“I am not much of an eVTOL fan, yet I am super excited talking to you about AutoFlight” (Omer Bar-Yohay, President of AutoFlight)

Dur­ing last week’s excel­lent three day Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety VTOL Sym­po­sium, held in Mesa, Ari­zona, where many of the lead­ing Indus­try play­ers attend­ed and spoke to a large pub­lic gath­er­ing about their lat­est com­pa­ny devel­op­ments, one such speak­er was Omer Bar-Yohay, Pres­i­dent of the Chi­na-based, Aut­oFlight.

Last Octo­ber, evtolinsights.com inter­viewed AutoFlight’s new CCO, Chad Cashin, who was full of praise for Bar-Yohay’s aero­nau­ti­cal exper­tise. He is the co-Founder and for­mer CEO of Evi­a­tion, who worked for 7 years on the company’s all-elec­tric nine-seat com­muter air­craft, Alice. It seemed only right to ‘vir­tu­al­ly watch’ and record his 25 minute talk.

Omer Bar-Yohay

Omer began with the com­ment, “I am not much of an eVTOL fan, but here I am, say­ing this at a Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety Sym­po­sium.” This caused a rip­ple of laugh­ter from the audi­ence. “But I am super hap­py and excit­ed to talk to you today about Aut­oFlight. We are a lead­ing play­er in the eVTOL indus­try, yet the com­pa­ny remains under the radar for many peo­ple.”

While much of the infor­ma­tion he then relayed is already in the pub­lic domain, what came over is his acute under­stand­ing of the com­plex­i­ties of not only devel­op­ing an eVTOL Air­craft from scratch, but how then to bring it to mar­ket.

For what makes Aut­oFlight such an impres­sive com­pa­ny, and this is dis­cussed in Cashin’s inter­view, is how it has its own eVTOL man­u­fac­tur­ing base already set-up in Chi­na, where costs are cheap­er than in the West. Few if any oth­er com­peti­tors hold this trump card. This places Aut­oFlight in a very strong posi­tion going for­ward.

Inter­view with AutoFlight’s New CCO Chad Cashin

Omer said he had spent eight years look­ing at var­i­ous eVTOL-relat­ed com­pa­nies. “I came across Aut­oFlight around 5 years ago,” he explained. “The com­pa­ny was the first to make me jump.” Omer empha­sised var­i­ous times just, “How hard it is to get those ducks in a row.” Adding, “There are so many pot­holes along the way.”

This includes cre­at­ing an eVTOL Air­craft to work in an air­space that allows pas­sen­gers or car­go to suc­cess­ful­ly and safe­ly fly from A to B; to be qui­et enough to be social­ly accept­able as a heli­copter replace­ment; obtain­ing full com­mer­cial cer­ti­fi­ca­tion from an air reg­u­la­tor; “And God for­bid!” he exclaimed, “It makes mon­ey.” Omer believes only Aut­oFlight present­ly ticks these box­es, espe­cial­ly the final one.

He told the audi­ence about AutoFlight’s Pros­per­i­ty 1 eVTOL and how far up the road its devel­op­ment has reached com­pared to a major­i­ty of the com­pe­ti­tion includ­ing over 150 flight tran­si­tions to date. Per­haps, one of the most impor­tant stages of any eVTOL devel­op­ment. Omer said, “It works and it flies real­ly well. We have many hun­dreds of fly­ing hours over a two year peri­od to prove this.” AutoFlight’s test area is locat­ed just out­side of Shang­hai, not far from pop­u­lat­ed areas, where the com­pa­ny “works hand in hand with the Chi­nese author­i­ties.”

Omer then touched on the sen­si­tive area of cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. He believes a new craft must be built from the ground up to meet the strin­gent require­ments, but point­ed out the dif­fi­cul­ties of the dis­crep­an­cy, a diver­si­ty, between EASA and the FAA over Part 27B.

In Europe, Aut­oFlight has cho­sen the EASA SC VTOL approach rather than the Part 21 17B. While he admit­ted this was a more dif­fi­cult route, where, he believes, there is an exces­sive high bar, “A pre­scribed list of things to do and achieve, makes it eas­i­er for the man­u­fac­tur­er to fol­low, as it is impor­tant to have a clear and trans­par­ent tar­get.” Mean­while, to add to the com­pli­ca­tions, the Chi­nese path to cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is dif­fer­ent to else­where.

Omer then returned to the man­u­fac­tur­ing side, explain­ing how Aut­oFlight makes its own air­frame, in an exist­ing facil­i­ty at Kun­sham, Jiang­su host­ing hun­dreds of employ­ees. The same facil­i­ty that is also build­ing drones (a major part of the com­pa­ny busi­ness) which over the years has pro­duced “tens of mil­lions of units.”

The motor and con­troller is man­u­fac­tured, along­side the sen­sor relay, test­ing of bat­ter­ies, propul­sion sys­tem etc. at Kun­shan (see dia­gram below). The actu­al flight con­trol holds a dif­fer­ent prob­lem and so the com­pa­ny builds two — one for Europe and anoth­er for Chi­na which are then inte­grat­ed sep­a­rate­ly. He admit­ted this is a “huge bur­den on the pro­gram”, but being able to build most things in-house “makes it all worth­while.”

After men­tion­ing the busi­ness expe­ri­ence of AutoFlight’s lead­ers as well as its investors, he returned to Chi­na and the dete­ri­o­rat­ing geopol­i­tics. Omer remarked, “If we want to scale the eVTOL indus­try glob­al­ly longterm, say over a 20 year hori­zon, if we still have sim­i­lar geopo­lit­i­cal prob­lems then, I find this a depress­ing view. So I think more opti­misti­cal­ly.”

Omer swift­ly returned to Europe and high­light­ed the company’s HQ at Augs­burg. “We are mov­ing the com­pa­ny cen­tre of grav­i­ty to here. We feel this is the place where we need to be right now.”

He was crit­i­cal of AutoFlight’s com­peti­tors cre­at­ing part­ner­ships with the auto­mo­tive indus­try. “Just because you do a deal with a major car man­u­fac­tur­er, this is a mis­un­der­stand­ing of the avi­a­tion indus­try. It doesn’t work that way. Of course, it is great to have tons of mon­ey and the man­u­fac­tur­ing expe­ri­ence behind you, but this needs to be avi­a­tion expe­ri­ence. They are two very dif­fer­ent things.”

Again, he stat­ed how impor­tant it is to have the man­u­fac­tur­ing oper­a­tion already set-up before going to mar­ket. “Play­ers who have sort­ed them­selves out cor­rect­ly lead­ing up to cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and, more impor­tant­ly, have cre­at­ed a pro­duc­tion sys­tem before going to mar­ket, are the ones who will sur­vive. For once the indus­try is off and run­ning, eVTOLs will ini­tial­ly replace heli­copters. They are qui­eter and safer and can fly clos­er to peo­ple.”

He then warned, “But there is a long road still to trav­el before eVTOLs become com­mon place in the skies. This lies beyond the niche of the Paris Olympics or the odd flight in Sin­ga­pore. It is beyond demon­stra­tions and the SPACs.”

Omer end­ed, “For the indus­try to scale up to the Jet­sons or Fifth Ele­ment vision, this will hap­pen, but not for a very long time.”

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.autoflight.com/en/

(images: AutoFlight/VFS)