Manta Aircraft to work with Avionord and develop its ANN eVTOL platform for medical transportation

Man­ta Air­craft and pri­vate med­ical air trans­port com­pa­ny Avionord have agreed to field up to 15 hybrid-elec­tric long-range eVTOL air­craft derived from Man­ta’s ANN plat­form. 

Avionord will also take a stake in the com­pa­ny with deliv­er­ies expect­ed to start in 2026, while the part­ner­ship will fos­ter the devel­op­ment of an ecosys­tem and a time­ly estab­lish­ment of Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty. 

The use of the inno­v­a­tive air­craft plat­form is planned all in the area of spe­cial trans­port of organs for trans­plants and trans­port of equip­ment for re-per­fu­sion of organs des­tined for trans­plan­ta­tion, as well as rapid-inter­ven­tion oper­a­tions. 

The eVTOL option to con­nect heli­pads from two hos­pi­tals in dif­fer­ent cities, cou­pled with the long range and low infra­struc­ture require­ments, result in new point-to-point capa­bil­i­ties and eco­nom­ic effi­cien­cies, rep­re­sent­ing a sig­nif­i­cant cost sav­ing and noise reduc­tion com­pared to con­ven­tion­al heli­copters.

Avionord CEO Euge­nio Cre­mas­coli says: “After analysing the mar­ket and con­sid­er­ing our time-crit­i­cal mis­sions, we see that the Man­ta ANN plat­form is today the only eVTOL offer­ing a range of sev­er­al hun­dred kilo­me­tres, which is use­ful for the mis­sions to trans­port organs for trans­plan­ta­tion from one hos­pi­tal to anoth­er, and avoid­ing depen­dence on air­ports and road trans­port. 

“The ANN eVTOLs will enable us to reduce the trans­porta­tion time of the organs that have a lim­it­ed life when not con­nect­ed to the ded­i­cat­ed machines, using air­craft with a reduced oper­at­ing cost.”

Man­ta Air­craft CEO Lucas March­esi­ni adds: “We are very pleased with this part­ner­ship with Avionord, which has recog­nised the ANN plat­form in terms of range, push­ing into the direc­tion of cre­at­ing a real user case that will con­tribute to the rapid estab­lish­ment of Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty.

From the out­set, the design of the air­craft was planned for a rel­e­vant range and speed in com­bi­na­tion with low infra­struc­ture require­ments and over­all costs at a frac­tion of the cost of a heli­copter suit­able for these kinds of oper­a­tions.”

The invest­ment of Avionord in Man­ta Air­craft fol­lows the invest­ment of oth­er Ital­ian tech com­pa­nies in an effort to expe­dite the cre­ation of an Ital­ian AAM ecosys­tem.

Man­ta Air­craft plans to begin cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the first two-seat mul­ti-pur­pose mod­el, ANN2, in 2023, with test­ing cur­rent­ly under­way of a 1:3 scale demon­stra­tor, with a final con­fig­u­ra­tion of the pro­to­type expect­ed to start fly­ing in 2022.

ANN2 fea­tures eight elec­tric duct­ed fans and mea­sures 28ft in length, with a 22ft wingspan. It can trav­el more than 600 km with a cruise speed of 300km/h and a larg­er, four-seater ver­sion is also in devel­op­ment.