The Canadian Advanced Air Mobility Consortium (CAAM) Open House is an annual event hosted by the organization that aims to present to the attendees where Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) stands, where it can go, and what’s happening on AAM and beyond. In 2022, CAAM presented the state of the industry while partnering with Mikaël Cardinal and Unither Bioelectronics to showcase the potential of AAM beyond ‘air taxis’ in Urban Air Mobility (UAM) and Regional Air Mobility (RAM). What follows is a summary of the Open House through the lens of J.R. Hammond, Executive Director of CAAM.
J.R. Hammond reflections on CAAM Open House event
Now that this year’s [2022] Open House is over, are you happy with the result?
I am!, Our team got a chance to catch up after the event, and we all felt pretty excited about the year to come for the industry, especially for bringing Advanced Air Mobility beyond solely our aviation industry, as the intersecting developments of biotech and the future of aviation have shown through Mikaël Cardinal and Unither Bioelectronics.
The Open House theme was momentum. Do you think the event added to the momentum of AAM?
Our attention is always to keep the momentum growing. We structure these Open House events precisely to lean into that inspirational voice of the forward-looking side as well as the grounded in reality. We hoped that by bringing on tangible operations [Breathe in the sky] from groups like Unither Bioelectronics, we could continue to speed up and keep the momentum growing in not only just the AAM space but also innovation across other industries as well.
If you had to highlight two things about the Open House, what those two things would be?
Number one, I would like to highlight the social need for this technology [AAM] today. Our existing hospital and organ transplant networks can benefit from this technology today! This doesn’t have to be designed just for future use cases. And number two, the diversity in the Open House attendees. We were bringing together industry, government, capital, and academia, which shows the ecosystem we’ve created in welcoming different stakeholders into the Advanced Air Mobility space.
Which two things that Mikaël Cardinal [Unither Bioelectronics] said are worth highlighting for those that missed the event?
The two things I would like to highlight about Mikaël Cardinal’s speech is, number one, the commitment of the company to be a public benefit corporation identifying additional use cases where Advanced Air Mobility can help to realize their goal [improving the availability and effective distribution of scarce life-saving organs for transplantation]. Number two is their commitment to the North-American market with a focus on Canadian operations as well.
Lastly, what is your final take on the Open House?
My take on the Open House is that we can continue to showcase Canada at the leading edge of bringing a unified national voice to the future of AAM. Regarding CAAM, we showcase that we continue to help guide and steer AAM in Canada while catalyzing the ecosystem together.
If you missed the event and found the contents interesting, click here and register for CAAM’s next event, AAM Manufacturing Best Practices.
And if you want to participate or know more about CAAM’s following events, click here to see the list and reserve your place on the following webinars.
By Giovani Izidorio Cesconetto
