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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”)
The 4th Transformative Vertical Flight Workshop kicked off today in Denver, Colorado as part of AIAA AVIATION 2017's Transformational Electric Flight Workshop.
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.
An aviation gold rush is on. The belief that advances in electric propulsion and autonomy technologies are making cheap, quiet and even fully automated air taxis as feasible as automatic elevators is fueling a frenzy of design and development of small electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. Some e-VTOLs are already flying. Others will be soon. Many more are on the drawing boards.
The third annual Joint Workshop on Transformative Vertical Flight Concepts, with the subtitle of “Enabling New Flight Concepts through Novel Propulsion and Energy Architectures,” was held on Sept. 29-30 in Hartford, Connecticut. The workshop series has brought together vehicle developers, technology companies, government scientists and regulators, investors, and potential electric VTOL customers/operators
In an onstage interview with me today at the Nantucket Conference, Uber products head Jeff Holden said the fast-growing ride sharing company was seriously looking at a new form of transportation to offer its customers: Short-haul flying in cities.
AHS International held a groundbreaking event on August 27-29. The “Transformative Vertical Flight Concepts Joint Workshop on Enabling New Flight Concepts through Novel Propulsion and Energy Architectures” was held in Arlington, Virginia at the offices of CENTRA Technology, Inc. and with the support of the F.N. Piasecki Foundation. The workshop was co-sponsored by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).
The past decade or so has seen an incredible infusion of innovative technologies into the vertical flight industry, but regulatory guidance has not kept pace. Between tiltrotors, iPads, drones, innovative new approaches to vertical flight, and conventional helicopter enhancements, regulatory agencies such as the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) have not developed timely, consistent guidance that can facilitate the safe implementation of new technologies for vertical flight in today’s demanding marketplace.
