Electric self-piloted Airbus VTOL aircraft completes first full-scale test flight

https://newatlas.com/airbus-vtol-vah...53228/Electric
self-piloted Airbus VTOL aircraft completes first full-scale test
flight

The race is most certainly heating up in the world of autonomous
flying taxis. From the Intel-backed Volocopter's recent debut at CES
to Ehang's autonomous passenger drone
https://newatlas.com/dubai-ehang-taxi-drone/47888/ , what seemed like
a crazy sci-fi idea just a few short years ago is rapidly becoming
reality. The latest leap forward comes from Airbus and A³ with the
first successful, full-scale test flight of its single passenger,
self-piloted, electric VTOL aircraft called Vahana.

Early concept art of Vahana
Early concept art of Vahana
The first sketch on a napkin two years ago that started everything
for Vahana
In late 2017, the Vahana team moved to this hangar at the Eastern
Oregon Regional Airport

The Vahana project is relatively new compared to much of its
competition with Airbus only launching the project two short years
ago. To move from concept sketch on a napkin to a working prototype in
such a short time is undeniably a remarkable achievement.
In late 2017, the Vahana team moved to this hangar at the Eastern
Oregon Regional Airport

The full-scale aircraft tested was dubbed Alpha One and its first
flight was completely self-piloted, lasting 53 seconds and reaching a
modest height of 5 m (16 ft). The test aircraft measured 5.7 m (18.7
ft) long, 6.2 m (20.3 ft) wide and 2.8 m (9.2 ft) high and had a
takeoff weight of 745 kg (1,642 lb). The next stages for testing will
involve transitioning from vertical to forward flight.

There are undeniably many hurdles, both technically and regulatory,
that need to be overcome before these things are set loose in the
airspace over our cities ,but the pace of development seen in the
Vahana, and others, is truly startling. So much so, it isn't
unreasonable to expect to see autonomous flying taxis in our skies
within the next 10 years.

Source: Vahana.aero
https://vahana.aero/vahanas-first-fl...s-ade26d26ba02

The test flights were initially scheduled for late 2017 but slight
delays pushed them back to...
The test flights were initially scheduled for late 2017 but slight
delays pushed them back to...
The test flights were initially scheduled for late 2017 but slight
delays pushed them back to...
Vahana during initial engine testing

View gallery - 10 images

https://www.avweb.com/avwebflash/new...-230266-1.html

Vahana Flies, Joby Attracts Capital

By Russ Niles | February 4, 2018

Airbus has flown its A3 Vahana autonomous electric VTOL aircraft,
completing two short test flights in Oregon last Wednesday and
Thursday. The aircraft is the test article for what Airbus hopes will
become fleets of pilotless tiltrotors carrying passengers and cargo
from point to point. It wants to have a working prototype by 2020 and
project leader Zach Lovering noted how far the initiative has come in
a comparatively short time. “In just under two years, Vahana took a
concept sketch on a napkin and built a full-scale, self-piloted
aircraft that has successfully completed its first flight,” he said.
Meanwhile, Joby, a much more grassroots company that hopes to compete
with Airbus in that market, picked up some substantial backing this
week.

Joby founder JoeBen Bevirt invited two Bloomberg reporters to his
secret airfield somewhere on the California coast to see (but not
describe in detail or photograph) his entry in the VTOL market. He did
tell Ashley Vance and Brad Stone the aircraft was flown by a test
pilot for 15 minutes, covering 15 miles and taking off vertically. The
writers also reported he told them the aircraft will “fly at twice the
speed of a helicopter” which suggests a tiltrotor or hybrid thrust
design. The reporters said the aircraft is “exotic looking” and has
“numerous propellers.” Whatever it is, it’s attracted some
high-profile support worth about $100 million. The company says Intel
Capital, Toyota AI Ventures, JetBlue Technology Ventures and
Tesla/SpaceX backers Capricorn Investment Group have all thrown money
into the venture capital pot to keep the project going.


Comments (1)

Gee, I can't wait to strap into a pilotless aircraft. If it has a
Windows computer operating system that will be even more thrilling.

Posted by: Kenneth Sabel | February 5, 2018 4:51 AM
---------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.jobyaviation.com/

Bloomberg: Air-Taxi Startup Has a Working Prototype and a Fresh $100
Million

If you want to see JoeBen Bevirt’s flying car, you have to get in a
helicopter. The engineer’s private airfield is nestled in a valley on
the Northern California coast between Monterey and Santa Barbara, and
it’s remote by design, out past a swirl of tan and green fields… [It
is likely Oceano (L52), Watsonville (WVI) or Marina (OAR), or perhaps
closed Carmel Valley Vintage:
http://www.airfields-freeman.com/CA/...m#carmelvalley
..]


