Lost your password?

The Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety (VFS) has expe­ri­enced steady growth in the sec­ond quar­ter of 2022, with a total of 176 com­pa­nies now mem­bers, 20 up from a year ago, and record growth with a 13% annu­al increase, dou­bling the num­ber of cor­po­rate mem­bers from just five years ago.

Much of this growth is due to the exten­sive sup­port efforts and resources that VFS pro­vides to the ver­ti­cal elec­tric flight com­mu­ni­ty, includ­ing tech­ni­cal resources, tal­ent acqui­si­tion, edu­ca­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ties and net­work­ing.

Pro­pelled large­ly by the con­tin­ued expan­sion of elec­tric air­craft devel­op­ments around the world, descrip­tions of each com­pa­ny are list­ed below, includ­ing links to web­sites and con­tact infor­ma­tion found in the VFS Cor­po­rate Mem­ber Direc­to­ry.

They include:
EHang Intel­li­gent Equip­ment (Guangzhou) Co., Ltd. (Small Busi­ness Class)
Enstrom Heli­copter Cor­po­ra­tion (Small Busi­ness Class)
Lock­heed Mar­tin Gov­ern­ment Affairs (Small Busi­ness Class)
MightyFly (Asso­ciate Class)
OSS Air Man­age­ment Pvt Ltd (Asso­ciate Class)
PSSC Labs (Small Busi­ness Class)
Qar­bon Aero­space (Sil­ver Class)
Tech­nol­o­gy for Ener­gy Cor­po­ra­tion (Asso­ciate Class)
Xagon Solu­tions Inc (Small Busi­ness Class)

In addi­tion, VFS is pleased to announce that Lil­i­um, which was one of the first eVTOL air­craft com­pa­nies to join VFS in Feb­ru­ary 2017, has increased its mem­ber­ship lev­el from Asso­ciate to Gold Mem­ber, the same lev­el as GE Avi­a­tion and Joby Avi­a­tion.

The Gold Mem­ber­ship Class is sec­ond only to that of the five VFS Plat­inum Mem­bers, major heli­copter man­u­fac­tur­ers Air­bus, Bell, Boe­ing, Leonar­do and Siko­rsky.

Part­ly due to Lilium’s ear­ly sup­port, VFS was able to expand its mis­sion over the past sev­er­al years from con­ven­tion­al heli­copters and advanced rotor­craft to elec­tric flight air­craft.

This has con­tin­ued with expand­ing VFS sup­port to oth­er types of elec­tric air­craft that use bat­tery-elec­tric, hybrid-elec­tric or hydro­gen-elec­tric propul­sion sys­tems, like fixed-wing elec­tric-pow­ered con­ven­tion­al take­off and land­ing (eCTOL) and short take­off and land­ing (eSTOL) air­craft.

VFS Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Mike Hirschberg said: “The advanced air mobil­i­ty (AAM) indus­try has changed tremen­dous­ly since Lil­i­um and oth­er eVTOL com­pa­nies first joined VFS more than five years ago.

“Beyond mov­ing from draw­ings to advanced pro­to­types, many oth­er facets of the AAM ecosys­tem — includ­ing sup­ply-chain, infra­struc­ture, stan­dards, reg­u­la­tions, man­u­fac­tur­ing and oper­a­tional approach­es — are com­ing togeth­er to sup­port the eVTOL Rev­o­lu­tion.”

Last month, VFS announced the win­ners of its sec­ond annu­al Design-Build-Ver­ti­cal Flight (DBVF) Stu­dent Com­pe­ti­tion, sup­port­ed by ARL, and spon­sored by Sur­vice Engi­neer­ing and Wisk Aero as Gold and Bronze spon­sors.

In April, VFS announced three com­pet­i­tive­ly select­ed engi­neer­ing stu­dents at US minor­i­ty-serv­ing insti­tu­tions for its inau­gur­al 2022 Diver­si­Flite Schol­ars pro­gramme, which select­ed engi­neer­ing stu­dents for an all-expens­es-paid trip to the VFS’ annu­al Forum, which is the largest and longest-run­ning VTOL tech­ni­cal event in the world.