Dufour Aerospace launches Aero2 – described as the ‘Swiss Army Knife’ of small unmanned eVTOL aircraft

Dufour Aero­space has launched Aero2, its mul­ti-pur­pose small unmanned which is the first com­mer­cial­ly avail­able prod­uct in their tilt-wing eVTOL fam­i­ly.

Described by the Swiss com­pa­ny as being ‘as ver­sa­tile as a Swiss Army Knife’, Aero2 builds on the suc­cess­ful, on-going test flights of Dufour’s tilt-wing eVTOL plat­form.

It has a pay­load of up to 40 kg (88 lbs), a max­i­mum take-off weight of 150 kg (330 lbs) and a flight time of three hours in stan­dard con­fig­u­ra­tion. It is being tar­get­ed for a wide vari­ety of cus­tomer appli­ca­tions.

Thomas Pfam­mat­ter, Co-founder and CEO of Dufour Aero­space, said: “This inno­v­a­tive small unmanned air­craft will great­ly sup­port our cus­tomers in their activ­i­ties. With its quick­ly exchange­able nose cone, it is the per­fect tool to car­ry dif­fer­ent cus­tomer pay­loads, be it in logis­tics, topo­graph­i­cal sur­veys, map­pings, mea­sure­ments or for pub­lic safe­ty appli­ca­tions.”

This first prod­uct of Dufour’s tilt-wing fam­i­ly will fly as fast as 170 km/h (92kts) in cruise speed. In VTOL-con­fig­u­ra­tion, it takes-off and lands on the small­est land­ing spots, using as lit­tle space as a con­ven­tion­al unmanned aer­i­al vehi­cle.

Dur­ing flight it uses as lit­tle ener­gy as a con­ven­tion­al air­plane. The tilt-wing design com­bines the best fea­tures of both heli­copters and air­planes. Dufour Aero­space first suc­cess­ful­ly flew a tech­nol­o­gy demon­stra­tor in 2020, as seen on the company’s web­site.

Jas­mine Kent, Co-founder and CTO, added: “The plat­form showed the expect­ed out­stand­ing aero­dy­nam­ic per­for­mance and ver­sa­til­i­ty. This is how Aero2 was born. Reac­tions from observers of the cur­rent pro­to­type are encour­ag­ing.

“In a series of pro­to­types, we will con­tin­ue to add and cer­ti­fy more fea­tures such as the hybrid propul­sion mod­ule, de-icing capa­bil­i­ties and a usage and health mon­i­tor­ing sys­tem. Aero2 offers redun­dan­cy in many ways and will there­fore meet strict safe­ty require­ments.”

Aero2 is designed to ful­ly com­ply with EASA’s Spe­cial Con­di­tion for Light Unmanned Aer­i­al Sys­tems and is expect­ed to enter ser­i­al pro­duc­tion in 2023.

Dufour Aero­space was found­ed in 2017 by Thomas Pfam­mat­ter, Jas­mine Kent and Dominique Stef­fen to devel­op, build and exploit tilt-wing eVTOL air­craft. Today, the com­pa­ny is work­ing on dif­fer­ent projects that share the same tech­no­log­i­cal core.

In 2016, the com­pa­ny built and pre­sent­ed the first ever ful­ly elec­tric aer­o­bat­ic air­craft in the world: Aero1 has flown over 80 hours and demon­strat­ed the abil­i­ties of elec­tric propul­sion in the chal­leng­ing envi­ron­ment of aer­o­bat­ic flight. Aero1 is cur­rent­ly being mod­i­fied to serve as a fly­ing test­bed for the lat­est devel­op­ments of Dufour Aero­space such as flight com­put­ers, bat­tery packs and teleme­try sys­tems in real flight con­di­tions.

While Aero3 is Dufour’s tilt-wing eVTOL air­plane that will be capa­ble of assum­ing the duties of most of today’s light sin­gle and twin-engine heli­copters while oper­at­ing at much low­er costs and high­er speeds, mak­ing larg­er mar­ket seg­ments acces­si­ble for air­borne appli­ca­tions.