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South Korea: Plana Aero Joins eVTOL Race With Unique-Looking, 7‑Seat Hybrid-Powered Flying Taxi

South Kore­an start­up, Plana Aero, has joined “the eVTOL race to mar­ket” with a unique-look­ing 7‑seat hybrid e‑powertrain fly­ing taxi, reports newatlas.com. The com­pa­ny is found­ed by Braden J. Kim who led the orig­i­nal Hyundai Urban Air Mobil­i­ty devel­op­ment pro­gram until ear­ly 2020 that lat­er led to the Super­nal eVTOL.

Kim’s Plana has start­ed work on a new long-range, hybrid-elec­tric VTOL air taxi designed to car­ry sev­en peo­ple up to 350 miles at speeds of over 210 mph.

Braden J. Kim

Plana has recent­ly raised fur­ther invest­ment of USD8.3 mil­lion bring­ing the total close to USD10 mil­lion, eas­i­ly suf­fi­cient to con­struct a half-scale pro­to­type. The con­cept air­craft has a dif­fer­ent look to oth­er air taxis.

newatlas.com writes, “Its long, thin fuse­lage sweeps out into an upper main wing, and a knife-thin pair of canards extend from low­er down the main tube up front. The propul­sion sys­tem is a full vec­tored thrust design, using large, tilt­ing five-blade elec­tric props.”

And con­tin­ues, “Two are mount­ed to the canards, two at the out­er front edges of the main wing, and the third pair sit clos­er to the fuse­lage on the trail­ing edge of the main wing, mak­ing the over­all lay­out in hov­er mode some­thing akin to a hexa­copter.”

The web­site fur­ther states, “The rear two props tilt down­ward for VTOL oper­a­tions, while the rest tilt upward. That’s because they’re con­fig­ured as push­er props for cruise mode; if they tilt upwards like the oth­ers, they’d have to reverse their rota­tion dur­ing the tran­si­tion to cruise flight.”

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newat­las points out the dan­gers of such a posi­tioned rotor sys­tem explain­ing, “It places these large props right at a per­son-minc­ing height on the ground. Plana does­n’t seem too con­cerned; the front canard props will be chest-high slicer-dicers as well by the looks of things. So I guess we’d best bud­get for some nice stripey yel­low lines on the ver­ti­pad.”

As a large hybrid-pow­ered, long-range, high-speed design, the Plana air­craft could become a strong region­al air­craft con­tender, although a lit­tle behind its com­peti­tors giv­en a demon­stra­tor is only planned for 2024 and a ful­ly cer­ti­fied craft by 2028.

At least, Plana is off to a sol­id start with a 40-per­son team, but a lot more invest­ment is required to bring this air­craft to full cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and the eVTOL mar­ket.

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(News Source: https://newatlas.com/)

(Pics: Plana)

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