DIFCO partners with Hughes Aerospace and Five-Alpha to build USA’s first aero-medical eVTOL vertiport in Illinois

DIFCO has begun con­struc­tion of the first eVTOL air­craft ver­ti­port facil­i­ty at Rock Island, Illi­nois. 

Offi­cial­ly named The Cor­po­ral Jason G Pautsch Ver­ti­port, the site is locat­ed cen­tral­ly with­in the four Quad Cities met­ro­pol­i­tan area and will include cor­po­rate hangar facil­i­ties for lease, refu­elling ser­vices, an exec­u­tive pilot lounge, a pro­to­type visu­al nav­i­ga­tion­al aid bea­con and area nav­i­ga­tion (RNAV) instru­men­ta­tion approach and depar­ture egress.

DIFCO part­nered with rotor­craft avi­a­tion com­pa­ny Hugh­es Aero­space and Five Alpha on the devel­op­ment in ear­ly 2021.

DIFCO CEO Jake Pautsch announced the project to help famil­iarise the com­mu­ni­ty with eVTOL and VTOL, and the future resources avail­able to them by locat­ing a sig­nif­i­cant hos­pi­tal’s aero-med­ical avi­a­tion divi­sion to the site.

Pautsch said: “We are excit­ed to be pio­neer­ing with our team a ver­ti­port that will sup­ply Quad Cities med­ical patients with safer and faster high-end access to aero-med­ical trans­port. 

“In addi­tion to sup­port­ing tra­di­tion­al rotor­craft the state-of-the-art facil­i­ty will sup­port the ris­ing, elec­tric bat­tery-pow­ered eVTOL air­craft. 

“Numer­ous, one-of-a-kind com­po­nents of the project are unheard of in this indus­try and will increase safe­ty, and the use of advanced tech­nol­o­gy will man­age pow­er pro­duc­tion demands that eVTOL air­craft require with­out draw­ing from tra­di­tion­al ener­gy grid pow­er. 

“Eval­u­at­ing the mas­sive pow­er demands of elec­tric air­craft is a moral respon­si­bil­i­ty and we have inte­grat­ed com­po­nents to be renew­ably con­scious.” 

DIFCO is a his­toric and indus­tri­al preser­va­tion and spe­cial­ty indus­tri­al real estate devel­op­ment firm with a Union Iron Works Divi­sion pos­sess­ing an estab­lished in-house legal depart­ment. Head­quar­tered in Dav­en­port, Iowa, the com­pa­ny’s focus is on serv­ing munic­i­pal and fed­er­al sec­tor clients and select cri­te­ria-based com­mer­cial clien­tele across the Unit­ed States.

Five-Alpha is a glob­al aero­nau­ti­cal com­pa­ny ded­i­cat­ed to pro­vid­ing spe­cialised edu­ca­tion, train­ing, insight and ser­vices into the very chal­leng­ing and unique com­mu­ni­ties of heli­copter and ver­ti­cal lift infra­struc­ture and organ/tissue dona­tion and trans­plan­ta­tion.

In April last year, Five-Alpha part­nered with Varon Vehi­cles to sup­port the devel­op­ment of its Infra­struc­ture Net­works in Latin Amer­i­ca with plans to begin trans­porta­tion ser­vices in Colom­bia.