US Air Force to kick off ‘Agility Prime’ eVTOL programme with virtual launch next week

The US Air Force (USAF) will launch its eVTOL air­craft devel­op­ment pro­gramme, called Agili­ty Prime, with a week-long sched­ule of vir­tu­al events start­ing on Mon­day.

The objec­tive is to rein­force the USAF’s com­mit­ment to part­ner­ing with indus­try investors and help­ing to fund the cre­ation of tech­nolo­gies which could be used for mil­i­tary mis­sions. It is being spear­head­ed by Will Rop­er, assis­tant sec­re­tary of the USAF for acqui­si­tion, tech­nol­o­gy and logis­tics.

He said: “Now is the per­fect time to make Jet­sons cars real. The programme’s Inno­v­a­tive Capa­bil­i­ties Open­ing estab­lish­es the rapid con­tract­ing mech­a­nism to explore and poten­tial­ly field trans­for­ma­tive ver­ti­cal flight air­craft with­in three years. It will host a chal­lenge series this year to select vehi­cles, cer­ti­fy safe­ty and air­wor­thi­ness, pro­cure sys­tems for the most promis­ing mis­sions, and reach oper­a­tional capa­bil­i­ty by 2023.”

Dur­ing the week, there will be live vir­tu­al pan­els for man­u­fac­tur­ers to show­case their capa­bil­i­ties along­side investors and aca­d­e­mics. The US Gov­ern­ment will also pro­vide brief­in­gs and live mod­er­at­ed Q&A ses­sions to describe the con­tract­ing, test­ing, air­wor­thi­ness and import/export process.

The first Inno­va­tion Capa­bil­i­ties Open­ing released by Agili­ty Prime describes the need for an air­craft that can move up to eight pas­sen­gers at ranges greater than 100 miles at speeds exceed­ing 100mph, with the first flight of a full-scale demon­stra­tor planned to occur no lat­er than 17th Decem­ber 2020.

Col. Nathan Diller, Agili­ty Prime IPT lead, said: “The intent of the ini­tia­tive is to help devel­op the indus­tri­al base through mar­ket stim­u­la­tion in an effort to accel­er­ate com­mer­cial and mil­i­tary field­ing which cre­ates addi­tion­al capa­bil­i­ty for our oper­a­tors while sav­ing the tax­pay­er mon­ey,” 

The USAF’s time­frame also match­es the com­mer­cial sched­ule of ride-hail­ing firm Uber, which announced plans to roll out an aer­i­al ride shar­ing net­work in Dal­las, Los Ange­les and Mel­bourne. Joby Avi­a­tion is the only eVTOL man­u­fac­tur­er to pub­licly com­mit to cer­ti­fi­ca­tion with­in this time­frame.

To reg­is­ter for the event and view the full sched­ule, vis­it https://agilityprime.com/index.html