VONAER signs MOU with AutoFlight for Asian Market, “to Purchase 20 Prosperity 1 Aircraft”

VONAER, a South Kore­an Urban Air Mobil­i­ty (UAM) ser­vice com­pa­ny based in Seoul, announced this week it has signed a Mem­o­ran­dum of Under­stand­ing (MOU) to intro­duce AutoFlight’s air­craft into South Korea. The ini­tial aim is to pur­chase 20 Pros­per­i­ty eVTOLs. The sign­ing cer­e­mo­ny was held fol­low­ing Aut­oFlight’s Pros­per­i­ty 1 flight demon­stra­tion in the skies over Shen­zhen, Chi­na. 

Two air­craft flew in for­ma­tion. Both suc­ceed­ed in cross­ing the 55km sec­tion of the strait between Hong Kong and Macao in 20 min­utes with low noise of 65db and sta­ble flight while main­tain­ing an alti­tude of 150m.

Kel­lan Xie, Vice Pres­i­dent of Aut­oFlight, com­ment­ed: “Korea is one of the most active coun­tries in the UAM indus­try and through the col­lab­o­ra­tion with VONAER, we aim to con­tribute to this devel­op­ment by pre­sent­ing a new ser­vice mod­el.” Adding, “The objec­tive is to seam­less­ly inte­grate the VONAER plat­form for UAM ser­vices.”

Before AutoFlight’s com­mer­cial Type Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, VONAER plans to estab­lish an air taxi ser­vice MaaS plat­form util­is­ing heli­copters, with the inten­tion of tran­si­tion­ing to cer­ti­fied eVTOL air­craft once the UAM ser­vice is estab­lished.

Shin Min, CEO of VONAER, remarked, “Safe­ty ver­i­fi­ca­tion is the most impor­tant aspect and why I have been look­ing at AutoFlight’s air­craft, which has an excel­lent safe­ty and main­te­nance record.” He con­tin­ued, “Through this col­lab­o­ra­tion, we will devel­op a UAM air­craft oper­a­tion man­age­ment solu­tion on our plat­form and pre­pare for glob­al expan­sion.”

Xie added, “Our agree­ment with VONAER is a strate­gic move to pave the way for our entry into the Kore­an mar­ket.”

Aut­oflight, based both in Ger­many and Chi­na, already pos­sess­es a pro­duc­tion line capa­ble of man­u­fac­tur­ing var­i­ous types of eVTOLs includ­ing drones, cov­er­ing both pas­sen­ger and car­go trans­porta­tion.  Its facil­i­ty in Shang­hai is capa­ble of pro­duc­ing up to 1,000 air­craft a year. Aut­oflight aims to com­mence com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion fol­low­ing approval from the Civ­il Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion of Chi­na (CAAC) for car­go trans­porta­tion eVTOLs in the first half of this year.

Pros­per­i­ty 1 accom­mo­dates four pas­sen­gers along­side one safe­ty pilot and can trav­el up to 200 km/h, with a dis­tance a range of 250km on a sin­gle charge. Aut­oflight is to begin full-scale com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion in the first half of this year after Type Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion approval from China’s CAAC air reg­u­la­tor.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://autoflight.com/en/

https://www.vonaer.com/en

(News Source: https://www.edaily.co.kr/)

(Top image: VONAER CEO Shin Min (left) and Aut­oFlight VP Kel­lan Jai (right) at the sign­ing cer­e­mo­ny after the Pros­per­i­ty 1 demon­stra­tion held in Shen­zhen, Chi­na: Pho­to VONAER)

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