FutureFlight

Burt Rutan has been at the cutting edge of aircraft design for decades. When he sold his Scaled Composites company in 2011, many might have assumed he was transitioning to a well-earned retirement. Then, at an October 20, 2019, event to mark the 40th anniversary of the first flight of his Long EZ aircraft, 76-year-old Rutan let slip that he's working on a design for an eVTOL aircraft. As if realizing that he might have said too much, he declined to provide his audience, and a select group of reporters, with any further details.

Self-driving cars are already "a thing," albeit a not-widely-accepted one in the wake of some well-documented mishaps. But Sebastian Thrun, founder and CEO of Kitty Hawk, is convinced that autonomous operations will take off more quickly and comprehensively in the air than on the ground. He would say that, of course, given Kitty Hawk's ambitions in this area through its partnership with Boeing NeXt to develop the Cora eVTOL aircraft.

Multi-disciplinary clusters of academics worldwide are the engine room for many of the key areas of technology advancement underpinning the development of electric aircraft. One such research and development hub is the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering, where associate professor Anubhav Datta is leading a team developing new approaches to lightweight electrical storage to go on board aircraft.

Industry standardization body ASTM International is a significant contributor to the complex collaboration between industry and government to establish the foundational standards needed to allow eVTOL aircraft operations to be conducted safely. This article in ASTM Standardisation News provides granular detail as to how these efforts are coming together.

ASTM experts from across the aviation industry are working on specialist committees to tackle complex issues relating to aircraft systems, autonomous flight, and personnel needs for urban air mobility, among other topics.

So far, in the short but frantic history of the urban air mobility sector, it seems to have been the IT crowd and existing aerospace players who have led the investment charge in electric vertical takeoff and landing technology. There are obvious synergies between these established industries and the precocious newcomers, not least because both can contribute significant expertise on top of cold, hard cash. 

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report into the crash of Boeing's Passenger Air Vehicle prototype on June 2, 2019, highlighted an apparent design or system weakness in the aircraft. According to detailed analysis of aircraft data, excessive levels of vibration caused the aircraft to enter "ground mode," which resulted in the motors being shut down incorrectly. This caused the aircraft to fall quickly to the ground, causing significant damage. 

The 2019 UP summit meeting brought together a self-defining elite of aviation entrepreneurs and prospective investors at ranch of Ross Perot Jr. in Westlake, Texas. Ben Marcus and Cyrus Sigari, founders of private jet broker JetAviva, jointly organized the third annual summit, claiming that this year's gathering included around $100 billion of investable capital among the attendees. This lured start-ups such as Beta Technologies and Lift Aircraft, joining senior executives from aerospace giants like Bell, Boeing, and Airbus.

How do non-believers view eVTOL aircraft and the self-styled urban air mobility revolution? This report by Alexis Ong for The Verge about Volocopter's recent unveiling in Singapore of its VoloPort concept and flight demonstration of the 2X prototype aircraft gives us some idea.

Danny in the Valley—aka Danny Fortson, West Coast correspondent for the UK's Sunday Times—did a good job getting Lilium founder and CEO Daniel Wiegand to open up about the eVTOL start-up's business plan in this recent podcast. He talks about how the German company got launched and how the science drives everything. 

There are places in the podcast where I found myself yelling out questions and wishing Danny in the Valley had pushed Danny in the Black Forest a bit harder, such as:

Lilium Jet has been very measured and selective about how it communicates its plans to develop distinctive its ducted-fan eVTOL aircraft. For months, it seemed the German company could not be comment publicly on its plans. Then rivals like Volocopter and EHang started getting extensive media coverage and a few drips of information were released to the media. So when I saw the link below to a presentation given in the first week of November 2019 at the Web Summit in Portugal's capital Lisbon, I was eager to hear how illuminating Lilium Jet CEO Daniel Wiegand might be.