multicopter Archives - 2LUXURY2.COM

Sustainable flight mobility solutions: eVTOL developer Volocopter unveiled VoloConnect

May 20, 2021May 19, 2021 by Editorial Team

EBACE Connect 2021 novelties: Volocopter unveiled its newest aircraft capable to travel longer distances.
Volocopter’s new urban air mobility aircraft is designed for connecting suburbs to cities.

Volocopter, the pioneer of urban air mobility (UAM), unveiled its newest aircraft, VoloConnect, at EBACE Connect 2021.

This electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOL) is designed to connect suburbs to cities and complements the company’s existing family of aircraft for the intra-city mission. VoloConnect’s distinctive hybrid lift
and push design is expected to achieve certification within the next 5 years.

VoloConnect carries on Volocopter’s track record of developing high-tech, electric aircraft for the urban mission.

VoloConnect uses a hybrid lift and push design to transport up to four passengers electrically on routes of 100 km at
a speed of 180 km/h, with a top speed of ~250 km/h. The compact aircraft layout, necessary for urban missions, is
naturally stable and highly efficient during forward flight while maintaining a low stall speed. Volocopter’s Munich-
based team of experts, led by Chief Engineer Sebastian Mores, have been working on the aircraft for over two
years and filed several patents for its technology. They are already flying multiple scaled prototypes of VoloConnect
and are quickly progressing towards testing full scale prototypes.

With the capacity to travel longer distances, VoloConnect joins Volocopter’s aircraft family and extends the company’s UAM ecosystem coverage to the suburbs. The new aircraft will be seamlessly integrated into Volocopter’s existing portfolio of urban air mobility ecosystem solutions: VoloDrone, VoloCity, VoloPort, and the digital platform, VoloIQ.

“VoloConnect embodies the next dimension of our mission to offer affordable, efficient, and sustainable flight mobility solutions for cities around the globe. Leveraging customer insights from our existing VoloCity and VoloDrone, VoloConnect’s capacity to support longer missions and higher payloads serves another strong growing market demand,” says Florian Reuter, Volocopter CEO. “We are confident that this aircraft family, and the years of experience and leading innovation on which it’s founded, will pioneer the way for electric UAM services to launch commercially and internationally.”

Volocopter takes a holistic approach to UAM by developing a full ecosystem that connects the necessary components to offer electric flight in cities. This ecosystem includes partnerships with global leaders such as Aéroports de Paris, Microsoft Azure, Lufthansa Industry Solutions, and many more. Additionally, Volocopter is the only eVTOL developer with a product portfolio of multicopter and fixed wing designs that can be used for passenger and cargo transportation.

All-electric & whisper quiet: WatFly’s Atlas recreational eVTOL is safe, electric, and easy to fly

May 5, 2020May 1, 2020 by Editorial Team

Flight isn’t about following tradition. It should inspire you. It should bring you surprising, beautiful experiences and a feeling of freedom. Free of runways: Wherever you decide to go, just keep enjoying the journey while the flight computer of this recreational eVTOL from Canada handles the controls. Watfly’s Atlas proprietary award-winning electric ducted … Read more

Welcome to the future of drones: HES Hycopter’s flight durations can extend to 3.5 hours

November 8, 2018 by Editorial Team

HYCOPTER – a New Phase in Drone Technology Begins

Singapore’s HES Energy Systems is announcing the commercial launch of HYCOPTER, an industrial-grade multi-rotor drone designed for large-scale industrial maintenance inspections. The H2Drone is a long endurance hydrogen-powered multicopter and fixed-wings for high-end-data-collection commercial missions.

HES Hycopter H2 Drone; photos: hes.sg/hycopter

Last month, HES also unveiled plans for regional hydrogen-electric passenger aircraft called Element One. One century after the start of commercial flights, Element One reinvents aviation pioneering a new form of Aerial Mobility: quiet and Zero Carbon, personalized, on-demand, decentralized and economically inclusive of rural communities.

After many years of work, HES Energy Systems merged its core technologies with a specially adapted multi-rotor design so that flight durations can extend to 3.5 hours, instead of the typical 20-30 minutes when using lithium batteries.

Meet HYCOPTER, a hydrogen multi-rotor system by HES Energy Systems which is now able to keep precision cameras and other sensors in the air for much longer, opening up new commercial use cases while reducing operational costs for service providers.

HES Element One aircraft concept; photos: www.hes.sg

HYCOPTER was designed in Austin, Texas where a local production base is being set up.

Addressing short flight durations is one of the final frontiers in drone technology. HES has a long-standing reputation for producing the world’s lightest and most compact fuel cell systems, which can be as much as 5 times lighter than lithium batteries. Following a first world distance record set in the US by a NASA-backed team from OSU over 10 years ago, HES has been pushing the limits its energy storage technology increasingly further, working from Singapore on various UAV programs and with leading aerospace institutions around the world.

HES is currently capable of over 700Wh/kg system-level specific energy and is working to push this limit even further thanks to a variety of novel technologies.

HYCOPTER includes a new breakthrough 140g pressure regulator capable of reducing hydrogen pressure from 350bar to 0.5 bar. Other system components include specially designed HES fuel cell stacks capable of generating over1W per gram.

HYCOPTER can recharge in minutes using bottled industrial-grade hydrogen from local hydrogen suppliers. Withfurther improvements, HYCOPTER-type platforms could also enable product deliveries over much longer distances than are possible today. In the future, long range cargo drones would be deployed from autonomous hydrogen “droneports”.

“Versions of HYCOPTER will emerge next in transitional wing VTOL applications, and the same HES core technologyis now being scaled up to power manned electric aviation as well as other aerial mobility platforms under discussion with various international aerospace companies,” announced HES Energy Systems.

HES Hycopter H2 Drone-details — HES Hycopter H2 Drone; photos: www.hes.sg

Fly the green way with Volocopter

March 8, 2016March 8, 2016 by Editorial Team

A new two-seat e-multicopter makes a revolutionary step in transportation.

The Volocopter VC200 redefines the helicopter. Learning to pilot vertical takeoff and landing now requires fewer costly and time consuming flying lessons. Volocopter revolutionary e-multicopter will provide clean, energy-efficient transportation.

The Volocopter combines the joy of flying with the highest levels of safety. And not only that – thanks to its reduced mechanics it is low maintenance and extremely easy to operate.

“The pilot merely has to command direction via a joystick and the 2-seater, ultralight aircraft glides into the desired position. In this process our comprehensive redundancy concept ensures a level of safety that immediately compensates a failure of the drive units and forgives a large number of flying errors. Moreover, we have already developed the prototypes of the VC200 with environmentally-friendly rechargeable battery technology,” said Volocopter’s team.

The revolutionary safety & propulsion system of the Volocopter will serve as a platform for additional aviation systems in the future. It is the perfect platform for both vertical takeoff manned aircraft and heavy-duty drones. The flight concept of the Volocopter facilitates piloted, remote-controlled or even completely autonomous air operations. This creates the potential for many diverse applications.

The modular flight systems can be developed in various sizes. Depending on client’s requirements, a purely electric or hybrid form of propulsion can be used to power the aircraft.

The Volocopter can be operated with a pilot, using remote controls or completely autonomously. It allows the Volocopter to serve a broad range of purposes and solve many unique problems like mobility concept for transporting people/mass transit, platform for physical measurement devices, autonomous farming of fields in the precision agriculture sector, yacht tender, pleasure rides for amusement, recreation or sightseeing, air-taxi and so on.