• 30 Sep 2019 09:47 AM
• 0

US Air Force Interest in eVTOL

For small businesses seeking to fund development across the spectrum of eVTOL technologies, the US Air Force recently posted a new Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program release at https://www.afwerx.af.mil/sbir.html. Applications are open Sep 24 to Oct 23, 2019. As stated on the AFWERX page:

2. View Air Force focus areas and user needs.

While the “Open Topic” allows any businesses that meets the SBIR criteria to apply, we encourage applicants to view our current list of focus areas and Air Force user needs to determine if your product or service might be desired by a certain unit.

View the focus areas currently listed here.

View our current Air Force users needs here.

The focus areas includes this topic:

14. Focus Area: eVTOL/UAM (Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing/Urban Air Mobility)
The objective of this topic is to explore potential commercial products being developed in the emerging eVTOL/UAM market for potential disaster response, humanitarian aid, and logistics missions. This sub-topic is intended survey a large scope of technologies to include: autonomy; advanced aircraft materials and manufacturing; novel acoustics techniques; subsystem, aircraft, and portfolio design tools; rapid mission planning for dense air environments and logistics efficiencies; command and control of air vehicles; robotic landing gear; large flotation devices; modular payload designs; air vehicle data networks and RF waveforms; sense and avoid architectures, algorithms, and sensors; electrical power storage, generation, charging; distributed electric propulsion control techniques.

The page with information on all Department of Defense open SBIR solicitations is https://sbir.defensebusiness.org/topics. Here, it lists the two SBIR calls that reference Focus Area 14: