UST: News

On August 17, 2019 EcoFest was held — an annual event that takes place on-site SkyWay test and demonstration center — EcoTechnoPark. The speech by SkyWay General designer Anatoly Yunitskiy was one of the most anticipated points in the program of the event.

Traditionally, Anatoly Yunitskiy summed up in his report the results of the company’s development for the year, commented on the key events in the life of the project and outlined the strategy for further development of SkyWay.

Here is the speech of the General designer in full:

"Dear friends, partners, colleagues, investors and enthusiasts of SkyWay!

Welcome to the fourth EcoFest here in Maryina Gorka, at SkyWay EcoTechnoPark. Thanks to us, this small Belarusian town has become known all over the world, in at least two hundred countries where our investors live. However, people in many of these countries did not even know that there was such a state — Belarus, since it is perceived by many abroad as part of Russia and not in the center of Europe, but somewhere over there, beyond the Urals, in Siberia.

This former tank range, where another unexploded shell has been recently found during excavation work, has become even more beautiful. Look around and you will see it for yourselves.

The solutions that we demonstrate here at the Belarusian Innovation Center of string technologies, in the Center of Europe, laid in the basis of SkyWay, have a global transformative potential. We are ahead of the whole world for at least 10 years and people come to us from many countries to study, and from Japan — for inspiration, although, generally speaking, we are still a startup, since we have not entered the world market with commercial projects yet.

We have created a serious material base and intangible assets, without which it is impossible to design and build innovative SkyWay complexes.

Any customer, no matter from which country, wants to see three components:

Really working and certified technology;

Market attractiveness of proposed solutions;

Team and assets, tangible and intangible, necessary for the implementation of targeted projects.

We already have all of the above, and we are moving decisively towards the most ambitious goals.

Today the engineering company SkyWay Technologies, that is, all of our investors, have the following:

fixed assets worth more than 16.6 million USD,

36 buildings and structures, more than 3,000 units of machinery and equipment (including computers, laptops, monitors),

32 vehicles and dozens thousands of tools, equipment and other property,

intangible assets worth 2 million 700 thousand dollars — these are professional software (including the rights to 3D EXPERIENCE) and rights of land use,

a charter Fund of 56 million USD generated with money and authorized in the United States. This is about the same as that of such a Belarusian industrial giant as the Minsk wheel tractor plant.

However, only in Minsk there are a number of companies, in addition to SkyWay Technologies Co., owned by GTI (Global Transport Investment), that is, all investors in SkyWay technology — they are owners of real estate, office and production facilities with a total area of more than 10 thousand square meters!

In less than 4 years, since the beginning of designing and the first hammered survey peg, on the former tank range with about 36-hectare area, 5 demonstration and certification SkyWay test complexes of different types with a total length of more than 4 kilometers have been built from scratch for the first time in the world.

We are constantly updating the technology — for which, in fact, EcoTechnoPark was created in the logic: “For 100 years.”

The semi-rigid track structure has already been modernized to increase its load capacity by 3 times.

On the truss-string overpass, the raceway under the head of the belt-type rail has been modernized, which has increased the evenness of the track tenfold — it is the unavoidable micro-roughness of rolled standard steel profiles that create today the main problems with smoothness and noise when driving our vehicles. Different types of innovative jointless rail heads are already being tested here — they won’t even have welded seams, which also create a little extra knocking when a wheel is rolling due to local steel hardness changes.

All the necessary infrastructure of the “second level” has been built:

stations;

turnout switches;

multi-kilometer engineering networks of water supply and sewerage;

power supply systems with networks with a total capacity of about 1,000 kilowatts;

communication and intelligent control systems, equipped with system sensors and technical vision.

Construction of the sixth test complex of almost a kilometer length (it is to your right) is nearing completion in order to work out standards for climatic conditions of the United Arab Emirates, including those for running-in of rolling stock in tropical version manufactured in Minsk, before its delivery to Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and other cities and regions of the Middle East and Asia.

