Indian startup ePlane reveals its eVTOL aircraft as it targets door-to-door city transport across Asia-Pacific region

The Asia-Pacif­ic region is regard­ed by many in the eVTOL air­craft indus­try to be a key mar­ket and looks set to be where the first com­mer­cial pas­sen­ger-car­ry­ing ser­vices launch in the near future.

With many com­pa­nies already vying to get a foothold in this lucra­tive mar­ket, one com­pa­ny from India is aim­ing to be one of them. ePlane is the brain­child of Pro­fes­sor Satya Chakravarthy and Pran­jal Mehta, with the busi­ness being set up at the Indi­an Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy (IIT) in Madras in 2019.

It is devel­op­ing an elec­tric fly­ing air taxi — called the e200 — which ePlane says can pro­vide ten times faster door-to-door trav­el at just 1.5x the price. The air­craft aims to replace lux­u­ry cars and heli­copters, as well as road taxis for a sim­i­lar price. Addi­tion­al­ly, the e200 is also tar­get­ing car­go and indus­tri­al use cas­es.

Speak­ing to eVTOL Insights, Mehta talked more about the back­ground behind set­ting up the com­pa­ny, the tech­ni­cal aspects of the e200 and the vision for the future.

He said: “We’re try­ing to build a com­pact taxi to enable door-to-door trav­el in cities. This is sort of a unique mis­sion because most of the oth­er com­pa­nies — which are doing fan­tas­tic work — are build­ing very large vehi­cles that will require a ver­ti­port or heli­pad. It’ll be like a bus ser­vice in the air; not nec­es­sar­i­ly a per­son­al door-to-door ser­vice or a ride-hail­ing Uber ser­vice.

“Satya has been teach­ing aero­space for 24 years and is a real expert. Dur­ing his time at IIT, he set up a $30 mil­lion com­bus­tion research cen­tre which is one of the largest of its kind in the world. Com­pa­nies such as GE Avi­a­tion have been doing work out of this cen­tre, but while this was going on, he realised the world was mov­ing towards an elec­tric future.

“We began talk­ing in 2017 to scope what elec­tric air­planes could do and realised they could­n’t trav­el very far; we could­n’t elec­tri­fy the Air­bus and Boe­ing’s of the world because bat­tery tech­nol­o­gy would­n’t allow us to do so. And if we were to devel­op an air­craft as small as a Cess­na, it still would­n’t trav­el very far.”

Mehta ini­tial­ly looked into set­ting up a heli­copter taxi ser­vice com­pa­ny in his home­town of Ben­galu­ru, to try and val­i­date whether peo­ple would want to fly in cities. He had a small amount of suc­cess, before decid­ing to build small­er, sub-scale ver­sions of the e200. Both him and Chakravarthy came up with a method of mak­ing extreme­ly com­pact planes which can still go long dis­tances.

“You have the wing­less designs like EHang and Volo­copter and the fixed-wing plus VTOL where the rotors aren’t tilt­ing, e.g. Wisk,” Mehta said. “Then you have the next gen­er­a­tion which is Joby Avi­a­tion and Archer tilt­ing the rotors. So we want­ed to see how we can avoid tilt­ing, giv­en that tilt­ing comes with a cer­ti­fi­ca­tion chal­lenge, and yet build some­thing that is not too big because in India, we have a large pop­u­la­tion den­si­ty. Space is a huge con­straint.

“So we said ‘hey, let’s build­ing some­thing that is extreme­ly com­pact, does not tilt yet gives you suf­fi­cient range.’ It’s about four metres wide, which coverts into six by six metres of land­ing space, and can go 200km with two pas­sen­gers. I don’t think there is a com­pa­ny in this mar­ket which is build­ing any­thing sim­i­lar.

“Even though we’re build­ing out of India, we’re not cre­at­ing some­thing which is a copy of what oth­er com­pa­nies are doing in the west­ern part of the world. Peo­ple usu­al­ly expect us to build a cheap­er ver­sion, but what we’re actu­al­ly doing is going fur­ther by inno­vat­ing on the tech­nol­o­gy and build­ing some­thing that suits the mar­ket.”

ePlane has said the idea of its ser­vice in India would be mak­ing 15km-20km trips across cities, which would offer com­muters a sus­tain­able option to ground trans­porta­tion — espe­cial­ly in a coun­try where its cities suf­fer from some of the world’s worst con­ges­tion. The com­pa­ny’s work­force has already tripled in size, with Mehta prais­ing Indi­a’s efforts in the aero­space indus­try and its cal­i­bre of engi­neer­ing tal­ent.

