/Astro Aerospace Elroy/Passenger-Drone-2.jpg)
Ft. Worth, Texas-based ASTRO Aerospace announced on May 8th that it had acquired Passenger Drone, which had made manned flights last year of its two-seat 16-propeller wingless eVTOL aircraft, now dubbed the AA360. [Note: the company renamed the aircraft "Elroy" in four months later.]
On Nov. 8, 2017, The Boeing Company acquired Aurora Flight Sciences, which bills itself as “an innovative technology company which strives to create smarter aircraft through the development of versatile and intuitive autonomous systems.” Or to put it another way, a company whose entire existence is thinking outside the box.
Workhorse completed the first flight of its two-seat SureFly hybrid eVTOL quadcopter on April 30, 2018, in Cincinnati, Ohio. This was the world’s first manned free flight of a hybrid-electric VTOL aircraft. The SureFly made a 10-second, untethered hover with an experimental flight certification.
On April 24, Aurora Flight Sciences announced that it had reached an agreement with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to conclude the joint hybrid-electric vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) X-Plane program that was developing the XV-24A LightningStrike.
For those who knew to look for it as something potentially revolutionary — rather than some crazy idea for a far-away future — electric VTOL almost broke into the mainstream this year. On Monday, Feb. 26, the day before Heli-Expo began, AHS Executive Director Mike Hirschberg gave a press briefing, entitled, “The Future of Vertical Flight,” providing a perspective on the global vertical flight market and technological development, including the potential of eVTOL.
On March 12, Kitty Hawk revealed its latest surprise: Cora. After nearly eight years of secretive electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft development, the Mountain View, California-based company backed by Google co-founder Larry Page finally went public. With the hashtag #MeetCora, Kitty Hawk announced that it had been flying a two-seat derivative of the Zee Aero Z-P2 (see “Electric VTOL News,” Vertiflite March/April 2018) in California and in New Zealand. The company also announced that it had established Zephyr Airworks, the operator of Cora in New Zealand.
AHS International is pleased to announce that the Society is rebranding to better reflect our membership and our role in the world.
After years of discussion and months of debate, the Board of Directors of AHS International voted to change the identity of AHS to the “Vertical Flight Society,” the moniker that the Society had been using in various forms for at least a half century. While not a legal name change, the “Vertical Flight Society” will become the “trade name” for AHS.
XTI Aircraft announced on Feb. 20 that it was on schedule and on budget as it completed the ducts and fans for its 60% scale flying prototype of the TriFan 600 aircraft, and moved toward ground testing those components (see “XTI Aircraft Refines Its TriFan 600 VTOL BizJet,” Vertiflite March/April 2018).
In February 2018, EHANG — a major player in the quadcopter market — revealed a new version of its 184 eVTOL drone with two-seats and twice as many arms and propellers. The new version can carry a total payload of up to 620 lb (280 kg). The company had unveiled the original 184, whose name means “1 passenger, 8 propellers, 4 arms”, in January 2016 at the Consumer Electronics Show.
The American company HopFlyt began hovering tests of its Venturi one-seventh scale model in its hangar in Lusby, Maryland, in December. The Venturi pairs variable incidence, tandem channel wings with eight counter-rotating propellers within the channels that can generate very high levels of static thrust and lift while reducing propeller noise.
