Engineering Challenges To Reinvent The Sky

Several electrical vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) concepts have emerged from startups, to propose new sustainable mobility experiences. As opposed to traditional players in aircraft manufacturing, these "shakers" are innovating around first-of-a-kind, novel configurations of fully electric air taxis with distributed propulsion and tilt rotors. While the eVTOL development is itself a challenge, being a startup builds upon additional challenges to be successful: they need to be first on the market and reach a functioning prototype as soon as possible, they need to be agile, be unique and propose a mobility experience. Lastly, they need to reach type certificate for their vehicle - something not yet achieved and with few months-old regulatory guidance. The tools to be used by the startups and the associated business processes to be implemented are of critical importance to tackle the engineering challenges and to answer the ambition of the startups. Systems engineering and simulation are on the path for reinventing the sky, around a single business platform on the cloud.