Electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft are a hot topic in the aviation industry, and discussions of them often center around “Urban Air Mobility” or UAM. Everyone knows how frustrating it is to be stuck in traffic in the city, and the idea of taking off in an eVTOL air taxi and zooming through the air to your destination is very appealing.
However, we believe that over the next decade eVTOLs will be most valuable for personal transport between cities, not within them. We call this “Regional Air Mobility” or RAM.
The fastest option available today for many urban journeys, and the baseline for comparison, is the car.
Significant time savings over cars will not be easy to achieve with eVTOLs within cities because, while they are much faster, their passengers will need to use heliports to embark and disembark. These are smaller, more efficient, and more numerous than airports, but they still add overhead to your journey. It will typically be necessary to use a car to get to and from the heliports.
Dufour Aerospace is developing a hybrid eVTOL aircraft and larger cousin of aEro 2 called aEro 3, which will cruise at 350 km/h. As we will show below, this high speed makes it worth the time to go to a heliport for most journeys over about 75 km.
For even longer journeys over 500 km or so, going to an airport will be worthwhile, since commercial jets fly upwards of 800 km/h.
find out more on dufour.aero