TompAero takes flight with aviation-first approach to autonomous eVTOL development

French start-up Tom­pAero has begun flight test­ing its full-scale pro­to­type as it devel­ops a new class of small, autonomous air­craft designed to bring zero-emis­sion air trans­port into exist­ing avi­a­tion infra­struc­ture.

Flight test­ing its full-scale pro­to­type marks a sig­nif­i­cant mile­stone for the start-up as it moves from devel­op­ment into a struc­tured flight-test pro­gramme.

The com­pa­ny is devel­op­ing the FSC – or ‘Fly­ing Suit­case’, a small eVTOL air­craft designed around a com­bi­na­tion of mod­u­lar car­go capa­bil­i­ty, avi­a­tion-grade safe­ty prin­ci­ples and embed­ded auton­o­my.

Speak­ing exclu­sive­ly to eVTOL Insights, Tom­pAero co-founder Tom­ma­so Passerin d’Entrèves explained that the com­pa­ny has delib­er­ate­ly tak­en a dif­fer­ent approach from many emerg­ing unmanned avi­a­tion and eVTOL devel­op­ers.

“Since then, we fin­ished build­ing our self-fund­ed pro­to­type. What we do is tack­le the air­craft and the autonomous sys­tems togeth­er,” he said. “Right now, we have begun the flight test­ing of the pro­to­type named FSC‑X here at our head­quar­ters in Brit­tany, France, and we also have the autonomous sys­tem that is about to start fly­ing on a manned plat­form.”

The strat­e­gy is to devel­op the air­craft and auton­o­my sep­a­rate­ly before inte­grat­ing the two, allow­ing Tom­pAero to prove safe­ty and estab­lish reli­a­bil­i­ty at each stage of devel­op­ment.

“The whole point is to move for­ward with the design of the air­craft and the sys­tem sep­a­rate­ly until we can at least prove suf­fi­cient reli­a­bil­i­ty to put the two things togeth­er,” Passerin d’Entrèves explained.

An aviation-first approach

While the FSC occu­pies a space between con­ven­tion­al drones and larg­er pas­sen­ger-car­ry­ing eVTOL air­craft, Tom­pAero is keen to empha­sise that it was not designed as a con­ven­tion­al drone scaled upwards.

Instead, the com­pa­ny has sought to take the prin­ci­ples of cer­ti­fied avi­a­tion and apply them to a small­er, unmanned air­craft.

“What makes it very dif­fer­ent is that it was­n’t designed like a larg­er drone. It was designed like a prop­er cer­ti­fi­able eVTOL, includ­ing many safe­ty fea­tures that I would very much like to see on larg­er pas­sen­ger-car­ry­ing air­craft that I don’t see,” Passerin d’Entrèves said.

“It was real­ly designed from avi­a­tion lega­cy, scaled down, just remov­ing the crew, but every­thing else – the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion objec­tives and the safe­ty fea­tures – are all there.”

The objec­tive, he added, is to ensure that the air­craft can even­tu­al­ly become part of the exist­ing avi­a­tion ecosys­tem rather than requir­ing an entire­ly sep­a­rate oper­at­ing envi­ron­ment.

“The whole point is to send this into prop­er avi­a­tion with­out recre­at­ing it. We want it to be 100% native­ly com­pat­i­ble with lega­cy avi­a­tion,” he said.

That phi­los­o­phy also explains why Tom­pAero is not pri­mar­i­ly focused on achiev­ing the high­est pos­si­ble per­for­mance fig­ures.

The cur­rent pro­to­type has an approx­i­mate 45 kg max­i­mum take-off weight, a 15kg pay­load capa­bil­i­ty, eight motors pro­duc­ing a com­bined 20kW, a tar­get­ed cruise speed of approx­i­mate­ly 90 knots and around one hour of range.

“Most of the effort is not made to have the best per­for­mance. It’s made to have the best safe­ty and cer­ti­fi­a­bil­i­ty, because that’s what will give us access to prop­er util­i­ty. We are not rac­ing the per­for­mance race. We are rac­ing the safe­ty one and the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion one.”