We have already developed 11 fundamentally different models of innovative electric rail vehicles that were manufactured at our own production facility, created from scratch and equipped with the most modern machine equipment.

Based on one of the passenger models, namely — unicar, we have made 2 modifications — a single pod and an articulated one with three sections, as well as produced another brand new tropical modification with a 4-seater cabin in VIP-design.

In fact, each of these pods is a vehicle of immense complexity, not inferior to the aircraft in its complexity and significantly superior of the electric Tesla in its innovation.

We have designed and manufactured another efficient vehicle — unilight. We already have an order for this product and next year the first commercial route will be put into operation in a test mode.

There is a saying: “A shoemaker is always ill shod”. This doesn’t apply to me, the author and General designer of SkyWay, therefore the first order on a commercial route came to SkyWay Technologies Co. from Yunitskiy’s farm household, located adjacent to EcoTechnoPark on your right, behind the string fencing.

A super-light route with six-seater unilights (after their certification) is planned to deliver agricultural products, and then, after pilot testing, — to ride fishermen and campers to the lake “Nadezhda”, which is a kilometer distance from the entrance to the farm. The track will pass over the pond and forest.

5 vehicle models with their names beginning with "uni" are already certified.

Currently, 4 more new models of our electric rail vehicles are in the active development stage. Their novelty is fundamental and lies not so much in the constructive aspect but in the ideology, methodologies and the depth of integrated approaches being implemented.

“Industry 4.0” and digitalization of production for SkyWay is the present that allows us to get the result already at the early stages of development and provide technical support and modernization of products throughout the entire life cycle.

We have created a cargo drone with a capacity of 1.5 tons on the basis of a serial Russian Ka-26 helicopter. It’s already flying on its own. After all, a drone is a helicopter that flies on its own, on a route task, without a pilot and a dispatcher — that is, it is a robot. Although many believe that a drone is a radio-controlled toy from the shop “Children’s world” with many propellers. But those who understand, including the military, are shocked: “How did you manage to do it in such a short time and for such small funds? We couldn’t do it even during 10 years." So that we could continue to improve and then sell these unique aircraft, we have recently acquired in the ownership even a small airfield — we had no place to test and certify them without an airfield with a flight license.

We managed to do an incredible thing — to create not only the brain of the drone, teach it, create the senses, including technical vision, but also to equip a large and powerful helicopter with twelve executive units developed by us that are have replaced the arms and legs of the pilot in helicopter control.

We have designed and arranged production of a whole line of electric motor-wheels of our own design from several kilowatts to 100 kW capacity.

We have created a unique social electric car for wheelchair users, in which a driver can get inside in an electric wheelchair developed by us and control the car sitting in it. But since electric vehicles for asphalt is not our profile, it will soon become an independent business — we intend to sell the development with a profit for us.

A key competitive factor for a world-class engineering company is the availability of engineers and workers prepared and trained in the specifics of SkyWay. And today it is above 1,000 engineers, designers, project developers, logisticians, builders, economists for designing, construction and operation of new transport and infrastructure complexes of cargo and passenger, city and high-speed intercity types, including fundamentally new transport overpasses, rolling stock and infrastructure of the “second level”.

The organizational structure of SkyWay Technologies Co. already has more than 80 departments and design bureaus, including a special design and technological Bureau with pilot production. For comparison, it takes decades for global industry leaders to build up such teams of professionals.

If you take the globe and, rotating it, poke your finger at any place at random, and then assess the degree of development of transport communications there, you will see in 99% of cases that SkyWay is needed there. Therefore, to protect our business, including that from global competitors, we actively protect our intellectual property and patent our scientific and technological developments in dozens of countries.

More than 60 patents for industrial designs, trademarks and inventions have already been received in Belarus, Russia, Australia, China, Japan, the USA, Canada, India, the United Arab Emirates, in 23 countries of the European Community and a number of other states.

