Category Filtering: 'vertiflite'
Airbus Helicopters posted a video on July 31 stating that its “CityAirbus demonstrator performed its first fully automatic flight: take off, stabilisation in flight and landing” at its Donauwörth, Germany, plant.
On June 3, Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Kitty Hawk and Alex Roetter, president of the Kitty Hawk Flyer program, announced on its website blog that it was ending its ultralight eVTOL program. “We built and flew 111 aircraft. More than 75 people flew Flyer. We proved to ourselves that people could safely operate Flyer — and become a pilot — with less than two hours of training. On a single day, we trained 50 new novice Flyer pilots, none of whom were licensed...
Calling itself “The first electric Short Take Off and Landing (eSTOL) aircraft for middle-mile logistics,” Airflow came out of stealth on June 10. The company, headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, was founded in 2019 by a team who worked together on the now-defunct Airbus Vahana program.
Deli Zhao, a radio-controlled aircraft model and small drone producer in Guangdong Province, China, flew a one-seat eVTOL “flying motorcycle” in June 2018 — followed by a two-seat “flying bathtub” concept more recently — which attracted millions of dollars of venture capital funds from Chinese investors.
EHang has been developing a human-passenger electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft along with drones for many years (see “How EHang Build an eVTOL for the World,” Vertiflite, July/Aug 2020). Few aviation startups are poised to take advantage of manned and unmanned urban air mobility (UAM) as EHang.
On March 9, a week before the 2nd VFS “Workshop on Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) Infrastructure for Urban Air Mobility (UAM)” was to kick off at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey, the state governor declared a state of emergency and the university closed its campus.
In April, Bell named Jason Hurst as its new vice president of innovation, after more than 17 years at the company. Hurst is a graduate of the University of North Texas, and received a Master of Science in Engineering Management from the University of Texas at Arlington. He joined Bell in 2002 as a project engineer on the V-22 Osprey.
EHang is a unique story of how a Chinese aviation startup developed electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft on its own. Away from the western urban air mobility (UAM) buzz, EHang today has six models of its manned and unmanned Autonomous Aerial Vehicle (AAV) designs, as well as an ecosystem for managing its aircraft. (Above: In May, EHang received the world’s first approval to conduct a pilot program for unmanned air logistics delivery. All photos via EHang.)
The US Air Force got an unexpected payoff in April from, of all things, the novel coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19 led the service to officially launch Agility Prime — its initiative to boost electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft and related technologies — online instead of live. Broad participation by senior military officers and government officials in the quickly organized “virtual conference” showed significant support for Agility Prime within federal ranks.
On May 21, electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft startup Archer unveiled its plans and progress to the world. The company is led by co-founders Brett Adcock and Adam Goldstein, serial entrepreneurs who recently sold hiring marketplace startup Vettery to The Adecco Group for over $100M.
