ZURI unveils its next generation VTOL aircraft, which can travel more than 700km and also be used for cargo transport

ZURI has revealed the next con­cept of its hybrid VTOL air­craft, which will have a range of more than 700km, and also includes a car­go mod­el.

Known as ZURI 2.0, the air­craft is based on the expe­ri­ence which the team gained after more than three years of devel­op­ment and suc­cess­ful ground tests with a tech­nol­o­gy demon­stra­tor. The pre­vi­ous stage was com­plet­ed last year, with work on the demon­stra­tor answer­ing ques­tions about aero­dy­nam­ics, con­trol sys­tems, the num­ber and required out­put of pow­er units, and many oth­er para­me­ters.

The spec­i­fi­ca­tions of Zuri 2.0 are:

Wingspan: 12–13 m (39 — 43 ft)

Max­i­mum car­go pay­load: 300 kg (660 lbs)

Crew: one pilot 

Num­ber of pas­sen­gers: 4 in the Exec­u­tive ver­sion, 3 in the VIP ver­sion

Range: 700+ km (435 miles) plus 30 minute reserve

Cruis­ing speed: 300+ km/h (186+ mph)

Pow­er units: 8 tilt­ing elec­tric motors

On-board gen­er­a­tor: tur­bine with an elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­a­tor for pow­er­ing elec­tric motors and recharg­ing Lithi­um bat­ter­ies.

With the intro­duc­tion of the ZURI 2.0 mod­el, the next stage of ZURI devel­op­ment began. The team is already build­ing small­er, ful­ly func­tion­al ZURI 2.0 mod­els dur­ing this stage, main­ly to ver­i­fy aero­dy­nam­ic para­me­ters and com­pare sev­er­al ver­sions of con­trol sys­tems. At the same time, the design of the hybrid VTOL ZURI design will be locked dur­ing this devel­op­ment phase.

The com­pa­ny plans to devel­op hybrid VTOL avi­a­tion tech­nol­o­gy by cer­ti­fy­ing both mod­els, i.e., ZURI 2.0 for pas­sen­ger trans­port and ZURI 2.0 in the CARGO ver­sion.

The cer­ti­fi­ca­tion will occur under EASA (Euro­pean Union Avi­a­tion Safe­ty Agency) and in the first years, ZURI’s VTOL air­craft will only be intend­ed for the Euro­pean mar­ket and mar­kets where EASA cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is valid. The com­pa­ny added that it is also look­ing to obtain FAA cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for the North Amer­i­can mar­ket.

The hybrid VTOL ZURI tech­nol­o­gy aims at region­al air trans­port. This mar­ket seg­ment is cur­rent­ly fac­ing sev­er­al leg­isla­tive restric­tions to reduce the neg­a­tive impact of air trans­port on the envi­ron­ment. Pure­ly elec­tric or hybrid tech­nolo­gies such as ZURI 2.0 can help reduce the adverse effects of avi­a­tion on the envi­ron­ment while allow­ing fur­ther devel­op­ment of region­al avi­a­tion.

In addi­tion, ZURI can sig­nif­i­cant­ly expand region­al air trans­port as VTOL tech­nol­o­gy does not need expen­sive air­port infra­struc­ture and thus pro­vides take-off and land­ing from exist­ing small air­ports, heli­ports, or any VTOL cer­ti­fied place with dimen­sions of about 25x25 m.