GKN Aerospace-led Skybus Project completes initial feasibility studies for six rotor, 30-person eVTOL aircraft concept

The Sky­bus col­lab­o­ra­tion project, which is explor­ing the poten­tial for a six-rotor, 30-seater eVTOL air­craft con­cept, has com­plet­ed suc­cess­ful fea­si­bil­i­ty stud­ies.

Sky­bus was launched under the Future Flight Chal­lenge in Jan­u­ary 2021 as a GKN Aero­space-led project, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Swan­son Avi­a­tion Con­sul­tan­cy, Pascall+Watson and Con­nect­ed Places Cat­a­pult. It want­ed to look into the fea­si­bil­i­ty for mass tran­sit eVTOL air­craft of this size to oper­ate from ver­ti­ports on sched­uled jour­neys in the future, akin to bus net­works on today’s roads.

These would oper­ate along­side air taxis to help bypass road con­ges­tion in major cities — reduc­ing trav­el time and emis­sions — and poten­tial­ly improve access to more remote areas, such as islands and moun­tain­ous regions.  A suc­cess­ful zero emis­sions mass tran­sit sys­tem in the air would also ease con­ges­tion on the road net­work, reduc­ing over­all trav­el time, cost and emis­sions for all trav­ellers.

Russ Dunn, CTO GKN Aero­space said: “We are com­mit­ted to a more sus­tain­able future for avi­a­tion and we believe there is no sin­gle solu­tion to achieve this. It will take a range of tech­nolo­gies and col­lab­o­ra­tion across the whole indus­try to achieve our net zero goal. Sky­bus is a great exam­ple of GKN Aerospace’s ambi­tion to work in part­ner­ship to inspire our cus­tomers into new mar­kets, prod­ucts and tech­nolo­gies.”

The project has iden­ti­fied unique oppor­tu­ni­ties for air ‘bus­es’ to oper­ate along­side air taxis in future air mobil­i­ty trans­port net­works. The Sky­bus con­sor­tium also devel­oped a Thames-based ver­ti­port con­cept as well as eco­nom­ic mod­els and demand fore­casts for a Lon­don based intra-city use case, with fur­ther analy­ses now to be car­ried out.

Gary Cutts, Future Flight Chal­lenge Direc­tor at UK Research and Inno­va­tion said: “The Future Flight Chal­lenge has always tak­en a broad view of the oppor­tu­ni­ties pro­vid­ed by the many dif­fer­ent types of nov­el clean air­craft emerg­ing.

“Our mar­ket stud­ies show a real poten­tial for a sub­stan­tial dis­trib­uted avi­a­tion sys­tem using the types of air­craft con­cept envis­aged by the Sky­bus con­sor­tium and we wel­come the sys­tem-wide insights gained from their fea­si­bil­i­ty stud­ies.”

GKN Aero­space is the lead­ing Tier 1 air­frame sup­pli­er for Urban Air Mobil­i­ty (UAM) plat­forms, and lead­ing the Sky­bus project has helped devel­op fur­ther under­stand­ing of the emerg­ing UAM sec­tor.

The Sky­bus project was fund­ed as part of the Future Flight Chal­lenge, a four-year, £125 mil­lion Indus­tri­al Strat­e­gy Chal­lenge Fund pro­gramme to devel­op more sus­tain­able avi­a­tion solu­tions. The cur­rent phase is focused on the devel­op­ment of inte­grat­ed avi­a­tion sys­tems that enable new class­es of elec­tric or autonomous air vehi­cles.