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Imagine a scene in which your working week comes to an end and
the traffic trying to get home for the weekend is heavy. However,
you are not too fussed because waiting for you on the roof of your
Brisbane work building is a flying taxi, which will fly you at a
height of 500 metres along the coastline to your Sunshine Coast
home in just 20 minutes.
Pure fantasy, you might say? The Council of Mayors of South East
Queensland (Council) doesn’t believe so. The Council has
examined Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) vehicles, which includes
Electric Vertical Take Off and Landing (eVTOL) vehicles, both
manned and unmanned, during a recent 11-day fact finding mission to
California and Canada.
The Council has seen enough potential in the technology to enter
into a partnership with WiskAero, a company producing four-seater
flying taxis based on this eVTOL technology.
The regulatory framework to govern such a technological
advancement is also underway.
The Commonwealth government has produced an issues paper on AAM
and the nation’s aviation regulator, the Civil Aviation Safety
Authority (CASA), has issued a road map to reshape the regulation
of Australia’s airspace to accommodate the rapidly evolving
aviation technology. In fact, CASA is planning to roll out the
necessary rules for flying taxis by 2025 and then deployment of
those regulations the following year depending on foreign initial
airworthiness certification and the commitment of eVTOL
manufacturers to the Australian market. CASA is currently
undertaking public consultation on the guidelines for the design of
vertiports, the areas at which flying taxis will take off and
land.
The industry is expected to grow so big so quickly that Morgan
Stanley predicts the global market for AAM will be valued at AU$2.2
trillion by 2040.
With the technology moving at pace, the federal government knows
that legislation regulating this will need to be developed quickly.
The only similar industry that legislation can be modelled on is
the drone industry. However, the existing legal framework that
governs the safe and lawful use of drone operations is not fit for
purpose to regulate flying vehicles that are not delivering food or
a pair of shoes, but rather people.
A new and bespoke legislative regime is urgently required.
Fortunately aviation is subject to international conventions that
the signatories to which adopt best global standards, which means
we can learn from what is happening overseas. The United States of
America, France, Germany, Brazil and Singapore are already putting
in place the infrastructure or legislative frameworks to deal with
flying taxis.
The full passenger journey from terminal to take off is already
being tested at a passenger terminal testbed in France, in time for
the 2024 Paris Olympics. Billy Nolen, acting administrator of the
US Federal Aviation Administration, has been reported as saying
that with the Los Angeles Olympics on the horizon, “we’re
talking about probably having hundreds if not thousands of AAM
vehicles by the 2028 timeframe”.
There are also other legal issues outside of safety that will
need to be addressed. Noise pollution is an important one. If
flying taxis use airspace over densely populated areas as is
envisaged, this could create a significant noise pollution problem.
Technological developments may take care of these noise levels
anyway, however excessive noise will limit the locations of
vertiports.
While much of the regulatory heavy lifting will be done at a
federal level, state and local governments also have an important
role to play. State governments and local councils must be able to
massage their respective legislative regimes with the overriding
need to facilitate a legal framework to support a flying taxi
ecosystem.
Possibly the greatest hurdle state governments will have to
overcome is the necessary amendments to local authorities’
planning schemes and building codes. This may involve legislating
planning directives to local authorities to facilitate the
necessary infrastructure to support the AAM ecosystem, especially
the vertiports.
There will also be a need to integrate the new legislative
regime for the safe operations of flying taxis into the existing
regulatory matrix governing privacy, environmental impacts,
cultural sites and cyber security.
At this stage the idea of an air taxi flight over the city to
home is a pipedream. But the fact remains that the technology is
well ahead of the regulations and the opportunity to play an
important role from the ground floor in this emerging industry will
only come once.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general
guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought
about your specific circumstances.
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