Expands Its Business To Offer Specialist Technical Consulting Services For VTOL And Urban Air Mobility (UAM) Aircraft

AeroMobil, the Bratislava, Slovakia-based company with an actual flying car, has expanded its business to offer specialist technical consulting services for VTOL and Urban Air Mobility (UAM) aircraft.

Aeromobil’s Technical Consulting Services division will provide services in three areas: technical advisory, engineering consulting and concept development on offer for existing organisations and new entrants aiming to solve engineering challenges and create safe, certifiable VTOL aircraft. The company plans to make a formal announcement on during the inaugural Global Urban Air Mobility Summit 2019 in Farnborough, UK, on Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2019.

AeroMobil said it has identified a growing need in the market, driven by the continued growth of new entrants and the increasing demand for proven technical knowledge and capability to develop VTOL aircraft for the next frontier in personal mobility. By expanding its current offer to VTOL technical services, AeroMobil aims to offer its deep expertise across the major technical building blocks of UAM – vehicle, infrastructure and operations.

AeroMobil has extensive experience in the development of personal aerial vehicles (PAVs) and VTOL aircraft. Over the last ten years, the team has accumulated a depth of expertise in critical areas related to the design, certification and development of PAVs with unprecedented innovation experience resulting in in 14 global patents.

To date, AeroMobil is unique in having flown and tested three generations of its flying car, having conceptualized and developed a range of VTOL vehicles, showcased by the AeroMobil 5.0 eVTOL. Over the past 18 months, the AeroMobil team has developed and analysed over 50 different VTOL aircraft designs for different applications and mission profiles using its engineers’ cumulative 400 years of auto, aero and rotorcraft experience.

The AeroMobil team has a unique blend of both automotive, aerospace and aviation capability, the combination of which is essential to develop VTOL technologies and certifiable aircraft at scale. The AeroMobil team has engineered and developed a range of vehicles aircraft, from racing cars to commercial airliners, super-cars and rotorcraft for commercial, civil and military applications.

The range of technical consulting services from AeroMobil is grounded in engineering and design capabilities around whole vehicle design and systems integration. AeroMobil is comfortable engineering systems for existing VTOL designs, to creating aircraft from a clean sheet design to meet the specific application requirements and categories.

The automotive and aerospace businesses are converging in UAM, and future UAM design must have a consumer appeal like cars do today, AeroMobil said. The UAM space is growing rapidly with many new entrants that have little or no aviation experience or resources to complete development through certification and operations. AeroMobil has been working on CS-23 (small airplane) certification through the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) for its conventional takeoff and landing (CTOL) AeroMobil 4.0 flying car and can bring that expertise to bear for other developers.

AeroMobil’s view is that the market is currently very inefficient with too much redundancy; the company aims to be a de facto engineering services arm, which will result in de-risking activities for many of these startups. Based in Slovakia, the company can offer lower-cost services than in Western Europe.

Although AeroMobil remains an eVTOL original equipment manufacturer (OEM) it occupies a fairly unique position with an actual flying car, so it does not see competition with other eVTOL developers. AeroMobil will also write the consulting contracts to fence them off from the core AeroMobil programs (this is similar to what Lotus Design now does in the automotive world). As an OEM, AeroMobil has a great deal of design experience that can be leveraged, allowing customers to focus on big-picture business model execution.

AeroMobil Technical Services fall into three capability areas:

• Advisory: including reviewing customer designs, preparing for certification and reviewing operations, essentially to short-cut the knowledge gap of new companies entering the aerospace domain
• Consulting: AeroMobil can provide expertise in many different areas to aid in defining the overall vehicle architecture and subsystem selection, as well as various types of analyses. AeroMobil said the contracts can be very flexible on the amount and type of work, permitting small task orders to provide services in smaller “bite-size” chunks when needed.
• Development: full-vehicle design to subsystem and component design from concept to prototype and production. AeroMobil has already executed a contract of this type for a large automotive OEM.

AeroMobil Chief Technology Officer Doug MacAndrew explained that “AeroMobil is uniquely placed to offer its deep experience to support companies who wish to address this new market for personal air transportation. The engineering team possesses over nine year’s experience in developing PAVs and can help customers accelerate their knowledge of critical requirements, systems and regulation to reduce risk, lower cost and realize an advantage over other solutions in the market. AeroMobil technical services are a suite of services available to existing personal air vehicle (PAV) developers, auto and aero OEMs and to new companies entering the market. From the new service offer, they can choose the most suitable one that suits their needs. Whether they want to understand the market, mission profiles or test their concept, they can rely on a team which is focused exclusively on how to industrialize VTOL.”

AeroMobil currently works with a range of world-leading technology and strategy partners to further enhance its range of services and capabilities. AeroMobil has already completed several projects in the last 12 months for leading automotive OEM and technology suppliers.

(Image provided with AeroMobil news release)

FMI: www.aeromobil.com/technical-services