Electra Tests Ultra Short Aircraft at Commercial Airports Using Helicopter-Style Procedures

Elec­tra has com­plet­ed a series of flight tests in Vir­ginia demon­strat­ing how its fixed-wing Ultra Short air­craft could oper­ate from heli­ports and oth­er non-run­way access points at com­mer­cial air­ports.

The tests used Electra’s hybrid-elec­tric EL2 tech­nol­o­gy demon­stra­tor as part of the Vir­ginia Smart Air­space flight test cam­paign under the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Administration’s eVTOL and Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty Inte­gra­tion Pilot Pro­gram (eIPP).

Flights were con­duct­ed at sev­er­al Vir­ginia loca­tions, includ­ing Roanoke–Blacksburg Region­al Air­port, Vir­ginia Tech/Montgomery Region­al Air­port and Allan C. Perkinson/Blackstone Army Air­field. The air­craft also oper­at­ed from sites in New­port News and Rich­mond.

Rather than using con­ven­tion­al air­port run­ways, the EL2 took off and land­ed from small heli­ports, ver­ti­ports, taxi­ways and oth­er access points. Elec­tra and its part­ners test­ed point-in-space approach­es and ded­i­cat­ed instru­ment routes designed around the aircraft’s short take-off and land­ing capa­bil­i­ties.

The com­pa­ny said the test­ing is intend­ed to sup­port future oper­a­tions of its larg­er EL9 air­craft and pro­vide data for inte­grat­ing fixed-wing AAM air­craft into the US Nation­al Air­space Sys­tem.

The Vir­ginia Smart Air­space pro­gramme has been devel­op­ing instru­ment pro­ce­dures and air traf­fic con­cepts for air­craft with per­for­mance char­ac­ter­is­tics that dif­fer from con­ven­tion­al fixed-wing air­craft. Over more than a year of prepa­ra­tion, pro­gramme part­ners and the FAA worked on approach­es and depar­ture pro­ce­dures for heli­ports and ver­ti­ports, as well as meth­ods for allow­ing Ultra Short air­craft to oper­ate from areas away from con­ven­tion­al run­ways.

Dur­ing the lat­est flights, Elec­tra and its part­ners col­lect­ed oper­a­tional data to assess air­craft per­for­mance against the pro­ce­dures and exam­ine how heli­copter-style instru­ment oper­a­tions could be applied to fixed-wing AAM air­craft.

The tests involved the FAA, Vir­ginia Tech, the Vir­ginia Depart­ment of Avi­a­tion and Pen­nDOT, which is lead­ing Virginia’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the eIPP.

Elec­tra said the work could pro­vide a basis for future guid­ance on oper­at­ing Ultra Short air­craft at com­mer­cial air­ports and oth­er access points. Its planned EL9 is designed around short-field and ver­ti­cal-flight capa­bil­i­ties intend­ed to pro­vide access clos­er to pop­u­la­tion cen­tres with­out rely­ing sole­ly on con­ven­tion­al air­port infra­struc­ture.

Thomas Sleightholm

Thomas is a con­tent writer for eVTOL Insights, cov­er­ing all aspects of the glob­al Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty ecosys­tem. Got a sto­ry for him? Please send an email to editorial@evtolinsights.com

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