Volocopter has presented the design for its newest air taxi model: the VoloCity. This will be the fourth-generation electrical take-off and landing aircraft by the German Urban Air Mobility developer. With a calculated range of 35 km and airspeed of 110 km/h, the VoloCity is designed to serve as an on-demand inner-city air taxi.
VoloCity is the result of the learnings of over 1,000 test flights on previous Volocopter generations and market research with several hundred potential customers. It has 18 rotors, and, according to the company, redundancy in all critical systems, a low noise signature and a rigid commitment to the inner-city mission. It has a payload to accommodate 2 people including hand luggage.
“The VoloCity is our most powerful Volocopter yet”, says Florian Reuter, CEO of Volocopter. “It is designed to meet the demands of Urban Air Mobility and incorporates all requirements of the SC-VTOL certification standard established by EASA in July 2019. It is a result of all the insights we have gathered from our extensive testing programmes over the past years. With the VoloCity we will open the first commercial routes and bring Urban Air Mobility to life.”
Volocopter wrote aviation history with the first manned flight of an electrically powered vertical take-off and landing aircraft in 2011. Since then, the German company has developed three generations of aircraft and performed public flights most notably in Dubai in 2017 and during CES in Las Vegas in 2018.
The company is now focusing on establishing the necessary ecosystem around the aircraft to bring on-demand Urban Air Mobility services to life. This entails building up the operational environment such as the physical take-off and landing infrastructure and integrating into air traffic management systems of interested cities. A next public test flight is scheduled for later this year in Singapore, where Volocopter will also display the first VoloPort Urban Air Mobility infrastructure prototype together with its partner Skyports.
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