Trek Aerospace Tern
Tern
Trek Aerospace, Inc.
Folsom, California, USA
www.trekaero.com
Founded in 1999, Trek Aerospace, Inc. is a small engineering company based in Folsom, California, USA. The company has designed and made multiple vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft including its exoskeleton jetpacks using shrouded propellers in the airframe design. The company has also designed and made watercraft. Trek Aerospace also assists companies in the design, fabrication, and licensing of projects involving shrouded propellers and/or autonomous control systems.
The company states their core technology has the highest thrust to hp/kw in the industry. This allows their aircraft to carry a lot of weight in a smaller footprint. Trek’s shrouded props require less power, use fewer batteries than other battery powered aircraft, have a greater payload and have a farther range.
The Tren is a hybrid-electric VTOL or eVTOL one passenger high-performance aircraft which has a unique x-wing design for its main wings, each having a ducted fan on the ends of each wing. In fact, because there are four wings, one can see from the drawing that the length of each wing is shorter than a standard size wing you would normally see on this size of fuselage. One advantage of having an x-wing design is width of the aircraft has smaller dimensions.
The aircraft has an estimated cruise speed 300 mph (482 km/h) with an estimated range of 200 miles (322 km). Each ducted fan tilts independently from the vertical to horizontal to accomplish VTOL flight. This allows the aircraft to have excellent flight responses to any pilot input and/or wing gusts. The rear tail has a configuration with one high horizontal stabilizer and at the end of the horizontal stabilizers are inverted vertical stabilizers.
The aircraft has been designed for personal use as a luxury sports car type aircraft which could be used for daily flying to work, used for shopping, traveling to restaurants, for use on vacation and for air racing competitions. The aircraft could also be used for urban and regional air taxi service, scientific research in remote areas, search and rescue missions, government agencies, for military reconnaissance missions and more.
It is unknown if the company is planning on making this aircraft into a production aircraft.
Specifications:
- Aircraft type: Hybrid-electric VTOL or eVTOL passenger aircraft
- Piloting: 1 or 2 pilots or autonomous
- Capacity: 8 people total, including the pilots. (Either 1 or 2 pilots)
- Cruise speed: 300 mph (482 km/h)
- Range: 200 miles (322 km)
- Flight Time: Unknown
- Propellers: 4 ducted propellers
- Electric Motors: 4 electric motors
- Power source: Hybrid-electric or batteries
- Fuselage: Carbon fiber composite
- Windows: Canopy over cockpit for excellent views
- Wings: 1 x-wing (which is made of 4 wings)
- Tail: 1 rear mounted horizontal stabilizer with two inverted vertical stabilizers
- Landing gear: Fixed skid landing gear
- Safety features: There are redundancies in the sub-systems of the aircraft and the aircraft has a whole aircraft ballistic parachute.
Resources:
Recent Pages
- Flowcopter FC100 (production model)
- Seahorse Air SH5-3E (concept design)
- teTra Aviation Mk-7 (prototype)
- AutoFlight Firefighting (production model)
- AutoFlight CarryAll V2000CG (production model)
- AutoFlight Prosperity (production model)
- Velo X Aerospace Velocitor X-1 (concept design)
- Vivame Stycraft Iside (prototype)
- Grasshopper Air Mobility e350 (concept design)
- Auburn University VT-02 Sevak (concept design)
