INTERVIEW: Duncan Walker of Skyports Infrastructure gives exciting update on company’s role ahead of air taxi launch in Dubai
In February, Skyports and Joby Aviation confirmed it would be launching air taxi operations in Dubai by 2026. The news was met with great excitement from both the AAM industry and those outside of the space.
eVTOL Insights’ Executive Editor Jason Pritchard met up with Skyports CEO Duncan Walker at this year’s Singapore Airshow, to get more reaction and information.
Q: Thanks for speaking to me, Duncan. How big of an announcement is this latest news from Dubai for Skyports and the industry as a whole?
DW: For us [Skyports] it’s amazing. This is something we’ve been working on for two years with the Road Transport Authority (RTA) and Joby. I’m excited because it is going to be the first proper commercial network anywhere in the world.
Dubai is good at identifying challenges and solving problems, which we’re not always brilliant at in other places around the world.
The co-ordination and buy-in from senior government levels is amazing, and really validates the announcement. The signing ceremony brought together key representatives that are enabling Dubai’s air taxi transition; His Excellency (HE) Mattar Al Tayer, Chairman of the RTA, HE Mohammed Abdulla Lengawi, Director General of the DCAA, Abdulla Bin Touq Al Marri, Minister of Economy and Chairman of the GCAA, ourselves and Joby Aviation. The signing was attended by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum which really demonstrates the significance of the project.
Our partners in Dubai have been incredibly accommodating and proactive to make it happen. They want to be first, they’re very clear about that. And they can unlock some of those challenges to make it possible. So we’re super excited about it.
Q: And what does that say about the region and the fact it is putting the pieces together for companies like Skyports and Joby to come to Dubai and set up operations. Could it be an area where others could learn from?
DW: Absolutely. And it’s a virtuous circle they’ve created. They are super proactive, forward looking and bold in their decision making. They unlock doors to make themselves first and it requires a lot of courage and vision.
It also sets a template for other places around the world. Not only will this be the first air taxi network, but it will create and launch the wider industry and drive the economy.
We’re creating an Advanced Air Mobility hub with an enabling ecosystem. So there’s going to be pilot training, maintenance and repair, operations of the vertiports, the market development people. This won’t only be good for Dubai’s domestic economy, but it becomes a harbour of knowledge that can be exported elsewhere around the world. It’s quite a refreshing place to work and develop at pace.
There are no corners cut, safety is absolutely paramount.The Dubai Civil Aviation Authority (DCAA) and General Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA), work well with the RTA, as well as with us and Joby on the ground and aircraft operating regulations. This cohesion means we can get to do everything more efficiently, from securing permits to allocating sites.
Infrastructure has a long lead time and to achieve what we’re trying to achieve with this industry, we need to unlock it now; not with roundtables and discussions but with actions.
It’s hard to introduce new solutions and innovations without a proof point. My hope is that Dubai becomes that proof point for other countries.
It’s early days, but what are the next steps leading up to 2026?
DW: So the sites are already allocated and secured, which is great. Electrification work, which is one of the longer lead times, is ongoing. DEWA, which is the electrification authority in Dubai, has been super supportive.
The ground surveys on the first couple of sites and airspace have been completed. Flying air taxis is, in its own right, an incredible feat and we’re planning to enable it beside next to DXB, one of the busiest airports in the world. It requires a lot of coordination, but we’ve found a airspace path that works.
We will be constructing sites by June this year, ready for operations by 2026 – hopefully sooner. Testing will go into Q3 and Q4 this year.
JoeBen [Bevirt, Founder and CEO of Joby Aviation] was in Dubai during the announcement and we were talking about how fast we should push the pace. There’s always a fine balance between vehicle certification and infrastructure development to ensure they happen in tandem, so we’re aligning closely.
We’re nearly at the finish line and the start of commercial operations, but can you talk about Skyports’ journey? It’s been an incredible couple of years.
DW: It’s been way longer and way harder than we thought it would be! We started the business six and a half years ago and I think we were a little bit naive about the pace at which vehicles would go through certification. If you recall back then, everyone was saying 2021 or 2022 for certification and surprise, surprise, it took longer.
