The Vertical Flight Society welcomed 36 new members in 2020 as its industry influence continues to grow

The Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety (VFS) con­tin­ues to gath­er momen­tum in the grow­ing ‘eVTOL air­craft rev­o­lu­tion’, with 36 com­pa­nies join­ing as mem­bers in 2020 — a net growth of 15 per cent from the pre­vi­ous year.

Although indi­vid­ual mem­ber­ships fell in the mid­dle of last year due to the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic and sub­se­quent eco­nom­ic impact, mem­ber­ship is now start­ing to grow again — with 5,800 indi­vid­ual mem­bers on Jan­u­ary 1st, some 25 per cent of which are locat­ed out­side of the Unit­ed States.

Alto­geth­er, there are now 137 cor­po­rate mem­bers, with 36 per cent being non-US-owned com­pa­nies plus 30 uni­ver­si­ties which have joined as edu­ca­tion­al mem­bers — 43 per cent being out­side the US.

The lat­est com­pa­nies to join include Dren­nan Inno­va­tion, which was set up by J. Scott Dren­nan. He was at Bell Flight for 26 years and most recent­ly, the for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent of Research and Devel­op­ment at Hyundai’s Urban Air Mobil­i­ty divi­sion. Towards the end of last year Dren­nan and Hyundai Motor Group agreed to vol­un­tar­i­ly sep­a­rate.

HyPoint, which is devel­op­ing the next gen­er­a­tion hydro­gen fuel cell sys­tem for the air trans­porta­tion and urban air mobil­i­ty mar­ket, has also joined VFS, while oth­er notable new mem­bers include Dufour Aero­space, CycloTech, Daedalean, Gan­nett Flem­ing, Man­ta Air­craft, Jump Aero, Robot­ic Skies, the Urban Air Mobil­i­ty Divi­sion of Hyundai Motor Group and Wisk.

In 2020, the VFS dra­mat­i­cal­ly increased its online edu­ca­tion­al offer­ings, hold­ing more than 50 sep­a­rate webi­na­rs and work­shops, as well as sev­er­al major online con­fer­ences and two online short cours­es.

The Society’s  now fea­tures near­ly 350 videos, cov­er­ing hun­dreds of hours of lec­tures, meet­ings and inter­views, plus cur­rent and his­tor­i­cal flight footage.

Addi­tion­al­ly, VFS also set up the eVTOL Writ­ers Group for aero­space media which cov­er elec­tric VTOL air­craft — includ­ing eVTOL Insights. It has helped to edu­cate the press, its read­ers and the pub­lic on the promise, progress and chal­lenges toward see­ing ubiq­ui­tous eVTOL air­craft oper­a­tions. 

Key eVTOL resources includ­ed the defin­i­tive World eVTOL Air­craft Direc­to­ry — with more than 400 air­craft list­ed — on the VFS eVTOL.news web­site. From next Tues­day, it will host its eighth Annu­al Elec­tric VTOL Sym­po­sium — the world’s largest and longest run­ning event focus­ing on the promise, and chal­lenges, of eVTOL air­craft. As many as 500 atten­dees are expect­ed.

Below are a list of all 36 com­pa­nies which joined in 2020. Those inter­est­ed in becom­ing a mem­ber of the Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety can find more infor­ma­tion .