FutureFlight

Cormorant Seaplanes is looking to refresh the fleet of amphibious aircraft by using wood as a key manufacturing material for its planned hybrid-electric design. The Dutch-Scottish start-up is fundraising to accelerate its plans, building on its role in the Sustainable Aviation Test Environment project, based in Scotland’s Orkney Islands.

With so much of the efforts to bring eVTOL aircraft into commercial service focused on new propulsion systems and automated flight controls, the interiors of these vehicles have been largely overlooked. Air taxi services could start in 2025 and yet hardly any of the prospective passengers have yet been given the faintest idea of what the cabin experience will be like.

Electric air taxi developer Joby Aviation has received a $180 million investment from one of its long-term investors, Baillie Gifford. The British investment management firm, which is also a major backer of Tesla and Amazon, has agreed to purchase nearly 44 million newly issued shares of Joby’s common stock at a public offering price of $4.10 per share, Joby announced May 3 before releasing its first quarterly financial report of the year. 

Lilium's latest fundraising campaign has been launched as the public company seeks to preserve its listing on New York's Nasdaq market after being notified on April 13 that it was not compliant with the requirement to maintain its closing bid price above $1. A subsidiary of existing shareholder Tencent Holding is ready to contribute $100 million and also a further $75 million if other backers will match this amount.

Helisul Aviation intends to add Moya Aero’s autonomous eVTOL aircraft to its fleet, having last week signed a letter of intent with the Brazilian start-up covering the purchase of 50 of the all-electric vehicles. With a payload of 200 kilograms (440 pounds) and a range of up to 110 kilometers (70 miles), the aircraft is being developed for roles such as cargo deliveries and crop spraying.

Alaska Airlines this week donated a Dash 8 Q400 twin turboprop aircraft to ZeroAvia to support the company’s work to convert regional airliners to hydrogen propulsion. The aircraft handed over at a May 1 event at ZeroAvia’s research and development facility at Paine Field in Washington state will be fitted with the company’s ZA2000 fuel-cell-based propulsion system in preparation for eventual flight testing.

Revolution may have been in the air in October 2018 when a cabal of disruptors armed with plans for distributed electric propulsion and automated flight controls first gathered in San Francisco to plot how to turn the aviation world upside down. Almost five years and a global pandemic later, the Revolution.Aero event convened in Dublin last week, with the upstarts beginning to sound more like their boring legacy aviation industry parents, tempering bold promises that eVTOL aircraft would fill urban skies by 2024 with a more cautious and patient approach.

Electric air taxi developer Joby Aviation is expanding its partnership with Toyota Motor Corporation. The Japanese carmaker has agreed to supply key components for Joby’s eVTOL aircraft, the companies announced on April 27. 

NASA marked the anniversary of the 50-year ban on commercial supersonic travel over land last week highlighting the progress of its “Quesst” mission, which includes plans to fly a Mach 1.4 X-59 test aircraft this year to pave the way for noise trials. Those noise trials involving the X-plane will be used to gather data that could ultimately make supersonic operations over land possible again.

Reliable Robotics has teamed with NASA to improve the safety of remotely-piloted aircraft in the National Airspace System using FAA primary surveillance radar data. Specifically, the partners wanted to explore the use of existing radar infrastructure for automated detect-and-avoid systems on board autonomous aircraft.