The Autoflight vertical take-off taxi has made its first transition flight
This is a significant milestone for Autoflight, which has recently opened an office in Germany to target the European car market. air taxis. The aircraft, Prosperity I, is a 4-seat piloted design that promises a range of 250km at cruising speeds of up to 200km / h.
It is a lift & cruise design, with the passenger pod supported on a pair of large wings. These are equipped with long propulsion pods running from front to back, which contain three large lifting props each, and a fourth torque is elevated to a higher floor to keep the aircraft compact. The propulsion pods are connected at the front by an additional front wing, complete with control surfaces, and there is a pusher prop at the rear of the cabin for horizontal flight.
The team says the l The plane peaked at 198 km / h on this flight, which was launched from Autoflight's test facility in JiangSu province in January. There is still a long way to go before certification, which Autoflight hopes to achieve with both the Chinese CAAC and European EASA by 2025.
In a press release, the company sets out its claim supremacy over other eVTOL companies: “Existing solutions are either low performance or highly complex. Furthermore, most draw on traditional aviation supply chains, which are not designed for VTOL, and therefore involve unreasonable costs. "
Using a simple lift & cruise project with solid performance data, producing most of their own parts, hitting the market relatively early, and implementing a "powerful business model (combination of high margin aircraft sales of ~ 70%, ”Autoflight estimates it should bring in $ 100 billion annually by 2031, for a valuation of more than $ 1 trillion.
