China: “ET9 eVTOL Prototype’s Maiden Flight Signals Nanjing’s Low-Altitude Progress”

Chi­na remains a dark horse when it comes to the eVTOL indus­try. Just when you think you know all of the dif­fer­ent Chi­nese com­pa­nies involved in the UAM indus­try anoth­er pops out of the wood­work.

Thanks to some excel­lent research work by Cana­di­an jour­nal­ist, Jen­nifer Meszaros, who works for the Air Cur­rent amongst oth­er pub­li­ca­tions, her fea­ture about the com­pa­ny was first pub­lished in APAC Avi­a­tion Insights ear­li­er this month and was then picked up by medium.com this week.

The com­pa­ny is EVT Aerotech­nics, who reached a mile­stone on March 31st with a suc­cess­ful maid­en flight of its self-devel­oped pro­to­type eVTOL called the ET9. The com­pa­ny plans to con­tin­ue with its test flights and pro­ceed towards the air­wor­thi­ness ver­i­fi­ca­tion phase.

Found­ed in Jan­u­ary 2022 and based in Yuhu­atai, one of 11 dis­tricts of Nan­jing and the cap­i­tal of Jiang­su province, EVT is present­ly focused on the R&D devel­op­ment of its air­craft.

Jen­nifer Meszaros (Cred­it: Air Cur­rent)

Meszaros writes, “The company’s founders and tech­ni­cal team have col­lab­o­rat­ed for a decade, design­ing and devel­op­ing var­i­ous air­craft mod­els, along with sev­er­al large and medi­um-sized drones. Air­craft include the Shaanxi Y‑8 medi­um-range trans­port plane pro­duced by Shaanxi Air­craft Cor­po­ra­tion, as well as COMAC’s ARJ21 region­al jet and the C919 nar­row-body air­lin­er.”

She con­tin­ues, “Regard­ing ET9 specs, the eVTOL air­craft boasts a take-off weight of 2200 kg, capa­ble of car­ry­ing up to 5 peo­ple or 500 kg and fea­tures a quad­copter-eight pro­peller com­pound wing con­fig­u­ra­tion. With a max­i­mum range of 240 kilo­me­tres and a top speed of over 200 kilo­me­tres per hour, the ET9 suits var­i­ous appli­ca­tions like high-fre­quen­cy freight trans­porta­tion, spe­cialised tourism, emer­gency res­cue oper­a­tions and urban air trav­el.”

EVT Aerotech­nics Team

Air­frame man­u­fac­tur­ing is car­ried out in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Ling­hang Com­pos­ites, a sub­sidiary of the state-owned Avi­a­tion Indus­try Cor­po­ra­tion of Chi­na (AVIC) and whol­ly owned by its affil­i­ate Chi­na Avi­a­tion Indus­try Gen­er­al Air­craft.

Meszaros explains that EVT Aerotech­nics has also devel­oped a low-alti­tude com­put­ing mod­el, a 3D sim­u­la­tion plat­form and a com­pre­hen­sive low-alti­tude sit­u­a­tion plat­form. These tools gath­er mete­o­ro­log­i­cal, geo­graph­i­cal, his­tor­i­cal and envi­ron­men­tal data for var­i­ous appli­ca­tions and air­space clas­si­fi­ca­tions.

Using this data, the plat­form can mon­i­tor var­i­ous ele­ments such as three-dimen­sion­al envi­ron­ments, alerts, low-alti­tude equip­ment, flight requests, and juris­dic­tion­al infor­ma­tion. It enables online con­trol and mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the flight sta­tus of aer­i­al vehi­cles, typ­i­cal­ly fol­low­ing pre­set routes to avoid air traf­fic con­ges­tion and enhance trav­el effi­cien­cy. More­over, dur­ing oper­a­tions, the plat­form can inter­vene by rerout­ing or land­ing eVTOL and drones if there are obsta­cles or safe­ty con­cerns along the route, pre­vent­ing poten­tial acci­dents.

The com­pa­ny aims for its pri­ma­ry prod­ucts to hit the mar­ket no lat­er than 2027.

(Top image: ET9’s Maid­en Flight)

(Images cred­it: EVT Aerotech­nics)

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