Jason Hurst takes the lead as Bell’s new VP of Innovation

Jason Hurst is the new Vice Pres­i­dent of Bel­l’s Tech­nol­o­gy and Inno­va­tion team, and will lead the com­pa­ny’s eVTOL projects on its Nexus air taxi and Autonomous Pod Trans­port (APT) drone.

Hurst has been at Bell since 2002, and worked on the V‑22 Project before becom­ing Pro­gramme Man­ag­er of the V‑247 Vig­i­lant. He replaces J. Scott Dren­nan, who left the com­pa­ny to join Hyundai’s Urban Air Mobil­i­ty (UAM) divi­sion.

Speak­ing about his new role, Hurst said: “The tim­ing of the oppor­tu­ni­ty was excit­ing with the emer­gence of eVTOL tech­nol­o­gy and the gen­er­a­tional mod­erni­sa­tion of the Depart­ment of Defense. The envi­ron­ment is rich for our ded­i­cat­ed group of engi­neers who have such great exper­tise to focus on leap ahead tech­nol­o­gy.

“Right now, there are more new prod­ucts in the pipeline than we’ve ever seen before at Bell. Whether it’s clean-sheet designs or new tech­nol­o­gy for exist­ing plat­forms, our team is already div­ing into new oppor­tu­ni­ties.”

Bell unveiled its Nexus air taxi vehi­cle at CES 2019, which is pow­ered by a hybrid-elec­tric propul­sion sys­tem and fea­tures Bell’s sig­na­ture pow­ered lift con­cept, incor­po­rat­ing six tilt­ing duct­ed fans designed to safe­ly and effi­cient­ly rede­fine air trav­el.

And at this year’s show, the com­pa­ny show­cased the Nexus 4EX, which also fea­tures Bell’s sig­na­ture pow­ered-lift con­cept, but has four tilt­ing duct­ed fans which can be con­fig­ured as hybrid-elec­tric or all-elec­tric.

Bell will lead the design, devel­op­ment and pro­duc­tion of the VTOL sys­tems. As part of ‘Team Nexus’, Safran will pro­vide the hybrid propul­sion and dri­ve sys­tems, EPS will pro­vide the ener­gy stor­age sys­tems, Thales will pro­vide the Flight Con­trol Com­put­er (FCC) hard­ware and soft­ware, Moog will devel­op the flight con­trol actu­a­tion sys­tems and Garmin will inte­grate the avion­ics and the vehi­cle man­age­ment com­put­er (VMC).

Along­side the Nexus, Bell also unveiled the Autonomous Pod Trans­port (APT), which the com­pa­ny says ‘offers a whole new lev­el of oper­a­tional effi­cien­cy’. It has VTOL capa­bil­i­ty and can trav­el 18 miles (29km) at speeds of up to 100mph.

Bell claims the APT is three times faster than ground trans­porta­tion, tak­ing just over five min­utes to trav­el 10 miles. Scaled con­fig­u­ra­tions allow for pay­loads rang­ing from 20 pounds to hun­dreds of pounds — mak­ing it ver­sa­tile for a vari­ety of mis­sions, includ­ing med­ical, law enforce­ment, off-shore and on-demand deliv­ery ser­vices.