Market opportunities for eSTOL technology discussed at Electric Aircraft Symposium

A fas­ci­nat­ing pan­el ses­sion at this year’s Elec­tric Air­craft Sym­po­sium talked about the mar­ket poten­tial of eSTOL air­craft and its tech­nol­o­gy.

Organ­ised by The CAFE Foun­da­tion and co-spon­sored by the Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety (VFS), the event is usu­al­ly held in con­junc­tion with the Exper­i­men­tal Asso­ci­a­tion (EAA) Air­Ven­ture in Oshkosh, but has gone vir­tu­al this year after Air­Ven­ture was can­celled.

From 28th — 30th July, more than 30 indus­try experts from a dozen coun­tries par­tic­i­pat­ed in 12 in-depth pan­el dis­cus­sions, cov­er­ing top­ics includ­ing commuter/regional air ser­vice, Urban Air Mobil­i­ty, elec­tric air­craft con­fig­u­ra­tions, com­mu­ni­ty inte­gra­tion, mar­ket seg­ments and test­ing and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

Mod­er­at­ed by Ken Swartz of Aero­me­dia Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, this ses­sion on Wednes­day fea­tured Bruno Mom­brinie, Founder of CEO of Metro­Hop, John Lang­ford, Founder and CEO of Electra.aero and Co-Founder and CEO of Airflow.aero, Marc Aus­man.

Mom­brinie start­ed off the dis­cus­sion by talk­ing about Metro­Hop’s car­go plane, which the com­pa­ny says can rev­o­lu­tionise the par­cel and pack­age deliv­ery ser­vice in greater met­ro­pol­i­tan areas. It can take-off and land in 200ft and has the abil­i­ty to car­ry pay­loads of up to 1,000lbs.

Trav­el­ling at speeds of 250mph for about 125 miles, he added that because of the air­craft’s low RPM, its pro­pellers and motors would be extreme­ly qui­et — mak­ing it per­fect for trav­el in urban envi­ron­ments.

Metro­Hop’s Mid-Mile sys­tem aims to solve the mid­dle-mile effi­cien­cy for par­cel trans­port, with robot­i­cal­ly-loaded car­go bins and hot-swapped bat­tery poads help­ing to replace par­cel bins from the air­craft in less than a minute. Alto­geth­er, the total time from touch­down to take-off is sev­en min­utes.

To demon­strate the com­pa­ny’s abil­i­ty to reduce CO2 emis­sions, Mom­bri­nine explained that four Metro­Hop car­go planes can do the work of 40 trucks. Fly­ing point-to-point and at a 1/3 of the dis­tance, a squadron of 25 planes would take 250 trucks off the road and elim­i­nate 100 mil­lion pounds of CO2 every year.

The planes would fly into two omni-direc­tion­al airstrips — known as MetroDocks. Mea­sur­ing 99 metres by 99 metres, two planes would fly in as two planes fly out — with a four minute turn­around time to replace emp­ty par­cel bins with full ones. Cost­ing $6 to $9 mil­lion to install and opti­mise at ful­fil­ment cen­tres, Mom­brinie con­clud­ed by say­ing the com­pa­ny would be will­ing to invest $1 mil­lion to help get this busi­ness mod­el off the ground.

Mak­ing the case for eSTOL air­craft com­pared to eVTOL, Aus­man said the air­craft would only need 150ft of ground roll for take-off and land­ing, which would trans­late into a 300ft run­way when account­ing for a safe­ty mar­gin. He says oper­at­ing costs for eSTOL air­craft would also be 60 per cent low­er, devel­op­ment costs reduced by 70 per cent and emit less noise.

He went on to talk about a study by the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy (MIT), which revealed there are thou­sands of rooftop sites across major cities in the USA, includ­ing Boston, Chica­go, Dal­las, New York and Los Ange­les.

“If just one per cent are viable sites, then we can have about 25–62 loca­tions per city. It’s total­ly fea­si­ble that we could build some­thing that can sup­port dif­fer­ent types of air­craft”, he said.

Electra.aero is devel­op­ing hybrid-elec­tric air­craft for region­al mobil­i­ty and fin­ish­ing off the dis­cus­sion, Lang­ford said there is a tremen­dous poten­tial to make sure region­al air mobil­i­ty can move peo­ple out of cars and into air­planes, adding that most eVTOL mis­sions could be achiev­able using eSTOL air­craft.

He added that short­er jour­neys are unlike­ly to save time, due to pas­sen­gers hav­ing to trav­el to and from each ver­ti­port, but added that places like Nor­way — who are push­ing for sus­tain­able trav­el options — would be a great coun­try to become an ear­ly adopter of this kind of tech­nol­o­gy.

When asked what needs to be done to get eSTOL off the ground, Mom­brinie said: “Once we have demon­strat­ed what they are going to do. Devel­op­ment pro­grammes are only going to take us a year, when it would take eVTOL com­pa­nies at least 10. What we are doing is a lot eas­i­er. The issue of noise is not going to go away, but it is a great that we’re not the only one doing this any­more.”

Anoth­er com­pa­ny push­ing eSTOL tech­nol­o­gy over eVTOL is Pyka. The Cal­i­for­nia-based com­pa­ny is using autonomous, eSTOL planes to per­form com­mer­cial crop-dust­ing oper­a­tions in New Zealand.

We spoke to Michael Nor­cia, Pyka’s Co-Founder and CEO as part of a pod­cast ear­li­er this year, and we’ve also had sim­i­lar dis­cus­sions with Mom­brinie and Aus­man, with these episodes being released soon.