‘It takes time to normalise, then all of a sudden it is hard to remember life without it.’

In the early days of the automotive industry, the US and UK enacted the ‘Red Flag Act’, which required three drivers to a car – two to sit in the vehicle and one to walk in front waving a red flag to warn other road users. Cars also had to stick to strict speed limits of 2mph (3.2kph) in urban areas and 4mph in the countryside.

The 1865 act came into existence because of lobbying by the stagecoach and locomotive industries, afraid the car would replace them. Legislation was also relatively easy to implement because the public did not yet have confidence in the evolutionary technology of the automobile. The act was repealed in 1896 and the speed limit was increased to 14mph.

“Looking back and thinking about laws such as the Red Flag Act, they seem absurd nowadays, but that is because we are looking from today’s perspective where cars are everywhere,” Manuel Heredia, MD at Spanish eVTOL developer Crisalion Mobility, tells us.

“Then if you think about the mobile phone, everybody has one or maybe more. But the first mobile phones were big, inconvenient and expensive. They were probably perceived as something for the elites. And yes, that was true initially, but you need to take the jump and imagine how things are going to evolve in the years to come.

“I think this industry has suffered a little bit. When you look at where we are in the hype curve, I think there is still some way to go down before we head up again.”

Industry challenges remaining

Heredia is openly less bullish on the early eVTOL industry than many of his industry peers. He sees the appetite for the industry but believes the race is “very much still on” with respect to seizing market opportunities. And that race is sure to throw up some peculiarities along the way.

“When thinking about entry into service next year for some eVTOLs, I think if that happens, it will be very, very limited in scope simply because the ecosystem is not there. It is not enough to have a certified electric aircraft – no matter how fantastic it is. If there are no chargers, what use is it?

“You also need an infrastructure of vertiports. Yes, they will be 30% cheaper to operate from, but you need to build them. Globally, this is one of the biggest infrastructure undertakings humankind has ever thought about. Then, if you think about air traffic control, today’s solutions do not have the scale to cope with the hundreds of new aircraft flying at any one time as proposed,” says Heredia.

Those are just two issues that require solving, says the former Airbus vice president. Maintenance also throws up its own challenges that could hinder the rollout and scale-up of the eVTOL industry. The current maintenance network is set up to cater for aircraft that can fly long distances, meaning there are only a few maintenance centres on each continent. Electric aircraft will require a network more akin to car workshops today, which needs to be built out too. That also throws up some positive implications for employment and spreading talent across a larger area, adds Heredia.

Insurance is also a key challenge for eVTOLs and electric aircraft in general. “Insurance is an industry that relies on statistics and when you don’t have that data you are really pushing insurers to the limit.

“It is going to take time for all of the above elements to fit into place,” he says.

Saudi realism 

Heredia gives the example of Saudi Arabia, “where the winds are all blowing in the right direction”. Back in January, the kingdom published an AAM roadmap outlining the intended plan to integrate eVTOL operations with traditional aviation systems and other transport modes. The country has the political will, funding, customers and modern infrastructure required to make it an ideal incubator for early commercial eVTOL services, he says.

“Yet they say it will still take two to three years to put all of the puzzle pieces together. Then they believe there will be five to 10 years where the market will be driven by supply. Only after that, maybe in 15 to 20 years, is when we will start to see real competition between OEMs.”

Nevertheless, it is a matter of when, not if, the eVTOL industry takes flight, says Heredia. There are now over 11,000 eVTOLs on order across the industry, but only 4% are part of a binding agreement. This is evidence of an appetite for the aircraft, but also shows how customers will take the opportunity to shop around and buy something certified when it arrives.

Crisalion’s Fly Free technology 

Revolution.Aero has covered a number of electric aircraft developers that are firm believers in ‘second-mover advantage’. Crisalion Mobility also falls into this category. The company, which is developing electric mobility solutions for the air and ground, was founded in 2019 as a spin-off from drone startup Umiles Next. Crisalion now has its base in Madrid, Spain with offices in Bilbao, Spain and Doha, Qatar.

