Vertical Flight Society’s World eVTOL Aircraft Directory reaches 600 design concepts, with nearly a third being added in the last 12 months

The Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety (VFS) has said the num­ber of eVTOL air­craft being tracked in its World eVTOL Air­craft Direc­to­ry has now reached 600 designs, from near­ly 350 com­pa­nies world­wide.

The direc­to­ry is part of the VFS’ Elec­tric VTOL News web­site, www.eVTOL.news, which is the world’s old­est and most exten­sive online resource on eVTOL air­craft and tech­nol­o­gy. After sup­port­ing the eVTOL com­mu­ni­ty begin­ning in 2013, VFS launched the web­site in April 2017 when the list of known eVTOL pro­grammes under devel­op­ment reached about a dozen.

Since then, designs have been added and an ever-increas­ing pace., with near­ly 200 new designs were added in 2021 alone. The free site also hosts more than 600 eVTOL news sto­ries, includ­ing some 270 in-depth arti­cles from the Society’s Ver­ti­flite mag­a­zine, the lead­ing peri­od­i­cal on eVTOL and rotor­craft devel­op­ments. 

Mike Hirschberg, VFS’ Exec­u­tive Direc­tor, said: “We realised there need­ed to be some way for the pub­lic to keep track of all the new inno­v­a­tive con­cepts being explored. Since some inno­v­a­tive designs that seemed implau­si­ble at the time con­tin­ued matur­ing into plau­si­ble approach­es, we decid­ed to cat­a­logue every know design — from the sil­ly to the seri­ous.”

The num­ber of design con­cepts cat­a­logued (both active and defunct designs) has dou­bled over the past 18 months. 2021 also saw a dou­bling of the amount of fund­ing being invest­ed in eVTOL air­craft devel­op­ers. VFS had esti­mat­ed $4.5B of invest­ments in eVTOL com­pa­nies in 2010–2020. How­ev­er, last year saw sev­er­al addi­tion­al devel­op­ers go pub­lic and/or attract size­able pri­vate invest­ments, bring­ing the total to more than $10B today. 

VFS has been at the fore­front of what it calls the “Elec­tric VTOL Rev­o­lu­tion” since 2014 when it held the world’s first meet­ing of the eVTOL devel­op­ment com­mu­ni­ty.

Run­ning from Tues­day to today (Thurs­day), the Society’s 9th Annu­al Elec­tric VTOL Sym­po­sium was held as a hybrid in-per­son­/vir­tu­al event as part of its Trans­for­ma­tive Ver­ti­cal Flight (TVF) Tech­ni­cal Meet­ing in San Jose, Cal­i­for­nia.

It con­tin­ues as the world’s largest and longest-run­ning event focus­ing on the incred­i­ble promise, progress and chal­lenges of eVTOL air­craft. As in pre­vi­ous years, the annu­al sym­po­sium pre­sent­ed the lat­est insights, trends and progress in eVTOL devel­op­ments. This month’s sym­po­sium fea­tured ple­nary pre­sen­ta­tions by gov­ern­ment lead­ers from NASA, the US Army, US Air Force and the FAA, as well as indus­try talks from Siko­rsky, Hyundai’s Super­nal, Lil­i­um and Wisk.

More than 50 addi­tion­al VIP speak­ers and pan­el­lists in the sym­po­sium cov­er impor­tant top­ics regard­ing eVTOL, while more than 50 tech­ni­cal papers on rotor­craft aero­me­chan­ics, eVTOL, the Mars Heli­copter, advanced air mobil­i­ty (AAM) will be pre­sent­ed.