AirAsia X is sketching City Traffic on canvas. It is thinking far beyond cheap seats to London. Airbus’s CityAirbus is an eVTOL, with vertiports and charging pads for urban air mobility.
The airline’s latest move is straightforward on the surface. From 26 June 2026, AirAsia X is flying a daily Kuala Lumpur–Bahrain–London Gatwick service with A330s, designating Bahrain as its first global hub outside Southeast Asia. Bahrain to London is its second fifth freedom sector.
Now, view the picture of the eVTOL that Air Asia has drawn. Capital A, the holding company of Air Asia, has said openly that it is in discussions about integrating Airbus’s CityAirbus NextGen into its network, positioning urban air taxis as a logical extension of its point-to-point philosophy in Southeast Asia. The promise is simple. Use eVTOLs to move passengers between congested urban cores and AirAsia’s airport bases, shaving time off door-to-door journeys in cities like Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila. The harder question is who pays for the vertiports, charging, maintenance and regulatory scaffolding that make those hops possible.
CityAirbus NextGen is Airbus’s flagship urban air mobility project. It is an all‑electric, four‑seat eVTOL prototype designed for short flights in and around cities. The aircraft follows a lift‑and‑cruise concept with fixed wings, a V‑shaped tail and eight electrically driven propellers in a distributed propulsion system. Airbus targets an operational range of about 80 kilometres and a cruise speed of around 120 kilometres an hour, with a two‑tonne class airframe and a wingspan of roughly 12 metres.
This is where the low-cost carrier model has something to teach the eVTOL world. Two decades ago, AirAsia and its peers did not just order 737s and A320s. They pushed secondary airports and local governments to build low-cost terminals to simplify turnaround infrastructure. Their argument was blunt. Give us cheap, functional facilities and we will bring you volume. Over time, that bargain reshaped airports, ground expansions.
Urban air mobility players have talked endlessly about aircraft, batteries and autonomy. They have been quieter about who will fund the vertiport lattice that makes those vehicles useful. One thesis that nobody spells out loudly is that the next generation of those pads could be financed the way low-cost carriers helped fund airport growth. A carrier like AirAsia could bundle vertiport access into its broader relationship with airports and petrol station operators in Asia. It already has a brand, a captive customer base in the tens of millions via its app.
No eVTOL OEM balance sheet can carry that on its own at scale. But a low-cost group deploying dozens of narrowbodies a month and targeting hundreds of thousands of passengers on new long-haul routes can spread that investment across a wider base. It can treat vertiports as another layer of its hub strategy.
Urban air mobility is high capex and heavily regulated in ways that even airports are not. Safety margins are tight. Public acceptance is fragile. A mispriced ride or a high-profile accident could chill demand faster than a low-cost carrier can discount its way out of trouble. And unlike early low-cost terminals, vertiports live inside cities, not on the cheap land outside them. The politics are fiercer.
But AirAsia’s history makes one thing clear. Low-cost carriers have a track record of normalising infrastructure that looked aspirational. One thing is clear that to turn eVTOL into mass transport a low cost carrier will be needed and to give the last mile comfortable journey ride, the premium carrier shall come in.
Asia has already used low-cost carriers to democratise air travel and pressure governments into building more runways. The next frontier will be to seed the vertiports and charging hubs that urban air mobility needs, long before venture capital alone could make the early first buck.