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

Air­bus has announced plans for a new CityAir­bus eVTOL air­craft, which was revealed at the company’s first Air­bus­Sum­mit on ‘Pio­neer­ing Sus­tain­able Aero­space’ today (Tues­day).

Ush­er­ing in the next gen­er­a­tion of CityAir­bus, the ful­ly-elec­tric vehi­cle is equipped with fixed wings, a V‑shaped tail, and eight elec­tri­cal­ly pow­ered pro­pellers as part of its unique­ly designed dis­trib­uted propul­sion sys­tem. It is designed to car­ry up to four pas­sen­gers in a zero emis­sions flight in mul­ti­ple appli­ca­tions.  

CityAir­bus is being devel­oped to fly with a 80 km range and to reach a cruise speed of 120 km/h, mak­ing it per­fect­ly suit­ed for oper­a­tions in major cities for a vari­ety of mis­sions.  

Bruno Even, Air­bus Heli­copters CEO, said: “We are on a quest to co-cre­ate an entire­ly new mar­ket that sus­tain­ably inte­grates urban air mobil­i­ty into the cities while address­ing envi­ron­men­tal and social con­cerns.

“Air­bus is con­vinced that the real chal­lenges are as much about urban inte­gra­tion, pub­lic accep­tance, and auto­mat­ed air traf­fic man­age­ment, as about vehi­cle tech­nol­o­gy and busi­ness mod­els. We build on all of the capa­bil­i­ties to deliv­er a safe, sus­tain­able, and ful­ly inte­grat­ed ser­vice to soci­ety.”

The com­pa­ny’s exten­sive exper­tise in noise-friend­ly designs is dri­ving CityAir­bus’ sound lev­els below 65 dB(A) dur­ing fly-over and below 70 dB(A) dur­ing land­ing. It is opti­mised for hov­er and cruise effi­cien­cy, while not requir­ing mov­ing sur­faces or tilt­ing parts dur­ing tran­si­tion.

The CityAir­bus NextGen meets the high­est cer­ti­fi­ca­tion stan­dards (EASA SC-VTOL Enhanced Cat­e­go­ry). Designed with sim­plic­i­ty in mind, Air­bus has said the air­craft will offer best-in-class eco­nom­ic per­for­mance in oper­a­tions and sup­port.

Even added: “We have learned a lot from the test cam­paigns with our two demon­stra­tors, CityAir­bus and Vahana. The CityAir­bus NextGen com­bines the best from both worlds with the new archi­tec­ture strik­ing the right bal­ance between hov­er and for­ward flight. The pro­to­type is paving the way for cer­ti­fi­ca­tion expect­ed around 2025.”

Air­bus is ben­e­fit­ting from years of ded­i­cat­ed research and inno­va­tion, two eVTOL air­craft demon­stra­tors and devel­op­ment on sound tech­nol­o­gy across its port­fo­lio of prod­ucts, as well as decades of expe­ri­ence in cer­ti­fy­ing air­craft.

The Vahana and CityAir­bus demon­stra­tors have joint­ly con­duct­ed 242 flight and ground tests and have flown around 1,000 km in total.

Addi­tion­al­ly, Air­bus has used exten­sive sub-scale flight test­ing and wind tun­nel cam­paigns and lever­aged its com­put­ing and mod­el­ling pow­er. CityAir­bus NextGen is in a detailed design phase right now and the prototype’s first flight is planned for 2023.