Airbus Displays Vahana eVTOL Demonstrator at AirVenture

Airbus is featuring its second eVTOL prototype—the tandem tilt-wing Vahana—this week at EAA AirVenture. A single-seat urban air mobility demonstrator, the futuristic vehicle features eight 45-kW electric motors. While it's drawing more foot traffic than any of the company’s helicopters every did, Airbus Americas v-p for research and technology Amanda Simpson cautioned that it will be some time before such vehicles are commercially viable in a way that appeals to a mass market. 

“There are limitations as to what we can do with batteries,” she said. “If you took the best battery today and made it five times more efficient and you wanted to make an [all-electric] airliner the size of an [Airbus] A320, it would weigh six times as much as the aircraft of today without even putting any passengers or cargo on board."

However, battery capacity is only part of the problem, Simpson said. “The challenge isn't the energy density as it goes to weight and volume, but also charging. There’s only so much energy you can pump into these things over a given period of time.” Simpson, like others within the aircraft industry, thinks the first generation of UAMs will have to be hybrids. “I don’t see any other way around it. What the hybrid offers is efficiency, either for boost or distributed power.”

Six Disabled Pilots Get Wings from Able Flight

With the pinning of wings on six new pilots, 501c(3) non-profit Able Flight, which provides flight training for aspiring disabled aviators, graduated its 10th class of aviators this week at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh. The six, disabled in military service or by accident, underwent seven weeks of intensive ground school and flight training (more than 700 total hours) at Purdue University and Ohio State University. A seventh grad was unable to attend the ceremony.

Recently, the Aerospace Center for Excellence (ACE) aviation education complex in Lakeland, Florida—site of the annual Sun ’n‘ Fun fly-in—has joined the program as a training facility, enabling the charitable group to operate throughout the year. ACE students are currently building a Zenith 750 Cruzer—dubbed the Spirit of Lakeland—to be used by Able Flight student pilots and the center’s own students for training.

Founded in 2006, Able Flight has awarded more than 100 flight training scholarships to date. “We certainly have the number of applicants to support more people” in the program, said executive director Charles Stites, but the group needs additional funding to be able to do so.

Able Flight sponsors include ForeFlight, Tempest Plus, Perrone Aerospace, Shell Aviation, Embraer, Lockheed Martin, Signature Flight Support, Alerion, Muncie Aviation, and Flexjet.

Inventor Promotes eSTOL

Dr. David Ullman is skeptical about eVTOL and its potential for widespread use as a vehicle for an urban air taxi system. “I think a lot of people who drank the Uber [Elevate] Kool-Aid are in for some real surprises,” said Ullman, who discussed his JabirWatt eSTOL aircraft this week at EAA AirVenture. He believes eVTOLs simply use too much power and that a better alternative is to add small ducted fans to the wing surfaces of conventional aircraft to turn them into high-performance eSTOLs that can use runways as short as 400 feet. 

“Electric VTOL kills you on the battery,” he said, pointing out that his aircraft consumes just 50 kW to get airborne while a comparable eVTOL uses 250 kW to take to the air. An eSTOL delivers twice the range using current battery technology, Ullman notes. The concept uses multiple electric ducted fans that not only propel the aircraft but also shape high-velocity air over the top surface of the wing to create propulsion airframe interaction, producing aircraft that handle well at very low speeds. 

Ullman has tested 18 different configurations and wind tunnel data to determine optimum fan placement on the Jabiru's wing. The aircraft made its maiden flight two weeks ago with four 120-mm ducted fans. Longer-term, he plans to make a purpose-built aircraft.

BendixKing’s xVue Finds Way On New Pipistrel Trainer

BendixKing’s xVue Touch integrated flight deck has been selected for Pipistrel’s Alpha training aircraft that’s expected to begin deliveries later this year, the Honeywell subsidiary announced this week at EAA AirVenture. Pipistrel trainers equipped with xVue will be known as Alpha King.

“We want to ensure that students and instructors can take advantage of all the advancements afforded by new technology, which makes the Alpha King an ideal solution for flight schools,” Pipistrel founder and president Ivo Boscarol said. “We recognize the unmatched value in BendixKing avionics, which enables us to offer a cost-effective and affordable new generation of training aircraft and build upon our existing, ongoing relationship with Honeywell as a whole.”

The avionics package is expected to cut student pilots’ training time because of its touchscreen primary flight display that with its streamlined, simple software menus make all its functions accessible within two to four touches of the touchscreen, according to BendixKing. Other xVue features include Honeywell’s SmartView synthetic vision system that displays the aircraft flight path over terrain and ADS-B weather display.

“Aspiring pilots can train using sophisticated technology that’s easy to use, enabling them to get their pilot licenses in significantly less time,” said BendixKing president Gregg Cohen. “Plus, our advanced flight deck is simple to maintain and lightweight, saving flight schools money in the long run.” 

Freshly Restored 1928 Gipsy Moth New to AirVenture

Michael Maniatis restored his first airplane decades ago in his Manhattan apartment, assembling wings, fuselage, and tail surfaces and passing them through a second-floor window for later assembly. He is now retired and living in upstate New York, and his latest effort is a 1928 de Havilland DH60G Gipsy Moth biplane. Much more rare than the World War II-vintage Tiger Moth, the Gipsy Moth was de Havilland’s first airplane.

Maniatis acquired the project in 2014, and now, with just six hours’ flying time logged, he loaded it onto a trailer to come to EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh. “It got banged up a little on the way,” he told AIN. Unless you knew every inch of the airplane like Maniatis does, you’d never know.

Asked what was the most difficult part of the project, he said, “Assembly. You work to collect and restore all the original parts and pieces, but the hardest part is taking all those separate parts and making them into an airplane.”

Built in England, the airplane was bought by a Canadian owner in 1931, crashed in 1943 and stored in a barn until 1978, when another de Havilland collector bought the project. He never got to it, however, and Maniatis bought it from the estate.