Volocopter partners with Honeywell to develop VTOL landing systems
Volocopter has signed an agreement with aviation services company Honeywelll to develop new automatic take-off and landing systems for Volocopter’s VTOL aircraft.
Honeywell is breaking into the urban air-mobility market and is working with Volocopter to build on its research technologies developed as part of the European Clean Sky 2 and Single European Sky Air Traffic Management initiatives.
The first port of call will be testing and evolving various sensor-based navigation systems for use in electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft.
Jan Hendrik Boelens, chief technology officer, Volocopter said: “Congestion and traffic jams continue to be time killers for people in modern megacities. New time-saving, environmentally friendly solutions are required, and air taxis will certainly be one of them.
“Honeywell’s wealth of experience and knowledge in the development of next-generation avionics technologies combined with our manufacturing expertise will make autonomous, on-demand air mobility a reality across the world. A key goal of our collaboration is to fly a Honeywell inertial measurement-based attitude reference system solution in one of our Volocopters in 2019.”
In February, Volocopter partnered with Frankfurt Airport to develop concepts for air-taxi services at airports.
Honeywell supporting UAM
This is not the first VTOL project that Honeywell has worked on. In January, Honeywell announced that it was working with Pipistrel to develop avionics, navigation, flight-control systems and connectivity systems to support the manufacturer’s VTOL.
Honeywell and Pipistrel are hoping to develop the aircraft to the point where they can conduct demonstration flights some time in 2019.
Carl Esposito, president, electronic solutions, Honeywell Aerospace said: “Alongside Volocopter, we will be building on our fundamental expertise of navigation sensor solutions plus other landing expertise, moving us closer to the reality of urban air mobility.”
“Our global outlook stems from years of working alongside organizations such as the Federal Aviation Administration and the European Aviation Safety Agency. This collaboration has allowed us to explore the challenges, opportunities and safe integration of technologies and aircraft in civil airspace.”
