Progress of eVTOL aircraft discussed during Vertical Flight Society’s Forum76 event

A bril­liant pan­el of speak­ers gath­ered at the Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety’s Forum76 event last Thurs­day to talk about the activ­i­ties dri­ving the devel­op­ment and accep­tance of eVTOL air­craft.

The event is the world’s lead­ing tech­ni­cal event on ver­ti­cal flight tech­nol­o­gy, and this year’s vir­tu­al con­fer­ence spanned four days from Octo­ber 5th — 8th and fea­tured more than 230 papers on every dis­ci­pline — from acoustics to unmanned sys­tems.

Con­tribut­ing to this dis­cus­sion, was Col. Nathan Diller, AFWERX Com­man­der in the US Air Force, Mark Moore, Engi­neer­ing Direc­tor of Avi­a­tion at Uber Ele­vate, Star Ginn, Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty Nation­al Lead at NASA, Wes Ryan, Unmanned and Pilot­less Air­craft Tech­nol­o­gy Lead at the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion (FAA), and David Solar, Head of VTOL at the Euro­pean Union Avi­a­tion Safe­ty Agency (EASA).

After each speak­er gave a short pre­sen­ta­tion, one of the ques­tions asked by mod­er­a­tor Bri­an Gar­rett-Glaser — eVTOL.com’s new­ly-appoint­ed Man­ag­ing Edi­tor — was where they think the indus­try is today in terms of progress, com­pared to where they expect­ed it would be two to three years ago.

Com­ment­ing first, Diller said: “No-one could for­get the fact that we are still liv­ing under Covid-19 and that has cre­at­ed some chal­lenges that set some folks back, but in some cas­es there were areas where it cre­at­ed oppor­tu­ni­ties.

“There is cer­tain­ly the real­i­sa­tion that cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is a chal­lenge, that’s a hard thing to do. We’re pret­ty far ahead in terms of col­lab­o­ra­tion. Wes and his team at the FAA, a fan­tas­tic team with Star at NASA, the lev­el of col­lab­o­ra­tion between gov­ern­ment organ­i­sa­tions which are able to help work with folks like Uber and the great things they are doing, that is going to be key to suc­cess.

“We’ve made some pret­ty great strides in that, and we have a dozen com­pa­nies on con­tract right now where there is mean­ing­ful invest­ment actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing this year. But over­all, I’m impressed with the pace at which the indus­try is going and if we can keep it up, we’ll be sur­prised at how quick­ly it will come to fruition.”

Adding his com­ments, Moore said: “Three years ago, I’d have nev­er been so auda­cious to guess that we’d have $3 bil­lion going into eVTOL devel­op­ment. It’s absolute­ly stun­ning, the momen­tum in this indus­try.

“Every­day I’m hold­ing my breath, wait­ing for the fed­er­al reg­is­ter to show the G1 and essen­tial­ly the spe­cial con­di­tions and cer­ti­fi­ca­tions basis for one of these eVTOL devel­op­ers.

“There has been such great work done with Amend­ment 64 and Part 23 Con­sen­sus Stan­dards, and we’ve got to open up the path clear­ly and pub­licly for these eVTOL air­craft. I’m dis­ap­point­ed that has­n’t hap­pened, and I’m going to keep hold­ing my breath until we see that, because the indus­try will be blocked until we push through it.”

Ryan added: “When Mark and I and oth­ers met in Kansas City back in 2015 and talked about on-demand mobil­i­ty at the time, try­ing to get this stuff mov­ing, we were all very hope­ful and opti­mistic.

“We could see tech­nol­o­gy emerg­ing and see things where we hoped it would go, and I’m very impressed with the com­pa­nies which have come in and built pro­to­types, are in flight test­ing and col­lab­o­rat­ing with gov­ern­ment part­ners, and as men­tioned in Col. Diller’s open­ing com­ments, the hir­ing of experts from the F35 to get the best flight con­trol experts in the team. It’s been amaz­ing to watch that evo­lu­tion hap­pen.”

