Montréal-based Limosa Group discusses plans for its seven-seater eVTOL aircraft LimoConnect

Tech­nol­o­gy start-up Limosa Inc. is anoth­er com­pa­ny look­ing to enter the advanced air mobil­i­ty mar­ket (AAM) and aims to rev­o­lu­tionise the trans­porta­tion sys­tem and make it safe, fast and eas­i­er for every­one to trav­el.

Made up of experts in air­craft struc­tur­al design, struc­tur­al analy­ses, aero­dy­nam­ics, design­ing propul­sion sys­tems, flight con­trol and avion­ics, eVTOL Insights spoke to com­pa­ny CEO Hamid Hami­di, who told us more about its vision for the mar­ket and how work is com­ing along to make it a real­i­ty.

Q: Can you talk to us about the back­ground behind Limosa and what led you to set up the com­pa­ny? 

Hamid Hami­di: “The util­i­sa­tion of the zero-emis­sion trans­porta­tion sys­tem attract­ed indus­try inter­est in recent years to solve the cur­rent prob­lem of air pol­lu­tion in big met­ro­pol­i­tan areas. Sec­ond issue is the time-wast­ing in heavy traf­fic using ground trans­porta­tion sys­tems.

“This leads us to think about using air as the third dimen­sion to pro­vide a faster, easy to use and cheap­er trans­porta­tion sys­tem. Elec­tric air vehi­cles would be the right solu­tion to over­come these two issues as they are zero-emis­sion vehi­cles, and they add air to trav­el­ing routes.

“This idea becomes our main goal to estab­lish Limosa Inc. in order to pro­vide a faster, cheap­er and clean­er trav­el­ing sys­tem. Our vehi­cle is named Limo­Con­nect and is a bio-inspired air­craft in which its body orig­i­nat­ed from a bird named Limosa.

“Limo­Con­nect will be equipped with elec­tric engines which pro­vide ver­ti­cal take-off and land­ing mak­ing it a zero-emis­sion trans­porta­tion to car­ry peo­ple through their lives. The ver­ti­cal take-off and land­ing capa­bil­i­ty of Limo­Con­nect results in easy pick­ing-up peo­ple in con­gest­ed cities. 

Q: What val­ue do you think the com­pa­ny can bring to the grow­ing advanced air mobil­i­ty mar­ket? 

HH: “Limosa Inc. has the poten­tial to meet the demands of advanced air mobil­i­ty mar­ket includ­ing the oper­a­tional effi­cien­cy, reduc­tion in human inter­ven­tion for inter­ci­ty and intracity trans­porta­tion using Limo­Con­nect, and grow­ing invest­ment activ­i­ties around the world are key fac­tors expect­ed to dri­ve the mar­ket val­ue. 

“Con­tri­bu­tion in infra­struc­tures need­ed to inte­grate air mobil­i­ty to the exist­ing pub­lic trans­porta­tion sys­tem. The con­struc­tion of ver­ti­cal take-off and land­ing pads (i.e. ver­ti­ports) of Limo­Con­nect, in addi­tion to inte­gra­tion to aero­space and oth­er modes of trans­porta­tion, would be our con­tri­bu­tion to the growth of the advanced air mobil­i­ty mar­ket. 

“The capa­bil­i­ties and poten­tial use of Limo­Con­nect as point-to-point pas­sen­ger ser­vice provider through­out urban areas, rur­al areas, air ambu­lance func­tion and car­go trans­porta­tion will sat­is­fy the grow­ing advanced air mobil­i­ty mar­ket. Over­com­ing some chal­lenges of eVTOLs such as pub­lic accep­tance, safe­ty, social equi­ty, issues around plan­ning and imple­men­ta­tion.”

Q: What can you tell us about Limosa’s air­craft and its spec­i­fi­ca­tions? 

HH: “Limo­Con­nect is a sev­en-seater air­craft con­fig­urable to all-car­go and autonomous options, fea­tur­ing a pilot and six pas­sen­gers. The pre­lim­i­nary design has 10 elec­tric motors out of which six motors will be installed on the main wing and four motors on the curved tail wing. Tilt­ing rotors will pro­vide tran­si­tion from take-off to cruise posi­tion.

“The air­craft is designed for a dis­tance of 150 miles at a speed of 200 miles/hour. We want our air­craft to cre­ate a noise lev­el of 67 dB at max­i­mum, so that it can be eas­i­ly used in the urban areas. This will be at least 100-times qui­eter than a heli­copter.

Q: And what does your devel­op­ment roadmap look like, do you have a plan towards cer­ti­fi­ca­tion?

