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Florida has emerged as an early market for Vertiports by Atlantic.
Vertiports By Atlantic has named global commercial real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield as its preferred advisor for site selection and development of its future vertiport network for electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) aircraft.
Formed earlier this year through fixed-base operator (FBO) Atlantic Aviation’s acquisition of airport operator Ferrovial’s vertiport division, Vertiports by Atlantic has emerged as one of the key players in the nascent vertiport industry. The company is pursuing a dual strategy of electrifying some of Atlantic’s more than 100 existing FBOs across North America while also seeking out potential sites for vertiport development, beginning with urban and suburban communities in key markets across the U.S.
Speaking to Aviation Week, Kevin Cox, the CEO of Vertiports by Atlantic and former head of Ferrovial’s vertiport division, emphasized the significance of partnering with Cushman & Wakefield, which has over 100 years of experience as a real estate services and property management firm. He said the firm will be instrumental in site selection and securing long-term leases for vertiport sites in markets including Florida, New York, New Jersey and California, among others.
“Beyond having the wonderful FBO sites that we're looking at and analyzing, we really know that to maximize the potential for advanced air mobility, we need to be able to get into city centers and urban environments,” Cox says. [Cushman & Wakefield] can take our heat maps and help develop them into real lease opportunities.
"My team and theirs are already looking at 30-35 potential locations available in the Northeast, looking at both brownfield and greenfield sites,” he adds, using industry terms for existing and new locations, respectively.
When selecting sites for potential vertiport sites, Vertiports by Atlantic employs a sophisticated algorithm developed using demand modeling, or “heat maps” that use granular cell phone data to track travel patterns and identify viable routes for future air taxi corridors.
“We know every place between two points on a map; how many people are currently traveling from Point A to Point B,” Cox says. “We know what they’re traveling for—whether it’s commuting or business or pleasure—and we have the ability to stratify a bunch of data points that get built into a very sophisticated algorithm, which allows us to predict where we can save people time and money and get them out of the car and onto an eVTOL. That’s unique in this industry, and that’s one of our secret sauces that allows us to do what we do.”
Cox says that Florida has emerged as a key early market, along with the Northeast, where he says Vertiports by Atlantic, alongside Cushman & Wakefield, recently visited around 35 potential vertiport locations.
In New York City, he says work has begun toward electrifying the East 34th Street Heliport in anticipation of the first air taxi services in 2026 or 2027.
And while he says he is very bullish about the future of eVTOL air taxi services, he acknowledges the new industry will take time to reach scale.
“We're not going to build countless numbers of vertiports,” he says. “We're going to begin to focus on those areas that are the highest commercial viability and build our networks as aircraft scale and as operations increase. We’ll put additional secondary and tertiary dots on the map, and it will take time to do that. And we’ll be doing it by working hand in glove with the operator.”
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