Mike Hirschberg to Step Down At ‘Vertical Flight Society’

Mike Hirschberg, an inspi­ra­tion behind the Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety (VFS), has announced he is to step down from his 12 year stint as Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of VFS, from the mid­dle of next year, reports ainonline.com. Hirschberg explained his announce­ment enables the Board to find a suc­ces­sor in an order­ly fash­ion. 

He wrote to the VFS mem­ber­ship, “As all things must even­tu­al­ly come to an end, I have decid­ed that it is time to pass the baton. I am inspired dai­ly by the pas­sion, knowl­edge, tech­ni­cal exper­tise and kind­ness of our mem­bers. I will con­tin­ue to work as hard as ever to keep VFS run­ning at full speed over the next six months, through our 79th Annu­al Forum in May. I hope to con­tin­ue serv­ing VFS after the June 1st tran­si­tion.” 

Under his lead­er­ship, VFS rebrand­ed from The Amer­i­can Heli­copter Soci­ety to become the nation’s most respect­ed organ­i­sa­tion deal­ing with the tech­ni­cal and pub­lic pol­i­cy aspects of Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty (AAM), while great­ly increas­ing the mem­ber­ship and pro­gram offer­ings.  

A strong and inspi­ra­tional advo­cate for the fast-emerg­ing AAM sec­tor, Hirschberg keeps his feet on the ground and reg­u­lar­ly offers a real­is­tic per­spec­tive on some of the hype sur­round­ing the new eVTOL air­craft indus­try.

For exam­ple, in 2020 he told ainonline.com, “For eVTOL to be worth the invest­ment they real­ly need larg­er-scale oper­a­tions. When tens of thou­sands of peo­ple are fly­ing every day in a city, then there will real­ly be a ben­e­fit. We’ll see more cities around the world adopt UAM [urban air mobil­i­ty] ser­vices and those will scale up in terms of the num­ber of cities, ver­ti­ports, air­craft, and pas­sen­gers.”

Hirschberg worked from 1994 to 2001 in the Joint Strike Fight­er (JSF) pro­gram office, sup­port­ing the devel­op­ment of the X‑32 and X‑35 ver­ti­cal flight propul­sion sys­tems. He holds a bach­e­lor’s degree in aero­space engi­neer­ing from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia and a mas­ter’s in mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing from the Catholic Uni­ver­si­ty of Amer­i­ca.

Then he became a prin­ci­pal aero­space engi­neer with Cen­tra Tech­nol­o­gy, pro­vid­ing tech­ni­cal and pro­gram man­age­ment sup­port for more than 10 years to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) and Office of Naval Research (ONR) on advanced air­craft and rotor­craft con­cepts.

Hirschberg’s VFS lead­er­ship will be sore­ly missed. evtolinsights.com sends its best regards to a man who has immea­sur­ably helped the eVTOL indus­try to devel­op and evolve. We wish him every good luck for the future and look for­ward to hear­ing about his new role.

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(top image: ainonline.com)