Redefining Advanced Air Mobility

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1:54Lisa Wright:Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. Well, you might recall last week, shares of the electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle from Archer Aviation fell 8%. That was on Friday. Actually, I had a pretty bad week, but they fell on Friday after the company reported results. They said they were buying Hawthorne Airport in Los Angeles. Which is super interesting. Archer is saying it would offer shares at$8 each to certain institutional investors to raise gross proceeds of$650 million, part of which will be used to fund the acquisition.

2:35There's a lot going on in the eVTOL space. Yeah, that's why we have Lisa Wright in here. She's founder and CEO of Landings. It's a company that says it's building a landing and ground operations network for invertiports for these eVTOLs. She joins us here in our Bloomberg Interactive Brokers studio. Welcome. Have you ever been in an eVTOL? I have sat in one. Actually, I've sat in While it was flying? No, it was in the ground. Has anyone ever been in one while they're flying? There have been. There have been test flights with pilots. I believe Beta made a flight to JFK. It wasn't an eVTOL, it was a CETOL, but it's similar.

3:12So there have been passengers, although it's still all in test. When do you think you will be a paying customer of one of these companies? Whether I pay or not, I'd like to be a customer within a year. I believe that. You really believe that? in the U.S. within a year? I didn't say in the U.S. Okay. Where? In the Middle East? In the Middle East, most likely. Dubai is ahead of us. I probably won't get to ride one in China, but they're flying in China. There's about, I think, 60 already in the air. Listen, I think about, you know, Lisa, what's gone on with the EV space just in terms of cars, right?

3:44And part of it is like the infrastructure needed to back it up. And there's been this, you know, kind of push-pull, tug-and-back, you know, back and forth in terms of cars getting on the road, but needing places to charge and so on and so forth. We need the infrastructure. And it's, it's, I feel a little torturous that it's been. What do you see in terms of the infrastructure that's needed? Because this is where you guys play in. What's needed for this industry to, no pun intended, take off? And then where are we in that process? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, exactly what you described is what we were seeing a few years ago when these aircraft were starting to get their flight worthy credit, creditness.

4:20And we said the same, like, where are they going to land? Where are they going to charge. And as you know, EVs had a huge problem. The bottleneck in getting EVs on the ground was actually not having enough charging for them. And you can charge your EV at home. You cannot charge your EVTOL at home. So that was the basis of us saying we need to build not just one or two. In order to make this real point-to-point travel, which is the promise, we have to have thousands. What do they look like? And where can you build them? Especially in these places, this land is at a premium. Right. So, well, most of the companies right now, and the big money is all in cities.

4:58My company is focusing most, first of all, in rural communities. And so the land is less expensive there. But also because vertiports can be, they're very similar to a helipad. They don't require thousands of acres of land. We can put them on manufacturing sites. We can put them on industrial sites. We can put them on retail locations. We can put them on logistics centers. They can go on just about any type of real estate that we want where a helipad could go. Well, how do you envision the customers of these vehicles using them? Because if I think of high demand routes, they're not necessarily from rural area to rural area.

5:42Correct. So we're looking at it as a first a logistics and freight issue. So already we can handle, say, heavy drones, which can carry freight. We can also, there's smaller aircraft that can be flown today that are called light sport craft, where you can carry emergency service personnel to an accident. So there's already. They can land anywhere a helicopter could land. These ports are really just for charging and taking off. Exactly. So they can land in a helipad, but if the helipad doesn't have the charging equipment, you wouldn't be able to charge there. What's the cost? The cost, so ours are fairly small.

6:22They range from two acres to 12 acres, which is relatively small. The cost for the smallest one is about$350 ,000. And that has slow charge. It doesn't have fast charge. The vertiplexes, the larger ones, which will have pilot centers and training and storage, parking, etc., those will cost closer to$3 million. So how do you build out responsibly? Exactly. Because it sounds exciting, but as we keep talking to people in the industry, we're yet to really see it take off in a big way. And we've all just kind of been watching this closely for, I feel like, a few years now. So what is the rollout that you envision?

7:02Yeah, so we're approaching this in the way that American Tower approached cell service. This is the REIT that owns a lot of the cell towers. Exactly. 90 billion market cap, I believe. Yeah. What they did was, while everybody was focusing on the cities and getting cell service in the cities, is they went out and went across the nation, essentially, and got options on the land. I know you just were talking about land man earlier. I like to call myself a land woman. We're essentially getting options on different pieces of property. We're asset light because we're not purchasing them right now. We're not paying any leases on them.

7:40Essentially, we will get the capital to build the vertiports and the energy network. And then we're going to share the revenue with the landowner. So we just spoke to John Gittleson of our Bloomberg News team, and he talked about two data centers that are in Santa Clara, California that are empty because they're awaiting power. How are you able to get power to these vertiports? Yeah, power is going to be the biggest difficulty, similar to data centers. However, we don't require as much energy as a data center. We can use five acres of solar to power one of our vertiports. Will there be those acres of solar in this administration?

8:19Absolutely. Absolutely. Solar may not be the priority and there may not be, see, the public funding for it in the way, but there's still a lot of private money going towards these networks. So, Lisa, we're talking with Lisa Wright, founder and CEO of Landings. So, Lisa, so is solar your power of choice? Like, are you guys already thinking in terms of how you build this out that there will be solar, a solar farm as part of it? Indeed, many of them will be co-located. We are trying to connect to the grid in some of the smaller regional airports. We can do that. Right. We can connect to the grid.

8:49It may not be a lot of excess energy. So we're working as well with the communities to provide basically a battery backup system that will use peak demand and becomes resiliency for the community. Just 10 seconds. Are you working with any eVTOL companies right now? I'm working with all eVTOL companies. So Archer, Beta, Joby. I'm also working with a short takeoff and landing company called Electra. and the Sportcraft companies are Pivotal and Jetson. Yes or no, you've got your funding already or you're working on it? I'm working on it. All right, well, let us know. Thank you very much. Stay in touch.

9:23Yeah, Lisa Wright, founder and CEO of Landings, joining us in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker Studio.

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