Category Filtering: 'vertiflite'
Bruchsal, Germany-based Volocopter (previously known as “e-volo GmbH”) has continued its series of stunning announcements. The company, which made the world’s first manned multicopter flight in March 2016 with its VC200 eVTOL demonstrator, is preparing to fly its next aircraft, the pre-series 2X multicopter. The first 2X is complete and the second 2X is in fabrication.
Airbus Helicopters has unveiled more information about their CityAirbus quad duct electric VTOL. CityAirbus is a multi-passenger, self-piloted eVTOL demonstrator “designed for urban air mobility with cost efficiency, high-volume production and a low environmental footprint in mind.”
A3 by Airbus Group, the company’s Silicon Valley outpost, is independently developing another eVTOL concept. The single-seat, self-piloted Vahana eVTOL uses four electric propellers each on its canard and aft wing.
Since the release of the Uber Elevate white paper in October 2016, the San Francisco-based ride-sharing technology company has charged forward, widely sharing its vision of a revolutionary urban on-demand air network with a wide range of aerospace, municipal, real estate, financial, regulatory and other stakeholders.
A confluence of technical, business and societal developments in recent years is driving an expectation that air transportation will be transformed to cut urban daily commute times dramatically, enable faster emergency response, and allow inter- and intra-city transportation at costs competitive to traveling by car, bus or train.
The UKi Future of Transportation World Conference was held 5-6 July in Cologne, Germany. The session on "Getting Transportation Off the Ground" focused on how electric VTOL and "personal airborne transportation systems (PATS) will shake up personal transportation before 2030.
Serious progress is being made around the world in eVTOL development. Here is a roundup of recent news that has come out since the detailed article in the last issue of Vertiflite.
Airbus Decides to Pop Up
Airbus XO, the company’s innovation group, revealed a concept for “seamless, multi-modal, fully electric urban mobility.”
The Elevate Summit, a conference to promote the air taxi concept, hosted in Dallas, Texas, April 25–27, by cell phone ride-paging service Uber, attracted advocates and expert speakers from nearly every industry and regulatory agency with a role to play in turning the eVTOL dream into reality.
At the Forum 73 Grand Awards Banquet, the leaders of the major rotorcraft manufacturers and Uber Technologies’ chief of product development talked about the future of vertical flight. Uber imagines a world where on-demand transportation leverages the vertical dimension to connect people efficiently and affordably through a network of vertiports with electrically-powered VTOL aircraft. A score of companies are now developing one- to four-seat aircraft that could enable achieve this vision. (See “Charging Forward”)
Twenty years ago, in the March/April 1997 issue of Vertiflite, I published my first article. The 20-page “V/STOL: The First Half- Century” included the wheel of “V/STOL Aircraft and Propulsion Concepts,” which can now be found on the AHS Vertipedia site at www.vtol.org/wheel.
The article and the V/STOL Wheel catalogued the most prominent attempts to combine the vertical takeoff and landing capabilities of a helicopter with the high-speed forward flight of a fixed- wing aircraft.
