Vertical Flight Society Electric VTOL Directory Hits 700 Concepts

The Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety (VFS) has announced that the num­ber of eVTOL air­craft con­cepts being tracked in its World eVTOL Air­craft Direc­to­ry has now exceed­ed 700 designs from near­ly 350 com­pa­nies and inno­va­tors world­wide.

The direc­to­ry is part of the VFS Elec­tric VTOL News web­site and near­ly every lead­ing eVTOL com­pa­ny is a mem­ber of VFS, with more than 175 cor­po­rate mem­bers world­wide.

The direc­to­ry is divid­ed up into propul­sion sys­tem approach­es, and cur­rent­ly includes 235 con­cepts using var­i­ous vec­tored thrust approach­es, 124 ‘lift + cruise’ con­fig­u­ra­tions, 195 ‘wing­less (mul­ti­copter)’ con­cepts, 103 designs for hov­er bikes and per­son­al fly­ing devices and 47 elec­tric rotor­craft.

The con­cepts are from 347 enti­ties in 48 coun­tries, with the most pro­lif­ic coun­tries of ori­gin being the US with 124 enti­ties, UK (24), Chi­na (21), Ger­many (19) and Cana­da (17), account­ing for near­ly 60% of all design enti­ties.

VFS Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Mike Hirschberg said: “We were pleased to cre­ate these resources for the nascent eVTOL indus­try six years ago. Since then, the direc­to­ry has cat­a­logued every known eVTOL design — from the sil­ly to the seri­ous.”

The direc­to­ry grew at a rate of about one air­craft per week dur­ing the first years, but this accel­er­at­ed to an aver­age rate of two air­craft per week with 100 air­craft cat­a­logued by July 2018, fol­lowed by the 200th in Sep­tem­ber 2019, the 300th by July 2020, the 500th by August 2021, and 600th this Jan­u­ary.

For the first time ever, hun­dreds of design teams around the world are engaged in ver­ti­cal flight, aid­ed by the advance­ments in com­put­er mod­el­ling and design tools, low-cost man­u­fac­tur­ing, bat­ter­ies and elec­tric motors.

Last year also saw a dou­bling of the amount of fund­ing being invest­ed in eVTOL air­craft devel­op­ers. VFS had esti­mat­ed $4.5B of invest­ments in eVTOL com­pa­nies in 2010–2020. How­ev­er, last year saw sev­er­al addi­tion­al devel­op­ers go pub­lic and/or attract siz­able pri­vate invest­ments, bring­ing the total to more than $10 bil­lion.

This spike in invest­ment came from sev­er­al lead­ing eVTOL com­pa­nies that went pub­lic in 2021 — name­ly Archer Avi­a­tion, Eve Air Mobil­i­ty, Joby Avi­a­tion, Lil­i­um and Ver­ti­cal Aero­space.

In May 2020, VFS announced that an addi­tion­al 10,000 engi­neers could be need­ed in the next decade to sup­port the grow­ing urban air mobil­i­ty and eVTOL mar­ket in the USA in a white paper pub­lished ear­li­er that year.