Category Filtering: 'vertiflite'
VFS members are well aware of the “Electric VTOL Revolution” that has been underway for several years, with more than 250 electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft concepts on the VFS website, www.eVTOL.news. Most of the helicopter OEMs, most visibly Airbus Helicopters and Bell, have been considering eVTOL and urban air mobility (UAM) options for the future.
Electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft promise to be quieter than helicopters, but how much quieter? And how will that shape the future of urban air mobility (UAM)?
These are some of the questions that were addressed at “The ((Quiet)) Electric VTOL Revolution,” the third annual VFS eVTOL panel at the annual Helicopter Association International (HAI) Heli-Expo 2020 trade show.
The Air Force marked the 116th anniversary of the Dec. 17, 1903, Wright brothers flight at Kitty Hawk by issuing a request for information (RFI) aimed at helping foster a new powered flight revolution — electric or hybrid electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft — eventually self-flying.
On Dec. 4, Disney unveiled its new “Rise of the Resistance” ride at the grand opening of its new “Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge” theme park in Orlando, Florida. Video of the nighttime event shows the two T-70 X-Wing fighters take off vertically, rotate and then translate forward away from the huge crowd. TheDrive.com website reported that the interceptors used the unmanned Boeing Cargo Air Vehicle (CAV) eVTOL aircraft as the platform for the two-thirds scale spaceships.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
