ALCIFO, a next-generation air taxi network simulation provider, explains the critical use-case for business simulation software in its latest white paper. The paper discusses the Eviation’s Alice-like aircraft’s business opportunities for Regional Air Mobility market in Florida.
ALCIFO’s founder, Satadru Roy, has worked with many of the best aerospace engineers at NASA, GeorgiaTech, and in the private sector. However, Roy discovered that while aerospace engineers may know better than anyone “how” to build an aircraft, they don’t necessarily know “what” kind and “why” to build the aircraft in the first place. Roy established ALCIFO to help air taxi companies uncover viable use-cases that will lead to success.
Origin Story
How did Roy come up with the idea to start ALCIFO? Years ago, the director of engineering at Kittyhawk — an air taxi startup founded by the pioneer of self-driving cars, Sebastian Thrun, and backed by Google’s co-founder, Larry Page — reached out to Roy, asking him to help evaluate aircraft performance from an operator’s perspective using a detailed network analysis. Due to visa restrictions and work commitments, Roy had to pass on the request, but this situation sparked the idea to form ALCIFO.
“If ALCIFO was incorporated back then, Kittyhawk would have been our first customer,” Roy quips.
ALCIFO’s network simulation platform is the first
Aircraft design, infrastructure network, flight operations, market demand, economics — some of the main pillars of the air taxi ecosystem — are highly inter-connected. Even more so when the aircraft is small. ALCIFO’s simulation software is the first-of-its-kind built to streamline the intricate decision-making processes that these aircraft manufacturers often encounter. Traditional thinking that reasons, let us build it first and we can figure out the economics later, no longer works in today’s world, especially for products which involve high technological development risk.
Cautionary tale
Do you remember Concordes? — The revolutionary supersonic jets used to fly people from New York to London in little over three hours. It was a technological marvel, yet it failed economically.
If aircraft companies do not consider the network their fleets will operate in, while the aircraft is still in the design and development phase, by the time the aircraft goes through the expensive certification process and enters service for operations, the operator may realize too late that the aircraft is not a good product-market fit that does not lead to a viable business use-case.
Why use-case software matters
ALCIFO’s proprietary simulation platform can run a wide range of business scenarios, giving aircraft companies the confidence to move forward with some options, and the certainty to walk away from others. For instance, for one of its recent clients, the platform helped evaluate under what pricing scheme the performance of their aircraft is most favorable on the network.
Roy concluded, "Our holistic, data-driven approach is state-of-the-art, backed by several years of NASA-funded research. With our tool, we present air taxi manufacturers with a vivid understanding of why what they are building is so important and relevant beyond just simply saying that their aircraft are going to save people time.”
Read more about the future of flight in ALCIFO’s most recent white paper, Enabling Air Taxis: A Regional Air Mobility Business Use-Case in Florida.
About ALCIFO
Founded by Satadru Roy in the year 2021, ALCIFO is enabling air taxis with network simulation. A combination of data-driven, holistic, and operator-centric approaches to evaluate the aircraft's performance from operator’s lens puts ALCIFO a step closer towards making air taxis a reality.
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Media Contact
Company Name: ALCIFO
Contact Person: Satadru Roy
Email: Send Email
City: Jamison
State: Pennsylvania
Country: United States
Website: www.alcifo.com
