FeaturedNews

Watch Video: China’s Vertaxi eVTOL on Display at Shanghai’s 6th China International Import Expo

Anoth­er Chi­nese Inter­na­tion­al Event, anoth­er new Chi­nese eVTOL on dis­play, this time the Ver­taxi Matrix 1.

Found­ed in 2021, Ver­taxi is based in Zhuhai, Guang­dong and devel­ops both manned and unmanned eVTOL Air­craft for pas­sen­gers and air car­go. By Feb­ru­ary of this year, the com­pa­ny had raised USD22 mil­lion and a few months lat­er, unveiled its first full-scale pro­to­type of the Matrix 1 (M1), along­side detailed plans to enter the mar­ket first with an uncrewed car­go ver­sion. The M1 recent­ly car­ried out its first suc­cess­ful tri­al flight (see video). It is this air­craft on dis­play at the Expo.

Assem­bled at the company’s Jin­shan unmanned air­craft test site on the out­skirts of Shang­hai, the M1 is a 4,400-lb gross-weight lift-plus-cruise eVTOL air­craft with a wingspan of 49 ft. The craft has four wing booms car­ry­ing 16 lift rotors for ver­ti­cal flight and four pro­pellers for wing-borne cruise flight. There are 20 elec­tric motors. The tail con­nects the booms to the rear fuse­lage. The air­craft has a flat-floor cab­in that can accom­mo­date up to 32 stan­dard postal box­es.

The air­craft’s esti­mat­ed cruise speed is 123 mph with a range of 155 miles. It has a max­i­mum pay­load weight of 1,102 lb. The craft has six­teen VTOL pro­pellers and four for­ward flight ones with all pro­pellers locat­ed on two booms.

Ver­taxi M1 in Flight (graph­ic image)

Please Watch Video

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2023–11-04/Ready-to-take-an-air-taxi–1orUXRudSY8/index.html

In recent months, the pro­to­type has been ground test­ing at Jin­shan. After cer­ti­fy­ing the M1 for the car­go mar­ket, the company’s aim is to select suit­able rur­al and remote loca­tions such as islands and moun­tain­ous regions to begin tri­al oper­a­tions and start accu­mu­lat­ing oper­a­tional expe­ri­ence and data.

The start­up empha­sis­es it is pur­su­ing a devel­op­ment path of “sub­urbs before cities, objects before peo­ple, iso­la­tion before inte­gra­tion.” This begins with the uncrewed car­go con­fig­u­ra­tion, grad­u­al­ly tran­si­tion­ing to crewed oper­a­tion, before final­ly apply­ing the air­craft to pas­sen­ger-car­ry­ing UAM ser­vices. 

After EHang gained Type Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion in Octo­ber and is close to begin­ning com­mer­cial oper­a­tions, all eyes are on Chi­na with a num­ber of oth­er eVTOLs,  apart from Ver­taxi, emerg­ing. These include Aut­oFlight, AeroFu­gia, TCab, Xpeng Aero­HT, Volant AeroTech and Volk­swa­gen Group Chi­na V.MO Fly­ing Tiger.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.vertaxi.com/

(Images: Ver­taxi)

eVTOL Insights is part of the Industry Insights Group. Registered in the UK. Company No: 14395769