Yesh Premkumar leads global partnerships at Hyundai’s Urban Air Mobility division (recently renamed Supernal). He was interviewed by Fierce Wireless’ Editor Bevin Fletcher for a keynote session during the E5G Show in November. He talked about connectivity options, including 5G, and considerations related to UAM and future air transportation vehicles.
This transcript was lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Fierce: To delve in, can we maybe start with a little bit about what UAM is and what it means for you, kind of the main components or applications, and how it's different from transportation as we know it today?
Premkumar: Sure. I'll start with, we just rebranded ourself to be called Supernal. Just so there is a specific identity for what we're doing, associated with the work that we're doing and what we're trying to promote through that work. So UAM, interesting question. Air mobility and what urban air mobility is — there's a notion that, you know, air mobility, we're trying to do this to replace the cars—that's not the intent. The intent is there's a third dimension in transportation and in our communities that is unused, it's completely underutilized, that we see as an opportunity or an avenue to utilize, to improve the efficiency of the current transportation network on ground. So your cars, your buses, your rail.
The question is, how do you make them better and remove bottlenecks? We can’t do that today. There's not enough room, space to add more ground transportation capability. So we're looking to the third dimension, which is air, to say, okay, this is how we're going to offset some of the inefficiencies and remove some of the bottlenecks and transition or transfer some of the payload or basically the passenger load from ground to air.
So what does air mobility do, or at least what we're trying to do with urban air mobility? It is to provide a new mode of transport using air aerial vehicles within cities for all individuals. That is what Hyundai is focused on.
We want air mobility to be affordable and universally accessible, such that it integrates really well within the existing communities to provide connectivity at the next level or enhance the ability to connect and mobilize people. Give them the access that perhaps is limited based on where ground is today or how ground could evolve from today.
Fierce: That's interesting. And so that can mean a few different things, of personal transportation and also cargo transportation, things like that?
Premkumar: Absolutely. To us, what I've mentioned, one of the things like payload. The airport doesn't care whether it's carrying passengers or cargo, we’re designing in such a way that we're going to focus air mobility to first start in the people realm for urban air mobility, but we're also developing a family of vehicles which addresses cargo as well. We’re not developing drones that do the last mile delivery. That is not what we're doing. We're looking at much larger aircrafts. Cargo and passengers, both the focus. They have slightly different needs in aviation. Not quite like ground in terms of what the certification needs come in and how they come into play.
But the technology, the capabilities of the platform, its needs from an infrastructure perspective, all very closely align. Those are the two specific elements. And when you look at our portfolio products, we're looking at everything from aircraft that are four to five passengers big that go within cities, to aircrafts that will go within cities and carry cargo, and aircrafts that we call regional air mobility platforms that will carry both cargo and people from one city to another city. So intracity and intercity transport for people and cargo.
Fierce: Okay, cool. So big vision. And key to this conference, where does connectivity come into play in UAMs then? Are the requirements different, are they more stringent? What can you tell me about that?
Premkumar: It's everywhere. Communication is one of the key components when we talk about infrastructure for this specific mode of transport. Communication is really important for aviation in general. Aviation communication has always been different from what you or I would use on our cell phones or what cars use today in terms of, you know, in-car entertainment or infotainment. So this mode of transportation is going to be unique. It will be different.
And its uniqueness or difference really comes from the fact that it doesn't operate at the same altitude as regular aircrafts do. There's going to be a lot more of them operating within a city or a square mile radius than potentially large airplanes do today. We're looking at communication as something that would more relate to us than it does to aviation today. Like, how do we use things like 5G, Satcom, Wi-Fi, than focus on what traditionally has been a ADS-B IO or any other form of aviation communication. Those are all important. We have to figure out how to fit within it, but we have to figure out how to utilize things like 5G and Satcom more than the others.
Fierce: When we’re thinking about applications of connectivity, are they different than the needs you were saying, from in-vehicle or on your smartphone or entertainment in flight vehicles? Or are you talking more about communicating with infrastructure and other UAMs? How does the connectivity needs differ?
Premkumar: I'll start with where I left from the last one. The communication needs are everywhere around an aircraft. When we look at UAM, I don't want to say it's very different from how we look at autonomous vehicles or where the ground market’s going towards. But there are slight differences.
