Aviation Giant Gets New Insights

Aviation Giant Gets New Insights

Vahana air taxi

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The flagship program that launched the urban air mobility initiative at Airbus has come to a close. The Vahana unmanned air taxi concept that the aviation giant said would change the way people traverse urban areas has come to an end four years after its inception.

Vahana’s key learnings are now providing Airbus Urban Mobility with invaluable insight on the design of its future urban air vehicle.

Vahana is an all-electric, single-seat, tilt-wing vehicle demonstrator that focuses on advancing self-piloted, electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) flight. 

Vahana used eight electric motors and a tandem tilt-wing configuration that converts between rotor-borne vertical and wing-borne forward flight. This configuration enabled Vahana to achieve both vertical take-off and landing as well as cross-city flight range on battery power alone. Its cruise speed reached 100 knots (190 Km/h), enabling trip times that were two to four times faster than cars. The vehicle was self-piloted, thanks to  its onboard detect-and-avoid systems that can identify both air and ground hazards, according to Airbus website.

Back in 2016, no one could have predicted that leveraging the sky to improve urban mobility was practical. And yet, urban air mobility is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Today, it is one of the most exciting and promising markets in aerospace. According to uasnews.com, the extraordinary progress of Vahana has undoubtedly played a key role in bringing this vision closer to reality.

From the outset, Vahana was designed as a technical demonstrator project. In the R&D community, “technical demonstrators” are commonly used to test high-potential technologies and to support their transfer to real-world applications. 

Now as the dust settles on Vahana’s final flight, the next chapter in urban air mobility at Airbus is already taking shape. The project team is looking forward to applying the lessons learned to the future urban air vehicle at Airbus. And they will be in good company: the project team for CityAirbus — the second eVTOL demonstrator in the Airbus portfolio — will continue its flight test campaign throughout 2020 to be able to bring fresh insight to the concept development table.