Registration of intellectual property objects in different states allows not only to enter legally into the relevant markets with our products, but also to ensure its protection from unauthorized use and unfair competition.

This is shortly the list of tangible and intangible assets at the disposal of investors and SkyWay Group of Companies that are the most important part in the arsenal with which we are fighting for the world market in the most corrupt sector — transport industry. And this struggle against us will be getting only tougher in the future. There will never be any concessions here under no circumstances, and we should not have any illusions about this.

Sometimes I hear a proposal, “Why don’t you sell unibuses, because already 5 types of them are certified?”. In fact, we cannot sell unibuses — no one needs them separately as they are. It was easier for Henry Ford — he produced only cars and did not deal with asphalt, bridges, interchanges, gas stations and an automated control system. And who was his rival? The cart, stagecoach, carriage that were pulled by a horse along an earth road — such a competitor could be easily overtaken in the literal and figurative sense.

We are creating a new industry, not just as a science, but as a market product that we have to sell. A very complex, even super-complex product that surpasses the world’s analogues by several times, not by percentage, which includes fundamentally new rail electric vehicles, a pre-stressed string-rail overpass and infrastructure of the “second level” — stations, passenger and cargo terminals, turnouts, repair workshops, energy supply, communication, intelligent control system and much more.

And if we do not create any of the above, or do and show partially, or it does not reach the high requirements of the world level and, moreover, exceed it, no one will buy our products.

Our competitors are not just some car models, for example, Tesla electric car, but the global automotive industry as a whole with the entire transport infrastructure that has a century-old history; not just some kind of a tram, but the entire global railway industry, again with all its transport and related infrastructure.

It is important to remember that the modern transport sectors have worked out sophisticated and very high requirements to comfort, reliability, safety and efficiency of transport and transportation services by the efforts of millions of engineers for more than a hundred years. They are very different from similar requirements in the days of Henry Ford and the Wright brothers. Therefore, it was much easier for them to create the automotive and aviation industries and enter the world market with only a small part of these industries, namely — with vehicles that are quite primitive in today’s view.

Our unibuses are also compared with iPhones that sell like hotcakes, while the unibuses do not somehow. However, it is easy to sell an iPhone not only because it is good in itself, but also because its price is within a thousand dollars and anyone can buy it — without any tenders and international assessments.

We should not forget that the iPhone appeared as a marketable product 31 years after the creation of the company “Apple”, while the company SkyWay Technologies was set up only 4 years ago.

In addition, we need to sell not a product weighing 100 grams, but targeted projects, the market value of which, even of the most low-cost ones, starts from one hundred million dollars with manufacturing, supply and installation of complex innovative metal structures weighing thousands of tons in total.

Moreover, in order to implement any such project, which is not so much a vehicle, but a transport and infrastructure facility, it is necessary to perform a complex of works that can last for years:

SkyWay complex has to pass targeted certification, for example, an urban one, but not only its less important part — unibus, or, at best, — targeted adaptation of the technology to climatic and other requirements of the country of construction is required,

it is necessary to pass a targeted tender where other competitive offers from other companies have to be submitted,

it is necessary to pass numerous agreements with authorities and receive a targeted expert opinion, usually by competitors — transport professionals.

In addition, it is especially important that most potential buyers, i.e. customers, simply do not have funds for such an expensive purchase and they offer us to build an object for them at our own expense.

At the same time, no one canceled unfair competition in the process of receiving an order. I wonder if Henry Ford would manage to sell many cars and, in general — could create a new industry, if the most widely read Newspapers in the United States — New York Times and Washington Post — had been writing for years that he was a fraud and a crook, that he was the creator of a financial pyramid about to collapse, that he was a Russian spy and the grandson of Polish spies, that there was no innovations in his car, and every buyer of a Ford car would receive hundreds of threatening and abusive letters demanding to turn down the purchase.

Moreover, persuading good specialists not to go to work in the company “Ford” under the pretext imposed by the unscrupulous press, “Your company will soon be closed, and you will be put in prison.”

