Volocopter receives Pilot Training Approval in important step towards its certification goals

Volo­copter is now an Approved Train­ing Organ­i­sa­tion (ATO) from the Ger­man Fed­er­al avi­a­tion office (Luft­fahrt­bun­de­samt), through its sub­sidiary Volo­copter Air Ser­vices.

Being award­ed ATO is an impor­tant puz­zle piece in the jour­ney towards receiv­ing the Air Oper­a­tor Cer­tifi­cate. It will allow Volo­copter to oper­ate elec­tric air taxis once the VoloC­i­ty air­craft receives type cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, expect­ed lat­er this year.  

The ATO cer­ti­fi­ca­tion allows Volo­copter to deliv­er train­ing towards pilot licens­es for its future prod­ucts. It is believed the com­pa­ny is the first eVTOL air­craft to receive this kind of cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

Oliv­er Rein­hardt, Chief Risk and Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion Offi­cer at Volo­copter, said: “This is anoth­er sub­stan­tial mile­stone on the way to bring elec­tric air taxis to cities around the world. It bears wit­ness to the robust avi­a­tion com­pa­ny Volo­copter has become over the past decade and how dili­gent and pro­fes­sion­al our entire team works.”

The approval was hand­ed over with zero find­ings in the final audit. Over the past year, the Luft­fahrt­bun­de­samt rig­or­ous­ly checked if the com­pa­ny adheres to the strict rules and stan­dards required to pro­duce train­ing mate­ri­als for the aircraft/simulators that the train­ing will be deliv­ered on.  

As part of the approval, the com­pa­ny will now work on the tran­si­tion to final­ize the train­ing pro­gram for its elec­tric VoloC­i­ty air­craft in close coop­er­a­tion with the Ger­man Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion office.

Volo­copter has kicked off the approval of the pro­gram in prepa­ra­tion for com­mer­cial launch of elec­tric air taxis lat­er this year, imple­ment­ing the new­ly pub­lished EASA reg­u­la­tions applic­a­ble to the oper­a­tion and pilot licens­ing of this nov­el cat­e­go­ry of elec­tric air taxis.

Volo­copter is the first eVTOL com­pa­ny to receive Design Organ­i­sa­tion Approval (DOA) from the Euro­pean Union Avi­a­tion Safe­ty Agency (EASA) in 2019 and has more than ten years of devel­op­ment expe­ri­ence.