Bellwether Industries reveals Oryx — its new generation flying car model

Lon­don-based urban air mobil­i­ty com­pa­ny Bell­wether Indus­tries has today intro­duced its Oryx eVTOL air­craft, said to be a third-gen­er­a­tion air­craft mod­el design with a new air­frame.

Oryx is ini­tial­ly sized to car­ry one pilot and two pas­sen­gers, but will car­ry up to four pas­sen­gers in future, retain­ing the key fea­ture of its volar hid­den propul­sion sys­tem and esti­mat­ed at 6.2 metres in length and 3.8 metres in width, slight­ly big­ger than an SUV car.

It will be capa­ble of com­plet­ing a jour­ney from Heathrow Air­port to Canary Wharf, which takes 50 to 100 min­utes by car, with­in eight min­utes at a cruise speed of 140 kilo­me­tres per hour.

Bell­wether senior direc­tor of mobil­i­ty and strat­e­gy, Vidyut Jacob, said: “Oryx is one step ahead in the jour­ney to the ulti­mate goal of real­is­ing the poten­tial of volar propul­sion, which will focus on city com­pat­i­bil­i­ty.”

Volar has a hid­den propul­sion sys­tem and the abil­i­ty to take off and land ver­ti­cal­ly. Bellwether’s team chal­lenged the stereo­type of an air­craft with fixed wings or exter­nal pro­pellers, and has been carv­ing a con­trast­ing path since the orig­i­nal hov­er­craft mod­el Gazelle in 2015.

Bell­wether founder and CEO, Daniel Chen, added: “The design for fly­ing cars has been explored for over a cen­tu­ry. The expe­ri­ence and cur­rent tech­nolo­gies in avi­a­tion are a crit­i­cal foun­da­tion with­out fear of inno­va­tion.”

The cur­rent air­frame design is claimed to secure improve­ments in flight effi­cien­cy and con­trol to sus­tain sta­ble per­for­mance for Oryx, with addi­tion­al lift gen­er­a­tion pro­long­ing the flight dura­tion by using mul­ti­ple con­trol sur­faces.

Bell­wether expects that Oryx volar propul­sion can cope with a com­pli­cat­ed urban envi­ron­ment, and will debut in 2023 for the first time in Dubai with part­ners Ena­ta Aero­space and Inmarsat.

In May, Bell­wether Indus­tries col­lab­o­rat­ed with Inmarsat to explore how satel­lite com­mu­ni­ca­tions can opti­mise the future of intra-city trans­porta­tion ser­vices, with a focus on safe­ty, reg­u­la­tion and inno­va­tion.

Bell­wether Indus­tries joins Inmarsat’s Velaris net­work to ensure safe intra-city trav­el for urban air mobil­i­ty

In Octo­ber 2021, Bell­wether Indus­tries dis­played a pro­to­type of its VTOL tech­nol­o­gy demon­stra­tor for the first time at DroneX, the UK’s largest event ded­i­cat­ed to UAV prod­ucts, parts, acces­sories and ser­vices.

Bell­wether Indus­tries to present its pri­vate urban air­craft for the first time at DroneX