Redefining Advanced Air Mobility

Lisa Wright is the Founder and CEO of Landings, a pioneering company developing a network of rural vertiports that expand access to advanced air mobility across the US. With over 20 years of experience in architecture, design, and operations, Lisa brings a unique perspective at the intersection of infrastructure, technology, and community development. Since founding Landings, she has led the company in building partnerships with municipalities, regional economic development agencies, landowners, and equipment manufacturers to catalyze investment in rural communities.

Lisa lays out her vision for building this cutting-edge aviation infrastructure, which she says can also create hubs for clean energy, workforce training, and economic revitalization. Lisa speaks with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Businessweek Daily.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and
Tim Stenoveek on Bloomberg Radio.

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Well, you might recall last week's shares of the electric
vertical takeoff in landing vehicle from Archer Aviation fell eight percent.
That was on Friday. Actually had a pretty bad week,
but they fell on Friday. After the company reported results,
they said they were buying Hawthorne Airport in Los Angeles.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
Which is super interesting.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
Archer's saying would offer shares at eight dollars each to
certain institutional investors to raise gross proceeds of six hundred
and fifty million, part of which will be used to
fund the acquisition. There's a lot going on in the
EV tall space.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
Yeah, that's why we have Lisa right in here. She's
foundered in CEO of Landings. It's a company that says
it's building a landing in ground operations network for inverted
ports for these EV talls. She joins us here in
our Bloomberg Interactive Brokers studio. Welcome. Have you ever been
in an EV tall?

Speaker 4 (01:01):
I have sat in one, Actually I have sat in two.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
Well it was flying, No, it was in the ground.
Has there anyone ever been in one while they're flying?

Speaker 4 (01:08):
There have been, There have been test flights with pilots.
I believe Betam made a flight to JFK. It wasn't
an EV tall, it was a C tall, but it's similar.
So there have been passengers, although it's still all INtime.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
When do you think you will be a paying customer
of one of these.

Speaker 4 (01:26):
Companies, whether I pay or not. I'd like to be
a customer within a.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
Year, I believe you really believe that in the US
within a year.

Speaker 4 (01:34):
I didn't say in the US.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
Okay, where where? In the Middle East?

Speaker 4 (01:37):
In the Middle East, most likely Dubai is ahead of US.
I probably won't get to ride one in China, but
they're flying in China. There's about I think sixty already
in the air.

Speaker 3 (01:47):
Listen, I think about, you know, Lisa, what's gone on
with the EV space just in terms of cars, right,
and part of it is like the infrastructure needed to
back it up, and there's been this you know kind
of push pull, tug and back, you know, back and
forth in terms of cars getting on the road but
needing places to charge and so on and so forth.
We need the infrastructure, and I feel a little tortuous
that it's been what do you see in terms of

(02:09):
the infrastructure that's needed, because this is where you guys
play in what's needed for this industry to no pun
intended take off?

Speaker 2 (02:16):
And then where are we in that process? Yeah?

Speaker 4 (02:18):
Absolutely, I mean exactly what you described is what we
were seeing a few years ago when these aircraft were
starting to get their flight worthy credit creditness, and we
said the same like where are they going to land?
Where are they going to charge? And as you know,
EV's had a huge problem the bottleneck and getting EV's
on the ground was actually not having enough charging for them.

(02:40):
And you can charge your ev at home, you cannot
charge your ev t all at home. So that was
the basis of us saying we need to build not
just one or two in order to make this real
point to point travel, which is the promise, we have
to have thousands.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
What do they look like and where can you build them?
Especially in these places this this land is at a
premium right.

Speaker 4 (03:02):
So well, most of the companies right now and the
big money is all in cities. My company is focusing
most first of all in rural and rural communities and
so the land is less expensive there. But also because
vertiports can be they're very similar to a helipad. They
don't require thousands of acres of land. We can put

(03:24):
them on manufacturing sites, we can put them on industrial sites,
we can put them on retail locations, we can put
them on logistics centers. They can go on just about
any type of real estate that we want where helipad
could go.