A different role for eVTOL technology

Rather than devel­op­ing a pas­sen­ger-car­ry­ing air­craft, Tom­pAero has iden­ti­fied appli­ca­tions where a rel­a­tive­ly small autonomous air­craft could pro­vide capa­bil­i­ties that are cur­rent­ly dif­fi­cult, expen­sive or time-sen­si­tive to deliv­er.

Emer­gency response, crit­i­cal car­go and spe­cial­ist logis­tics are among the areas the com­pa­ny is tar­get­ing.

“The air­craft’s name is FSC – Fly­ing Suit­case. Basi­cal­ly, every­thing that you can fit in a suit­case, in a lug­gage, in a cab­in-lug­gage type form fac­tor, will fit inside,” Passerin d’Entrèves said.

“The car­go bay is a com­plete­ly seg­re­gat­ed and inde­pen­dent mod­ule. It’s up to the cus­tomer – we can design many dif­fer­ent types of car­go bays. We take care of hav­ing it fly prop­er­ly and safe­ly, but what it does is actu­al­ly very bespoke and very cus­tom.”

Tom­pAero has already devel­oped con­cepts for refrig­er­at­ed mod­ules for appli­ca­tions includ­ing organ trans­porta­tion, blood bags and med­i­cine, along­side a mod­ule designed to sup­port air­drop mis­sions for defence and emer­gency response. 

The com­pa­ny is also explor­ing indus­tri­al appli­ca­tions, where the FSC could act as a fly­ing test­bed car­ry­ing sen­sors or oth­er sys­tems.

“We’ve start­ed dis­cussing with large indus­tri­al groups that see our air­craft as fly­ing test­beds as well, because with­in those mod­ules you can fit what­ev­er type of sen­sors or sys­tems that you need to fly to actu­al­ly test,” he said.

The mod­u­lar con­cept is intend­ed to make the air­craft as ver­sa­tile as pos­si­ble while avoid­ing the need to devel­op a bespoke air­craft for every poten­tial appli­ca­tion.

“We are look­ing for a type cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. It’s very long and very cost­ly, so we need to design a sin­gle type of air­craft that is as ver­sa­tile as pos­si­ble, so that it can adapt to as many mis­sions,” Passerin d’Entrèves explained.

“That means that some mis­sions we haven’t thought about so far, and that don’t make a full mar­ket, could still be reached. In our case, it will only require a bespoke mod­ule, not a bespoke air­craft.”

Flight testing moves forward

Tom­pAero has now com­plet­ed the first flight of its full-scale pro­to­type and is pro­gress­ing through a struc­tured flight-test pro­gramme.

The ini­tial phase has focused on ver­ti­cal take-off and land­ing, with the com­pa­ny await­ing the nec­es­sary autho­ri­sa­tions to begin hor­i­zon­tal flight test­ing from an air­port.

The next major mile­stone will be tran­si­tion test­ing, which is expect­ed to be par­tic­u­lar­ly sig­nif­i­cant giv­en the FSC-X’s dual tilt-wing con­fig­u­ra­tion.

“We are fol­low­ing a prop­er test pro­gramme,” Passerin d’Entrèves said. “We start­ed with VTOL flights so far. We expect to get the autho­ri­sa­tion to begin hor­i­zon­tal flights from the air­port we are based at, and then the first tran­si­tions ear­ly next year.”

Along­side the air­craft pro­gramme, the com­pa­ny is prepar­ing to begin test­ing its autonomous sys­tem on a manned plat­form.

This reflects Tom­pAero’s belief that devel­op­ing the air­craft alone is only part of the chal­lenge. For the com­pa­ny, mak­ing an autonomous air­craft capa­ble of reach­ing the loca­tion where it is need­ed, when it is need­ed, is equal­ly impor­tant.

“As much as it’s about the air­craft itself, where we have com­peti­tors, it’s about how we can man­age to have the air­craft avail­able and reach the place it has to reach in time,” Passerin d’Entrèves said.

“You can build the best air­craft, but it’s still for­bid­den to reach the place it has to be when you need it and where you need it. That’s anoth­er prob­lem, and that’s a prob­lem that comes from the moment you’re unmanned.”

