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Airbus Unveils CityAirbus NextGen Prototype Ahead of Trial Campaign

Some might say, “bet­ter late than nev­er,” as Air­bus puts a mark­er down on the eVTOL indus­try this week after pre­sent­ing — with great fan­fare at its new test cen­tre in the town of Donauwörth, Ger­many — a pro­to­type of its elec­tric CityAir­bus NextGen. And to add spice to pro­ceed­ings a pro­vi­so: a promise of a maid­en flight lat­er this year. 

The two-tonne class CityAir­bus has “a lift and cruise” con­cept; a wing span of close to 12 metres; a flight range of 80 km; and a cruise speed of 120 km/h mak­ing it well-suit­ed for a vari­ety of oper­a­tions in major cities and sub­urbs.

The 10,700-sq. ft Donauwörth Cen­tre is part of Air­bus’ ongo­ing and long-term invest­ment in Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty (AAM), which will now be used for the remain­ing tri­als required before the prototype’s maid­en flight. These tests cov­er the elec­tric motors with their eight rotors as well as the aircraft’s oth­er sys­tems such as flight con­trols and avion­ics.

In fact, the inten­tion is for the Cen­tre to be ded­i­cat­ed to test­ing sys­tems for all of the manufacturer’s future eVTOL vehi­cles.

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Balk­iz Sar­i­han, Head of Urban Air Mobil­i­ty at Air­bus, com­ment­ed, “Rolling out CityAir­bus NextGen for the very first time is an impor­tant and real step that we are tak­ing towards Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty and our future prod­uct and mar­ket.”

The release states, “At the same time, Air­bus is expand­ing its glob­al net­work and part­ner­ships to cre­ate a unique ecosys­tem that will fos­ter a suc­cess­ful and viable AAM mar­ket. Air­bus recent­ly signed a part­ner­ship agree­ment with LCI, a lead­ing avi­a­tion com­pa­ny, to focus on the devel­op­ment of part­ner­ship sce­nar­ios and busi­ness mod­els in three core AAM areas: strat­e­gy, com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion and financ­ing.”

So, what has been the ini­tial reac­tion?

While the media has an array of new pho­tos as well as a three minute video to splash the inter­net, an imme­di­ate reac­tion on Youtube to the pro­to­type, for exam­ple, has not been favourable.

Solid1378 writes, “Why are the wings & fuse­lage so huge, com­pared to oth­er drone taxis?” Georgecerda6727 fol­lows this up, “It looks so bad. Seems like it only fits one per­son and has a foot­print the size of a larg­er plane. Why not just make a heli­copter at this point?” The­Mo­jo­jara even pooh-poohs the video, “Those 3 min­utes felt so long and bor­ing…” Only Yannlecadet485 gives it the thumbs up.

While the ini­tial tri­al phase will be remote­ly pilot­ed, Air­bus has been clear from the out­set that its plan is to enter the eVTOL mar­ket with a pilot­ed prod­uct. This flight test cam­paign will take place in par­al­lel with the devel­op­ment of tech­nolo­gies to be incor­po­rat­ed into the air­craft, such as the Mil­len­ni­um Sin­gle Stick Con­trol and Ver­tex Auton­o­my Sys­tem. 

Air­bus is also work­ing to devel­op a broad­er AAM ecosys­tem in dif­fer­ent glob­al regions, by sign­ing a num­ber of col­lab­o­ra­tions. 

Apart from LCI, these include agree­ments with Chilean oper­a­tor Eco­copter; Sau­di Arabia’s The Heli­copter Com­pa­ny; and Japan­ese oper­a­tor Hirata­gakuen. Air­bus has also part­nered with the Nor­we­gian Air Ambu­lance Foun­da­tion to explore the use of CityAir­bus NextGen for emer­gency med­ical ser­vices.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.airbus.com/en/innovation/low-carbon-aviation/urban-air-mobility/cityairbus-nextgen

(Images: CityAir­bus)

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