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...d-a-fresh-100m

February 1, 2018, 2:00 AM PST

Air-Taxi Startup Has a Working Prototype and a Fresh $100 Million
Joby Aviation hides its craft at a secretive private airfield.
By Ashlee Vance
and Brad Stone
February 1, 2018, 2:00 AM PST

If you want to see JoeBen Bevirt’s flying car, you have to get in a
helicopter. The engineer’s private airfield is nestled in a valley on
the Northern California coast between Monterey and Santa Barbara, and
it’s remote by design, out past a swirl of tan and green fields.
Bevirt, a 44-year-old whose bursts of childlike delight punctuate his
otherwise quiet intensity, bounds out to greet the chopper, then
points the arriving pair of reporters to the prototype resting on the
dirt runway nearby. It’s an exotic-looking white aircraft with
numerous propellers. (Bevirt agreed to the visit only on the condition
that physical specifics remain unpublished.) He calls it an air taxi.
“This is what I have been dreaming about for 40 years,” he says. “It’s
the culmination of my life’s work.”

Bevirt is the founder and chief executive officer of Joby Aviation
Inc., a startup that’s spent the past nine years trying to design and
build a whole new kind of short-hop aircraft. Believe it or not,
things have been going well. We were the first two reporters to see a
demo of the prototype, named Rachel after the women several of its
creators used to date. The pilot managed a vertical takeoff, 15
minutes of flight in a 15-mile loop, and a safe landing. Powered by
electric motors and sophisticated control software, the taxi performs
like a cross between a drone and a small plane, able to zip straight
up on takeoff and then fly at twice the speed of a helicopter while
making about as much noise as a swarm of superbees. Bevirt says
thousands of these sky cabs will one day shuttle people around cities,
soaring above the conventional traffic below.

Broken promises of flying cars predate The Jetsons, but Bevirt has
made believers out of people with deep pockets. On Feb. 1, Joby
Aviation announced a fresh $100 million in venture funding, more than
three times the capital it had raised before, from investors including
Intel Capital, Toyota AI Ventures, JetBlue Technology Ventures, and
Capricorn Investment Group, a prominent backer of Tesla and Space
Exploration Technologies. “There are a lot of dreamers in this space,
but we have done a lot of research here, and JoeBen has absolutely
nailed the right time for it,” says Bonny Simi, president of JetBlue’s
investment arm.

Thanks to advances in electric motors, batteries, software, and other
components, the field of flying cars, air taxis, or whatever you want
to call them (Sky Segways?) is a lot more crowded than it was even a
couple of years ago. Larry Page, the CEO of Google parent Alphabet
Inc., has pumped tens of millions of dollars into startups Kitty Hawk
and Zee.Aero. A dozen other startups around the world have similar
projects at various stages of design, as do Airbus SE and Boeing Co.
Even Uber Technologies Inc. claims to be working on an air taxi
service, tentatively called Uber Elevate
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ng-flying-cars
.. I think it’s going to happen within the next 10 years,” Uber CEO
Dara Khosrowshahi said during a Jan. 22 speech at a tech conference in
Munich.

Bevirt’s secrecy extends to the environs of Joby’s camouflaged lair:
The trailers that serve as his engineers’ flight-control centers are
covered in posters warning them about the area’s mountain lions,
snakes, spiders, and other deadly fauna. Bevirt does say Joby intends
to build an aircraft that will hold four passengers and a pilot and
will travel at least 150 miles on a single charge at an altitude of a
few thousand feet or less. (That would mean the cabin wouldn’t need to
be pressurized.) “Another goal is to be 100 times more quiet during
takeoff and landing than a helicopter and near-silent during
flyovers,” says Joby Executive Chairman Paul Sciarra, a co-founder of
Pinterest, the image-centric wish list site.

All told, Joby’s venture funding totals about $130 million

A trained mechanical engineer and sci-fi nerd, Bevirt made a fortune
selling bendable tripods and other camera accessories more than a
decade ago. He’s poured that money into his aviation startup. A couple
of years back, he had 35 people working on various prototype craft;
now he has 120, most of them working far from the airfield at his
500-acre ranch in Santa Cruz. There, engineers make just about every
part of the air taxi prototype, from the body and motors to the
flight-control software.

