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The GoFly Prize was unclaimed in the Final Fly Off in February. Here is the story of the 21 teams who attended and their status during the pandemic. This is a follow-on to the article “GoFly Inspires Innovation.”
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DragonAir Aviation’s viral YouTube videos have turned millions of viewers on to the idea of personal VTOL flight.
Everyone knows what a car is. The dominant configuration is a self-propelled, wheeled ground vehicle that carries a driver and one or more passengers, often built in large quantities on efficient production lines and usually made compliant with the regional rules of the road. Affordable, safe transportation that is there when we need it, that starts every time, is easy to own and easy to operate. The reliable family car.
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Although the explosion of interest in electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft over the past few years caught many by surprise, the development has been underway for more than a decade.
In October, Joby ... filed six patent applications to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), part of a total of 14 patents filed in 2020.
After eight months as the chief research and development officer for Hyundai’s UAM division, J. Scott Drennan has left the Uber Elevate Partner to start a consulting business — Drennan Innovations — that will provide “executive-level engineering, innovation and leadership consulting services,” with focus areas to include vertical takeoff and landing systems for advanced air mobility (the more expansive term for of “UAM”). Hyundai made the announcement on Oct. 20.
Electric conventional takeoff and landing (eCTOL) aircraft are anything but conventional, but include many of the same challenges as electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, most especially, of course, with the power systems.
Jaunt Air Mobility is an oddball in the sea of 350-plus electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft concepts catalogued on the VFS World eVTOL Aircraft Directory (www.eVTOL.news/aircraft). It is one of the only electric gyrodyne aircraft being developed for the urban air mobility (UAM) market, and many of those who understand autorotative rotorcraft are impressed.
When flight tests of a heavy-lift helicopter revealed undesirable vibration, coupled computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computational structural dynamics (CSD) tools helped model and fix the problem. Advanced Rotorcraft Technology, Inc. (ART) in Sunnyvale, California, has built its business developing software tools that create comprehensive models for rotorcraft engineers, support flight testing and improve flight simulators.
A Sept. 25 Aviation Week cover story provided additional insights into the Joby Aviation eVTOL air taxi (see “The First Electric VTOL Unicorn: Joby Aviation,” Vertiflite, March/April 2020).