Autonomy designed around existing airspace

Tom­pAero’s auton­o­my strat­e­gy is there­fore being devel­oped with con­ven­tion­al avi­a­tion oper­a­tions firm­ly in mind.

Passerin d’Entrèves describes the com­pa­ny’s approach as embed­ded auton­o­my, with the objec­tive of mak­ing the unmanned air­craft oper­ate as close­ly as pos­si­ble to how an air­craft with a human pilot would behave.

“We are using tech­nol­o­gy so that the unmanned air­craft behaves just as if it had a human pilot on board,” he said.

The com­pa­ny is also seek­ing to dis­tin­guish between gen­uine auton­o­my and sys­tems that are sim­ply unmanned or pre-pro­grammed.

“Some peo­ple call autonomous what is unmanned. Some peo­ple call autonomous things pre-pro­grammed. We call autonomous what is actu­al­ly autonomous,” Passerin d’Entrèves said.

“So you can put it into air­space, and it can dis­cuss over VHF radio with the traf­fic con­trollers and with the oth­er pilots. We are try­ing to pick up as much infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble from the air­space — infor­ma­tion that’s already there, but that’s cur­rent­ly only used by human pilots — and fac­tor that into flight plan­ning and the autonomous sys­tems.”

The approach is informed by the found­ing team’s avi­a­tion back­grounds, which include three pri­vate pilots and a co-founder who is also an air traf­fic con­troller.

“We kind of know what could be accept­able by our friends in manned avi­a­tion, and what would not be accept­able,” he said.

For Tom­pAero, the ulti­mate ambi­tion is there­fore not to cre­ate a sep­a­rate unmanned avi­a­tion ecosys­tem, but to devel­op an air­craft capa­ble of oper­at­ing with­in shared air­space.

“We decid­ed from the start, from the incep­tion, to go 100% the avi­a­tion way, not the drone, not the robot­ics way, and the shared-air­space way, because that’s what we’re look­ing for,” Passerin d’Entrèves said.

“It will take time and mon­ey, but we would like to offer a prop­er solu­tion that does not require you to seg­re­gate the sky between unmanned and manned.”

From a quiet development phase to the next stage

Tom­pAero’s progress comes after a delib­er­ate­ly low-pro­file devel­op­ment peri­od. Unlike many start-ups in the Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty sec­tor, the com­pa­ny has not focused heav­i­ly on exhi­bi­tions, pub­lic demon­stra­tions or pro­mot­ing ear­ly-stage con­cepts.

Instead, the team has con­cen­trat­ed its resources on devel­op­ing and fly­ing a phys­i­cal pro­to­type.

The com­pa­ny believes this approach has allowed it to focus on gath­er­ing real-world data and pro­gress­ing the tech­nol­o­gy rather than sim­ply pre­sent­ing future con­cepts.

As the FSC‑X enters its next phase of test­ing, Tom­pAero is now begin­ning to intro­duce its work to a wider indus­try audi­ence and is cur­rent­ly fundrais­ing to sup­port its con­tin­ued devel­op­ment.

For Passerin d’Entrèves, the com­pa­ny’s emer­gence comes down to a sim­ple objec­tive: iden­ti­fy­ing where avi­a­tion cur­rent­ly has gaps and devel­op­ing a tool that can address them.

“We all come from lega­cy avi­a­tion. We know what avi­a­tion is great at doing already, and we kind of iden­ti­fied what’s miss­ing with avi­a­tion,” he said.

“In our case, there’s no prop­er avi­a­tion tool that allows you to car­ry, with zero emis­sions and cost-effec­tive­ly, some small items that still require air trans­porta­tion or speed.”

With its first pro­to­type now fly­ing, Tom­pAero’s next chal­lenge will be to demon­strate that its avi­a­tion-first phi­los­o­phy can trans­late from engi­neer­ing con­cept into a reli­able, cer­ti­fi­able and gen­uine­ly use­ful autonomous air­craft.

For a com­pa­ny that has so far cho­sen to keep its work large­ly away from the spot­light, the FSC-X’s first flights could mark the begin­ning of a much more pub­lic chap­ter in Tom­pAero’s devel­op­ment.