Automotive News - Traverse City - August 8, 2019 - 12

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THURSDAY, AUGUST 8, 2019

Taking flight from an automotive cradle
Startup sees an era of urban air mobility
Published July 15, 2019,
in Automotive News

Pete Bigelow

pbigelow@crain.com

ETROIT - Weeds grow from
cracks on the tarmac. Runways sit empty for hours.
The last commercial passengers departed two decades ago.
Coleman A. Young Airport, better
known as Detroit City Airport, seems
like a crumbling remnant of a bygone era of Motor City greatness. But
from his vantage point on the second
floor of a dilapidated terminal build-

ing, Jon Rimanelli swears he sees the
future.
"Look, there's 760 million passengers that enplane at the nation's top
50 airports every year, and there's
like 13,000 airports that are underutilized in the United States," he
says. "There's a gap in air mobility
and vehicle platforms that connect
the big airports to the small ones like
this one and urban centers to suburbs. If you do that, you end up with
a distributed network of air transportation and literally tens of thousands of new aircraft that will be
pulled into the system."

The Mobi-One, a vertical takeoff-and-landing aircraft for cargo and passengers

Rimanelli intends to build those
aircraft. He's CEO of Airspace Experience Technologies, or ASX, a Detroit startup creating the Mobi-One,

an electric vertical takeoff-and-landing aircraft capable of carrying cargo
and passengers.
Like the industry it's trying to help

create, the Mobi-One doesn't yet exist. Smaller-scale prototypes are hovering around City Airport, a test
mule should be ready in the next 60
days and a full-scale prototype
should be operational by the fall of
2020.
Once aloft, Rimanelli says, the aircraft could usher in a new era of urban air mobility, linking travelers to
key destinations five times faster
than conventional modes of transportation do - at prices comparable
to those offered in today's ride-hailing networks.
It's an ambitious vision.
Incumbent aviation manufacturers, he says, are ensnared by the high
expenses associated with lower-volume production runs and the complexity of systems needed for higher-altitude flying. Simplifying systems for flights no higher than 3,000
feet and plans for high-volume production should hold down costs.
So will a novel approach - eschewing traditional aviation suppliers for automotive ones. Central to
ASX's plan is relying on Detroit's traditional auto industry and supply
base, and repurposing them for aviation use.
"We're not building flying cars, but
we are assembling car parts that you
can fly," says Rimanelli, a Dartmouth
business school graduate who previously founded Nextronix Inc., an
electronics design and manufacturing firm in Romulus, Mich. "The reality is the automotive industry is very
interested in electrification, automation, lightweighting, safety and reliability. Those are all the same things
I'm interested in."

Cargo by 2022
This wouldn't be the first time the
auto industry's collective might
would be harnessed for aviation.
During World War II, Ford Motor Co.
built B-24 Liberators at the Willow
Run assembly plant in Ypsilanti,
Mich. At the factory's peak in 1944, a
bomber rolled off the assembly line
once every hour.
Mobi-Ones might not be replicated at that pace, but Rimanelli wants
to borrow from that general idea.
"We've got this great industrial
base here, we've got skilled labor and
capacity," he says. "We can leverage
this at scale and make it an accessible product that everyone can afford
through ride-sharing programs."
Factories in Hamtramck and Detroit have been identified as potential assembly sites. Production could
start as early as 2022, when ASX intends to launch its first wave of aircraft for use in the logistics and
emergency-response industries. In
June, ASX signed a memorandum of
understanding with TPS Logistics, a
$1.5 billion global transportation
company in Troy, Mich., to explore
such possibilities.
Passengers may board the MobiOne starting in 2025. That's when
Rimanelli hopes to build 2,500 aircraft and launch 50 in each of the
most populous cities on ride-hailing
networks. Toward that end, ASX has
conferred with Uber and has
sketched its technical plans for the
Mobi-One to meet specifications
outlined by the ride-hailing network.
Those specifications include a tiltsee FLIGHT, next page

http://www.schaeffler.us http://www.schaeffler-mobility.com

Automotive News - Traverse City - August 8, 2019

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