Joby says it plans to mass-produce its air taxis for a ride-hailing
service that it will operate. Bevirt’s vision includes a landing pad
for every office and cul-de-sac. Each trip, he says, will cost about
as much as an Uber or Lyft ride does today, and eventually the air
taxis will be fully autonomous. “Our mission is to save a billion
people an hour a day,” he says. He’s less confident about a rollout
date, partly because the formidable challenges ahead include
convincing politicians, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the
cab-hailing public that air taxis are safe. “We are well into the
design and build of the production vehicle” was the most he’d say on
the subject of time to market.

While a whiff of the surreal hangs over Bevirt’s claims that he’ll
“change people’s relationship with aircraft,” some of his investors
are counting on it. JetBlue’s Simi says she sees Joby as part of a
broader shift in the aerospace industry, a way to make more personal
forms of air travel a part of daily life. JetBlue has also invested in
Zunum Aero https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/1499184D:US ,hich is
building an electric jet that can fly dozens of people 1,000 miles.
And though Intel owns a stake in a German air taxi startup called
Volocopter GmbH https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/1529151D:GR Wendell
Brooks, president of Intel Capital, says Joby “is very far ahead
relative to all the other things we’ve seen.”

For more on flying cars, check out the Decrypted podcast:

For more on the future of transportation, go to
Bloomberg.com/hyperdrive

BOTTOM LINE - Joby can’t say when its air taxis will reach your
neighborhood, but it’s got a $100 million vote of confidence from
backers including Intel, Toyota, and JetBlue.
-----------------------------------------------------

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ng-flying-cars


Uber Partners With NASA in Vision for Managing Flying Cars
By Natalie Wong
and Edward Ludlow
November 8, 2017, 2:45 AM PST

Test vehicles will launch in Dallas, Los Angeles by 2020
Collaboration will boost uberAIR’s speed to market, Uber says

Jury Selection in Waymo Versus Uber Goes Smoothly
Bloomberg Markets: Balance of Power (1/29/2018)
Uber’s Jeff Holden discusses the UberAir flying taxi project.

Uber Technologies Inc. advanced its vision of a network of flying cars
by signing an agreement with NASA on how to safely manage the
futuristic systems.

The ride-sharing startup has said it plans to roll out an on-demand
vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) network in Dallas and Dubai by
2020, and Wednesday added Los Angeles to the list. But many regulatory
hurdles will need to be cleared before that can happen, including
approval by the Federal Aviation Administration, which will have to
figure out how flying cars can get along with airplanes, helicopters
and drones in the sky.

On Tuesday, Uber took a step toward resolving that by signing an
agreement with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to
develop new traffic concepts that will enable safe and efficient
operations of robotic flight systems, the company said.

Uber said it’s also working with aircraft, infrastructure and real
estate partners to operate fixed routes between city hubs called
“Skyports.” The San Francisco-based company’s vision for the network,
dubbed “uberAir,” would let customers push a button and get high-speed
flight in and around cities, the company said at a web summit in
Lisbon.

“This collaboration makes a ton of sense in order to bring this to
market as fast as possible,” Uber chief product officer Jeff Holden
said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. With uberAir, there
will be an “unprecedented” number of flying aircrafts in cities, he
said, and NASA’s expertise lies in unmanned aerial systems traffic
management that can help come up with answers to controlling air
traffic.

Uber’s flying car initiative, dubbed “Uber Elevate,” comes at a time
when Uber has faced multiple controversies including dozens of civil
suits, the ousting of founder Travis Kalanick as chief executive
officer and criminal probes from the U.S. Justice Department.

New CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has said that he wants to focus on the core
business, which wouldn’t seem to include managing flying cars. But
Uber also faces competition on its flying cars ambitions, with those
including Alphabet Inc. CEO Larry Page, who has funded at least 2
projects.

Instead of tackling the building of actual aircraft, Uber will develop
the technology that manages flying vehicles and navigates air traffic.
The company has said it will double its staff to 24 over the next year
and already is in talks with the FAA and the European Aviation Safety
Agency about its plans.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-t...joby-aviation/

Electric ‘flying taxi’ with ‘numerous propellers’ given boost by
Toyota
By Trevor Mogg — Posted on February 1, 2018 10:10 pm

At a private airfield somewhere between Monterey and Santa Barbara in
California, you’ll find Joby Aviation’s electric “air taxi,” as JoeBen
Bevirt likes to call it.

