K-UAM conducts test flight of urban air mobility

The dream team of K-Urban Air Mobility (UAM), a public-private partnership involving local IT developers including SK Telecom, has successfully demonstrated its UAM capacity, making strides towards their goal of commercialization by 2025. On Thursday, SKT announced it succeeded in comprehensively demonstrating the operation of a commercial UAM model in metropolitan areas in conjunction with Korea Airports Corporation (KAC), Hanwha Systems, Korea Transport Institute, and TMAP Mobility. The UAM model under ongoing development for commercialization by 2025 is an aerial mobility service based on an electric-powered flying vehicle.

For the demonstration, SKT successfully connected the UAM pilot, who hovered around the skies of Gimpo International Airport for about three minutes, and the ground control tower through mobile communication network. “The purpose of the flight demonstration was to establish an integrated system to safely control the operations of UAMs as well as a data-sharing system to allow UAM passengers to transfer to different types of public transportations,” said an official from SKT.

SKT also proved its capacity to consolidate the management of aircraft, UAMs, and UAVs by successfully controlling self-driving drones in connection with “K-Drone System,” a system designed to support safe flight of multiple drones. TMAP Mobility, a subsidiary of SK Square that recently spun off from SK Telecom, implemented a next-generation mobility platform in the form of virtual reality, which automatically assigns transfers for UAM passengers by calculating their boarding time.

The Korean government is making preparation to launch an airport shuttle service, aiming at commercializing the UAM service by 2025. The routes will be centered around Gimpo airport, and their booking and transfer services will be handled by TMAP Mobility while SKT taking responsibility for the infrastructure to operate and manage the traffic of UAM.


Seong-Mo Kim mo@donga.com