Lyte Aviation's 44-seat SkyBus: VTOLs as public transport
By Loz Blain
November 08, 2023
London startup Lyte Aviation is thinking big when it comes to VTOL aircraft. Forget your piddly five-seaters, Lyte says its first aircraft will be a 44-seat monster with a 300-km/h (186-mph) top speed and a range over 1,000 km (620 miles).
The company's rendered SkyBus airframes look like stretched, chromed-out business jets, or even small airliners – but with tandem wings at the front and rear of the fuselage. These short wings each sport a medium-sized inner propeller and a smaller outer one, for a total of eight six-bladed props. The props look curiously small, considering the size of the thing.
For vertical takeoff and landing, the wings rotate to point the props upward, and once it's aloft, the SkyBus will begin tilting its wings forward until it reaches an efficient wing-supported cruise speed. The tilt-wing concept has certainly been floated before – albeit not at this kind of scale. We wonder how well it'll handle wind gusts in a hover with those wings sitting vertically.
Samson Switchblade: First flight for fold-out flying car
By Loz Blain
November 09, 2023
A year after it was pronounced airworthy by the FAA, and 14 years after it was first announced, the Samson Sky Switchblade is officially off the ground. This street-legal three-wheeler converts to a 200-mph (320-km/h) airplane at the touch of a button.
At the Grant Country International Airport in Moses Lake, Washington, the Switchblade lifted off for an exhilarating first flight, reaching an altitude of 500 ft (150 m) and circling around to touch down some six minutes later.
"After 14 years of design and rigorous testing, our first flight is a huge milestone,” stated Sam Bousfield, Samson Sky CEO and designer of the Switchblade. “This puts us on the path towards producing thousands of Switchblades to meet the large and enthusiastic demand we’re receiving."
Just weeks after its first manned flight in the California desert, Joby Aviation has taken its S4 eVTOL air taxi out for a piloted demo flight in the Big Apple, demonstrating just how much quieter and less disruptive it'll be than a helicopter.
On Sunday, NYC Mayor Eric Adams put on a press conference at the Downtown Heliport, which pokes out into the East River just a couple of blocks from Wall Street. The occasion, Adams announced, was that the city was planning to electrify the heliport in support of the coming wave of electric air taxis, as well as to enable the charging of ebikes for last-mile deliveries.
eVTOL aircraft promise to start a sustainable, traffic-busting clean urban transport revolution, offering quick and convenient flights over congested areas at a fraction of the cost– and the noise pollution – of a helicopter.
To hammer home the point, Joby had its S4 take off and fly a few fairly tight circles – as NASA confirmed in 2022, an S4 cruising at an altitude of 500 m (1,640 ft) creates a noise level on the ground somewhere between "refrigerator" and "moderate rainfall" at 45.2 dBA – as compared to the mean street noise level in NYC, which was measured at 73.4 dBA across 99 sites in this 2015 study.
The Sirius Jet will fly up to 1,150 miles (1,851 km) at speeds up to 323 mph (520 km/h) on a clean liquid-hydrogen powertrain. It'll rise vertically off a pad thanks to a deflected vectored thrust system using 20 smallish electric ducted fans.
It's the work of Swiss startup Sirius Aviation AG, which has apparently had a "team of 100+ engineers" beavering away at "intense R&D" on this project in the insanely picturesque lakeside town of Baar since 2021. Sirius says it's already started the certification process with the FAA, with a demonstration plane scheduled for first flights in 2025. Full certification, commercial deliveries and shuttle flights are planned for 2028.
So what have we got here? Effectively, something like a smaller version of Germany's Lilium Jet, but running on hydrogen for higher-density energy storage and much longer range, and using deflected thrust from its banks of fans instead of just tilting the propulsion units the way Lilium does.
Archer's futuristic Midnight air taxi completes phase 1 flight tests
By Loz Blain
January 31, 2024
Three months after its first takeoff, the production-spec Midnight air taxi has finished the first phase of flight testing. With the release of a new video, Archer says it expects to fly this next-gen machine with human pilots on board this year.
Currently sitting in fifth place on the AAM Reality Index – and with a bullet – Archer is making steady progress in its mission to get fully certified electric air taxis into commercial service by 2025. It's signed a couple of notable deals this month – one with Atlantic Aviation, around development of ground-based infrastructure in California, Florida and New York City, and another with NASA to study and validate the safety of high-performance battery systems.
So the pace in the boardroom appears healthy, and things are moving along in the hangar as well. The Midnight prototypes have been flying since late October, albeit only in standard multirotor mode. But the team has now validated the airframe's ability to take off, hover, turn, and maneuver like a multirotor drone, tilting to accelerate. The prototype is running and validating some of Archer's first high-voltage battery packs, which it's manufacturing in San Jose. So far, so good.
eHang's eVTOL air taxi will cost buyers less than $350,000 (in China)
By Ben Coxworth
February 02, 2024
While some other urban air mobility startups are still just producing renderings, eHang's EH 216 eVTOL has already been tested and cleared for commercial air taxi work in its home country of China. The company has now gone a step further, by announcing the retail price.
So first of all, we won't keep you in suspense any longer.
If you'd like an EH 216-S (as it's now known) of your own, be prepared to shell out 2.39 million RMB. That's about 332,304 US dollars, and it will take effect as of April 1st … no joking. It should be noted that the figure is the official suggested retail price, in China.
For readers who aren't familiar with the EH 216-S, it's an unpiloted eVTOL aircraft which flies on eight coaxially mounted pairs of propellers – for 16 props in total – and autonomously ferries two passengers up to 30 km (18.6 miles) between charges at a top speed around 130 km/h (81 mph).
LuftCar signs deal to develop detachable flying vans in the Philippines
By Loz Blain
February 09, 2024
Florida's LuftCar has designed a real burger with the lot: a hydrogen-powered jeepney van that backs into a special detachable airframe to turn into a high-speed, long-range, cruise-capable vectored-thrust eVTOL, perfect for island hopping.
The company has just announced it's signed a MoU with eFrancisco Motor Corporation in the Philippines, under which the two pledge to develop, integrate, deploy, brand and market a series of collaboratively designed Pinoy hydrogen eVTOLs built around eFrancisco's vehicle chassis.
eFrancisco, you see, is adapting the traditional Filipino jeepney into something a lot more like a van, and planning to run it on hydrogen fuel cells. Not just any van, either. Oh no, this one's gonna have a flip-up front for getting in and out.
There are now a number of companies working on eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) "air taxis," most of which look a bit like larger versions of consumer quadcopter drones. The eCopter is different, however, in a way that could make it more likely to see real-world use.
Currently being developed by Austrian startup FlyNow Aviation, the auto-piloted eCopter features a coaxial electric drivetrain which incorporates two counter-rotating rotor propellers (one above the other).
This setup allows it to be classified by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency as an electric helicopter. According to FlyNow, because the eCopter can be nicely slotted into this existing classification, certification should be much quicker and simpler than would be the case for more drone-like multi-rotor air taxis.
