Astro Aerospace Alta

Alta
Astro Aerospace
Lewisville, Texas, USA
www.flyastro.com

Astro Aerospace's business objective is to create and sell electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft that are safe, reliable, efficient, accessible, affordable, user-friendly and autonomous.

After creating and flying the Astro Elroy in October 2018, the company decided to create and build a new eVTOL aircraft called the Alta built with modularity and flexibility in its design.

The design of the airframe allows multiple types of pods to attach and detach to its fuselage, such as a passenger pod, medevac pod, agricultural pod, cargo pod, passenger pod and more. This way the fuselage can be flown with any type of cargo or passenger pod while other cargo or passengers pods are being loaded, stored or cleaned, thus creating a more efficient urban transportation system. The company has termed the aircraft fuselage as the "Top Frame" which is also foldable and can fit in a standard 20 foot shipping container.

Two (2) passenger pods have been designed with the smaller pod holding two (2) passengers and the other pod holding four (4) passengers. The pods are called CockPit2 and CockPit4. The cargo pod is named Orbit which has been made with an uncomplicated design to maximum the payload capacity of the pod. The fuselage can fold when in storage and can fit inside a standard 20 foot shipping container.

The company reports that having an airframe capable of handing multiple flight missions will help the company start flying sooner than companies which are focusing only on passenger transport.

The company plans to sell their aircraft to commercial market, governments, and the military for use in many types of operations such as agriculture, search and rescue, cargo delivery, sight-seeing, personal flight and more. Pending regulation and approvals, Astro expects pre-sales to take place as early as 2021.

Specifications:

• Aircraft: eVTOL aircraft with detachable pods allowing for a variety of transportation missions.
• Capacity: 2 to 4 people
• Piloting: Autonomous
• Distributed Electric Propulsion (DEP), means having multiple propellers and motors on the aircraft which provides safety through redundancy for its passengers or cargo. If one (1), two (2) or more motors/propellers fail, the other working motors/propellers can safely land the aircraft.

Company Insights:

• Pitchbook
• MarketWatch
• Tracxn

Resources:

• Astro Aerospace website
• Astro Aerospace Facebook
• Astro Aerospace Twitter
• Astro Aerospace YouTube
• Article: Astro In Full Development of New Modular, Multi-platform Design, GlobeNewswire, Jan. 29, 2020