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Full Charge: The eVTOL Revolution Will Need Batteries
Professor Martin Winter says powerful, but small, lightweight, batteries are essential to eVTOL success. “Battery development is triggered by the stakeholders,” says battery technology expert Professor Martin Winter. Winter is founder and scientific director of the MEET Battery Research Center at Münster University (about 340 miles west of Berlin). But, so far, most of…
Japan Moves Forward with Air Taxis and Flying Cars
One hundred Japanese and international corporations have agreed to help eVTOL air taxis become a reality in Japan by 2023 and automated cars that can fly by 2030. The companies are sponsoring SkyDrive Inc., a developer of urban air mobility solutions and joint developer CARTIVATOR Resource Management. Support will be in the form of financial…
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…
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…
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…