Bevirt founded Joby nine years ago to develop a short-hop aircraft
system and is also the company’s CEO. With a slew of rivals currently
clamoring to build their own flying car for personal transportation,
competition is tough. But Joby is clearly doing something right as it
has just received $100 million in venture funding from several major
outfits that include Toyota A.I. Ventures, Intel Capital, and JetBlue
Technology Ventures.

Bevirt is pretty secretive about the aircraft’s design (the Joby image
above is from 2014), telling a recent visiting Bloomberg reporter not
to spill the beans on the “physical specifics” of its working
prototype. What we do know is that it’s an “exotic-looking white
aircraft with numerous propellers,” suggesting a machine that’s part
plane and part drone.

As you’d expect with such a vehicle, it’s capable of a vertical
take-off and landing (VTOL), with a flight speed twice that of a
helicopter. And yes, this is much more than just a pretty prototype
that likes to stay close to terra firma — Bloomberg witnessed a
demonstration that took the aircraft on a 15-minute flight well beyond
the airfield.

The final design is likely to be a five-seat aircraft capable of 150
miles of flight time on a single charge. It also aims to be 100 times
quieter during takeoff and landing than conventional aircraft.
electric flying taxi joby aviation
A previous Joby Aviation design from 2014.

Joby Aviation is convinced the skies will one day be busy with small,
short-hop aircraft, carrying people across cities in a matter of
minutes — and at an affordable price.

“People waste billions of hours sitting on roads worldwide each year,”
Bevirt said in a release on Thursday. “We envision a future where
commuting by eVTOL is a safer, faster, and cost-competitive
alternative to ground transportation.”

He added that backing from “leaders in auto manufacturing, data
intelligence, and transportation sectors” means his team is “now ready
to build a commercial version of the aircraft.”

With its fresh funds, Joby is now working to expand its team to bring
in more experts in areas such as structural engineering, electrical
engineering, flight controls, and software.

Mindful of the competition, Bevirt prefers to keep his aircraft under
wraps for now, but we’ll be sure to update with images once he finally
decides to show off his flying taxi to the world.
---------------------------------------------------------------------




On Fri, 02 Feb 2018 08:52:03 -0800, Larry Dighera
wrote:

https://newatlas.com/airbus-vtol-vah...53228/Electric
self-piloted Airbus VTOL aircraft completes first full-scale test
flight

The race is most certainly heating up in the world of autonomous
flying taxis. From the Intel-backed Volocopter's recent debut at CES
to Ehang's autonomous passenger drone
https://newatlas.com/dubai-ehang-taxi-drone/47888/ , what seemed like
a crazy sci-fi idea just a few short years ago is rapidly becoming
reality. The latest leap forward comes from Airbus and A³ with the
first successful, full-scale test flight of its single passenger,
self-piloted, electric VTOL aircraft called Vahana.

Early concept art of Vahana
Early concept art of Vahana
The first sketch on a napkin two years ago that started everything
for Vahana
In late 2017, the Vahana team moved to this hangar at the Eastern
Oregon Regional Airport

The Vahana project is relatively new compared to much of its
competition with Airbus only launching the project two short years
ago. To move from concept sketch on a napkin to a working prototype in
such a short time is undeniably a remarkable achievement.
In late 2017, the Vahana team moved to this hangar at the Eastern
Oregon Regional Airport

The full-scale aircraft tested was dubbed Alpha One and its first
flight was completely self-piloted, lasting 53 seconds and reaching a
modest height of 5 m (16 ft). The test aircraft measured 5.7 m (18.7
ft) long, 6.2 m (20.3 ft) wide and 2.8 m (9.2 ft) high and had a
takeoff weight of 745 kg (1,642 lb). The next stages for testing will
involve transitioning from vertical to forward flight.

There are undeniably many hurdles, both technically and regulatory,
that need to be overcome before these things are set loose in the
airspace over our cities ,but the pace of development seen in the
Vahana, and others, is truly startling. So much so, it isn't
unreasonable to expect to see autonomous flying taxis in our skies
within the next 10 years.

Source: Vahana.aero
https://vahana.aero/vahanas-first-fl...s-ade26d26ba02

The test flights were initially scheduled for late 2017 but slight
delays pushed them back to...
The test flights were initially scheduled for late 2017 but slight
delays pushed them back to...
The test flights were initially scheduled for late 2017 but slight
delays pushed them back to...
Vahana during initial engine testing

View gallery - 10 images