Speaker 1 (03:36):
Well, how do you envision the customers of these vehicles
using them? Because if I think of high demand routes,
they're not necessarily from rural area to rural area, correct.

Speaker 4 (03:50):
So we're looking at it as a first a logistics
and freight issue. So already we can handle say heavy
drones which can carry freight. We can also there's smaller
aircraft that can be flown today that are called light sportcraft,
where you can carry emergency service personnel to an accident.

Speaker 1 (04:11):
So there's already they can land anywhere a helicopter could land.
These ports are really just for charging and taking off.

Speaker 4 (04:19):
Exactly, so they can land in a helipad. But if
the helipad doesn't have the charging equipment, you wouldn't be
able to charge there. What's the cost the cost so
ours are fairly small. They range from two acres to
twelve acres, which is relatively small. The cost for the
smallest one is about three hundred and fifty thousand dollars
and that has slow charge. It doesn't have fast charge.

(04:41):
The vertiplexes, the larger ones, which will have you know,
pilot centers and training and storage, parking, et cetera. Those
will cost closer to three million dollars.

Speaker 2 (04:51):
So how do you build out responsibly? Exactly?

Speaker 3 (04:54):
Because it sounds exciting, but as we keep talking to
people in the industry, you know, we're yet to really
see it take off in a big way, and we've
all just kind of been watching this closely for I
feel like a few years now. So what is the
role at that you envision?

Speaker 4 (05:09):
Yeah, so we're approaching this in the way that American
Tower approached it approach cell service essentially.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
Because the reate that looks at that owns a lot
of the cell towers exactly.

Speaker 4 (05:20):
Okay, a ninety billion market cap. I believe what they
did was while everybody was focusing on the cities and
getting cell service in the cities, as they went out
and went across the nation essentially and got options on
the land. I know you just were talking about land
man earlier. I like to call myself a land woman.
We're essentially getting options on different pieces of property. We're

(05:43):
asset light because we're not purchasing them right now, we're
not paying any leases on them. Essentially, we will get
the capital to build the vertiports and the energy network,
and then we're going to share the revenue with the landowner.

Speaker 1 (05:57):
So we just spoke to John gittleson of our Blueberg
News and he talked about two data centers that are
in Santa Clara, California that are empty because they're awaiting power.
How are you able to get power to these verta ports.

Speaker 4 (06:09):
Yeah, power is going to be the biggest difficulty, similar
to data centers. However, we don't require as much energy
as a data center. We can use five acres of
solar to power one of our verteports.

Speaker 1 (06:22):
Will there be those acres of solar in this administration?

Speaker 2 (06:26):
Absolutely? Absolutely.

Speaker 4 (06:28):
Solar may not be the priority and there may not
be see the public funding for it in the way,
but there are still a lot of private money going
towards these networks.

Speaker 3 (06:36):
So, Lisa, we're talking with Lisa Right, founder and CEO
of Landing. Lisa, so, is solar your power of choice? Like,
are you guys already thinking in terms of how you
build this out? That there will be asolar farmers part
of it.

Speaker 4 (06:48):
Indeed, many of them will be co located. We are
trying to connect to the grid and some of the
smaller regional airports we can do that we can connect
to the grid. It may not be a lot of
excess energy. So we're working as well with communities to
provide basically a battery backup system that will use peak
demand and becomes resiliency for the community.

Speaker 1 (07:08):
Just thirty ten seconds. Are you working with any ev
tall companies right now?

Speaker 4 (07:13):
I'm working with all ev tall companies, so Archer, Beta
and Joby. I'm also working with a short takeoff and
landing company called Electra, and the sportcraft companies are Pivotal
and Jetson.

Speaker 3 (07:25):
Yes or no, you've got your funding already or you're
working on I'm working on it all right, Let us know,
stay in touch.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (07:31):
Lisa Right, founder and CEO of Landings, joining us in
our Bloomberg Interactive Broker Studio