Aviation Safety Resources and AUTOFLUG to work on developing safety systems for eVTOL aircraft and UAVs

Avi­a­tion Safe­ty Resources (ASR) and AUTOFLUG have signed a coop­er­a­tion agree­ment which will look at devel­op­ing enhanced safe­ty sys­tems for unmanned aer­i­al vehi­cles and eVTOL air­craft.

The agree­ment, which was signed vir­tu­al­ly last week, will also look to help increase pub­lic accep­tance with the com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion of inte­grat­ed emer­gency-recov­ery-and-res­cue sys­tems. This will com­bine indi­vid­ual com­po­nents such as para­chute recov­ery sys­tems, crash resis­tant seat and har­ness sys­tems, cab­in struc­ture and land­ing gear to ensure max­i­mum safe­ty for pas­sen­gers in the air­craft.

Lar­ry Williams, pres­i­dent and CEO of Avi­a­tion Safe­ty Resources, said: “Our goal is to pro­vide a ful­ly inte­grat­ed safe­ty solu­tion. It’s not a ques­tion of whether acci­dents will occur in this devel­op­ing AAM mar­ket, but how seri­ous they will be.

“Fatal­i­ties, espe­cial­ly in the ear­ly stages will not only have an extreme­ly neg­a­tive impact on pub­lic accep­tance, but can also set back the devel­op­ment of the entire mar­ket by years and dev­as­tate air­craft man­u­fac­tur­ers and oper­a­tors alike.

“By com­bin­ing the design and engi­neer­ing skills of ASR and AUTOFLUG, this cre­ates a vir­tu­al dream team as we all speak the same tech­ni­cal lan­guage and our prod­uct devel­op­ment goals are extreme­ly well aligned.”

Avi­a­tion Safe­ty Resources designs, tests, and pro­duces air­craft emer­gency para­chute recov­ery sys­tems. The team has been work­ing for many years on the safe recov­ery of air­craft in the event of an in-flight emer­gency. This involves emer­gency recov­ery using para­chute sys­tems to bring air­craft safe­ly to the ground.

While AUTOFLUG has exten­sive expe­ri­ence in devel­op­ment of occu­pant safe­ty solu­tions. This includes crash-resis­tant safe­ty seat­ing sys­tems for air­planes, heli­copters and eVTOL air­craft that pro­tect pas­sen­gers to sur­vive in the event of a crash land­ing with forces of up to 30Gs.

Mar­tin Kroell, man­ag­ing part­ner at AUTOFLUG, said: “Many man­u­fac­tur­ers cur­rent­ly choose not to install a para­chute recov­ery sys­tem in their eVTOL because it increas­es the aircraft’s weight at the expense of range or pay­load.

“Yet numer­ous stud­ies show that pas­sen­gers are con­cerned about the safe­ty of an air taxi and would only board know­ing there was an over­all res­cue sys­tem installed in the event some­thing hap­pens in-flight. With our inte­grat­ed safe­ty sys­tem, it will even­tu­al­ly be pos­si­ble to save weight with­out sac­ri­fic­ing safe­ty. This will make it eas­i­er for our cus­tomers to decide on installing such a sys­tem and ulti­mate­ly give them a mar­ket advan­tage.

“We look for­ward to work­ing togeth­er and we see it as a great oppor­tu­ni­ty for both com­pa­nies to devel­op and mar­ket prod­ucts with a great pos­i­tive impact on the avi­a­tion indus­try.”

AUTOFLUG was announced as one of Volo­copter’s part­ners last year, where it will devel­op the pas­sen­ger seats for its VoloC­i­ty eVTOL air­craft. While Bye Aero­space has cho­sen ASR to work on para­chute safe­ty sys­tems for its eFlyer2 elec­tric air­craft.