Why am I saying this? In any case, not to complain, “How hard and difficult it is for us to work!”. No, I say this so that our investors would understand the realities in which we work, and not have their heads in the clouds drawn by investment funds, attracting investment to SkyWay crowdinvesting system.

Here it is worth noting — although these investment funds have the word “SkyWay” in the names, they are not part of SkyWay Group of Companies and our employees and I have nothing to do with their creation and their activities.

These funds are not affiliated with me and are created as a separate business with a single purpose: the sale of our specific product — shares in the holdings of SkyWay Group of Companies. These are purely sellers and there are no professional specialists on our innovative string technology among them. Naturally, any seller in any market wants to make money and, inviting buyers, conducts its own marketing policy, which is entirely on its conscience.

The only way we can influence the work of these funds is to give or not to give them our shares for sale. Of course, it is possible not to give, but then there will be no investment in the development of our technology at all. Though the media will stop talking bad about us and soon forget about us, because we will disappear from the market — our place will be taken over by Chinese, as their wise government finances innovations and breakthrough technologies generously.

I am also asked a lot of questions about referral payments in investment funds. As I said, I have nothing to do with these payments. But I can answer this question with another question, “How much funds do world leaders spend on advertising?” I am sure — even more than investment funds spend on referral payments for the same purpose. Dozens of thousands of our investors, as they say, work “in the field”, and spend their time, their efforts and their money on SkyWay promotion. And I do not see anything wrong in the fact that their work receives a decent reward.

Well, we spend the rest of the investment that comes to us for real work — in fact, like all other world leaders. And these investments come to us honestly, although there are many obstacles, including the existing banking system that is becoming obsolete.

Look around, and you will be able to see for yourselves — investments intended for the creation and development of SkyWay technology are actually invested in SkyWay technology and not only in Belarus, but also in other countries, primarily in the United Arab Emirates.

Therefore, right from these positions, we should not complain about the work of SkyWay investment funds.

It can also be noted that in different countries the word “SkyWay” is included in the names of hotels, shops and even airlines. And we also have no responsibility for their work.

It took us three years to master a scientific and design team capable of creating a competitive transport and infrastructure product. At first glance, a thousand employees is a lot. As a matter of fact, this is very little to solve the large-scale tasks facing us, both short-term and long-term ones, to create the largest business in the history of civilization, and we are experiencing a serious personnel shortage.

For example, our closest competitors have created engineering teams of tens of thousands of highly qualified employees to solve narrower problems. However, they had more than one decade and corresponding budgets for it, and we have neither time, nor money, no — we have to compete here and now.

What many of our investors consider a waste of time and money — a large number of test sites in different countries, a large range of newly created rolling stock, intensive expansion of production — is actually our main competitive advantage.

All potential customers tell us:

“You have a flexible technology — rolling stock has a capacity from 2 to 300 passengers, you can pass with any spans at any height with different options of the track structure — from light to heavy, to provide passenger traffic from a thousand to 50 thousand passengers at rush hour. You are ready to meet any of our requirements. And you can really demonstrate all this to us, including in our country.

Therefore, we choose you, not those who have been on the market for 100 years and offer inefficient and expensive transport technologies, though certified long ago. And you did it in the shortest possible time, from scratch, for little money, with constant resistance and persecution. That’s why we trust you…”

When we started, was it known that because of false accusations provoked by the yellow press, everything would be taken away from us in Lithuania and they would try to put me in prison, and in Belarus the Belarusian yellow press would slander and spread lies about SkyWay and its creator for years, which would form a strong opinion of the majority of local officials about the unscrupulous Belarusian — the builder of financial pyramids and window dressing?

Was it known in advance that they would not extend the plot to a length of 20 kilometers? Although we have spent on this land acquisition more than two years and have 16 approvals with stamps, starting from the Authorities on gas, communications and power grids, and ending with the forestry, firemen and Ministry of emergency situations, but we were denied at the level of the President’s Administration and the Executive Committee of Minsk region.

