Toulouse: the lab where we imagine the transport of the future
Transport Minister Jean-Baptiste Djebbari inaugurated, this Monday, November 22, the innovation agency for transport, the Toulouse “lab” where the future of air, land and sea transport is being prepared. The minister also toured the nuggets of the “new mobilities” pole of Francazal.
In front of the battery of giant control screens, one would imagine oneself in the control tower of the airport of Nice-Méditerranée. The planes take off and land on the runways, with the azure sea in the background. The Minister for Transport, Jean-Baptiste Djebbari, a virtual reality headset on his head, seems to want to catch, with both hands, the aircraft moving in front of him. We are in one of the rooms of the brand new transport innovation agency in Toulouse.
In these premises housed by the DTI (Transport and Innovation Department) and by the DGAC (General Directorate of Civil Aviation), around fifty engineers, computer scientists, technicians and transport specialists imagine the techniques, the software and the methods that foreshadow the transport of the future.
Very concrete “magic trick”
The minister, who came to inaugurate the new agency on Monday, November 22, is testing the Real Hightower (RealTwr) control tower simulator, guided by Rémi Lesbordes, its designer. This immersed the minister in the augmented reality of this virtual control tower. The latter, a former civilian pilot trained at Enac, the prestigious school of civil aviation in Toulouse, does not seem at all disconcerted by this experience. Because beyond the “magic trick”, RealTwr is a concrete innovation used in particular on the airport sites of Lille, Lyon, Marseille and Bâle-Mulhouse. “An augmented reality very useful for the training of air traffic controllers, the explanation of procedures, trajectories and aeronautical professions”, continues Rémi Lesbordes, who hopes that his baby will also grow thanks to industrial partnerships.
Yoda improves aircraft approach
Other innovations developed by the agency were presented to Jean-Basptiste Djebarri on Monday. Like the Yoda project, which has nothing to do, except its nod to the Star Wars character. It makes it possible to optimize the approach of planes and their movement on the ground in order to make traffic more fluid and save fuel. A system already tested by Orly and Roissy airports. Likewise, the drone setting of the “papi”, the device which guides planes on landing and on the ground, has been adopted by France and should be used by many airports. This system, much lighter, avoids closing a track for long hours when adjusting the device.
These are still radio stations providing links between air traffic controllers and pilots which are powered by green hydrogen electric cells produced from solar panels, such as the pilot from Sarlat. “It is a question of putting innovation in phase with the operational one”, translates Christophe Rouquié, director of the DTI.
New technological frontier
The AIT is a bit like the Toulouse lab that imagines the “new technological frontier” of transport, according to the Minister’s formula. To “move innovation faster from prototype to industrialization”.
To do this, a call for projects, entitled Propulse, has been launched which should lead to concrete improvements. In the field of “light and very light trains intended for small territorial lines, of local interest”, according to the minister, who also mentions the hydrogen train (developed with the Occitanie region) or carbon-free aviation, while ensuring that legislative and regulatory obstacles to the development of these new forms of mobility are being lifted, whether for autonomous vehicles, drones or light trains of the future.
The nuggets of Francazal
On the site of the former military airport of Francazal, under hangar HM7, a historic building of the French Air Force built in 1937, the aircraft of the future may be built. The Minister of Transport in fact arrested, yesterday, in this temple of aeronautics, on the occasion of his tour of the “Toulouse nuggets of new mobilities”. The company Aura Aéro, created by three former Airbus engineers, Wilfrid Dufau, Fabien Raison and Jérémy Caussade, presented to the Minister its revolutionary aerobatic aircraft prototype, the Integral R, two-seater side by side built in wood carbon, combining rigidity and lightness, a pioneering material and modernity. Three units of the IntegralR, which have already completed 90 hours of test flights, will be delivered in the first quarter of 2022 to Midi-Pyrénées Voltige, Dijon Voltige and the Châteauroux club. The Integral E, similar but with an electric motor, must be certified and delivered to its first customers in 2023 while Aura is working on an electric aircraft project for 19 passengers (or cargo) intended for regional flights by 2027 .
Ascendance, still in Francazal, yesterday presented its model (at 1/4) of a hybrid electric helicopter, which has already flown. The Atea is the name of this “flying taxi” with a wingspan of 14 m and a weight of 2 tonnes, with vertical takeoff thanks to its eight rotors inserted in its biplane wings, will be able to transport, in 2025, pilot and passengers, for half the cost of a traditional helicopter, and making much less noise (less than 80 dB on takeoff against 95), according to Jean-Christophe Lambert, CIO president of Ascendance.
The Minister also announced that Easymile, a specialist in autonomous vehicles installed in Francazal, has received the first authorization for circulation on public roads in Europe for a level 4 autonomous shuttle. The Easymile shuttle will be able to run, without a driver, at the Toulouse Oncopole from September 2022.
50 agents and 4 million euros
The innovation agency for transport (AIT) was launched by the Deputy Minister of Transport, Jean-Baptiste Djebbari, last July, and inaugurated yesterday Monday by the same minister. This agency is intended to explore “the new technological frontier” in terms of transport, whether air, sea or land (rail, road, autonomous vehicles). The AIT is the result of a memorandum of understanding signed yesterday between two national public administrations, the DGAC (general direction of civil aviation) and the DGITM (general direction of infrastructures, transport and the sea). About fifty local agents for the agency, whose premises (350 m2) are located on the Toulouse site of the DGAC, avenue du Docteur Grynfogel in Basso Cambo, and the DTI (transport and innovation department) . Four million euros were released to launch the agency, which yesterday signed partnership agreements with the French association of IRT (technological research institutes, including IRT Saint-Exupéry in Toulouse), with the Fabrique des Mobilities (land transport), the association of competitiveness clusters (including Aerospace Valley in Toulouse) and Enac. AIT is co-directed by Damien Cazé (DGAC) and Marc Papinutti (DGITM).