Industry speakers talk about future of aviation and urban air mobility at Foresight Aerospace 2020

Avi­a­tion and aero­space experts from across the world came togeth­er yes­ter­day (Wednes­day), albeit vir­tu­al­ly, for Fore­sight Aero­space 2020.

The one-day vir­tu­al con­fer­ence talked about the lat­est devel­op­ments in urban air mobil­i­ty, eVTOL, elec­tric avi­a­tion, R&D tech­nol­o­gy, future airspace/systems and airline/airport inno­va­tion. It con­sist­ed of six ses­sions, fea­tur­ing pre­sen­ta­tions, pan­el dis­cus­sions and Q&As.

Led by Dar­rell Swan­son, speak­ers includ­ed senior fig­ures from ADS Group, Air­bus, Autonomous Flight, EHang, EmbraerX, Faradair Aero­space, Fraz­er-Nash Con­sul­tan­cy, H55, Jaunt Air Mobil­i­ty, Logi­ka Con­sul­tants, Roland Berg­er, Rolls-Royce, Saab Tech­nolo­gies, Samad Aero­space, Ver­ti­cal Aero­space, VoltAero, VRCO and ZeroAvia.

There were also pre­sen­ta­tions from the Nation­al Grid, UK Research and Inno­va­tion, UK Civ­il Avi­a­tion Author­i­ty and the Inno­va­tion Hub.

One of the ses­sions, enti­tled ‘Urban Air Mobil­i­ty and eVTOL’, fea­tured Kay­don Stanzione, CEO of Jaunt Air Mobil­i­ty. In his pre­sen­ta­tion, he talked about the impor­tance of com­bat­ing the grow­ing rise of traf­fic con­ges­tion in some of the world’s biggest cities, and more about Jaun­t’s plans for its own eVTOL air­craft.

He said: “Jaunt is not just build­ing an air­craft, we are build­ing a com­plete eco-sys­tem which con­sists of every­thing that it takes to launch this air­craft. This is very impor­tant, because if we build a fleet of air­craft and make it avail­able to the pub­lic, if there are not enough trained pilots, MROs and FBOs in posi­tion, then we’re not going to be able to have the high up tem­po of oper­a­tions that we’re look­ing at.

“Jaun­t’s eVTOL air­craft would fly eight hours a day, 2,000 hours a year. So these are some of the things we’re look­ing at right now, and we’re work­ing with part­ners which have expe­ri­ence in flight oper­a­tions and main­te­nance and repair.”

Stanzione also used the pre­sen­ta­tion to announce the com­pa­ny will be fly­ing a demon­stra­tor this year. The air­craft, which is a tech­nol­o­gy demon­stra­tor acquired from a pre­vi­ous com­pa­ny, will be a cross of a hybrid and use both elec­tric pow­er and an inter­nal com­bus­tion engine.

“Our goal is to have the air­craft flight wor­thy and pro­vid­ing flight demon­stra­tions by Novem­ber. That is a big ini­tia­tive for us and we’re real­ly excit­ed to put that into place,” he adds.

Also giv­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion was Lawrence Blake­ley, Head of Pow­er Sup­ply at Ver­ti­cal Aero­space. He talked more about the Bris­tol-based fir­m’s jour­ney since being found­ed in 2016 and its eVTOL pas­sen­ger air­craft, called Ser­aph. The con­cept was unveiled for the first time in Canary Wharf ear­li­er this year.

Blake­ley said: “It was tak­ing off-the-shelf tech­nol­o­gy; the motor dri­ves, motors, bat­tery and land­ing gear, and prov­ing that the tech­nol­o­gy was good enough for us to start the jour­ney to cre­ate an eVTOL air­craft for the urban air mobil­i­ty mar­ket.

“The [Canary Wharf unveil­ing] was a real­ly spe­cif­ic activ­i­ty to see if we could take this off-the-shelf tech­nol­o­gy and cre­ate a redun­dant sys­tem which could evolve to sat­is­fy the aero­space require­ments.”

Blake­ley added that the com­pa­ny is cur­rent­ly work­ing on a new ‘mul­ti­copter winged eVTOL’ that will fly in 2021, but that no fur­ther details will be released until the prod­uct launch lat­er this year.

This ses­sion con­clud­ed with a pan­el dis­cus­sion about the vision for urban air mobil­i­ty and devel­op­ing air­space for the indus­try, which fea­tured David Rot­tblatt, Urban Air Mobil­i­ty Leader at EmbraerX, Head of Euro­pean Mar­ket at EHang, Rémi Petit­frere, Dan Hayes, CEO at VRCO, and Stanzione.

Oth­er pan­el dis­cus­sions dur­ing the day includ­ing ‘Improv­ing Sus­tain­abil­i­ty with­in Avi­a­tion’, with Adam Mor­ton, Head of Envi­ron­men­tal Tech­nol­o­gy at Rolls-Royce and Chair of Sus­tain­able Avi­a­tion, Glenn Llewe­lyn, VP of Zero Emis­sions at Air­bus and Man­ag­ing Direc­tor Logi­ka Con­sul­tants, Toby Gibbs.

‘Sub-region­al Trav­el and Elec­tric Con­ven­tion Air­craft’ was dis­cussed by Neil Clough­ley, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor at Faradair Aero­space, Jean Bot­ti, CEO of VoltAero and CEO of H55, Andre Borschberg.

‘Air­craft Devel­op­ment Tech­nol­o­gy’ was led by Sameer Savani, Head of Inno­va­tion and Engi­neer­ing at ADS Group, and Nor­man Wijk­er of Samad Aero­space, while the final dis­cus­sions of the day was called ‘How do we make the Wide­spread use of Auton­o­my a real­i­ty?’.

This fea­tured Chris All­sopp, Group Leader — Autonomous Sys­tems Engi­neer­ing at Fraz­er-Nash Con­sul­tan­cy, Chair­man and Founder of Autonomous Flight, Mar­tin Warn­er, Alex Geor­giades, Autonomous Sys­tems Spe­cial­ist at the Inno­va­tion Hub/CAA and Gary Cutts, Chal­lenge Direc­tor of Future Flight at UK Research and Inno­va­tion.

For more infor­ma­tion about the event, vis­it https://www.foresight.events/virtual-aerospace