Englewood, Colorado-based XTI Aircraft Company announced in a March 23 tweet that it was making progress with their 65%-scale hybrid-electric VTOL demonstrator: “Finalizing assembly and preparing for first flight … new motors arrive this week, fly soon after!!”
Volkswagen AG, the owner of the Audi brand, announced on March 21 that it and its partners would build a full-scale demonstrator of its Pop.Up Next multi-modal eVTOL system and fly it by the end of 2020. The joint Airbus-Audi-Italdesign system was originally proposed only as a feasibility concept (before Audi was added), then just called “Pop.Up,” in March 2017, although generally similar in appearance to the concurrent Airbus CityAirbus eVTOL approach.
Rolls-Royce announced on March 14 that the company had conducted successful ground tests of a hybrid system using the company’s ubiquitous M250 gas turbine. The company said that it successfully tested the hybrid version of the M250 gas turbine in a ground demonstration setting in three operating modes: series hybrid, parallel hybrid and turbo-electric.
Airbus revealed photos of its completed but unpainted unmanned CityAirbus at Heli-Expo on March 5, followed by an official unveiling of the demonstrator in Ingolstadt, Germany, on March 11. Developed about 35 miles (60 km) away at the company’s Donauwörth, Germany, plant, the aircraft will be tested at the Ingolstadt Manching Airport.
AutoFlightX GmbH, based near Munich, Germany, unveiled its full-sized V600 prototype on April 10, 2019, at the AERO Friedrichshafen 2019 aviation trade show. The two-place, all-electric AutoFlightX V600 has six propellers for lift fitted on two booms parallel to the fuselage and a pusher propeller in the rear for forward flight.
A new short course on eVTOL Design has been added to the VFS video-on-demand educational series:
The Electric VTOL News™ eNewsletter started in 2016 as a means to inform the attendees of the VFS Transformative Vertical Flight Workshops and interested parties of news in the eVTOL world. Since then, it has grown to be a regular report on eVTOL aircraft, progress and developments. Since April 2017, it has also highlighted new aircraft in the World eVTOL Aircraft Directory and other resources on the eVTOL.news website.
On Tuesday, March 12, 2019, the US House of Representatives Transportation & Infrastructure Committee's Aviation Subcommittee held a hearing on "Looking Forward: Aviation 2050" that included testimony on Urban Air Mobility (UAM) by Eric Allison, Head of Uber Elevate. The video lasts 2 hours 22 minutes.
The Vertical Flight Society hosted two sessions at the Helicopter Association International (HAI) Heli-Expo 2019 trade show held at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia.
On Monday, March 4, VFS Executive Director Mike Hirschberg, Executive Director of VFS presented on The Future of Vertical Flight. Slides are available and the video recording has been posted.
For many entrants in the race to develop electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, the speculative air taxi market is the prize at the end of the finish line — one that could someday yield orders for thousands of aircraft to ferry millions of passengers around congested cities. However, with numerous regulatory and social barriers standing in the way of that market — on top of the very real technological challenges associated with building and flying eVTOL aircraft — this type of on-demand urban air mobility (UAM) could take many years to come to fruition.
