China’s Pantuo Aviation latest eVTOL company to win iF Award 2023 for its Pantala Concept H

Pan­tuo Avi­a­tion and stu­diokur­bos have been announced as win­ners of the pres­ti­gious iF Design Award 2023 for their Pan­ta­la Con­cept H in the dis­ci­pline Pro­fes­sion­al Con­cept, in the cat­e­go­ry Prod­uct Con­cepts.

The Pan­ta­la Con­cept H stood out among almost 11,000 entries from 56 coun­tries, impress­ing the 133-mem­ber jury of inde­pen­dent experts with its con­fig­u­ra­tion. By tilt­ing the duct­ed fan wings, this eVTOL allows take-offs and land­ings in con­fined urban spaces.

Few duct­ed fan con­fig­u­ra­tions are seen in eVTOL design, not to men­tion a tilt-wing duct­ed fan con­fig­u­ra­tion, which makes it the first in civ­il avi­a­tion. This pro­vides safe­ty and low oper­at­ing noise to both pas­sen­gers and their sur­round­ings. At the same time, the advanced aero­dy­nam­ics shape allows it to fly faster and fur­ther as bat­tery tech­nol­o­gy evolves.

Pan­ta­la Con­cept H was released in Sep­tem­ber 2021 when Pan­tuo Avi­a­tion was devel­op­ing its half-scale tech­nol­o­gy T1 demon­stra­tor. In June 2022, the com­pa­ny shared a video of T1’s first flight.

T1 key tech­nolo­gies, such as bat­tery pack design, flight con­trol sys­tem and scal­able duct­ed fan wing were devel­oped in-house. The suc­cess of T1 not only ver­i­fies the fea­si­bil­i­ty of this con­fig­u­ra­tion, but also proves the team’s devel­op­ment capa­bil­i­ty.

The scaled-down tech­nol­o­gy demon­stra­tor pro­vides an oppor­tu­ni­ty for the team to push the bound­aries of tech­nol­o­gy with a frac­tion of the devel­op­ment bud­get, hav­ing suc­cess­ful­ly over­come count­less obsta­cles and chal­lenges.

This project has allowed them to gain a com­pre­hen­sive under­stand­ing of require­ment gen­er­a­tion, val­i­da­tion, and ver­i­fi­ca­tion, lay­ing the ground­work for expe­dit­ing the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process in the future.

“Pan­ta­la Con­cept H is a dis­rup­tive­ly inno­v­a­tive trans­porta­tion tool to rev­o­lu­tionise the way peo­ple trav­el. With indus­tri­al ecosys­tem sup­port and gov­ern­ment involve­ment, we are deter­mined to bring the future of mobil­i­ty to life,” said Pan­tuo Avi­a­tion founder and CEO Zhang.

As the world’s old­est inde­pen­dent design organ­i­sa­tion, Han­nover-based iF Inter­na­tion­al Forum Design GmbH has been organ­is­ing the iF Design Award for years, mak­ing this win a sig­nif­i­cant accom­plish­ment for Pan­tuo Avi­a­tion and stu­diokur­bos GmbH.

Last month, Plana announced that it won the Pro­fes­sion­al Con­cept cat­e­go­ry of the iF Design Awards held annu­al­ly in Ger­many and con­sid­ered one of the top three Design Awards glob­al­ly, along­side the Red Dot Design Award and IDEA.