Zuri emerges from stealth mode and shares vision for regional air mobility with its hybrid-powered VTOL aircraft

VTOL air­craft devel­op­er Zuri has out­lined its inten­tions to enter the mar­ket with its hybrid-pow­ered air­craft, say­ing it can offer pas­sen­gers region­al trav­el between cities and oth­er des­ti­na­tions of up to 700km.

Based in Prague, Czech Repub­lic, Zuri is cur­rent­ly build­ing the three- to four-seater air­craft, with the idea con­ceived by com­pa­ny founder Michal Illich. Its goal is to change the way peo­ple expe­ri­ence on-demand, door-to-door mid-range flights, by trav­el­ling on your own sched­ule and with­out air­ports. 

And Illich has even sug­gest­ed Zuri can build an air­craft which can trav­el fur­ther than 700km in the future, using hybrid-pow­ered tech­nol­o­gy.

The sto­ry of how Zuri began start­ed when Illich grew frus­trat­ed at the exces­sive wait­ing times expe­ri­enced dur­ing a flight from Czech Repub­lic to Croa­t­ia. Illich decid­ed to work on cre­at­ing an air­craft which could offer mil­lions of peo­ple a quick­er way of trav­el.

Illich said: “Since 1999, I have found­ed sev­er­al com­pa­nies, the most suc­cess­ful was a search engine, which was a lead­ing provider in Czech Repub­lic, Slo­va­kia, and Hun­gary for sev­er­al years.

“I sold that com­pa­ny for rough­ly $10M in 2008, stayed for two years, and since 2010 I’m both an active investor in more than 20 com­pa­nies and an entre­pre­neur in soft­ware and hard­ware.”

He added: “Czech Repub­lic has over 100 years of aero­space tra­di­tion, with dozens of com­pa­nies devel­op­ing air­craft, usu­al­ly in the gen­er­al avi­a­tion and ultra­light cat­e­gories. We can ben­e­fit from the tal­ent pool of peo­ple from great tech­ni­cal  uni­ver­si­ties and from the aero­space com­pa­nies here.”

Zuri is now work­ing on devel­op­ing its 11-metre demon­stra­tor and plans to con­duct its first flight tests in March/April. When com­plet­ed, the air­craft will trav­el at speeds of between 250–300km/h and its propul­sion sys­tem will con­sist of spe­cial­ly designed pro­pellers — dri­ven by high­ly effi­cient elec­tric pow­er­plant units.

Dur­ing hor­i­zon­tal flight, the pro­pellers are in the posi­tion of low­est drag. The propul­sion sys­tem of hor­i­zon­tal flight is based on a next-gen­er­a­tion hybrid pow­er­plant unit and due to its low fuel con­sump­tion, it pro­vides extend­ed range for Zuri’s mis­sions.

The bat­tery packs con­sist of mod­ern, light­weight lithi­um cells. There are sev­er­al inde­pen­dent bat­tery box­es, which are indi­vid­u­al­ly mon­i­tored and pro­tect­ed by an intel­li­gent bat­tery man­age­ment sys­tem. The box­es are pro­tect­ed with fire­proof insu­la­tion for addi­tion­al safe­ty.

In May 2018, the team at Zuri built a small mod­el with a two-metre wingspan to test the char­ac­ter­is­tics. Just three months lat­er, it hired an air­plane design­er and lat­er cre­at­ed a five-metre pro­to­type.

After test­ing it in hor­i­zon­tal mode as an air­plane, the com­pa­ny then added the ver­ti­cal take-off and land­ing sys­tem and start­ed to test in hov­er mode.

Fol­low­ing a €600,000 invest­ment from Pale Fire Cap­i­tal Fund­ing at the end of 2018, Zuri teamed up with Kiwi.com — the Czech start­up which sells air­line tick­ets and is lend­ing its exper­tise on the air trav­el indus­try. While Zuri has received fund­ing, it is now open to invest­ment while it is prepar­ing for a next round.

In 2019, Zuri start­ed to test com­po­nents which were to be used in its one-seater pro­to­type and lat­er that year, it print­ed a 3D mod­el and ver­i­fied the aero­dy­nam­ics in a wind tun­nel at the Czech Aero­space Research Cen­tre.

Now, Zuri in the process of build­ing its first exper­i­men­tal air­craft. The com­pa­ny has adopt­ed Das­sault Sys­temes’ 3DEXPERIENCE plat­form on the cloud with the Rein­vent the Sky, to design and pro­duce its design, cre­ate a vir­tu­al expe­ri­ence twin and con­nect all stake­hold­ers.

“The air­craft has eight elec­tro­mo­tors and pro­pellers for VTOL, which are pow­ered by both a bat­tery and turbogenerator.This com­bi­na­tion allows us to achieve a range of 700 km, sig­nif­i­cant­ly more than any pure eVTOL air­craft”, Illich said.

“We start­ed the design process on Solid­works and lat­er found out we want to upgrade to the state-of-the-art soft­ware which is Catia in their cloud ver­sion called 3DExperience. We part­nered with Das­sault’s local part­ner Techn­o­dat and migrat­ed all our design and engi­neer­ing to Catia.” 

For more infor­ma­tion about Zuri, vis­it https://zuri.com/