AAM Spotlight: Adam Slepian, Supernal CCO

Supernal is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hyundai Motor Group that is seeking to develop and certify a four-passenger piloted electric air taxi for service entry in 2028. Chief Commercial Officer Adam Slepian recently sat down with the AAM Report to discuss the company’s latest progress and share his vision for building out an urban air mobility ecosystem. A partial transcript follows.

AAM Report: Supernal recently opened a new R&D facility in Fremont, California. How will this new site fit into the company’s existing operations?

Slepian: It’s our second facility we’ve opened in California recently, along with our engineering center in Irvine. Those two locations are going to be very important for two reasons. One is they help us with our immediate progress in terms of building our full-scale technology demonstrator that we plan to fly next year in 2024. At Irvine, we’re going to be receiving all of our equipment and systems, working with our partners externally and putting it together to go into our initial test flights next year—so really important, and that work is already up and running. 

The second reason is more long-term in scope, looking to the future beyond our entry into service in 2028, and that’s where our Fremont facility really comes into focus. That’s where we’re really going to be iterating new technologies, starting with nearer-term things like simplified vehicle operations and moving into autonomous solutions for the future. Our battery team is also there so we can constantly iterate and make the aircraft better. And by that, I mean making it as safe as possible, but also getting to an operating picture where we can make it more affordable and scalable and get it out to more customer bases in the future after launch.

The company is targeting 2028 for entry into service. Are you concerned at all that your competitors may gain a first-mover advantage?

I’ll use an example from the automobile world. Ford put out the first car in 1903 and Hyundai Motor Group didn’t put out a car until the late 1960s, and now it’s the third-largest automotive group in the world. So, if we’re two to three years behind Joby and Archer, that’s really a nanosecond in the greater scheme, particularly as it applies to the world of aviation. For us, it’s more about bringing the right product to the right market, at the right time, with the right supporting ecosystem and infrastructure behind it. 

Even if we take the FAA’s Innovate 28 plan as an example, the vision is still very small-scale even in 2028, and that’s when they’ve said that we’ll start to see things begin to scale. We want to be able to come in with the right systems and processes in 2028 to be able to start that scaling process—not just in a specific location—but to be able to expand everywhere though standardization and interoperability. So we don’t really look at it as being behind; rather, it’s about being able to set us up for rapid scalability as we look beyond 2028 into the 2030s. 

How would you describe Supernal’s vision for supporting infrastructure?

To make urban air mobility (UAM) work, you’ve got to put the infrastructure and the vertiports in places that make sense for passengers, operators and the OEM. That means figuring out where the demand is going to be, and selecting the right markets for entry purposes. It’s not going to be hundreds of vertiports around the city in 2028—we’re still talking about a handful of locations at launch. So it will be about working with the right partners who can drive that demand and also have the innovative solutions from a development perspective—being able to secure land use, for example—to really support this initiative. 

If it’s in a regional airfield somewhere, you can probably just land without much trouble. But if we’re talking about urban or suburban environments, you’re going to need some level of vertiport there. But then you run into the problem of where in a city are you going to find this massive acreage that is just sitting there waiting to be used for a big vertiport? So making them as compact and small-footprint as possible and limiting the cost of acquiring that land will be key, and that will help us keep operating costs low.

What will it take to bring the cost curve down and ensure UAM is accessible for the wider public?

I think there are a few things. One is on the aircraft side of it: designing not only for manufacturability, but to get the direct operating costs down as much as you can. Take batteries, for example. How do you squeeze every bit of juice out of them? How do you make sure you can swap them out in the right ways? How do you design to ensure you won’t have to do an overhaul every time you upgrade them? 

Making vertiport operations as efficient as possible will also be key. I think a big challenge is going to be creating standardization and interoperability between OEMs to be able to utilize a lot of the same processes and equipment to make that happen. If everyone is doing different things, it makes that challenging to make those pieces come together and bring costs down for the whole market. I think that’s where the regulatory aspect comes into play—making the system more cohesive.

So long answer, but it really is an all-encompassing mix of design to manufacturing, design to direct operating costs, logistics, shipping, distribution, MRO services—anything we can do to make processes as efficient and scaled as possible. It will take time to bring all those different elements together and get the price point down. But we think in the 2030s, we can really start to precipitously bring it down if we get the infrastructure aspect right.