Competition
The Autocopter faces three kinds of competition, 1) the multi-rotor, battery-powered Air Taxis such as the Joby and Volocopter machines, 2) the conventional single-rotor, single-engine machines such as the Bell 500, and 3) the more sophisticated, up-market, Category A machines such as the Airbus 135. All these are funded or in production, confirming the size of the potential market.
Price-wise, the target before-tax cost of an Autocopter ranges from $800K to $1.2M depending on seats and equipment fit. The price of a Joby is unknown. The Bell 500 price is $1M and the Airbus 135 at $2+M.
The Joby (see right) is by far the most successful of the multi-rotor, battery powered helicopters. It derives from Uber’s original concept and it’s to Joby’s great credit that it has got so far. To reach a valuation of $6B before the machine has even entered service is probably in large part due to the US culture of rewarding innovation early.
Horizon for its Business plan looked hard in a bottom-to-top way at how much Horizon Helicopters would be worth after 5 years of sales and it came up with an estimate of £4.2B ($5.9B) for an investment of $800M. Compared to Joby’s $1.5B, that does not look excessive.
Horizon is prepared to let the market decide how many aircraft it sells into Personal Transport, Urban Air Taxis, Corporate Travel, Logistics, Public Services, Military etc, and indeed how many of these are gas turbine as opposed to battery powered. In fact, Horizon is endeavouring to become power plant neutral because it has no control whatsoever over how Governments of all countries develop their electricity grid systems, their infrastructure for distributing power to cars etc, their attitude towards the use / taxation of synthetic fuels and in general how they are to become carbon-net-zero, if they decide to do that at all. Horizon will move in the direction that allows it to sell into any country regardless of what power policy they adopt. It certainly does not want to become totally reliant on the sale of battery-powered helicopters, at least not until batteries are a lot, lot lighter and can offer the sorts of cruise speeds and ranges achieved by synthetic kerosene fuelled ones.