Urban Aeronautics to work with Hypoint and fuel CityHawk eVTOL with hydrogen

eVTOL devel­op­er Urban Aero­nau­tics has signed an agree­ment with HyPoint to incor­po­rate hydro­gen fuel cell pow­er in its City­Hawk air­craft.

The Israeli com­pa­ny is help­ing to pio­neer the next gen­er­a­tion of eVTOL for com­mer­cial air taxi and air res­cue use by devel­op­ing its City­Hawk air­craft. With Hypoint, it will explore the devel­op­ment of an advanced ver­sion which will be pow­ered by the man­u­fac­tur­er’s cut­ting-edge hydro­gen fuel cell stack tech­nol­o­gy.

As cur­rent­ly designed, the City­Hawk relies on hybrid propul­sion.

“We look for­ward to col­lab­o­rat­ing with HyPoint on the inte­gra­tion of the next gen­er­a­tion of hydro­gen fuel cell sys­tems for eVTOL trans­porta­tion and the urban air mobil­i­ty mar­ket,” said Rafi Yoeli, CEO of Urban Aero­nau­tics. “As a high-pow­er, 100 per­cent envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly fuel, hydro­gen is key to the future of eVTOL air­craft.”

The City­Hawk will seat up to six pas­sen­gers, with a com­pact foot­print and no exter­nal wings or rotors. Its small footprint/high pay­load con­fig­u­ra­tion is opti­mised for urban trans­porta­tion and emer­gency response.

The rotor­less, wing­less design offers enhanced safe­ty and unre­strict­ed mobil­i­ty with ‘fly any­where, land any­where’, door-to-door trans­porta­tion capa­bil­i­ty. It fea­tures Urban Aero­nau­tics’ inter­nal rotor Fan­craft™ tech­nol­o­gy, which utilis­es pow­er­ful duct­ed fans in com­bi­na­tion with inno­v­a­tive aero­dy­nam­ic tech­nolo­gies that result in supe­ri­or con­trol, sta­bil­i­ty, speed, safe­ty, noise reduc­tion and sus­tain­abil­i­ty.

The com­pa­ny says Fan­craft™ makes it pos­si­ble to design a safe, qui­et, car-sized eVTOL air­craft that needs no exter­nal rotors or wings and is able to fly and land where no oth­er vehi­cle can.

Designed to exist­ing FAA require­ments, both of Urban Aero­nau­tics’ pri­ma­ry prod­ucts – the unmanned Cor­morant and City­Hawk – offer ground­break­ing capa­bil­i­ties that the com­pa­ny say will rev­o­lu­tionise the eVTOL indus­try.

“We were very impressed with the next gen­er­a­tion of fly­ing vehi­cles being devel­oped by Urban Aero­nau­tics, as well as its com­mit­ment to hydro­gen pow­er, and we look for­ward to work­ing with them on this excit­ing project,” said Alex Iva­nenko, Founder & CEO of HyPoint.

Hydro­gen is the only 100 per cent envi­ron­men­tal­ly-friend­ly pow­er source, and can be pro­duced using solar and wind pow­er. The only bi-prod­uct of the ele­ment is water, mean­ing there will be no rare min­er­als or tox­ic chem­i­cals.

And unlike bat­ter­ies, hydro­gen fuel cells don’t have a lim­it­ed life cycle and gen­er­ate zero waste — help­ing to pro­mote zero emis­sions fly­ing.

HyPoint’s hydro­gen fuel cell design fea­tures zero car­bon emis­sions and supe­ri­or ener­gy per­for­mance through high­er spe­cif­ic pow­er and prac­ti­cal out­put pow­er capac­i­ty. The company’s new tur­bo-air cooled fuel cells increase the lifes­pan of hydro­gen pow­er­trains from 5,000 to 20,000 hours and only take a few min­utes to refu­el, rep­re­sent­ing a sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment over exist­ing sys­tems.

Com­bi­na­tion of these tech­nolo­gies allow the com­pa­ny to devel­op a tru­ly light­weight cli­mate-inde­pen­dent prod­uct with extend­ed lifes­pan.