LIFT Aircraft gave the public an opportunity to check out their Hexa autonomous single-seat eVTOL prototype at the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) conference and festival in Austin, Texas, held this year on Mar. 8–17. Attendees of the Smart Mobility Summit got to sit in the Hexa demonstrator and simulate flying in the ultralight eVTOL using virtual reality (VR) goggles.
The third annual Uber Elevate Summit touched down at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, DC, on June 11-12, 2019 — just one month after the Silicon Valley mobility company raised $8.1 billion when its shares (UBER) started trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
Electric/hybrid-electric propulsion enables new vertical flight aircraft configurations that have tremendous potential — but also significant challenges — to bring a radical transformation of air transportation for unmanned package delivery, unmanned logistics, personal air travel, air taxis, urban air mobility (UAM), regional air mobility (RAM) and many other missions.
Uber held its third annual summit on June 11-12 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, DC. According to the company, "The Uber Elevate Summit brought together 1200+ attendees for 2 days of technical sessions, hands-on demos, and evening networking events." This page is a web capture from https://www.uber.com/us/en/elevate/summit/2019/attending, June 2019.
Uber held its third annual Elevate Summit on June 11-12 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, DC. VFS was there in force, live-tweeting the event (https://twitter.com/electricVTOL) and posting photos real-time on Twitter and Facebook.
VFS has an album of 60 pictures from the event in the Vertical Flight Photo Gallery.
The Vertical Flight Society held its 75th Annual Forum & Technology Display, the world's leading international event on vertical flight technology, on May 13-16, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This special 75th anniversary event spanned four days and included a record 280+ technical papers, plus 75 presentations and discussions by leaders in industry, the military, government agencies and academia. Forum 75 was a spectacular success with a record 1,400 attendees celebrated 75 years of advancing vertical flight. Find out more about Forum 75 proceedings papers, photos and more!
On May 8, 2019, XTI Aircraft announced that they had successfully completed the first test flights of its 65% scale prototype of the TriFan 600 VTOL aircraft:
The TriFan 600 prototype completed multiple takeoffs, hover, and landings, which tested and validated the electric motors, battery power system, ducted fan propulsion, flight controls, other electrical systems and instrumentation. The aircraft was on a short tether during the tests due to its location at an airport in northern California where it was constructed. Future flights at a certified UAV test facility will be untethered in hover and will also test forward, wing-borne flight, as well as the transition phase between vertical and forward-flight modes.
On Monday, April 29, 2019, the Vertical Flight Society hosted a panel at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) XPONENTIAL 2019 trade show, with some 200 attendees.
The $2M GoFly Prize competition has completed its second phase and has so far received more interest than ever imagined. The idea to fund safe and innovative designs for a personal flying machine was a longtime dream for Gwen Lighter and she worked for years to get it started, including getting help from the Vertical Flight Society and other experts (see “AHS Supports GoFly!,” Vertiflite, Nov/Dec 2017).
A VFS panel and other discussions at Heli-Expo provided an opportunity for the commercial helicopter operating community to ask some tough questions about eVTOL technology.
For the second year in a row, the Vertical Flight Society organized a panel discussion at Heli-Expo to brief the civil helicopter industry and operators on electric- and hybrid-electric-powered vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft opportunities and challenges.