Skyports Drone Services has been a good accelerator for us, and brings invaluable learnings from real life flight operations.
In the infrastructure business, we’ve focused on refining our vertiport product – and demonstrating to industry what this will look like and why it is essential. We built our first vertiport prototype here in Singapore in 2019.
This was followed in 2022 by our Paris and Marina, California facilities. In addition, we also acquired the Skyports London Heliport which has been an invaluable tool for testing our vertiport technologies. So we’ve been going through this testing iteration stage for what feels like a long time and now I feel we’re finally at the end point.
We’ve still got a huge journey ahead and Dubai is super exciting as the first, but our aspiration isn’t just Dubai; we’ve got a market which is incredibly scalable and turning it from the theoretical to the actual is this year and next year’s job. It’s much more exciting than paperwork!
Any ideas as to where Skyports might set up operations next?
DW: Ultimately, we’ll go anywhere where operators want to fly and where regulators and governments will let us do it. That’s changed and continues to change a little bit.
We love the Asia Pacific region and the market is amazing, we just haven’t seen the pace of movement we’ve seen elsewhere. From my perspective, it’s Dubai and the wider Middle East.
As you know, we’re active in Saudi Arabia and other Emirates that are super excited and can unlock doors in a similar fashion to Dubai. In fact, when you start connecting some of those Emirates up there’s a big use case there. So we love that.
London’s my passion because it’s home, but it’s taking a little bit longer.
For the US market, I’ve actually been surprised it hasn’t had more attention. There was a lot of chat around two years ago with Miami, New York and Los Angeles. We have had a team over there for many years and I am surprised the OEMs and operators haven’t been more proactive about which markets they want to go to. I think that’s partly a regulatory thing.
I think south Florida is the natural choice out of the three. LA is very, very hard to solve as there is a massive stakeholder group. New York is interesting but it has infrastructure that exists so ‘day one’ operations might be covered already. I don’t think that solves the problem in the medium term, because the purpose of electrification isn’t just to replace helicopters; it’s there to enhance connectivity through a much wider network, but as a starting point it works. It will build out over time.
For south Florida, you look at the weather, space between the cities, the regulatory environment, topography – it makes sense for AAM.
So where will we be? My bet is the Middle East, one of the early movers in the US market and then Asia and Europe.
In Asia, it’s still a bit of a race between Japan and Korea, then maybe Singapore. But for Singapore, you’ve got to unlock the cross border because that’s the challenge here rather than domestic travel. I don’t know who wins that race.
A lot of talk is about the vehicles, but can you paint a picture of vertiports and the infrastructure perspective?
DW: Vertiports aren’t that complicated themselves. The easiest piece about the vertiport is the terminal itself. The really complicated things about them are airfield layout and design because you’re always operating in space constrained, populous areas.
But, if they weren’t space constrained, busy places, they probably wouldn’t be places that passengers wanted to travel to – so the challenge also represents an opportunity.
The other challenge is airspace and trying to integrate the existing air traffic without rewriting the entire rulebook which would be many, many years of work. There are two complicated things we try to solve.
The scheduling and resource management and situational awareness are the two bits we’re really focusing on and the team implemented that at our London heliport and our testing facility in Paris, so I think that’s going to be an exciting piece of the jigsaw too.
Any final thoughts?
DW: What’s going to be interesting for me this year is that we saw a load of money flying into the OEM world, a lot of SPACs. They need a lot of money to certify vehicles, but they raise a lot of money too. What we haven’t seen yet is lots of money flowing into the enabling ecosystem.
I think we will see that this year – and we need to see it. It’s certainly going to be interesting to see how it plays out.
We’ve already seen some extent of consolidation. Loads of markets saying ‘we want to do it’, but the reality is that only a few markets can. So I think we’ll see more and more focus on fewer and fewer markets, not as the end game but as a starting point.
You can’t really launch four markets at the same time, no matter how much you might want to. When the industry is more mature you might be able to. But you’ve got to do it somewhere first and then build from that.
