transportation services at first and eventually passenger transportation in conjunction with Transportation Network Company (TNC) partners.

Despite being a US company, Varon Vehicles Corp has identified several advantages in implementing first in Latin America instead of in the US or Europe, which essentially mean faster implementation and lower costs. This is evermore relevant now with global post COVID budget situations.

While most in the aerospace industry agree that an operable maturity level in urban air mobility in the US will be achieved near the year 2035 given the complexity of the design approach being undertaken, Varon Vehicles is targeting to have its first operating system in about 5 years.

The company has taken a simplistic approach for implementation in Latin America to get UAM operation started sooner, at a radically lower cost and with the exact same levels of safety to allow knowhow acquisition.

Varon Vehicles Corporation is proud to announce that it has become a signatory of the Shared Mobility Principles. It is the company’s belief that the Shared Mobility Principles are an important guide as it develops its Urban Air Mobility transportation services and their integration with other modes of transportation.

Produced in 2018 by a working group of NGOs, the Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities are a guiding framework for urban decision makers and stakeholders to navigate the shifting transportation landscape while prioritizing the best outcomes for all.

Urban Air Mobility is a complex nascent industry. Many companies and government agencies from around the world are hard at work to create this promising future mode of transportation. But it not only requires interdisciplinary work in engineering, aeronautics, architecture, policies, urban planning and mobility, it also requires vision, leadership and urban centric thinking. Urban Air Mobility will be viable not only if its economics are right, but also if the appropriate public acceptance is achieved and if it solves people’s and city problems.

Varon Vehicles believes people should have more time for what is valuable in life, that people should be able to move faster, safer and greener. The company believes that the highest technology and the best of innovative minds can serve the purpose of healing people’s deteriorated quality of life. This deterioration arises in great proportion from urban mobility issues. By creating a disruptive way of transportation, the company aims to tackle this in a radically innovative way in a manner that is highly replicable globally. The guidance of the Shared Mobility Principles serves as a solid basis to point the company’s development in the right direction from early stages, so the company is proud to become a signatory along with so many other reputable global mobility stakeholders.

In recent times, due to the ever-growing vehicle population, commuting has become very difficult. McKinsey had reported that more than two workweeks are spent in traffic by a typical Los Angeles commuter. A new hope has risen to end our commuting woes in the form of Urban Air Mobility (UAM). It is a term that is used in the aviation industry and it refers to on-demand transportation in a new generation of vertical take-off and landing aircraft, also known as VTOLs. Traffic is getting beyond worse, and it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to go from one place to another. UAM leverages the sky to better link people to cities and regions, giving them more possibilities to connect.

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