FlyNow Arabia CEO says Saudi security environment positions Kingdom as hub for advanced air mobility

Yvonne Winter, CEO of FlyNow Arabia and president of Sky Alliance for Automated Air Mobility, said Saudi Arabia's security, stability and infrastructure investment make it a prime market for the next generation of automated air mobility. She spoke on the opening day of the Security and History Dialogue Conference, held at the Cultural Palace in Riyadh's Diplomatic Quarter. "Security and sovereignty are a basis for prosperity," she said. "For companies like ours, which are introducing a completely new form of mobility, investors and partners need to know that the environment is secure, stable and capable of supporting long-term development."

FlyNow Arabia is developing modular electric aircraft, referred to as e-copters, for medical evacuation, firefighting, cargo delivery and passenger transportation. The company recently acquired a majority stake in its former Austrian entity and subsequently relocated its global headquarters to Riyadh, and it also plans to establish production operations in Saudi Arabia. Winter told Arab News: "This is our launch market, and we are going from Saudi Arabia to the world. My co-founder and I believe that the Kingdom offers the right environment to develop this technology, build the necessary ecosystem and eventually export the solution to international markets."

In her special address, Winter stressed the importance of maintaining national sovereignty over data and digital infrastructure when pursuing international partnerships. "The architecture, governance, operational authority and critical data must remain under Saudi control," she said. "That is how innovation can enter without creating dependency." She later joined a panel titled "Security and Investment: A Safe Nation and an Industry of Opportunities," alongside Royal Court adviser Dr. Majid Al-Moneef, who said security and development are tightly interlinked and noted that Saudi Arabia's investment in its security system has helped make it among the least economically affected countries in the region during a challenging period, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Winter's remarks illustrate a pattern in early-stage air mobility: companies developing entirely new aircraft categories weigh political and security stability alongside technical readiness, since investors need confidence that rules and infrastructure will hold for the years a certification and production buildout requires. Framing sovereignty over data, governance and operational control as a condition for foreign technology entry signals how host governments in this segment can seek to capture the ecosystem — production, standards, governance — rather than just the deployment.

How this plays out for FlyNow Arabia depends on steps not yet detailed: the shape of its planned Saudi production operations, the certification path for the e-copter across its stated use cases, and how the Sky Alliance for Automated Air Mobility positions the Kingdom relative to other markets pursuing similar technology. Al-Moneef's comment linking Saudi Arabia's security investment to its relative economic resilience, per the IMF, suggests the government will keep using that framing to court capital into new mobility sectors — whether other advanced air mobility developers follow FlyNow Arabia's headquarters relocation is the next thing to track.