Airbus Helicopters pioneers use of single-stick HMI to fly eVTOLs

Air­bus Heli­copters’ demon­stra­tor Flight­Lab has suc­cess­ful­ly test­ed an elec­tric flight con­trol sys­tem in prepa­ra­tion of a new human machine inter­face (HMI) that will equip CityAir­bus NextGen, Air­bus’ eVTOL pro­to­type.

The pilot con­trols have been con­sid­er­ably sim­pli­fied thanks to the enhanced pilot­ing assis­tance pro­vid­ed by the elec­tric flight con­trol sys­tem. Mark­ing a ‘first in the heli­copter indus­try’, one sin­gle pilot­ing stick replaces the three con­ven­tion­al pilot con­trols — cyclic, ped­als, col­lec­tive — and is able to con­trol all air­craft axes.

Using the sin­gle stick, the pilot is able to per­form take-off & land­ing, climb, descent, accel­er­a­tion, decel­er­a­tion, turn and approach, while tak­ing up less space and offer­ing improved vis­i­bil­i­ty to the pilot, com­bined with a revised HMI which uses sim­ple dis­plays that pro­vide a selec­tion of infor­ma­tion specif­i­cal­ly tai­lored to eVTOLs.

“From the start, we designed this sys­tem con­sid­er­ing every cer­ti­fi­ca­tion para­me­ter in mind as it will be a big step for­ward in val­i­dat­ing the design of our urban air mobil­i­ty eVTOL, CityAir­bus NextGen,” said Tomasz Kry­sisn­ki, head of research & inno­va­tion at Air­bus Heli­copters.

“The advan­tage of an elec­tric flight con­trol sys­tem is enor­mous, espe­cial­ly when it comes to reduc­ing pilot work­load and ulti­mate­ly enhanc­ing mis­sion safe­ty. It is also a great exam­ple of how our demon­stra­tors are used to mature the tech­no-bricks nec­es­sary to pre­pare the future of ver­ti­cal flight.”

After the suc­cess of the flight test cam­paign, Air­bus Heli­copters is work­ing on final­is­ing the details of this new sys­tem before new tests are con­duct­ed in the frame­work of Ver­tex, a project con­duct­ed in part­ner­ship with Air­bus UpNext that will advance auton­o­my even fur­ther by man­ag­ing nav­i­ga­tion and sim­pli­fy­ing mis­sion prepa­ra­tion.

Air­bus has been one of the pio­neers in explor­ing how elec­tric propul­sion can help dri­ve the devel­op­ment of new kinds of aer­i­al vehi­cles. Air­bus is devel­op­ing an advanced air mobil­i­ty solu­tion with eVTOLs, not only to offer a new mobil­i­ty ser­vice, but also as an impor­tant step in its mis­sion to reduce emis­sions in avi­a­tion across its prod­uct range.

In Sep­tem­ber 2021, the com­pa­ny unveiled its ful­ly elec­tric eVTOL pro­to­type, CityAir­bus NextGen.

Air­bus reveals next gen of its CityAir­bus eVTOL air­craft at company’s first Air­bus­Sum­mit