“Some of the biggest com­pa­nies in the world have their R&D offices here in India, includ­ing Boe­ing and Air­bus. So the planes them­selves are built in the USA, but a lot of the work on the air­craft is being done here which some peo­ple don’t know about,” he said.

“We went in and start­ing hir­ing these excep­tion­al­ly good engi­neers, who had been con­tribut­ing a very small part to a big plane. We flipped the script and said: ‘how would you like to con­tribute in a big way to a small plane?’ India has a good engi­neer­ing tal­ent and there is also a good amount of local infra­struc­ture tech­nol­o­gy and sup­ply chain avail­able to build some­thing like this.”

In terms of a roadmap, ePlane has already built small-scale pro­to­types but is cur­rent­ly work­ing on a 75 per cent scale which is due to fly in the com­ing months. A recent surge in local COVID-19 cas­es has meant a lock­down is now in place in India, but Mehta is con­fi­dent test flights can begin by August 2021.

A full-scale pro­to­type design is also in devel­op­ment and on course to begin fly­ing by Jan­u­ary 2022, with work now under way with the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion author­i­ties in India. Metha added ePlane hopes to achieve cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for its eVTOL air­craft by April 2024, and wants to col­lab­o­rate with oth­er cer­ti­fi­ca­tion author­i­ties across the world — such as the FAA and EASA.

He said: “If we’re try­ing to build some­thing com­pact, we should have a good rea­son to do it. Oth­er com­pa­nies want indi­vid­u­als to go from their homes to these ver­ti­ports, trav­el on the air­craft and then do the reverse jour­ney. So it becomes a three-legged jour­ney and that only makes sense when the mid­dle leg leads to enough time sav­ing for you to jus­ti­fy the cost and com­plex­i­ty of the jour­ney.

“You’re not going to do a short dis­tance, because you can just get in your car and dri­ve. A five to 10km jour­ney across three legs does not make sense. The fly­ing taxi has to basi­cal­ly come as close to your home as pos­si­ble and land either on the lawn, rooftop or dri­ve­way. And because our air­craft only car­ries two pas­sen­gers, it has a max­i­mum take-off weight of less than 1,000kg, so can land on any build­ing with­out affect­ing its struc­tur­al integri­ty.”

Look­ing back on how far ePlane has come along, and its vision to dis­rupt the eVTOL air­craft mar­ket in the Asia-Pacif­ic region, Metha is opti­mistic and excit­ed for the future. While the e200 will be pilot­ed to begin with, the com­pa­ny has­n’t com­plete­ly ruled out going down the autonomous route one day in the future.

“If you’re going to work to real­ly tight dead­lines, you’ve got to do things the reg­u­la­tors are com­fort­able with,” he explained. “It’s a well-known indus­try and reg­u­la­tors aren’t com­fort­able with doing autonomous cer­ti­fi­ca­tion just yet. But when the reg­u­la­tor allows it, we can do an autonomous ver­sion.

“The good thing about the Asia-Pacif­ic region is if you take India and Chi­na, those two coun­tries have a third of the world’s pop­u­la­tion. And if you include the rest of the mar­ket, that num­ber will increase fur­ther. There are a few com­pa­nies which are already cre­at­ing aware­ness, such as Sky­Drive in Japan, Hyundai in South Korea and Wisk in New Zealand.

“I’ve always believed com­pe­ti­tion is good, because it makes you work hard­er. But it also dri­ves home the point to the reg­u­la­tor if you have hun­dreds of com­pa­nies doing this, rather than one, they will want to move fast. It’s awe­some to see so much hap­pen­ing in Asia and we’re excit­ed to be able to get into this mar­ket.”

For more infor­ma­tion about ePlane and its air­craft, vis­it https://www.eplane.ai/