Urban-Air Port Thought Leaders - The Board of Advisors Speak Out
#004 Mike Forster
The former British Aviation Group Chairman and Heathrow Airport’s Strategy, Infrastructure & Sustainability Director - tells us what’s on his mind.
Mike Forster at the Urban-Air Port Cafe overlooking the UAP Vertical Airfield in discussion with fellow Board member Paul Hulme
Part 1 The Hard Yards
Delivering transport infrastructure is hard. Trust me, I was a member of the leadership team that delivered Heathrow Terminal 5!
The journey that any infrastructure developer faces is a long one, and one in which the challenges facing them seem to get harder the further they go before the rewards set in.
Identifying a need in the market and working up a solution which meets that need demands vision, ingenuity, leadership, commitment and persistence. It requires the leaders of the enterprise, in my case both Terminal 5 and the Third Runway at Heathrow, to gather a group of like-minded and experienced individuals around them and instil in them the same passion for the challenge facing them, and to raise the funds needed for the work to be done. If the venture involves new technology the leaders of the team will have to spend significant time growing a wider understanding of the technology and its potential benefits.
Urban-Air Port, under the leadership of Founder and Executive Chairman Ricky Sandhu and CEO Andrea Wu, between them having worked many of the leading architectural & design practices, has made extraordinary progress in creating a market leading concept for infrastructure for eVTOL aircraft that is in some cases, informing the aircraft OEM – a symbiotic relationship between infrastructure and aircraft.
Afterall if you don’t understand the technology, how can you provision for it by way of the necessary infrastructure?
However, bigger challenges lie ahead, and these are exacerbated by inequalities in distribution of the benefits the infrastructure will bring. The key thing is being aware of the challenges, plotting the course and understanding how to address them and this requires experience in delivering infrastructure. Something that the UAP team is well versed in.
The first of these challenges is developing a positive business case. Infrastructure is more often than not, an expensive initial outlay. As well as meeting all the technical requirements delivering good user experience is important, there are safety and security requirements, sustainability in its broadest sense, and carbon in particular, that will drive additional costs and, on top, there will be site specific costs.
“UAP have been tackling the initial capital cost of vertiport infrastructure head-on with their Vertical Airfield technology allowing for a smaller footprint that can grow as you go, affording cities and clients an affordable on-ramp.”
For the operator, the revenue side this is limited to direct revenue such as tickets sales or landing charges, and indirect revenues such as retail, f&b etc. Not dissimilar to traditional airport infrastructure such as Heathrow T5. We know that greater connectivity through new transport links facilitates economic development, but this wider economic benefit is rarely open to the providers of new infrastructure. For example, little of the value created through the growth of property values and increased development around each of the stations on the Jubilee Line across London went back to Transport for London who delivered the infrastructure. Urban-Air Port are working hard with partners to understand what the likely traffic flows will be, what are the likely price points, where are the opportunities for additional revenues, and how all this can be brought together within a positive business case. UAP is preparing for this too by building strong partnerships with experienced infrastructure operators like Egis who not only operate airports but also UK’s busiest motorways like the M40 and M25, Korea Airports Corporation and Munich Airport International.
The second is getting permission to go ahead. Infrastructure does have long-lasting impact on communities and the shape of the built environment. Rail takes huge swathes of land as well as generating significant noise. Airports have significant noise impacts, electrical generation comes with unsightly pylons, etc. Most of these impacts are local to the development and will impact those that live around it. Those residents and businesses will have to live through the uncertainty that the protracted planning processes bring, through the construction and with the finished development experience the increased noise and local traffic. In many cases those impacts may be very severe, such as demolition of their properties, and the impact on their lives very significant. I worked closely with the residents of the villages around Heathrow during my time on the Third Runway and you only have to look at the issues faced by HS2 to see how critical this topic can be.
However usually these residents will not benefit from the new infrastructure as these benefits will be felt by the users of the infrastructure and the wider economy. Faced with this inequality objections are common, and local politicians will take up the cause partly because they are bound to represent their constituents but also because they will depend on their vote in the future. In the process that follows the rational, logical approach taken by the development teams can be met with emotive language driven by different agendas. In search of human interest stories the media will fuel the fire positioning the local residents as the victims and the infrastructure developers as the oppressors.
On the Third Runway project I was in the thick of these issues, searching for ways to ensure that those affected were treated with fairness and understanding.
“As the opportunities for development become more concrete, I will bring this hard-earned expertise to continue supporting Urban-Air Port’s work through the issues they will face as they pioneer a new breed of aviation infrastructure.”
Next Up Mike Forster Part 2 – Getting over the Line