In terms of what are the elements of communication or where the communication happens, you have air-to-ground communication where the aircraft is relaying to a ground control station or an operator or a vertiport in terms of where it is, what's happening to it and what its needs are. Then you have ground-to-air communication, which may be slightly different. It may be where an operator or a user entity is providing information to the vehicle in terms of what's happening on the flight path, what the flight path is, changes to the flight path, or it could be a ground control station trying to control remotely the airplane. It could be non-critical. We consider anything that doesn't have to modify the airplane or make it unsafe as non-critical. When you have to control the airplane, it becomes critical. So it can be critical or non-critical versus air-to-ground could be mostly non-critical because of the nature of it, unless it's remote pilot or autonomous.
Then you have the ground-to-ground piece of it, which is a vertiport, an operator, a support service element, communicating through another location on ground to provide information on what's happening locally so that they can be aware of how to address or handle the aircraft coming in or on outbound aircraft. That’s ground-to-ground. Then you have air-to-air, which is like you said an airplane talking to another airplane. More for identification, understanding location, perhaps some advanced navigational capabilities in the future, which are associated to autonomous flight.
So four modes of communication that'll happen. Air-to-ground, ground-to-air, air-to-air, and then ground-to-ground. Those are the four modes of communication around the aircraft — infrastructure, operator, support services, first responders, some kind of a centralized, say coordinator if you would, of that airspace. You have all of that, and in the middle of that, you have the passenger. We also want to serve the passenger - passenger comfort, passenger needs. You have Wi-Fi and infotainment, all these elements that are required. We have to kind of take from what's happening in ground, in terms of how vehicles today communicate, what they use, but we have to build upon it multiple layers of restriction and constraints to say, is it reliable? Is it safe? Is it resilient? Can it be certified? Will a change in a medium or a communication medium impact the certification and the safety of the aircraft? If so, we have to rethink the mode of communication we're using.
It’s where — while we want to see how to use 5G, Satcom, Wi-Fi, other known modes that are more prevalent in ground transportation — we have to look at it from a complete different lens, which is around certification safety, et cetera. Because a car can pull over. Unfortunately, a plane can’t just stop and start hovering. We’re not there yet. So that's what we have to be very careful about when it comes to communication. It becomes very essential for aviation. It’s essential for aviation, but even more essential for this new motor transportation that we talked about called urban air mobility.
Fierce: You did mention 5G briefly and so this is E5G. How are you looking at 5G connectivity? Are you doing any kind of trialing or pilots?
Premkumar: We are as an industry actually quite serious about 5G. We think it has great potential. It's hard to think about a new mode of transportation today without taking 5G into consideration. There are limitations that we have to work through. Like I said, we don't operate at 20,000 feet. We're going to operate more like, say 1,000 to something like 6,000 feet, maybe 10,000 feet. 5G today, we have to test the limits of see okay, can we get the same level of bandwidth you need, and frequencies available at say 5,000 feet or a little higher? And will it be consistently available? We’re not talking about urban canyons anymore. Like we have these things, right, we walk around with our cell phones, we lose reception when we go around a building, that shouldn't be the problem in the sky, but now you need a lot more breadth and availability.
The towers today face downward. We need towers to now face upward. Do you get the same level of resilience, capabilities of 5G? So a lot of work, a lot of considerations. We are talking to various telco providers for 5G. We're looking at equipment manufacturers around 5G, the antennas that need to go on the aircraft. But all of this, this communication is very important, it's needed for everything, but there are a lot of other subsystems on the aircraft and the ground that also have to mesh with the technologies that are selected. So as an industry, we're trying to standardize around, okay, what should be those standard modes of comms? Because we can just say, it's only 5G. If it’s just 5G we've got to figure out how to say this will always be reliable. We talk about these safety ratings or operational safety hazard numbers. We talk about 10 to the power of nine is the rate of failure we can accept. One in a billion plus is what we can minimum acceptance, negative seven and 10 to the power of like 10 billion is what we need. Lots of things that we have to evaluate. 5G is absolutely there and top of everyone's mind, and from our perspective, absolutely looking at all aspects of 5G.
Fierce: Can you share any of those companies you're working with or how you're leveraging the wireless ecosystem, any partners? Or that you hope to work with, plan to work with?
Premkumar: Unfortunately, no. For this market to work for us we have to work with all providers. I can say that it is going to be regional. We’ll have different partners based on regions, because we know today, telcos, not every telco’s in every country, not every telco’s in every city or in certain places. So yeah, we'll be working with a lot of them, but I can't say right now who we're talking to or who we're working with. But we can definitely say that partnerships is a big avenue for us across the ecosystem. We'll be working on significant number of partnerships to make this market kind of come together.