US Air Force’s Mobility Flex Procurement to release eVTOL Request for Information

The US Air Force Life Cycle Man­age­ment Cen­ter (AFLCMC) Mobil­i­ty and Train­ing Directorate’s Heavy Air­lift Divi­sion Mobil­i­ty Flex Pro­cure­ment has released a Request for Infor­ma­tion (RFI) to under­stand the matu­ri­ty of eVTOLs for poten­tial near-term field­ing.

Led by the Pro­gram Exec­u­tive Office for Mobil­i­ty and Train­ing Air­craft, the RFI will focus on eval­u­at­ing eVTOLs for busi­ness use-cas­es of eVTOL air­craft for dis­tin­guished vis­i­tor, trans­port and test range logis­tics sup­port mis­sions by sup­ple­ment­ing cur­rent Depart­ment of Defense (DOD) capa­bil­i­ties in each of those mis­sion areas.

The DOD is explor­ing mul­ti­ple aspects of cost and meth­ods to obtain runway/road inde­pen­dent per­son­nel trans­port capa­bil­i­ty, which may include but are not lim­it­ed to sys­tem pur­chase, lease and/or obtain­ing capa­bil­i­ty as a ser­vice.

Through this RFI, Mobil­i­ty Flex Pro­cure­ment aims to col­lect cost infor­ma­tion and basic asso­ci­at­ed capa­bil­i­ty met­rics to use for com­par­i­son with oth­er avail­able air trans­porta­tion assets.

The US Gov­ern­ment is inter­est­ed in explor­ing com­mer­cial inter­est in align­ing ini­tial com­mer­cial oper­at­ing loca­tions with Air Force squadrons which would enable Gov­ern­ment use of eVTOL for DV trans­port mis­sions and range logis­tics sup­port where road access is not prac­ti­ca­ble, such as desert, swamp or snow­pack, while allow­ing com­mer­cial use of the vehi­cle oth­er­wise.

It is like­ly that these mil­i­tary mis­sions are close­ly aligned to the com­mer­cial design intent of these vehi­cles. This mis­sion align­ment will pro­vide a mutu­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial ear­ly use case for both the mil­i­tary and com­mer­cial indus­try and reduce reg­u­la­to­ry, finan­cial and tech­ni­cal risk

The Air Force Research Lab­o­ra­to­ry, or AFRL, is the pri­ma­ry sci­en­tif­ic research and devel­op­ment cen­ter for the Depart­ment of the Air Force, play­ing an inte­gral role in lead­ing the dis­cov­ery, devel­op­ment and inte­gra­tion of afford­able warfight­ing tech­nolo­gies for our air, space, and cyber­space force.

With a work­force of more than 11,500 across nine tech­nol­o­gy areas and 40 oth­er oper­a­tions across the globe, AFRL pro­vides a diverse port­fo­lio of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy rang­ing from fun­da­men­tal to advanced research and tech­nol­o­gy devel­op­ment.

AFWERX, a pro­gram office at the Air Force Research Lab­o­ra­to­ry, or AFRL, con­nects inno­va­tors across gov­ern­ment, indus­try and acad­e­mia. The Air Force recent­ly launched Agili­ty Prime, a non-tra­di­tion­al pro­gram seek­ing to accel­er­ate the com­mer­cial mar­ket for advanced air mobil­i­ty vehi­cles.