EHang receives long-term trial flight permit to test eVTOL aircraft in Austrian airspace

EHang has moved a step clos­er to intro­duc­ing com­mer­cial oper­a­tions of its flag­ship 216 eVTOL AAV in Europe, after the com­pa­ny was issued with a tri­al flight per­mit to con­duct unmanned flights in Aus­tri­a’s nation­al air­space.

The per­mit, which was grant­ed on Decem­ber 9th, is also the first flight per­mit for EHang’s pas­sen­ger-grade AAVs with­in the Euro­pean Union. As well as rep­re­sent­ing anoth­er impor­tant reg­u­la­to­ry break­through, the mile­stone also sup­ports EHang’s con­tin­ued growth on the con­ti­nent.

As part of the process, a test flight occurred in Novem­ber 2020 which was also the first in open EASA air­space. After a Spe­cif­ic Oper­a­tional Risk Assess­ment (SORA) pro­ce­dure, a 216 AAV took off in St. Mar­tin im Innkreis, in the province of Upper Aus­tria.

The per­mit was obtained togeth­er with EHang’s strate­gic part­ner FACC AG, with tech­ni­cal experts from both com­pa­nies work­ing with nation­al reg­u­la­tors to meet the nation­al and Euro­pean require­ments. 

Under the super­vi­sion of the Civ­il Avi­a­tion Author­i­ty, the unmanned air­craft took off for sev­er­al min­utes via auto­mat­ic flight pro­gram­ming and then safe­ly land­ed, despite the cold weath­er con­di­tions and high wind speeds. 

This lat­est news fol­lows on from EHang’s announce­ment ear­li­er this year that it had entered a part­ner­ship with both FACC and Linz AG to help estab­lish Linz — Aus­tri­a’s third largest city — into a pilot Urban Air Mobil­i­ty city.

While 5G infra­struc­ture is cur­rent­ly avail­able to ensure real-time com­mu­ni­ca­tion for nav­i­ga­tion dur­ing flight and land­ing, the part­ner­ship will also look at deter­min­ing a suit­able test­ing route over unin­hab­it­ed areas to ver­ti­ports with­in the city. While con­struc­tion is planned for 2021, tri­al flights are planned in the near future.

In the course of the test flights, var­i­ous aspects will be care­ful­ly stud­ied includ­ing the prac­ti­cal­i­ty of imple­men­ta­tion in urban areas, accep­tance by the pop­u­lace and the expect­ed pos­i­tive impact on the envi­ron­ment.