Kitty Hawk and Falck to explore possibility of using Heaviside eVTOL aircraft for emergency response missions

Fal­ck — the Dan­ish emer­gency response and health­care com­pa­ny — is team­ing up with Kit­ty Hawk to cre­ate a frame­work for Project Heav­i­side, which will see Kit­ty Hawk’s eVTOL air­craft used for emer­gency med­ical mis­sions.

This will enable the air­craft to be an addi­tion to Fal­ck­’s ser­vices, help­ing to increase flex­i­bil­i­ty and reduce emer­gency response time. Addi­tion­al­ly, it will con­tribute to Fal­ck­’s con­tin­u­ous devel­op­ment of its ser­vices with­in the pre­hos­pi­tal and ambu­lance area.

The new col­lab­o­ra­tion also adds to Fal­ck­’s drone ini­tia­tive, Ver­ti­cal, which aims to assess the poten­tial of drone tech­nol­o­gy in the pre­hos­pi­tal and ambu­lance ser­vices of the future. 

Jakob Riis, CEO of Fal­ck, said: “The agree­ment with Kit­ty Hawk takes us to the next lev­el in our com­mit­ment to inte­grate eVTOL air­craft into our ambu­lance oper­a­tions. Kit­ty Hawk brings the tech­nol­o­gy, while we at Fal­ck con­tribute with our ambu­lance ser­vice area as a use case.

“This com­bi­na­tion gives us the best con­di­tions to inves­ti­gate how we can joint­ly unleash the poten­tial of new  tech­nol­o­gy and devel­op the ambu­lance-borne health solu­tions which are like­ly to set the stan­dard in the near future.”

With Kit­ty Hawk’s Project Heav­i­side, Fal­ck plans to test and eval­u­ate new tech­nolo­gies on a large scale — with the aim of mak­ing emer­gency health­care more acces­si­ble and afford­able. 

Kit­ty Hawk’s team brings decades of expe­ri­ence to the part­ner­ship, from key areas such as com­mer­cial avi­a­tion, aero­space, auto­mo­tive engi­neer­ing, flight test and indus­tri­al design. Project Heav­i­side is designed to be fast, small and excep­tion­al­ly qui­et. The com­pa­ny has built 13 pro­to­types of the eVTOL air­craft to-date, com­plet­ing more than 700 test flights.

Sebas­t­ian Thrun, Co-Founder and CEO of Kit­ty Hawk, said: “We are excit­ed to be work­ing with Fal­ck to col­lab­o­rate on bring­ing our Heav­i­side air­craft for emer­gency ser­vices, first in Den­mark and then to oth­er areas. Fal­ck is an inno­v­a­tive leader in the area and this agree­ment marks a first and impor­tant step in mak­ing eVTOL avail­able to more peo­ple.”

Fal­ck expects to intro­duce Heav­i­side in a close col­lab­o­ra­tion with cus­tomers in Den­mark, Europe fol­lowed by the Unit­ed States.