Urban air mobility aircraft (UAM) company Volocopter unveiled the design for its newest electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOL) at EBACE Connect on Monday. The four-seat, retractable gear VoloConnect is expected to have a range of 100 km (54 NM) and a top cruise speed of 250 km/h (135 knots). Volocopter is also developing the two-seat VoloCity eVTOL air taxi and VoloDrone heavy-lift drone.
“VoloConnect embodies the next dimension of our mission to offer affordable, efficient, and sustainable flight mobility solutions for cities around the globe,” said Volocopter CEO Florian Reuter. “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.”
According to Volocopter, the VoloConnect is designed to connect suburbs to cities. The company is aiming to have the aircraft certified under EASA’s SC-VTOL rule in the next five years. As previously reported by AVweb, Volocopter raised €200 million ($238 million)—which the company says will go toward the certification of the VoloCity and the launch of its first commercial routes—in its Series D funding round last March.
A mere two months after announcing it’s “City,” they’re already on to the next design.
What is this … a race to see how many computer generated contraptions they can conjure up or is this some prop for the next Star Wars movie?
Oy vey !!
What urban market? At least in the USA, there ain’t nothing worth flying in for in downtown cities anymore. If anything, people with means are leaving downtown cities.
Larry,
‘Oy vey’!
Extra credit for the Yiddish reference!
🙂 I hit myself in the forehead w/ my R hand, too
“Introduce.”
“Unveil.”
BS.
These “aircraft” are 100% vaporware.
Perhaps “propose” would be a more communicative verb.
Amazing! The announced recent funding for these vaporware products simply proves P.T. Barnum was right, there is a sucker born every minute, but with the increase in world population and inflated money, it is more like 100 suckers born every minute. Also of note is the truism that a fool and his money are soon parted.
Isn’t this the company with a working prototype?
Yes; they flew a piloted prototype over Singapore’s Marina Bay in late ’19 – see: http://www.volocopter.com/newsroom/volocopter-air-taxi-flies-over-singapores-marina-bay/