e-flight-Journal01-2017

Uber UBER elevate Elevate
Ivo Boscarol, CEO of Pipistrel and one of the UBER partners, explains his Vision of WTOL: flying from window at home to the
window at work.
future, these eVTOL aircraft can also be used as computer-controlled
“on demand” air taxis. All possible options
were considered, from the construction of the power supply
for the inner city landing places for these machines
to the noise problem. And why - at least in the opinion of
the UBER-Elevate chief technician, multi-rotor concepts
are preferable in any case to conventional helicopters.
Illustrate list of partners
The list of participating company representatives is somewhat
like the “Who’s Who” of modern technology: car and
motorcycle manufacturers such as Toyota, Yamaha, And
Kawasaki, Boeing Embrair and Airbus, tech companies like
Siemens and GE - it was all represented for what the future
wants to design. Larry Page has already put more than 100
million dollars in the companies Zee AERO and Kitty Hawk.
Amazon has long established its department of drones and
next to Intel is now also Microsoft due to its purchase of
Skype, which has the European VTOL company Lilium.
At the same time, the requirements of UBER are very specific
when one looks at the capabilities that the machines
should have. Besides vertical takeoff capability the aircraft
should fly only with battery, can carry four people,
and can cover a distance of up to 80 miles with up to 160
mph. “In my opinion, just because of the range, pure multicopter
sets are excluded,” explains Mark Moore, the UBER
Elevate chief who has served a long career at NASA where
he studied distributed propulsion systems, which produced
an effective interplay between propellers and fixed
wings to make an optimization aerodynamic solution.
It was noted that Volocopter was not invited to the presentation,
but Daniel Wiegand head of Lilium was.
Just three days before the conference, Lilium’s unmanned
prototype had its first flight. Interestingly, although
the requirements are very specific, the concepts
are very different. Also interesting is the selection
of the partners that UBER presented at the conference.
There was the American helicopter manufacturer Bell
Helicopter along with the general aviation manufacturer
Mooney. Another partner was Gyrocopter pioneer Jay Carter
that has a gyrocopter concept, which starts and lands by
means of the electric drive of the main rotor and the thrust propeller.
Uber’s third partner is AURORA, an American technology
developer and defense contractor who has recently been
developing a huge unmanned electrically driven transporter.
The concept, which AURORA presented at the UBER conference
in Dallas, is a multicopter with eight rotors and
wings. “The wings are necessary, because they consume
much less energy than the multicopter to generate
the boost during the cruise flight or helicopter.”
The fourth manufacturer at the presentation was the
Brazilian airline and military aircraft manufacturer Embraer.
e Flight Journal
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