With a red flower in her hair and bright red lipstick, Elena pulled out all the stops in the colors of Spain. In front of the Parc des Princes, packed with people for the first competition of these Olympic Games, the thirty-year-old and her friend Paloma did not go unnoticed this Wednesday. The latter arrived in Paris the day before “specially” for the Games, years after her Erasmus studies in the French capital.
“We can’t wait,” smile the two friends. After football, they will continue with rugby and basketball and dream of completing the program, “if we can find tickets that are not too expensive”. “We feel that the atmosphere is there, we don't even hear French spoken anymore, it's quite special,” judges Elena, who handles the language of Molière wonderfully. The two friends have planned to enjoy the party. Just like this Lyonnais who went to the surroundings of the Parc des Nations (19th century) which will open on Saturday. “There are lots of places everywhere, it’s better than just one site where there would be a lot of people.
There will indeed be flying taxis in the skies of Paris this summer. Two days before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, the Council of State gave the green light to a full-scale experiment. The Paris City Hall, which had filed an appeal aimed at banning it, and the Mayor of the 15th arrondissement of Paris, who was opposed to it, therefore lost their standoff with the promoters of this project, which will make Paris, the first world capital to put into service an e-VTOL, an electric vertical take-off device.
Strictly supervised operation. The decision of the Council of State comes after the authorization given, on July 9, by the Ministry of Transport to create a “vertiport” at Paris-Austerlitz and its opening to public air traffic. This is a temporary barge, installed on the Seine, which is intended to serve as a takeoff and landing base for Volocity, the flying taxi designed by the German start-up Volocopter, as part of a project launched by Groupe ADP, the manager of Paris airports, in partnership with the Île-de-France region.
The flying taxi must be put into service on three connections: between the Issy-les-Moulineaux heliport and the Paris-Austerlitz barge and with the Saint-Cyr-l'École aerodrome as well as between the airport Le Bourget and Roissy-CDG. This is an emergency measure taken by the Council of State, therefore temporary, pending a hearing on the merits, which should be organized this fall.
The judge in summary proceedings rejected the arguments presented by Parisian elected officials, finding that consultation with the Airport Nuisance Control Authority (Acnusa) was not necessary for an experimental and time-limited project (until 31 December 2024, according to the Ministry of Transport). In addition, the operation of the Volocity is strictly supervised: it will be able to carry out demonstration flights between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. and the number of movements is limited to 2 flights per hour and 900 hours over the entire experiment between this month of July and end of December.
The Volocity should make it possible to demonstrate the feasibility and interest of this new mode of urban air transport which is the subject of numerous developments around the world. Volocopter was, however, not certified by the Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the DGAC to carry paying passengers during the experiment (July 26-August 8). The start-up hopes to obtain this green light this fall.
The machine, powered by eighteen small “not very noisy” electric motors, according to its designer, and with a range of 21 km, can only carry one passenger, in addition to the pilot. Volocity will have to make do with demonstration flights. The Paris City Hall has taken “note of the decision (of the Council of State)”. The municipality “will continue to warn about this ecological aberration”, and “asks the Minister of Transport to abandon this project,” declared Dan Lert, deputy for ecological transition at Paris City Hall.
Request which has no chance of succeeding. “I am delighted with the decision of the Council of State,” reacted Patrice Vergriete, Minister Delegate in charge of Transport. For its part, Volocopter declared itself “satisfied” to be able to benefit from the showcase of the Paris Olympics to demonstrate the capabilities of its device.
A Volocity intended for health missions. The latter highlights the missions that a flying taxi could carry out, particularly in the field of medical evacuations or the transport of organs. “Why do we want to experiment with it? Because I think that tomorrow it could perhaps save lives,” said the minister, interviewed by AFP, on the sidelines of a visit to Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airport.
Volocopter plans to launch a health version of the Volocity in Paris by the end of 2024, as part of a partnership established with the AP-HP and its 38 Parisian hospitals. A similar experiment will be carried out, in partnership with Adac, the medical emergency services in Germany. The objective is to reduce the intervention times of doctors and the transport of grafts, in particular.
For Dirk Hoke, CEO of Volocopter, the reaction of certain elected officials and Parisians against flying taxis, believing that they would only be useful to a wealthy and busy clientele, is, at this stage, “normal”. “This is always the case for a new mode of transport. The automobile and the plane also had their detractors, who believed that these machines would be reserved for the rich. History has shown the opposite: these two modes of transport have become democratized,” he explained last April.
