Uber has signed a partnership with Embraer for large-scale deployment of electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles (VTOLs) in order to fulfill its mission of providing a safe, reliable transportation service to everyone, everywhere. The goal of this partnership is to enable users of a future Uber Elevate Network to request an Embraer electric VTOL.
Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority is partnering with Uber to launch a demonstration transportation network of vertical takeoff and landing vehicles (VTOLs) by 2020. As part of this partnership, Uber and Dubai RTA will conduct a joint study into pricing models, people movement, and determining where VTOL routes should be created in the city. The partnership will result in everything from hover and forward flight tests to actual flight operations in the Dubai area.
Our goal is to launch an Elevate flight demonstration with passengers in Dubai in conjunction with the World Expo in October of 2020.
Metro Skyways Ltd., a subsidiary of Urban Aeronautics plans to launch the design and development of a four-passenger, Vertical-Takeoff and Landing (VTOL), flying car based on Urban Aeronautics' internal rotor, Fancraft™ technology. The vehicle will initially be powered by jet fuel, but will be designed from the outset to convert to liquid hydrogen and eventually also to 700 bar compressed hydrogen, once such options become commercially feasible.
Aurora Flight Sciences’ XV-24A LightningStrike subscale vehicle demonstrator (SVD) aircraft completed its planned flight test program in early March. Funded by DARPA, the SVD successfully demonstrated key technical features that the full-scale XV-24A will perform, including transition flight.
The XV-24A is a tiltwing unmanned aircraft that will be powered by a distributed electric propulsion system. Twenty-four variable pitch ducted fans driven by electric motors provide thrust for both hover and cruise.
Airbus XO, the company’s innovation group, revealed a concept for “seamless, multi-modal, fully electric urban mobility.” The modular Pop.Up concept features a capsule that connects to either a ground or air module. Airbus envisions the system relying on an artificial intelligence system where the “passengers plan their journey and book their trip via an easy-to-use app.
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.
Pure electric propulsion isn’t the only route to aeronautical revolution — and maybe not the fastest. Aurora Flight Sciences is working to prove that with its avant-garde LightningStrike, a hybrid-electric technology demonstrator that the Manassas, Virginia, company is building under an $89M Phase II Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) contract. “People are nibbling around the edges of what electric can do,” said John Langford, Aurora’s founder and chief executive officer. “This airplane drives directly to the heart. It transforms the whole configuration of the airplane.”
The hurdles are high and there is ample reason for skepticism, but tech entrepreneurs are pushing electric aircraft ideas that could lead to a new era for vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, aka VTOLs (pronounced VEE-talls). The latest entrant is Uber Technologies, the $68B cell phone app rent-a-ride provider, which recently announced it will invest in and promote “on-demand aviation.” Uber’s vision — shared by a growing number of aviation experts — is to use electric-powered VTOL (e-VTOL) aircraft as “air taxis” to revolutionize transport in and around big cities.
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
