Redefining Advanced Air Mobility

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Well, you might recall last week's shares of the electric vertical takeoff in landing vehicle from Archer Aviation fell eight percent. That was on Friday. Actually 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's saying would offer shares at eight dollars each to certain institutional investors to raise gross proceeds of six hundred and fifty million, part of which will be used to fund the acquisition. There's a lot going on in the EV tall space.

Yeah, that's why we have Lisa right in here. She's foundered in CEO of Landings. It's a company that says it's building a landing in ground operations network for inverted ports for these EV talls. She joins us here in our Bloomberg Interactive Brokers studio. Welcome. Have you ever been in an EV tall?

I have sat in one, Actually I have sat in two.

Well it was flying, No, it was in the ground. Has there anyone ever been in one while they're flying?

There have been, There have been test flights with pilots. I believe Betam made a flight to JFK. It wasn't an EV tall, it was a C tall, but it's similar. So there have been passengers, although it's still all INtime.

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 you really believe that in the US within a year.

I didn't say in the US.

Okay, where 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 sixty 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, and 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.

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, and we said the same like where are they going to land? Where are they going to charge? And as you know, EV's had a huge problem the bottleneck and getting EV's on the ground was actually not having enough charging for them. And you can charge your ev at home, you cannot

What do they look like and where can you build them? Especially in these places this this land is at a premium right.

So well, most of the companies right now and the big money is all in cities. My company is focusing most first of all in rural and 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

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, correct.

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 sportcraft, 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. They range from two acres to twelve acres, which is relatively small. The cost for the smallest one is about three hundred and fifty thousand dollars and that has slow charge. It doesn't have fast charge. The vertiplexes, the larger ones, which will have you know,

So how do you build out responsibly? Exactly?

Because it sounds exciting, but as we keep talking to people in the industry, you know, 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 role at that you envision?

Yeah, so we're approaching this in the way that American Tower approached it approach cell service essentially.

Because the reate that looks at that owns a lot of the cell towers exactly.

Okay, a ninety billion market cap. I believe what they did was while everybody was focusing on the cities and getting cell service in the cities, as 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

So we just spoke to John gittleson of our Blueberg News 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 verta ports.

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 verteports.

Will there be those acres of solar in this administration?

Absolutely? Absolutely.

Solar may not be the priority and there may not be see the public funding for it in the way, but there are still a lot of private money going towards these networks.

So, Lisa, we're talking with Lisa Right, founder and CEO of Landing. 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 asolar farmers part of it.

Indeed, many of them will be co located. We are trying to connect to the grid and some of the smaller regional airports we can do that we can connect to the grid. It may not be a lot of excess energy. So we're working as well with communities to provide basically a battery backup system that will use peak demand and becomes resiliency for the community.

Just thirty ten seconds. Are you working with any ev tall companies right now?

I'm working with all ev tall companies, so Archer, Beta and 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 I'm working on it all right, Let us know, stay in touch.

Yeah.

Lisa Right, founder and CEO of Landings, joining us in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker Studio