Eve Urban Air Mobility Solutions, an Embraer company, and Flapper Tecnologia, an independent on-demand private aviation platform, have entered into a partnership aimed at developing the urban air mobility (UAM) market in Latin America. The partnership will serve as a proof-of-concept (POC) for future regional operations of Eve's eVTOL aircraft, also known in the market as EVA (electrical vertical aircraft).

Eve expects to provide Flapper with up to 25,000 hours of flight time per year across key cities in South America, including São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte in Brazil, Santiago in Chile, Bogotá in Colombia and Mexico City. The parties plan to foster a culture of on-demand UAM booking using helicopters to serve as data collection for the future development of the EVA. This agreement has the potential to bring up to 25 of Eve's electrical vertical aircraft to Flapper's platform.

Eve unveils a unique value proposition by offering a suite of agnostic UAM products and services. Backed by Embraer's track record aircraft manufacturing and certification, Eve offers a zero-emission, low noise and community-friendly EVA based on a simple and intuitive human-centric design. Eve continues to reach development milestones, including the first flight of the engineering simulator in July 2020 and a proof of concept in October 2020. In parallel, Eve's urbanaAir traffic management (UATM) project has reached a new milestone in its collaboration with the UK CAA to develop a scalable environment needed to host UAM flights.

“Flapper's regional reach combined with its disruptive on-demand technology make it an ideal partner for the future expansion of our operations in Latin America,” says Eve president and CEO Andre Stein. “Deploying Eve's zero-emission aircraft will enable the company to democratise UAM to new stakeholders and key markets, such as Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Chile. This is an important building block to extend Eve's global leadership in the UAM space.”

Flapper CEO Paul Malicki adds: “Six out of the ten largest urban helicopter fleets are in Latin America, and the region currently boasts the densest helicopter infrastructure in the world. Together with a traditionally high acceptance of UAM in our operating markets, this makes us perfectly positioned to lead the aerial mobility revolution in the sector. Thanks to our partnership with Eve, we hope to expand our current pay-per-seat network and implement a smooth transition towards more agile and efficient supply types. We believe that the Eve team's track record of providing reliable AAM solutions at record speeds is of utmost importance to the success of similar projects anywhere in the world.”

The deployment of Eve aircraft across the Flapper network is subject to the parties entering into definitive final agreements.