CoFFEE

Nevertheless, FF developments to date have tended to focus on the engineering challenges of building delivery drones, flying taxis, or electric-powered aircraft for regional aviation. They assume that businesses and social entrepreneurs will someday develop interconnected social networks and capabilities (‘ecosystems’) to make them viable.

FF can only enhance the UK’s sustainable society and strengthen the economy when individuals, groups of users and non-users, innovation ecosystem stakeholders, and a broad range of local communities adopt these new technologies and forms of aviation. Without understanding the emerging innovation ecosystem, complex networks of stakeholders, and technology implementation, FF will likely fail. The CoFFEE project targets this challenge by Co-creating Future Flight Ecosystems and Enterprise.

We ask how the motivations of aerospace industry technologists, businesses, and social entrepreneurs influence the emergent FF business models, how such innovations can be co-developed by technologists and local communities to achieve social and environmental sustainability, and, ultimately, how the emerging FF ecosystem can be nudged toward viable, safe, and sustainable business models which have low, or even positive, environmental impacts. We achieve this through interviews, workshops, and case studies involving over 100 local communities, policymakers, aerospace industry technologists, businesses, social entrepreneurs, and NGOs.

Answering these questions will have three central outcomes. We will give Aerospace Industry Technologists opportunities to develop within socially and environmentally beneficial niches, provide Businesses with evidence that a Future Flight programme will align with their interests, and give Social Entrepreneurs evidence of how Future Flight can align with the local community’s priorities.

We realise our work packages by studying real-world cases. We consider how Doncaster-Sheffield Airport might reconfigure as a green aviation hub and how transporting time-sensitive human milk in rural Wales might be revolutionised. Our study of drones covers monitoring maritime laws and animal conservation, whilst ‘air taxis’ might offer a Bristol-Cardiff crow flies service across the Bristol Channel. We focus on Imagineering viable, sustainable, and futuristic scenarios because co-development is proven efficient and innovative. Also, our lab computers can’t simulate the multiverse.

By learning how local communities, policymakers, and FF stakeholders can work together to forge viable business models contributing to sustainability, public authorities can target the support and investment necessary to rapidly transform the UK’s society and economy through FF technologies. Hydrogen-powered short-flight aviation can connect cities like Doncaster without needing high-cost and landscape-damaging high-speed rail. Drones carrying up to three tonnes of vital supplies – or low-weight human milk donations – can operate without disruption in rural communities. Electrically-powered Vertical Take-off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft can provide new passenger air links, whilst remotely-piloted drones monitor marine fishing and human trafficking activities around the English coast or track land-based poaching to support conservation in Africa.

Ultimately, while CoFFEE is modest £150k project, we will support the foundational work of the UK becoming a global leader in Future Flight ecosystems rather than a customer of other nations.