Metro Hop awarded Agility Prime contract to begin testing the Active Landing Gear™ for its eSTOL aircraft

eSTOL air­craft devel­op­er Metro Hop has been giv­en the green light from the U.S Air Force’s Agili­ty Prime pro­gram to test its patent pend­ing Active Land­ing Gear™, which will allow its air­craft to fly up to 250mph while car­ry­ing sub­stan­tial pay­loads.

Thanks to a Phase I Small Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Trans­fer award con­tract, Metro Hop is team­ing up with Auburn University’s Vehi­cle Sys­tems, Dynam­ics, and Design Lab (VSDDL) to mod­el and val­i­date the design of the Active Land­ing Gear. VSDDL, along­side its direc­tor Dr. Imon Chakraborty, will then use its flight sim­u­la­tion facil­i­ties and soft­ware to mod­el the gear under var­i­ous con­di­tions dur­ing the take­off and land­ing phas­es of flight.

Speak­ing to eVTOL Insights, Metro Hop’s CEO and Founder, Bruno Mom­brinie, gave an update on the company’s work so far. He said: “We’re in the process of build­ing a vir­tu­al air­craft and the soft­ware we’re using to mod­el the behav­iour is extreme­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed; I was real­ly sur­prised by its capa­bil­i­ties.

“The sim­u­la­tion soft­ware has come a long way since I was doing this and it’s pret­ty amaz­ing what we can real­is­ti­cal­ly sim­u­late. And we think this will be a lot bet­ter than a scale mod­el. We’ll have real val­ues, be able to make adjust­ments and improve a lot of the design just from the the sim­u­la­tion.

“We can sim­u­late tur­bu­lence in the air, nev­er mind all the para­me­ters of the air­craft but we can also sim­u­late the envi­ron­ment very accu­rate­ly. And then of course, the data from the real air­craft can just be plugged into the mod­el to get even bet­ter num­bers. We’ve got a lot of sup­port from Auburn Uni­ver­si­ty. At least four stu­dents are work­ing on it there and the professor’s real­ly involved also so it’s a great effort and it’s push­ing us to do more. I’ve actu­al­ly actu­al­ly been able to do some engi­neer­ing work myself!”

The Vehi­cle Sys­tems, Dynam­ics, and Design Lab­o­ra­to­ry (VSDDL) at Auburn Uni­ver­si­ty has exten­sive expe­ri­ence in mod­el­ling and sim­u­la­tion of air­craft dynam­ics and sys­tems, flight sim­u­la­tion, and air­craft siz­ing and per­for­mance analy­sis.

The lab is sup­port­ed by fund­ing from NASA Lan­g­ley and Ames Research cen­ters to inves­ti­gate sta­bil­i­ty and con­trol for nov­el air­craft con­cepts. It is also involved in mul­ti­ple projects with SBC (small busi­ness con­cern) part­ners as part of the Agili­ty Prime pro­gram.  

Dr Chakraborty, who is also assis­tant pro­fes­sor in the Depart­ment of Aero­space Engi­neer­ing at Auburn Uni­ver­si­ty, said: “The VSDDL recent­ly devel­oped a recon­fig­urable flight sim­u­la­tor aimed at nov­el air­craft con­fig­u­ra­tions and we’re cur­rent­ly devel­op­ing two more.

“We look for­ward to using our capa­bil­i­ties to give us pre­cise mea­sure­ments of Metro Hop’s flight capa­bil­i­ties and allow us to aggre­gate essen­tial data on the plane.”

After this ini­tial phase of test­ing is com­plet­ed, Metro Hop will move for­ward with con­struc­tion of a ful­ly oper­a­tional land­ing gear set and begin dynam­ic land­ing-drop and taxi test­ing.

Talk­ing about the work that will be car­ried out as part of the Agili­ty Prime con­tract, Mom­brinie said: “Our air­craft flies like a nor­mal plane. But com­ing into the approach and land­ing, and the same with the ground roll and take off, those are things that are going to be a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent in our air­craft. So being able to real­is­ti­cal­ly mod­el that and know what’s going to hap­pen and how it affects the per­for­mance is huge.

“This soft­ware is then inte­grat­ed with a vir­tu­al sim­u­la­tor, so then we can actu­al­ly seen on a sim­u­la­tor what’s hap­pen­ing. As I said, it’s bet­ter than build­ing a mod­el in the sense that in a few weeks, we can build a machine. Of course, it’s on a com­put­er but it’s a very real­is­tic sim­u­la­tion and we can inves­ti­gate what hap­pens, play it back and so on.

“With a real machine, you’d be hard pressed to know what exact­ly hap­pened and you’d have to go try it again. And if it was some­thing that didn’t work well you might not want to go try it again.”

Mom­brinie added that the project, which will last until the end of sum­mer, will enable Metro Hop to present the data it finds in videos and use them to con­tribute towards fundrais­ing efforts.

“We’ll be able to show what our air­craft can do and in a kind of a real­is­tic way. It’s just not play­ing a video game with some neat pic­tures”, he said. “This is actu­al­ly how the thing behaves. And it also advances the next step of the detailed engi­neer­ing that’s involved in a big way.

“We’re not just detail­ing what we think or what we can cal­cu­late from a few rough cal­cu­la­tions, we’re actu­al­ly see­ing the whole behav­iour. The first aero­plane we’re going to build will be very close to the final thing; we’re not going to waste time mak­ing adjust­ments on the real one as will we will do it on the vir­tu­al machine. When get­ting cer­ti­fi­ca­tion from the FAA and EASA, you have to fly some real mis­sions, take the points and inter­po­late them with the com­put­er sim­u­la­tion because that it’s that good. That could help sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduce the time it takes to get cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for exam­ple.”

Many com­pa­nies in the indus­try like Metro Hop has have also ben­e­fit­ed from Agili­ty Prime con­tracts to fur­ther the devel­op­ment of their pro­grammes. Exam­ples include Airmap, Elroy Air and Jump Aero.

And Mom­brinie has spo­ken high­ly of the pro­gramme and the oppor­tu­ni­ty it gives for com­pa­nies want­i­ng to fur­ther accel­er­ate their projects.

“It gives com­pa­nies the abil­i­ty to have con­tracts with oth­er gov­ern­ment agen­cies and they have a very good out­reach pro­gramme with ques­tion and answer ses­sions. They’ve been real­ly help­ful and I’m appre­cia­tive of every­thing they’ve done so far.”

eVTOL Insights spoke to Mom­brinie as part of its pop­u­lar series of pod­casts, where he talked more about the company’s eSTOL air­craft and vision. It’s mid-mile deliv­ery ser­vice is struc­tured around a sim­ple air­craft with the pend­ing Active Land­ing Gear™ sys­tem that is designed to oper­ate in urban areas.

Metro Hop says its aircraft’s speed increas­es pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and offers a com­pet­i­tive edge, allow­ing for small­er and more effi­cient runs. Addi­tion­al­ly, its air­craft is sup­port­ed by robot­i­cal­ly loaded car­go bins and hot-swapped bat­tery pods at ded­i­cat­ed MetroDocks™.