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eVTOLS: Challenges, Obstacles, and Opportunities
Vertical Flight Society Executive Director Mike Hirschberg Tells Us What’s Up As far back as 2009, some of the people who pilot aircraft vertically, then fly them horizontally, recognized change was coming. NASA began to recognize the possibility, if not the inevitability, of eVTOLs in 2013. And the Vertical Flight Society (VFS), which began…
What Living with Flying Cars Will Be Like
We get so immersed in the mechanics and infrastructure surrounding the development of eVTOLs that we sometimes forget about what a world with flying cars will be like or what it will take to have the population at large accept these soon-to-be modern miracles. We know that eVTOLs are in our future – sooner than…
Embraer Pulse Is Part eVTOL, Part Self-Driving Car
It’s a plane! It’s a car. It’s Pulse – both at once. Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer is taking a different flight path for the future. Its “Pulse” is designed to be an eVTOL air taxi and a self-driving car. The concept calls for a smart cabin that attaches to an autonomous eVTOL and then detaches…
Startup Transcend Air Aims to Create Northeast Air Taxi
If you’ve got approximately US$20MM to spare, you might consider lending a startup hand to Transcend Air. Founders Gregory Bruell, formerly head of Elytron, a Silicon Valley VTOL design firm, and Peter Schmidt, a tech advisor for air-taxi provider Linear Air, have an eVTOL they’d like you to fund. Conceived as part traditional eVTOL and…
Kitty Hawk Flyer Permanently Grounded
What goes up, must come down. Such is the fate of the Flyer, an eVTOL project launched in 2015 headed by Sebastian Thrun (a former Google Fellow who founded Udacity). The Flyer had its wings permanently clipped, according to the company. The eVTOL, which, at 250 pounds, qualified as an ultralight aircraft that didn’t require…
EASA Flips the On Switch for Electric Aircraft
Patrick Ky, executive director of The European Union Aviation and Space Agency (EASA), announced on June 10, 2020 that EASA had given two thumbs up to the world’s first fully electric aircraft. The Pipistrel Velis Electro is a two-seat aircraft intended primarily for pilot training, according to Slovenia-based Pipistrel. The aircraft was certified in less…