Name: The Future of Travel Takes Flight
Uploaded: 2025-05-21
Duration: 11 min 15 s

In 2024, Istanbul, New York City, and London were among the world’s most congested cities, with drivers in each likely to spend more than 100 hours in traffic over the course of a year. What if there were a more efficient way to navigate urban areas that was also cost-effective and sustainable? FlyNow Aviation, an Austrian startup, is hoping to make this dream a reality with its autopiloted “eCopters” designed for short-distance travel. Learn how the company is prioritizing safety, sustainability, and affordability alongside the innovation and risk-taking required to transform travel as we know it.

The Future of Travel Takes Flight

Conferences

So now let's look at the future. I love this one, the future of personal transportation. Many of us own electric vehicles. Of course I don't here in Saudi Arabia, no, but if they become ubiquitous on the streets of some cities that we no longer think twice about them. So what's next is looking at maybe electric. Helicopters. So it's not such a crazy thought. It's called the ecopter, and it transports cargo and passengers in densely populated cities, and it's fly now. The Austrian company behind the vehicle has an ambitious goal of transporting some of the hundreds of people expected to visit Riyadh for the upcoming. Expo 2030. I would of course expect this Riyadh to be a first mover on technologies like this. I'm very excited to see what it is. First, we are going to have a video and then we are going to hear from the co-founder and chief operating officer of Fly Now, Yvonne Winter. Thanks very much, and you'll see a short clip first. Thank you. Riyadh, a dynamic city with over 8 million people. In about 10 million cars. Urban growth brings new challenges worldwide, congestion, delays, and pressure on infrastructure. But what if the next step is not on the ground, but in the air? Aligned with Saudi Vision 2030, Fly Now is developing a new generation of sustainable, quiet, and efficient air vehicles built for cities like Riyadh and made for everyone. Integrated into Salam Earth Air transport system and ready to start cargo applications in 2027. Mobility reimagined from above. Hello together, great pleasure to be here. It's so amazing and we are on the edge of an entire transformation, not only in mobility, because 25 years ago in one of my first speeches, it was at the congress in Germany. And I came there as a speaker and I watched and I was not only the only female speaker, I was the only female participant, so 250 men and now over 200 women. This is such a joy, and this is happening in Saudi Arabia. I can't believe so really a great applause to Saudi Arabia and to this transformation. I'm so happy. So the future is here and um as mentioned a full transformation is happening in mobility and uh recently in one of the panelists at the EV show two weeks ago, our panelist um made an intro and said 5th Avenue 1900, he showed a picture all over horse carriages, one car. 13 years later on the 5th Avenue. A second picture all over cars, only one horse carriage. So that shows how fast the transformation is taking place and everyone says, OK, air taxi, this will take a long time and then only a few will be able to fly. No, we focus on an ecopter that is affordable and available for the broad public. So the price is. Approximately 1.4 million Saudi rial in comparison to all the large competitors, they are way above 40 million. So imagine you can buy more than 30 ecopters for the price of I don't take any names, but other large competitors. So um what we focus on, we want to bring this technology for 2030 for the Expo and have it flying here as an air taxi, and the road map to get there is obviously in minor steps because you have to imagine that we have to build an entire ecosystem. We are flying automatically in predefined route, meaning we are dependent on a new air traffic management system. Where deports a new digital and physical infrastructure and therefore uh the way to get there is a bit of a challenge. You have to imagine it's a complete um green field, the technology is in development, the infrastructure is not there, the market is not there yet, the customers are not there. Um, so it takes a huge collaboration between a lot of different companies in this field, on one hand and the government and the regulatory bodies on the other hand. So when I went here, I, I came into the kingdom 2.5 years ago, um, through a destination deep tech program in Chaos King Abdullah University, and I'm deeply grateful for this opportunity. To come into this amazing country which I now consider my home, and I moved here. We have a company here. We set up their production here in the kingdom and as well the implementation. So we start this year with a pilot project in King Abdullah University because they recently came up with a sandbox together with the Ministry of Transportation. And there we will evaluate everything and have the operations and the integration and then step by step have the first cargo applications, fly 1 million cargo before we sit the passenger in and then um have an implementation as an air taxi service. I recently looked in CET GDP grade to, um, and asked CE GDP how many Uber drivers and Karim drivers does Riyadh have? And the answer was 335,000 plus the taxi and private drivers, so it's around 500,000 drivers operating in Riyadh. So imagine when you would take 5% and take it into the air, how much pilots you would need to do that. So what are the prerequisites to unlock the potential of how the Chinese call it the low altitude economy? There are some prerequisites. First of all, you have to have an air vehicle that is affordable and available for the broad public and that you can produce on a large scale. Otherwise it doesn't make sense because then you cannot create an impact. Then it has to be silent. It has to be sustainable. It has to be due to our opinion without the pilot because pilots don't grow on trees and um. Then of course um the economics and the operability uh has to be there. So, um, we strongly believe that this is the next step in mobility. Why? Because we observed that the automotive industry currently is in struggle, in struggle because of the congestion, no one wants to drive anymore because of the cost of ownership is constantly rising. And other things like electrification and with electricification it comes the cost of ownership on one hand and on the other hand, uh, the missing charging infrastructure. So there are a lot of troubles that the automotive industry is facing and we believe that the next step is into the third dimension. And when you now look at all the most developed countries, industry nations in the world, they all have a strong automotive industry. Why? Because with the automotive industry, um, there comes a lot of downstream value creation, a lot of jobs, uh, tier one suppliers, um, uh, chemical industry and so forth. So I deeply believe that the country who leads the development in 3D mobility will be the most powerful industry nation in the future. And in order to unlock that, they have to have an OEM manufacturer that is capable to produce on a large scale with a very limited price and on the other hand have an air traffic management system that allows a ubiquit implementation into the low airspace in a highly automated, safe, and scalable manner. So imagine we are here in Riyadh and we want to have um from a mall we want to start small drones with a medicine, we want to start um a cargo helicopter delivering a washing machine, for instance, and we want to have a toy flying a passenger. So we have three different types of vehicles and we need to coordinate them very in a very safe manner. But as well very uh organized with AI of course this is necessary because we have to have a um transition um one air traffic controller so far when we talk about aviation can handle 10 planes simultaneously. When we have thousands of different vehicles in a confined airspace, this is of course not possible. So we have to get into the next step and come up with a very automated and scalable system. So this is the first impression into how we envision the future, and we hope that we can all collaborate together and bring this into the world and what I always say, what it takes is collaboration, collaboration, collaboration and not putting fences and not fighting each other. Because we are now on a transformation to a new era in how we are um collaborating together, how we interact with each other and uh how mobility is defined and how the world is defined with all these developments in AI and in new technologies.