Rolls-Royce shares ‘invaluable’ learnings as the CityAirbus’ eVTOL flight test programme comes to an end

Rolls-Royce has con­firmed the CityAir­bus eVTOL air­craft it worked on with Air­bus has suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed its flight-test­ing pro­gramme.

Pub­lish­ing an update last week, the com­pa­ny said the impor­tant col­lab­o­ra­tion, in which a Rolls-Royce all-elec­tric propul­sion sys­tem pow­ered the air­craft, achieved ‘all the major tech­ni­cal and per­for­mance mile­stones need­ed to advance the tech­nol­o­gy.’

The all-elec­tric octo­copter was designed to car­ry up to four pas­sen­gers at a max­i­mum speed of 75 miles per hour. It was part of a tech­nol­o­gy demon­stra­tor pro­gramme that could help shape future trav­el with­in cities. For acoustic con­trol and a qui­eter flight, the eight pro­pellers were rotat­ed at low speeds of less than 1000 rpm.

Gabriele Teofili, Head of Urban Air Mobil­i­ty Busi­ness Area for Rolls-Royce Elec­tri­cal, said: “See­ing the CityAir­bus fly­ing, the very first take-off and then the very first land­ing and the hap­pi­ness that I felt, this was mag­ic! Flight after flight, we expe­ri­enced so much.

“These are incred­i­ble learn­ings which will accel­er­ate the Urban Air Mobil­i­ty mar­ket. We were extreme­ly proud of the devel­op­ment of the first elec­tric motor from scratch to deliv­ery in 9 months and 19 days.”

Dur­ing the pro­gramme, Rolls-Royce com­plet­ed more than 105 ground and flight tests at alti­tudes up to 100ft and speeds of 30 knots on the propul­sion and pow­er dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tems. It said the per­for­mance of its tech­nol­o­gy through­out test­ing meant all flights per­formed with­out any tech­ni­cal or per­for­mance con­cerns.

A Rolls-Royce Elec­tri­cal team in Munich devel­oped the elec­tric propul­sor com­pris­ing a 200kW elec­tric motor and asso­ci­at­ed pow­er elec­tron­ics, con­troller and the pow­er pro­tec­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem to gen­er­ate, dis­trib­ute and man­age the required high elec­tro-mechan­i­cal torque. This was then, con­vert­ed into a tremen­dous thrust via the plat­form pro­pellers at low speed.

A key ele­ment of this pro­gramme was the col­lab­o­ra­tion between Rolls-Royce and Air­bus at the devel­op­ment stage ensur­ing both com­pa­nies could define the air­craft and its pow­er and propul­sion needs effi­cient­ly and effec­tive­ly.

This project has also demon­strat­ed to us the impor­tance of a sys­tem inte­gra­tion design at an ear­ly stage, rein­forced the need for a sim­ple and safe archi­tec­ture on a sys­tem lev­el and the need for con­tin­u­ous data val­i­da­tion and dig­i­tal twin tech­nol­o­gy. This was cru­cial par­tic­u­lar­ly for the ground-test­ing phase. These tests are an impor­tant step in the jour­ney to cer­ti­fi­ca­tion prov­ing reli­a­bil­i­ty for our tech­nol­o­gy.

Teofili added: “Our team was bril­liant; they were fast, and they were bold! They were work­ing alto­geth­er in dif­fer­ent com­pe­ten­cies, dif­fer­ent fac­ul­ties, work­ing in a giant devel­op­ment style and togeth­er with Air­bus they pro­duced this incred­i­ble suc­cess.”

“We are full of con­fi­dence, full of trust to project our­selves to the next step. Deliv­er­ing cer­ti­fied prod­ucts to Urban Air Mobil­i­ty Cus­tomers, I am proud to be con­tribut­ing at the birth of the Urban Air Mobil­i­ty Mar­ket.”