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Airflow confirms development of full-scale eSTOL aircraft demonstrator

Air­flow has announced it is devel­op­ing one of the first full-scale pilot­ed eSTOL tech­nol­o­gy demon­stra­tors.

The aer­i­al logis­tics com­pa­ny, which was set up in 2019 by five for­mer Air­bus Vahana team mem­bers, aims to bring eSTOL capa­bil­i­ties to the mid­dle-mile logis­tics mar­ket. Its com­plet­ed air­craft is expect­ed to go into pro­duc­tion in 2025.

For the past year, the team — con­sist­ing of Marc Aus­man, Don Fung, Geof­frey DuBridge, Peter Kalo­gian­nis and Rob­bie Bunge — have been util­is­ing a sub-scale mod­el for test flights that have helped devel­op eSTOL flight con­trol tech­nol­o­gy.

The next phase will trans­form a Cess­na 210 into an eSTOL air­craft with Dis­trib­uted Elec­tric Propul­sion (DEP). This enables oper­a­tions into and out of very short run­ways, by pro­vid­ing more con­trol at slow­er air­speeds.

Kalo­gian­nis said: “Select­ing the Cess­na 210 saves us the effort to design and build the pieces that already work, such as the cock­pit, fuse­lage, land­ing gear, etc. We’ll con­cen­trate on chang­ing the rest to make it an eSTOL air­craft.

Talk­ing more on a Medi­um post, he added: “We’ll remove the exist­ing pis­ton engine and wing and replace them with a new wing and eight elec­tric motors and pro­pellers.

“We’ve got a fan­tas­tic set of part­ners we’re work­ing with to design and build the air­craft and a world-class sup­pli­er for the elec­tric propul­sion sys­tem. I can’t wait to show you more details as we start build­ing and test­ing.”

Last month, the com­pa­ny announced it was part­ner­ing with VerdeGo Aero to explore using its VerdeGo Aero hybrid-elec­tric pow­er­train sys­tem in the eSTOL air­craft.

It also released a blog stat­ing the ben­e­fits of eSTOL tech­nol­o­gy and Air­flow CEO Marc Aus­man spoke to eVTOL Insights as part of its pop­u­lar pod­cast series.

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Jason Pritchard

Jason Pritchard is the Editor of eVTOL Insights. He holds a BA from Leicester's De Montfort University and has worked in Journalism and Public Relations for more than a decade. Outside of work, Jason enjoys playing and watching football and golf. He also has a keen interest in Ancient Egypt.

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