HH: “Our mas­ter­plan from begin­ning to the final com­mer­cial phase: Man­u­fac­tur­ing an air­craft to demon­strate the capa­bil­i­ties of elec­tric VTOL

The main stage in pro­duc­tion of a pro­to­type eVTOL is the man­u­fac­tur­ing. This stage con­sists of the fol­low­ing steps:

Con­cep­tu­al design: The Limosa’s con­cep­tu­al design is bio-inspired which comes from Limosa bird. The first con­cep­tu­al air­craft based on its mode of trans­porta­tion is scaled and designed

Aero­dy­nam­ics analy­ses: The com­pu­ta­tion­al flu­id dynam­ics (CFD) team has a hard work to design the fuse­lage, wings, pro­pellers, and blades. The aero­dy­nam­ics opti­mi­sa­tion is the major job at this step to come up with the high­est effi­cien­cy of the air­craft. The high fideli­ty CFD sim­u­la­tion tools are applied for opti­mi­sa­tion in ear­ly design stages which play a strate­gic role in enabling the air­craft key require­ments through nov­el shap­ing. Reduc­ing the air­craft noise while hav­ing high effi­cien­cy is one of the key points of the aero­dy­nam­ic analy­sis 

Struc­tur­al design and analy­sis: A new gen­er­a­tion of eVTOL air­craft will be designed most­ly with com­pos­ite fuse­lage and wing struc­tures. The state-of-the art com­pos­ite mate­ri­als will be used for the air­craft which have advan­tages such as high strength-to-weight ratio, high stiff­ness-to-weight ratio, cor­ro­sion resis­tance, and high dura­bil­i­ty. For struc­tur­al design and stress analy­sis, vibra­tion, buck­ling, etc., the high-fideli­ty FEA tools as well as opti­miza­tion process will be con­duct­ed in which a design loop pro­ce­dure will be car­ried out. The analy­sis process includes ini­tial siz­ing, detailed analy­sis, man­u­fac­tur­ing and struc­tur­al test­ing, and final­ly full vehi­cle analy­sis

Elec­tri­cal design and flight con­trols: The propul­sion sys­tem of Limo­Con­nect will con­sist of 10 PMSM brush­less motors which need 760 kw ener­gy for hov­er­ing and 140 kw for cruis­ing. The pow­er sys­tem con­sists of bat­tery packs, bat­tery mon­i­tor­ing sys­tem and con­vert­ers. The bat­tery packs are embed­ded in the wings and nacelle of the pro­pellers. The flight con­trol sys­tem con­sists of hov­er and cruis­ing con­trollers which are using Lin­ear Qua­drat­ic Reg­u­la­tor to sta­bi­lize the vehi­cle.

Pro­to­type man­u­fac­tur­ing: Our pro­to­type man­u­fac­tur­ing site will be con­struct­ed, and the first pro­to­type will be man­u­fac­tured with the aim of achiev­ing Trans­port Cana­da Civ­il Avi­a­tion (TCCA) cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. Man­u­fac­tur­ing exper­tise in pro­duc­ing high­ly com­plex parts such as com­pos­ite fuse­lage, wings and inte­ri­or com­po­nents as well as bat­tery pow­er­train, pro­pellers, elec­tric motors will be hired. 

Detailed design and full scaled flight test: The flight test includes eval­u­a­tions on air­craft flight dynam­ics, per­for­mance and han­dling qual­i­ties which con­sists of per­formed bank­ing manoeu­vres, tests on yaw, pitch and roll, as well as acoustic data and vehi­cle com­mu­ni­ca­tion with con­trollers. The final goal of flight tests is to meet the pro­to­cols of flight safe­ty

Cer­ti­fy eVTOL air­craft that is just as safe as com­mer­cial air­lin­ers: “The cer­ti­fi­ca­tion stage is the main mile­stone to oper­ate our eVTOL for urban air mobil­i­ty mis­sions. To achieve this goal, we will start the process of apply­ing for a Trans­port Cana­da Civ­il Avi­a­tion (TCCA) cer­ti­fi­ca­tion includ­ing air­wor­thi­ness and envi­ron­men­tal require­ments nec­es­sary for full cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Limo­Con­nect. The next step is to focus on car­ry­ing out nec­es­sary test­ing and meth­ods required to demon­strate safe­ty and com­pli­ance of our air­craft.”

Launch com­mer­cial routes in cities & inte­grate autonomous sys­tems for safe­ty: “Our first pur­pose is to estab­lish an air taxi route in Québec as a region­al air­line in which our plan is to pro­vide jour­neys from point A to B to become a prac­ti­cal mode of trans­porta­tion in Cana­da. By con­sid­er­ing our plan to reduce the price of air taxi, we aim to inte­grate the air taxi with oth­er forms of pub­lic trans­porta­tion with the help of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (AI) to min­imise the total com­mut­ing time.”

Q: Does Limosa have any regions in par­tic­u­lar where it plans to enter the mar­ket? 

HH: “As men­tioned above our aim is to design Limo­Con­nect to be able to give ser­vice in the region­al state in our love­ly province Québec, Cana­da. The rea­son that we focus on region­al air­craft rather than urban area vehi­cles, is that for the lat­ter, the com­plex­i­ty of pub­lic accep­tance and safe­ty of these vehi­cles will take much more time to get cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. That means that the region­al elec­tric air­crafts will be eas­i­er to get cer­ti­fied.”

Q: What excites you the most about the advanced air mobil­i­ty mar­ket? 

HH: “Our inter­est is to advance the ben­e­fits of sus­tain­able air mobil­i­ty. By cre­at­ing the world’s lead­ing air mobil­i­ty net­work, we will help push the world towards a zero-emis­sions future.”

Q: When do you think you could be start­ing to fly pro­to­types of your air­craft?

HH: “The chart below shows the pre­lim­i­nary timetable of our project. We plan to cer­ti­fy Limo­Con­nect by 2025.”