Yes, I promised a speed of 500 kilometers per hour, but this is not for urban transport with its distances between stations less than 1 kilometer, but for high-speed intercity unibus, which needs a speeding-up path of about 10 kilometers with a comfortable acceleration of 1 meter per second squared and the same kilometers — for braking. Therefore, to my great regret, no one will be able to see 500 km/h speed here, in EcoTechnoPark, on a plot of 0.9 kilometer length.

This 500 km/h speed will be shown in 2—2.5 years (such large-scale test tracks are not built faster) to our Arab friends and partners who have allocated us a plot of land 25 kilometers long just for this purpose.

And in about another 1.5—2 years, our partners will see a speed exceeding a thousand kilometers per hour, for which they have also allocated an even longer plot of land — 60 kilometers.

I started working on such a hyper-speed fore-vacuum technology more than 40 years ago, and the scientific monograph “String transport systems: on Earth and in Space”, reprinted this year for the third time, even contains an illustration drawn in watercolor (there was no computer graphics at that time) showing an underwater forevacuum tunnel across the ocean from London to New York. Six hours on the route — and the passenger will be on another continent, faster and safer than by airplane.

And such large-scale projects do not frighten our Arab partners. On the contrary, they inspire them, as well as the SpaceWay program for bringing the Earth’s industry up into outer space.

I recently heard from a high-ranking official of the Emirates such words addressed to me, “We are happy that You have come to our country with breakthrough technologies. Our home is Your home.”

By the way, a couple of years ago, I heard from a Belarusian official of the same level — the Minister of transport, a former now, just the other words that were spoken here in our guest house at EcoTechnoPark in the presence of Deputy Prime Minister of Belarus, “this SkyWay with their unibuses is useless, there’s no innovation in it, and Yunitskiy is a criminal.”

Our scientific research and our engineering school, created by me, no matter how we are treated in my homeland, will continue to remain in Belarus. For example, to test individual components and assemblies, we have even built a laboratory complex — it is located to your right, behind the sixth line under construction. Full speed tests of various designs of rails, wheels, current collection will start there — to check up their wearing, noise and durability. Some of its rooms are reinforced with armor protection, as, for example, at a speed of more than 500 kilometers per hour the test wheel fragments can fly around by several hundred meters in case of destruction. Such cases have happened to motorists and railwaymen, and we want to avoid this at the design stage.

These studies are vital to us in order to overtake everyone and for good. For example, railwaymen have been improving the wheel and its flange, which has dozens of varieties, for almost 200 years — it would seem that nothing can already be improved in this “piece of iron”. But this is not so — the improvement of any technological product should continue for the entire life cycle of technology, and it’s hundreds of years in transport. Otherwise, competitors will quickly catch up with us and overtake us, and the developer will sink into oblivion with all the collected investments.

In addition to Belarus, which is a Northern country, we are building innovation centers of SkyWay technology in the United Arab Emirates already in a tropical version.

An innovative transport and infrastructure cluster SkyWay is being created in Sharjah, on the territory of TechnoPark at the American University, where we received 28 hectares of land. It is planned to build urban passenger and freight test and demonstration systems with tracks that have a length of 2.5 kilometers, which will allow to reach speeds of 150 kilometers per hour. We will not be able to reach such speeds in Belarus with the test tracks 900 meters long.

These test tracks are necessary for us not only to obtain high speed and to certify SkyWay under tropical conditions, but also to demonstrate high performance of string routes. Cargo uniconts and unitrucks will be able to traffic here 40-foot shipping containers and loads up to 35 tons; urban and suburban articulated unibuses will be able to accommodate comfortably up to 300 passengers.

We also could not demonstrate such a large and heavy transport in Belarus either, as overpasses at EcoTechnoPark are not designed for this load.

