Air Greenland commits to purchasing or leasing fleet of Vertical Aerospace’s VX4 eVTOL aircraft from Avolon

Avolon and Air Green­land, the flag-car­ri­er for Green­land, will part­ner to form a Work­ing Group to assess the oppor­tu­ni­ty to com­mer­cialise zero-emis­sions air trav­el, and will also iden­ti­fy local infra­struc­ture and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion require­ments for eVTOL air­craft. 

In Feb­ru­ary, AirA­sia signed a non-bind­ing mem­o­ran­dum of under­stand­ing with Avolon to lease a min­i­mum of 100 VX4 eVTOL air­craft and devel­op an urban air mobil­i­ty (UAM) plat­form in south­east Asia.

Described as the sec­ond largest air­craft leas­ing com­pa­ny in the world, Avolon signed a 500-strong order with Ver­ti­cal Aero­space last year. Air Green­land will pur­chase or lease a fleet of VX4 eVTOL air­craft from Avolon, with the size of its fleet to be decid­ed at the con­clu­sion of the Work­ing Group’s assess­ment of the scale of the mar­ket oppor­tu­ni­ty.

Dómh­nal Slat­tery, CEO of Avolon, and who was recent­ly appoint­ed as Ver­ti­cal Aero­space’s Non-Exec­u­tive Chair­man, said: “Since our ini­tial order, we have seen air­lines all over the world make a com­mit­ment to the zero-emis­sions trav­el by select­ing the VX4 air­craft as the first step in their decar­bon­i­sa­tion jour­ney. 

“Today’s announce­ment with Air Green­land means we are tak­ing zero-emis­sions trav­el to where cli­mate change is hav­ing its most pro­nounced impact.” 

The VX4 is claimed to be the most advanced and the safest eVTOL in the mar­ket and will be built to Euro­pean Union Avi­a­tion Safe­ty Agency (EASA) safe­ty cer­ti­fi­ca­tion stan­dards – the most strin­gent glob­al require­ments and at the same lev­el as com­mer­cial air­craft. 

The VX4 will be near silent when in flight and will have zero oper­at­ing emis­sions, trans­port­ing four pas­sen­gers and one pilot dis­tances of over 100 miles at up to 200 miles per hour. 

Jacob Nit­ter Sørensen, CEO of Air Green­land, added: “Today’s announce­ment marks the start of our long-term sus­tain­abil­i­ty jour­ney. 

“In Green­land, we see the effects of cli­mate change every day and as a com­pa­ny, we want to be at the fore­front of the cli­mate rev­o­lu­tion.”

Last month, Leonar­do helped design, test, man­u­fac­ture and sup­ply the car­bon com­pos­ite fuse­lage for the VX4, by opti­mis­ing light­weight com­pos­ite struc­tures, mod­u­lar design, sys­tems instal­la­tion, and struc­tur­al test­ing for the co-devel­op­ment of the aircraft’s fuse­lage.