News

Harbour Air Flies eCTOL

• 07 Jan 2020 12:32 PM
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On Dec. 10, Harbour Air, North America’s largest seaplane airline conducted a successful flight of what is claimed was “the world’s first all-electric commercial aircraft.”

Luminati Creates Vertically Integrated VTOL Development Business

• 04 Jan 2020 12:51 PM
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In May 2019, Luminati Aerospace exhibited a vintage Gyrodyne XRON-1 Rotorcycle coaxial helicopter at the VFS Forum 75 in Philadelphia equipped with a small electric motor to power the pair of 20-ft (6-m) diameter rotor blades.

HopFlyt Hops to the Future

• 03 Jan 2020 11:11 AM
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A Maryland startup has combined a 90-year-old aircraft design that was ahead of its time with the latest breakthroughs in composite materials, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and an innovative tilt-wing configuration to develop an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) flying taxi that could navigate high-rise urban landscapes.

Lilium Goes Its Own Way

• 03 Jan 2020 09:35 AM
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If German electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft developer Lilium GmbH had a theme song, it might be the Fleetwood Mac classic, “Go Your Own Way.” More than 150 companies worldwide, most of them startups, are pursuing the tantalizing vision of a multibillion-dollar eVTOL market, but Lilium’s aircraft design and business model go in drastically different directions from most of the rest.

Honeywell Goes “All In” on Urban Air Mobility

• 02 Jan 2020 09:18 PM
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On June 18, 1914, Lawrence Sperry of the Sperry Corporation performed a spectacular demonstration of his new invention, the gyroscopic autopilot, before a crowd assembled on the banks of the Seine River in France. Not content to simply lift his hands off the controls, Sperry actually left his pilot seat and crawled onto the wing of his Curtiss C-2 biplane to display his confidence in the device, launching a new era of automatic flight control.

Cora + Boeing = Wisk

• 01 Jan 2020 09:19 AM
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On Dec. 1, the vertical flight community learned that the Cora two-seat, lift-plus-cruise electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) program was moving to a joint venture established by The Boeing Company and Kitty Hawk Corporation called Wisk Aero.

This is quite the remarkable accomplishment for the Silicon Valley technology company, considering that most in the aerospace community didn’t know that this stealth eVTOL program existed less than two years ago.

The eVTOL View from Europe

• 01 Jan 2020 09:10 AM
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European views on how soon and how best electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft might create new transportation markets differ — in some cases strongly — with the vision being pushed by urban air mobility (UAM) promoters, such as Uber. At its Uber Elevate Summit in Washington in June, the ride-hailing company promised it was on track to launch air taxi demonstration flights with its partners in the Dallas/Fort Worth area in 2020 and to begin actual commercial service in 2023.

March of the Interns

• 01 Jan 2020 08:50 AM
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Summer 2019 brought 70 interns — from Puerto Rico, 44 continental US states, Sweden, and the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago — into the NASA Ames Aeromechanics Branch. Some were high school students learning engineering for the first time, while most were mechanical and aerospace engineering students, though two physics majors and a math major jumped into the mix to provide balance.

VFS Propulsion & Power Presentations Posted

• 25 Nov 2019 03:36 PM
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The Vertical Flight Society held its quadrennial Propulsion and Power Technical Meeting at the Hampton Roads Convention Center in Hampton, Virginia, on Oct. 29-30, 2019. The theme of the two-day conference was “Powering the Future of Vertical Flight,” which highlighted research and development efforts — both current and planned — related to manned and unmanned rotorcraft and other vertical flight vehicles.

NEXA Completes Landmark Urban Air Mobility Study, Focuses on Infrastructure

• 06 Nov 2019 03:17 PM
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In August, NEXA Advisors and VFS announced the completion of a comprehensive year-long study, “Urban Air Mobility—Economics and Global Markets.” The groundbreaking NEXA report, undertaken with support from VFS, contains forecasts for 74 metropolitan areas over the period of 2020–2040. The online databases include thousands of geocoded data features and characteristics of each city, as well as the study’s findings on their potential market for urban air mobility (UAM). Included on these web pages are custom ArcGIS maps of each city.