Bellwether Industries increases industry presence and prepares to bring its private urban aircraft to Dubai Air Show

Urban air mobil­i­ty com­pa­ny Bell­wether Indus­tries has today announced it will be attend­ing this year’s Dubai Air Show, where it will dis­play anoth­er work­ing pro­to­type of its pri­vate urban air­craft, the Ante­lope. The start­up has recent­ly come out of stealth mode and attend­ed DroneX and the AIRTAXI World Con­gress ear­li­er this month. 

Bell­wether is now begin­ning to show­case its vision at these events, where it wants to help break the bound­aries of what peo­ple think about air­craft and lead the world towards com­pre­hen­sive urban air mobil­i­ty. This will incor­po­rate its air­craft, an air trans­port sys­tem and infra­struc­ture.

The pro­to­type being dis­played at the Dubai Air Show, which takes place from 14th-18th Novem­ber, will be the first time it has been shown to the pub­lic. It fea­tures a dif­fer­ent colour­way and will have bet­ter con­trol capa­bil­i­ties and struc­tur­al opti­mi­sa­tion.

The event will fea­ture mil­i­tary and civ­il del­e­gates from more than 96 coun­tries, as well as hav­ing more than 50 hours of thought lead­er­ship con­tent across car­go, sus­tain­abil­i­ty, air traf­fic man­age­ment and aer­i­al mobil­i­ty.

Includ­ed in the line-up of speak­ers is Kai-Tse Lin, Bellwether’s co-founder and Chief of Oper­a­tions, who will be part of a pan­el enti­tled ‘Invest­ing in the future of sus­tain­able autonomous flight’. It is from 10.50am to 11.30am on Novem­ber 17th and will dis­cuss how com­pa­nies can cap­i­talise on drone tech­nol­o­gy, cal­cu­late ROI and accel­er­ate invest­ment in air-mobil­i­ty infra­struc­ture to sup­port drone devel­op­ment.

Kai-Tse said: “This year has been an extreme­ly busy one for Bell­wether Indus­tries, but we can’t wait to meet more peo­ple at the Dubai Air Show and tell them about our progress and future plans. We received fan­tas­tic feed­back from both DroneX and the AIRTAXI World Con­gress, so we’re real­ly excit­ed to be attend­ing anoth­er impor­tant indus­try event.”

Ini­ti­at­ed in 2013, Bell­wether Indus­tries ini­tial­ly began devel­op­ing a hov­er­craft project known as Gazelle, which was put on dis­play at YODEX, Taipei, Tai­wan, in 2015. In 2018, the com­pa­ny start­ed work on Project Ante­lope — its ver­ti­cal take-off and land­ing vehi­cle known as a ‘volar’.

Volar is defined as a new cat­e­go­ry of pri­vate urban air­craft for intra-city trav­el, which has a hid­den propul­sion sys­tem, a very com­pact pro­file, a lift­ing body and the abil­i­ty to take off and land ver­ti­cal­ly. It is being tai­lored for trans­port­ing pas­sen­gers into the cities, with deep con­sid­er­a­tions for safe­ty and envi­ron­men­tal impact. 

Bell­wether Indus­tries has already com­plet­ed mul­ti­ple test flights of its pro­to­types since last year, which mon­i­tored con­trol capa­bil­i­ties. It will reveal a new gen­er­a­tion of its volar mod­el next year and plans to bring the first com­mer­cial mod­el to mar­ket by 2028.

Bell­wether Indus­tries will be on stand num­ber V20A in the Vista Start­up Hub sec­tion of the Dubai Air Show. For more infor­ma­tion, vis­it www.bellwether-industries.com