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“Airbus Pauses Plan to Bring NextGen eVTOL Aircraft to Market”

Air­bus sur­prised the avi­a­tion indus­try this week, after a brief­ing to jour­nal­ists stat­ing the com­pa­ny has pressed the pause but­ton on bring­ing its NextGen eVTOL to mar­ket. The announce­ment was made dur­ing news that sales of their con­ven­tion­al heli­copters had increased dur­ing 2024.

Bruno Even, CEO of Air­bus Heli­copters, told the assem­bled media, “We launched this (NextGen) pro­to­type four years ago with the objec­tive to be in posi­tion to launch a new pro­gram before the end of the decade. It has been instru­men­tal in advanc­ing our under­stand­ing of tech­nolo­gies which are not only rel­e­vant for the urban air mobil­i­ty mar­ket, but for all our port­fo­lio.”

He con­tin­ued, “At the same time, we see today — and that is the result of the strate­gic review that we per­formed at the end of last year — that the con­di­tions to launch such a pro­gram are not nec­es­sar­i­ly there.” 

The Euro­pean aero­space group is defer­ring plans for a com­mer­cial launch fol­low­ing a rethink of both the busi­ness case and tech­nol­o­gy require­ments. Air­bus had pre­vi­ous­ly indi­cat­ed, it had aims to bring the four-pas­sen­ger eVTOL air­craft into com­mer­cial ser­vice by 2030.

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Yet, Even point­ed out that Air­bus remains com­mit­ted to avi­a­tion progress. “We are con­vinced that inno­va­tion is always the best way to con­tin­ue bring­ing val­ue to our cus­tomers.”

The rea­sons for the delay are var­ied, in par­tic­u­lar, the present bat­tery tech­nol­o­gy. The Air­bus CEO explained, “The con­di­tion to launch a new pro­gram, from the tech­nol­o­gy side, is to be able to per­form the mis­sion. The min­i­mum lev­el of our per­for­mance is to trans­port (pas­sen­gers) for up to 100 kilo­me­tres. There­fore, it’s real­ly down to the bat­tery.”

While some tri­al flights with the first CityAir­bus pro­to­type are to be made this year at the company’s Donauwörth facil­i­ty in Ger­many, oth­er pro­grams will be sus­pend­ed. Although, work con­tin­ues with the company’s three research vehi­cles, Demon­stra­tor­Lab, Pio­neer­Lab and Dis­rup­tive­Lab.

Even point­ed out, “The urban air mobil­i­ty econ­o­my and launch of a new pro­gram depend on many fac­tors like reg­u­la­tion, matu­ri­ty of the busi­ness mod­el, as well as tech­nol­o­gy matu­ri­ty. We con­sid­er some of these need to evolve first before we’re in a posi­tion to launch.”

Bruno Even

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.airbus.com/en/innovation/energy-transition/hybrid-and-electric-flight/cityairbus-nextgen

(Top image: NextGen eVTOL — Cred­it: Air­bus)

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