Eve Air Mobility completes eVTOL wind tunnel testing

Eve Air Mobil­i­ty recent­ly com­plet­ed wind tun­nel test­ing near Lucerne, Switzer­land, with a scale mod­el of its eVTOL vehi­cle, which is pro­ject­ed to enter ser­vice in 2026.

Test­ing allows engi­neers to mon­i­tor the flow of air over and around the vehi­cle and each of its indi­vid­ual parts. It is also used to mea­sure the aero­dy­nam­ic forces and moments act­ing on the vehi­cle, allow­ing the team to eval­u­ate the vehicle’s lift, effi­cien­cy, fly­ing qual­i­ties and per­for­mance.

The main objec­tive of the test was to inves­ti­gate and val­i­date how com­po­nents includ­ing fuse­lage, rotors, wing, tail and oth­er sur­faces would per­form in flight. Wind tun­nel test­ing pro­vides a unique view of aero­dy­nam­ic behav­ior of com­plex geom­e­try and pro­vides a high­er lev­el of val­i­da­tion of design char­ac­ter­is­tics.

The tests are part of an effort to acquire exper­i­men­tal data to val­i­date pro­duc­tion solu­tions, devel­op­ment tools and mod­els which also includes oth­er test arti­cles such as fixed and mov­ing rigs, fly­ing vehi­cles and oth­er wind tun­nel tests.

“The com­ple­tion of wind tun­nel test­ing is an impor­tant engi­neer­ing mile­stone as we con­tin­ue the devel­op­ment of our eVTOL,” said Luiz Valen­ti­ni, chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer at Eve Air Mobil­i­ty.

“The infor­ma­tion we obtained dur­ing this phase of devel­op­ment has helped us fur­ther refine the tech­ni­cal solu­tions of our eVTOL before com­mit­ting to pro­duc­tion tool­ing and con­form­ing pro­to­types. Our goal is to design, pro­duce and cer­ti­fy an aero­dy­nam­ic and effi­cient eVTOL that will be used for a vari­ety of urban air mobil­i­ty mis­sions.”

Eve’s engi­neer­ing team will use the data gath­ered through wind tun­nel test­ing to con­tin­ue to devel­op the eVTOL’s con­trol laws lead­ing to opti­mal per­for­mance and pas­sen­ger com­fort.

Eve’s eVTOL is 100% elec­tric and has a range of 60 miles (100 kilo­me­ters) allow­ing it to com­plete a vari­ety of urban air mobil­i­ty mis­sions. Its human-cen­tered design ensures the safe­ty, acces­si­bil­i­ty and com­fort of pas­sen­gers, the pilot and the com­mu­ni­ty.

The air­craft fea­tures a lift + cruise con­fig­u­ra­tion with ded­i­cat­ed rotors for ver­ti­cal flight and fixed wings to fly on cruise, with no com­po­nents required to change posi­tion dur­ing flight. It will be pilot­ed at launch, but ready for autonomous oper­a­tions in the future.

In March, Fer­rovial Ver­ti­ports and Eve Air Mobil­i­ty agreed to part­ner to devel­op safe and reli­able oper­a­tion of ver­ti­ports and eVTOLs.