US Air Force uses Kitty Hawk’s Heaviside eVTOL in first medical evacuation exercise

Kit­ty Hawk has joined the US Air Force’s Agili­ty Prime pro­gramme, with its Heav­i­side eVTOL becom­ing the first elec­tric air­craft to be used in a med­ical evac­u­a­tion exer­cise.

A diverse group of indus­try and gov­ern­ment oper­a­tors, engi­neers and test pro­fes­sion­als assessed Heav­iside’s abil­i­ty to do per­son­nel recov­ery and logis­tics, while Kit­ty Hawk’s team demon­strat­ed the air­craft’s remote fly­ing capa­bil­i­ties.  

The exer­cise gath­ered a rich cat­a­logue of data to inform dual-use util­i­ty at the pro­to­type stage, which will inform future devel­op­men­tal and field­ing deci­sions. Besides assess­ing dif­fer­ent load­ing sce­nar­ios, the team also observed demon­stra­tions of remote­ly pilot­ed and ful­ly autonomous flights with Heav­i­side. 

Col. Don Haley, Com­man­der of Air Edu­ca­tion and Train­ing Com­mand Detach­ment 62, who leads a team in devel­op­ing train­ing syl­labi for eVTOL air­craft, said: “This col­lab­o­ra­tive commercial/DoD use-case explo­ration revealed com­mon attrib­ut­es that serve both urban air mobil­i­ty and search and res­cue oper­a­tions: High-reli­a­bil­i­ty, respon­sive launch & recov­ery, min­i­mal logis­ti­cal foot­print, acces­si­bil­i­ty for mobil­i­ty-chal­lenged, low acoustic sig­na­ture, and high lev­els of auton­o­my.”

Found­ed in 2010 and based in Cal­i­for­nia, Kit­ty Hawk has devel­oped numer­ous eVTOL vehi­cles includ­ing the Heav­i­side vehi­cle, which is named after Eng­lish engi­neer Oliv­er Heav­i­side.

It flies at speeds of up to 180 mph with a poten­tial range of 100 miles plus reserves on a sin­gle charge. It takes off and lands in a 30x30 foot space, reach­es sound lev­els of 38 dBA at 1,000 feet and is 100x qui­eter than a heli­copter. Kit­ty Hawk added that it requires less than half the ener­gy per mile of a con­ven­tion­al elec­tric car.

Sebas­t­ian Thrun, Kit­ty Hawk CEO, said: “The world is going to need new modes of trans­porta­tion and Heav­i­side is one path to get­ting us there. We are excit­ed to be work­ing with Agili­ty Prime and look for­ward to our con­tin­ued col­lab­o­ra­tion as we bring eVTOLs to more peo­ple.” 

Lt. Col. Mar­tin Sali­nas, the mis­sion design team lead in the Air Force Oper­a­tional Test and Eval­u­a­tion Cen­ter (AFOTEC), said: “This exer­cise pro­duced impor­tant data that will bol­ster the pro­gram going for­ward.

“The Agili­ty Prime and Kit­ty Hawk teams facil­i­tat­ed the con­ver­gence of Air Force and Marine Corps testers and oper­a­tors to engage with Heav­i­side, all while exper­i­ment­ing with­in the con­text of Per­son­nel Recov­ery and logis­tics use-case sce­nar­ios.”

Col. Nathan Diller, AFWERX Direc­tor, added: “We are pleased to wel­come a new part­ner and hap­py about the progress in this first Agili­ty Prime exer­cise. This is just the begin­ning of many exam­ples that the team will be explor­ing in the com­ing months to part­ner with com­mer­cial com­pa­nies in a way that accel­er­ates matu­ri­ty for com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion, while pro­vid­ing the Depart­ment of the Air Force with deci­sion-qual­i­ty data for future force design.” 

As well as work­ing with the US Air Force, Kit­ty Hawk is also work­ing with Dan­ish emer­gency response and health­care com­pa­ny Fal­ck, to cre­ate a frame­work which will see Heav­i­side used for emer­gency med­ical mis­sions.

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