Boeing announced Oct. 10 that it had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Volkswagen subsidiary Porsche to “explore the premium urban air mobility market and the extension of urban traffic into airspace.” Boeing, Porsche and Boeing subsidiary Aurora Flight Sciences are also developing a concept for a fully electric VTOL aircraft.
Like the bright blue frames of his trendy spectacles, Dr. Matthias Bittner is cheery. And why not? As chief operating officer of Gilching, Germany-based startup AutoFlightX — a position the 34-year-old aeronautical engineer calls his “first real job in industry” — Bittner is part of a team of fewer than 10 trying to help their company’s Chinese entrepreneur founder, electric aircraft pioneer Tian Yu, change the world through urban air mobility (UAM).
According to Automotive News Europe on Oct. 14, Audi has stopped work on the Pop.Up multi-modal eVTOL concept — which consists of an electric automotive chassis, a detachable people-pod, and an autonomous quad copter propulsion system — that its subsidiary Ital design had been developing with Airbus. In a statement, Audi said: “We believe it will be a very long time before an air taxi can be serially produced that does not require passengers to change vehicles. In the modular concept of Pop.Up, we were working on a solution with the highest complexity.”
Chinese drone maker EHang delivered the first batch of “passenger grade” EHang 216 autonomous aerial vehicles (AAVs) in June, followed by a second batch in October. The company says these aircraft have now reached customers in Asia, Europe and North America.
On Aug. 21, Volocopter revealed its fourth-generation electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) design, the VoloCity, intended to be its first production aircraft. The company says that the VoloCity has been designed to meet the safety standards specified by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) SC-VTOL regulation (see www.eVTOL.news/ EASA) and incorporates user feedback, as well as test data from all previous Volocopter generations, including more than 1,000 test flights.
Whether electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft will soon produce clean, quiet, autonomous air taxis for urban air mobility (UAM) is uncertain, but Dr. Juergen Rauleder says the drive to develop such aircraft is inspiring aerospace engineering students — about half of his class from Germany and the other half from across Europe — like nothing since the Space Race of the 1960s.
On Oct. 3, Boeing NeXt announced that it had flown its Cargo Air Vehicle demonstrator outdoors up to 20 kt (37 km/h). Since its first outdoor flight in February, Boeing has completed more than 90 outdoor flight tests.
On Oct. 3, Mountain View, California-based Kitty Hawk revealed it has been secretly working for two years on a single-seat, high-performance eVTOL called Heaviside (named for the English self-taught electrical engineer, mathematician and physicist, Oliver Heaviside, 1850-1925).
Boeing and Safran have invested in Electric Power Systems (EPS), a company offering a suite of safe, certifiable and lightweight energy storage products that provide high quality power for aerospace and other markets. Boeing HorizonX Ventures and Safran Corporate Ventures jointly invested in EPS during this Series A funding round they announced on Sept. 17.
