There is a tendency to think,
that Personal Transport System or Personal Air vehicle is intended for
rich men and wealthy countries only, like USA, and therefore do not
represent a major business case at European level. It is true today for
existing personal air vehicle like Falcon, Learjet or Gulfstream, for
which the acquisition price surpasses 15 millions euros and flying costs
are more than 10 thousands euros per hours. But it is not true any more,
if we consider the future society needs for flexible and affordable air
travel, and the possibility of development of both small aircrafts and
infrastructures, with performances and operational costs that could be
more than ten times lesser than today.
These potentials show a clear
opportunity for developing a new small aircraft transport system which
would support air transport future needs and would represent a strong
opportunity for strengthening the European small aircraft transportation
supply chain. If no Research & Development work is undertaken, the
threat to the European ATS will be the deepening of the technological gap
in this domain between Europe and America, and result in huge Personal
Aircraft import with all its economic and industrial negative consequences
for the European industry.
The
need to travel within Europe is increasing rapidly, as can be derived from
the statistics provided by the European Union. More especially the
extension of Europe to 25 Member States will increase the demand for
transportation within the European Union.
Current modes of
transport suffer from severe congestion or limitations. The European
road network is heavily congested, the average travel car speed
doesn’t exceed seventy five km/h since a lot of years, existing
and new high-speed trains connect only a limited number of cities
and will never deserve medium and small cities, the average speed of
traditional train connecting medium and small cities remains low.
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Air
transport is expected to triple in the next 15 years. But the 43 European
large hub airports that still handle 85% of the European air traffic are
congested and some are already reaching the limits of their capacity.
Other airports in Europe are greatly under-used however. Apart from the
hub airports, there are some 2200 other airports, including 450 main
airports that can be used to satisfy the increased demand for travel. They
form an already existing infrastructure that can solve the capacity
problems easily in short time without heavy investments!
The
experience shows that door-to-door travel time in Europe could
benefit from a different approach to air travel. As an example, travelling
from Poznan in Poland to Lille in France, using different modes of
transport shows that travelling by small aeroplanes provides substantial
benefits as shown in the figures below with the example
of the Poznan/Lille business travel.
Travel
mode
|
Travel
time
from
door to door
|
Travel
cost per person
|
Regular
air transport (via Warsaw and Paris)
|
10,2
hrs
|
1221
euro
|
Regular
car
|
14,0
hrs
|
675
euro
|
Train
|
15,3
hrs
|
612
euro
|
Personal
aircraft (example PZL I-23 “Manager”)
|
4,6
hrs
|
411
euro
|
The
general aviation (small aircraft) in Europe is mainly composed of obsolete
aeroplanes (about 30.000) which can not fulfil the new requirements for
air transport, as these serve mainly sport, recreation, pilot training and
special duties (like crop spraying and patrolling). Only few of them are
really designed for air travel tasks. However, the European industry has a
good track record in building small aeroplanes and has all skills to
further develop this market.
A preliminary comparison of road
and air travel parameters based on high level technology shows the rational
for EPATS. |