If you could not attend AirVenture 2018, the CAFE Foundation has recorded and made available all 19 presentations from the Electric Aircraft Symposium. Hosted by Yolanka Wulff, CAFE’s Executive Director, this high-level course in revolutionary aerodynamics, futuristic thinking and potential rules and regulations for all this creativity, EAS 2018 drew a wealth of great speakers.
You can tap into this wealth here. Enjoy learning about the turbulent history of VTOL flight from Todd Hodges, a retired engineer from NASA Langley. He explores why otherwise brilliantly engineered vertical takeoff and landing machines failed, and ends with a note of hope, with DEP and DEAC allowing configurations that solve a lot of problems.
Willi Tacke, Founder and Organizer of the e-Flight-Expo and CEO of Flying Pages GmbH, an international publisher of light aircraft directories in four languages, gave a review of what’s flying now.
Keeping it real, Michael Friend, Chief Engineer for Future Platforms (Retired) for Boeing Commercial Airplanes, and responsible for the first fuel-cell powered aircraft, brings his practical experience to “Balancing Optimism and Realism in Electric Aircraft Design.”
Gilles Rosenberger, industrial engineer for the Airbus E-Fan project and CEO of Faraday, takes a daring look at the future, attempting to predict where electric flight will be in 2028.
Kevin Noertker, Co-founder and CEO of Ampaire, and sponsor of the Symposium, discusses, “Accelerating the World’s Transition to Sustainable Aviation” He shows a series of logical steps Ampaire is taking to make their future craft a reality.
Ampaire’s Kevin Noertker explains his firm’s design to a group of Boy Scouts
Josh Portlock, Founder and Chairman of Electro.Aero.Pty.Ltd in Australia, talks about his career in electric aviation, including making the first electric aircraft cross-country flight on his home turf. He discusses two major building blocks to sustainable aviation, electrofans and universal charging – while showing the multiplicity of plugs available today.
Bye Aerospace CEO George Bye gives a background and forecast for his two- and four-seat Sun Flyers.
Rosenberger, Noertker and Portlock engage in a panel discussion about their experiences as Electric Aircraft Developers.
Omer Bar-Yohay, Co-founder and CEO of Eviation, discusses his firm’s nine-seat, autonomously-controlled electric aircraft, designed from the beginning to have ultralight construction and a powerful battery installation. He anticipates manned flight tests in 2019 and production in 2022, and his talk emphasizes how valuable partnerships can make that happen.
Carl Dietrich, C0-founder and CTO for Terrafugia, reveals a surprising new design for the company, the TF-2, a three-part solution to interfacing ground and air transport.
All these new designs will need powerplants, and Luciano Serra, Director for Certification and Safety for MagniX, an Australian motor developer producing light-weight motors from 265 to 560 kilowatts (355 to 751 shp). He lays out “traps” on the way to certification and discusses a cooperative approach between developers and regulators to helping avoid them.
While many speakers discuss hardware, Tom Gunnarson, former FAA regulator and now Lead of Regulatory Affairs for Kitty Hawk, unsurprisingly talks about rules and regulations, and how industry and regulators will need to work together to create rules for a much-changed operating environment.
Kenneth I. Swartz, Board Member of the Vertical Flight Society; and President of Aeromedia Communications discusses the history of the American Helicopter Society, founded in 1943, and its transformation to the Vertical Flight Society. He shows the massive changes in technology, and approaches to selling that technology to the public.
Aurora Flight Sciences has pioneered in everything from human-powered flight to eVTOL technology. Ed Lovelace, a Technical Fellow in High-Power Electrical Systems for the firm, discusses Aurora’s history and its commitment to Large Scale, On-Demand Urban Air Mobility.
With an ever-growing number of lives saved by his BRS ballistic recovery parachutes, Boris Popov, the Founder of BRS Aerospace, is looking at how to bring down eVTOL craft safely. Designs are necessarily different for these mostly multi-rotor craft, and include laser warning systems to alert those of the ground of a descending eVTOL.
What Path to Scale for Aerial Ridesharing will we follow? Adam Warmoth, Vehicle Requirements Lead for Uber Elevate, answers those questions – explaining how we will go from small to large scale operations in this new transportation paradigm.
Stan Ross, Founder and CEO of EFX Applied Technology, shows how his firm’s products literally shine a light on danger zones. IPAS (Intelligent Proximity Alert System) will be useful as growing numbers of passengers arrive and depart on multi-rotor vehicles.
EFX’s laser displays literally illuminate danger areas
Finally, how will we pay for all this new stuff? Peter Shannon, Managing Director of the appropriately named Levitate Capital, will provide “An Investor’s Perspective to the Opportunity in Advanced Aerial Mobility.”
You can access this resource at any time, and learn from the experts in their fields. These are opportunities not to be missed.