VIDEO: AutoFlight reveals details about its first eVTOL aircraft designed to transport passengers, known as ‘Prosperity I’

Fol­low­ing on from estab­lish­ing its first loca­tion in Europe, Aut­oFlight has unveiled the proof of con­cept design of its first eVTOL air­craft designed for trans­port­ing pas­sen­gers.

Known as Pros­per­i­ty I, the air­craft will seat three pas­sen­gers plus a pilot and have a range of approx­i­mate­ly 250km. Led by Tian Yu, Aut­oFlight was ini­tial­ly focused on unmanned car­go drones but it has now switched its efforts on the emerg­ing pas­sen­ger-car­ry­ing mar­ket.

A team led by for­mer Air­bus man­ag­er Mark Hen­ning is now ramp­ing up at Augs­burg Air­port in Ger­many, with its first task being to achieve cer­ti­fi­ca­tion from EASA. The pro­gramme will begin this year, with com­ple­tion expect­ed by 2025.

In a YouTube video announc­ing the news, Yu, who is CEO and Founder of Aut­oFlight, said the maid­en flight of Pros­per­i­ty I was com­plet­ed in Octo­ber 2021 and that fur­ther test flights are being worked on ‘con­tin­u­ous­ly’. It will have a max­i­mum take-off weight (MTOW) of 1,500kg, fly­ing at speeds of 200km/h.

In Jan­u­ary 2022, Hen­ning took on the posi­tion as Man­ag­ing Direc­tor at Aut­oFlight Europe. The aero­nau­ti­cal engi­neer and grad­u­ate of Munich’s Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty has worked in the avi­a­tion indus­try for 26 years. Mr. Hen­ning start­ed his career at DASA and held lead­er­ship posi­tions at EADS and Euro­copter.

Pre­vi­ous­ly, he was Man­ag­er for Gov­ern­men­tal Busi­ness at the heli­copter divi­sion of Air­bus and head of prod­uct EC135. He has also held posi­tions in pro­gram man­age­ment, strat­e­gy, pro­duc­tion and devel­op­ment and has worked for the Air­bus Group in Indone­sia, South Korea, Israel, South Africa and the Unit­ed States.

Hen­ning said: “We are bring­ing air­craft con­struc­tion back to Augs­burg, cre­at­ing a high-tech loca­tion and jobs as we build drones and cre­ate a com­plete­ly new mar­ket seg­ment for air taxis. What I real­ly like about Aut­oFlight and ‘Pros­per­i­ty I’ is the under­ly­ing sim­ple con­cept. Sim­plic­i­ty trans­lates into safe­ty and effi­cien­cy.”

Aut­oFlight has already com­plet­ed more than 10,000 take­offs and land­ings in adverse weath­er con­di­tions and said a flight test video of Pros­per­i­ty I will be unveiled soon.

The com­pa­ny’s head­quar­ters is in Shang­hai, with a com­pos­ite mate­r­i­al man­u­fac­tur­ing plant in Jining/Shandong Province and flight con­trol sys­tem research cen­tre in Ger­many.