Frank Stephenson to design AutoFlight’s Prosperity I aircraft — final version to be unveiled later this year

It is the third eVTOL project over­seen by Frank Stephen­son Design, after the firm worked on designs for Archer and Lil­i­um. The final design of Pros­per­i­ty I set to be unveiled in Q3 of this year.

Stephenson’s role with Aut­oFlight involves the design of the inte­ri­or and exte­ri­or of the whole vehi­cle, with light weight­ing and lux­u­ry the fore­most con­sid­er­a­tion for future mobil­i­ty users.

Mark Robert Hen­ning, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor of Aut­oFlight Europe said: “Frank is one of the world’s most renowned and influ­en­tial design­ers of our time. His unique style is already evi­dent on Pros­per­i­ty I with its sleek, sculpt­ed, unclut­tered and dynam­ic feel that has been inspired by a nat­ur­al sense of flow and dynam­ics. It’s uplift­ing to work with him as we bring our vision of unlock­ing the skies for mass indi­vid­ual trans­porta­tion to life.”

With more than thir­ty years of exper­tise from world-lead­ing com­pa­nies includ­ing Fer­rari, Maserati and McLaren, BMW and MINI, Frank is known for a design phi­los­o­phy that blends art with sci­ence, whilst using the lat­est eco-friend­ly tech­nol­o­gy to shape the future of design mobil­i­ty.

The team at Frank Stephen­son Design includes world-renowned design­ers and pio­neer­ing inno­va­tors which are instru­men­tal in the recent upgrades for Pros­per­i­ty I.

Speak­ing about this announce­ment, Frank added: “Dur­ing my career, I’ve aspired to cre­ate vehi­cles that are effi­cient, safe, tech­ni­cal­ly bril­liant, and beau­ti­ful and I’m huge­ly excit­ed to now be apply­ing these prin­ci­ples to the eVTOL indus­try.

“The avi­a­tion land­scape is shift­ing, and we are on the cusp of enter­ing a new era where elec­tric air trans­porta­tion is afford­able and avail­able to every­body. The Aut­oFlight name is syn­ony­mous with sim­plic­i­ty, safe­ty, and effi­cien­cy. I’m delight­ed to be part of its fan­tas­tic team and join them on their inspir­ing jour­ney.”

The last 12 months have seen a series of mile­stones and sig­nif­i­cant devel­op­ments for Aut­oFlight. As well as a man­u­fac­tur­ing cen­tre in Chi­na, the com­pa­ny estab­lished a Euro­pean base in Augs­burg, Ger­many, appoint­ed Hen­ning as its Euro­pean Man­ag­ing Direc­tor and received a $100 mil­lion invest­ment from next-gen­er­a­tion mobil­i­ty investor Team Glob­al.

More recent­ly, Pros­per­i­ty I has had 105 sales to date — includ­ing a major com­mer­cial deal with EvFly — and is cur­rent­ly on its fourth pro­to­type. The vehi­cle suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed mul­ti­ple full-scale test flights last year and set a world record for the longest flight by an eVTOL air­craft on a sin­gle elec­tric charge in Feb­ru­ary of this year.

Pros­per­i­ty I has been built for trans­fers between parts of a city, air­port com­mutes, con­nect­ing two near­by cities or enabling trips to the coun­try­side while avoid­ing traf­fic on the ground.

When ready for com­mer­cial flight in 2026, it is expect­ed that a trip that takes an hour by car will be reduced to about 10 min­utes with Pros­per­i­ty I, whilst being safer and not much more expen­sive.