And address­ing Moore’s final point, he said: “One thing that is a bit of chal­lenge is what Mark’s com­ment was, is that we have too many peo­ple wait­ing on the side­lines say­ing it’s the gov­ern­ment or we’re wait­ing for the gov­ern­ment to tell us what us to do.

“The com­pa­nies which are build­ing pro­to­types, fly­ing and test­ing sub-scale and full-scale pro­to­types and devel­op­ing the core tech­nolo­gies are the ones which will move for­ward.

“We pur­pose­ly don’t want peo­ple wait­ing for the gov­ern­ment. I under­stand your point about the G1 which would be a very nice thing to have, I don’t disagree…I hope we can get some gener­ic stan­dards put togeth­er, we’re work­ing through the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process on a few projects to help us lay down some more detailed foun­da­tions.

“What we did­n’t want to do was pub­lish some­thing that was so open, that almost any design would meet the stan­dard or require­ment, so we’re try­ing to be a lit­tle more pre­cise than that. It’s a great chal­lenge for us to con­tin­ue, but I would also vol­ley it back and say the indus­try has got to keep devel­op­ing detect-and-avoid and automa­tion tech­nolo­gies, and the elec­tric propul­sion bat­tery tech­nolo­gies to make sure we have viable and fly­able prod­ucts that are safe for civ­il use.”

Gar­rett-Glaser then asked Solar and Ginn about flight data, and whether the indus­try is strug­gling to get enough, and if so, how does it fix that.

“I think on vehi­cle design we are mov­ing quite fast,” Solar said. “We have the most promis­ing com­pa­nies on eVTOL which are design­ing fan­tas­tic vehi­cles right now with the spec­i­fi­ca­tions they have got. Some of them are fair­ly sur­pris­ing­ly mov­ing much more quick­er than we expect­ed.

“Where I think we are lag­ging a bit behind is on the upside, where the require­ment to set down oper­a­tional envi­ron­ment, and the UTM use space envi­ron­ment; we need much more vis­i­bil­i­ty on that. That is where I see a prob­lem in the near future, or at least the bot­tle­neck because the lead time for these reg­u­la­tions are much high­er than any­thing you can see now.”

Final­ly, Ginn said that she feels the indus­try is exact­ly where she expect­ed it to be, and hav­ing 25 years of doing flight research of one-of-a-kind air­craft, she said these are in them­selves, X‑planes.

“The tech­nolo­gies are brand new, and a lot of ground test­ing to prove robust­ness for the flight envi­ron­ment is still occur­ing at the same time as peo­ple are devel­op­ing the inte­grat­ed sys­tems to do the flight tests to under­stand han­dling qual­i­ties and fly-by-wire systems…we’re def­i­nite­ly expand­ing the enve­lope of under­stand­ing what these vehi­cles are and until we’re done doing that, we can’t start the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process.

“Are these pow­ered lift vehi­cles? Does it make sense what the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion path looks like, with­out see­ing the oper­a­tional data, and what their lim­i­ta­tions are in the realm of cross­winds? There are a lot of things to flesh out on the oper­a­tions side and that takes a lot of empir­i­cal data…anyone who thinks they’re going to skip ahead needs to under­stand the end-to-end process.”

Ginn also applaud­ed the efforts of Moore for cre­at­ing the ecosys­tem, and the team at Uber for putting the mon­ey behind expand­ing it fur­ther.

She added: “And it’s also all of us who have been in that core team of the crazy peo­ple who thought this was going to be a future, we’ve luck­i­ly kept that glue togeth­er on the ecosys­tem and it’s just extra­or­di­nary where we are right now.”

Those who reg­is­tered for Forum76 can view every video pre­sen­ta­tion from the four days, by log­ging into the event page. For more infor­ma­tion about the event, click here.