The first phase of the project in Sharjah with a flexible track structure 400 meters long with all the infrastructure — engineering networks, motor-roads, stations in VIP-performance and the first wooden house in the Emirates, where SkyWay headquarters will be located, is nearing completion and will begin to be tested together with a tropical unicar in about 2 months.

In Abu Dhabi, we will create a Global SkyWay Technology Center for long-distance high-speed transportation at speeds up to 500 km/h and hyper-speed traffic in a forevacuum tunnel at speeds of more than 1,000 km/h.

We plan to start this work in autumn this year, as the procedure of land acquisition of such a long section took more than a year. Investments in this project will amount to about a billion dollars.

There will be no order without testing and pilot development of SkyWay transport and infrastructure complexes (urban, cargo, high-speed intercity ones) under natural climatic conditions similar to the targeted project. Now it has become absolutely obvious to us, although a year ago we did not know that this is a mandatory tacit condition for receiving an order for a targeted project.

And since the real projects have moved over to the East, to the tropics, where the leaders of the countries have a need for new transport and projects, even large-scale ones, have funds, we did not continue to beat our heads against a brick wall in Belarus or Russia, but came to this amazing Arab country through an innovative door opened for us.

Now it became clear to us that no initiators and network activists from investment funds are able to lead us to targeted projects. Moreover, through their incompetence and cavalry swoops, they push away, or rather — drive away and deter potential customers from SkyWay technology. The experience of Australia, India, Indonesia and other countries confirms this.

I would also like to highlight another issue that is of interest to some of our investors, namely cryptocurrency. In fact, we do not deal with it specifically, because the crypt is a byproduct of our more extensive program.

This super important program for all of us is the creation of a reliable security system and intelligent management of SkyWay technologies and targeted projects, which will eventually unite millions and then billions of users into a single global Transnet network. Millions of rail cars with names beginning with “uni-“ will run on it. Millions of on-board, linear and dispatching computers will be processing every second billions of managing, controlling and settlement transactions, that is, a series of information exchange operations, as a result of which changes will be introduced in the system. And all this work will be done through secure blockchain technologies.

Therefore, the Transnet should have its own unit of account, an analogue of cryptocurrency, which should not be mined specifically. Figuratively speaking, each support will go mining tokens when a unibus is passing, paying dividends to the owner of this support for its use.

Such a system will help to avoid time delays, errors and minimize the negative impact of the human factor. In addition, the blockchain is able to ensure safety of elements and objects using cryptographic methods. For example, using this system, it will be impossible to forge string rails or replace them with low-quality analogues.

The acquired token is a unit of accounting that will be used to ensure a digital balance in the asset of any targeted project. Thus, the unit of accounting in SkyWay system will become a secured real economy and will become stronger with the increase of targeted projects, passengers and cargo serviced through them.

It is the blockchain technology that will allow to combine (in all projects using string technologies) the economy, management, transportation of passengers and cargo, energy, communication into a single communication and infrastructure complex covering the planet and reaching its most remote corners.

Here lies the clue why SkyWay cryptocurrency is still not released — it goes in conjunction with targeted projects. And we have a plan: this will happen soon — when contracts worth a total of about 10 billion USD will be signed. I stress again that this will happen soon enough.

Due to a number of circumstances listed above, I cannot and will not disclose more detailed information about our plans. Folk wisdom says, “If you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans.”

In short, without going into details, we have one more goal — at the international exhibition EXPO 2020 in Dubai, where SkyWay will have an extensive exposition, we will have all the opportunities to sign more contracts for about 50 billion USD.

And by that time we will be fully ready — we will create production facilities for serial production of rolling stock, elements of string-rail overpasses and infrastructure not only in Belarus but also in other countries, and we will carry out pilot testing and certification of SkyWay transport and infrastructure complexes both under Northern and tropical conditions.

Another significant event for us happened this year — SkyWay was identified among the partners and experts of the UN sustainable development program in infrastructure technology “smart cities”. This suggests that preference in smart cities of the future will be given to the most environmentally friendly, most efficient and safest transport of the “second level” — SkyWay.