The company has connections to Spain’s largest private R&D centre, Tecnalia. The centre is a reference technological partner of Crisalion and has helped to accelerate the start-up’s programme.

It was at Tecnalia’s headquarters that Crisalion began development of its patented ‘Fly Free’ propulsion technology. Capable of controlling an aircraft’s movements in all directions, the system consists of sophisticated rotor control software that allows the independent control of each propulsion unit, increasing stability, safety and agility in all flight phases.

Crisalion initially tested its Fly Free system in a multicopter – this was the configuration of choice for Umiles – but the range was limited to about 15km (9.3miles). “That is not something you can offer to an operator, there is no business case. So after some deep industry consultation, the result we came to was the aircraft you see here today.

“The wing is what allows you to achieve meaningful distances in an electric aircraft. When you look at our design, it is relatively conventional, we are not building in any futuristic features. It has a straight wing, a T-shaped tail, so it looks somewhere between a helicopter and an aeroplane. We have purposely tried to reduce the risk to areas where you need to be disruptive. The batteries, the electric propulsion system and flight control system are where we are pushing the envelope.”

Named Integrity, Crisalion’s eVTOL aircraft has room for one pilot and five passengers. This equates to a maximum payload of 400kg and a maximum take-off weight of 2.8t. The aircraft will have a range of 130km (80miles) with reserves and be capable of achieving a cruise speed of 180kph (111mph). The Fly Free system works through 16 motors arranged in two arms on each side of the aircraft. Each arm can independently modify its thrust vector in pitch and roll through differential thrust of the motors.

“Safety is critical in aviation,” says Heredia. “But as well as being safe, we also wanted to create an aircraft that felt safe too. If you fly in small aircraft, especially a helicopter close to tall buildings, you will be used to feeling the impact of turbulence. So the idea behind Fly Free was to create an aircraft that the public would be confident to fly in. I often joke that if you want to make a successful aircraft it has to be something your mother would fly in. Our system has very low inertia and allows you to orient the vector thrust quickly which protects the cabin from disruption.”

The firm has grown fast. Starting with between five and 10 employees, Crisalion now employs 70 people and has plans to expand to 110 by the end of the year. It also has a full-scale flight demonstrator currently undergoing testing. The company has raised around €20m from Spanish public and private investors, primarily from Grupo Ibérica. It also has plans to raise a further €20m later this year from public and private investors and soft loans, says Heredia. “Next year we are planning to raise €100m and at that time we are to begin looking outside of Spain, regions like the Middle East for example.”

Heredia, a proud Spaniard, is a firm believer in the benefits Spain can offer a company like Crisalion. “In terms of aerospace, Spain is a powerful actor. It is one of the few countries in the past 50 years to put into flight, end-to-end, a new large freighter, the A400M. It has had a direct role in the CR925, MRTT and the Eurofighter. All of the disciplines you need to put a new aircraft into flight you will find in close proximity to one another in Spain. Also, in terms of a skilled workforce, it is much more competitive to hire in Spain versus California, Germany or the UK for example.”

Plans to go pilotless 

As mentioned earlier, Crisalion is developing solutions for both the air and ground. The company made the expansion to land mobility solutions in 2022 when it identified the crossover of automation trends in both industries. After watching the self-driving car sector begin to grab headlines worldwide, Heredia said Crisalion decided to weigh in with an aviation-inspired roadmap to autonomous operations.

“Implicitly the roadmap to autonomy has always had three steps,” he says. “First, a pilot on board a normal aircraft, then you put your pilot on the ground and essentially have a drone. After that you progressively transfer functions from your ground pilot to the aircraft. If you look at the self-driving car space, we have seen various projects, players that somehow skip the intermediary step and try to go from a normal car to integrating driverless vehicles in an inner-city setting. This is a very difficult thing to do.”

Heredia says it is just as true for the eVTOL industry as it is for automotive. “You need to work on three things in parallel: societal acceptance, maturity of the technology and trust of the regulator. All of these are interrelated.” He’s right. In the case of the car, if the technology is not assertive enough to navigate a roundabout or overtake a dumpster truck, that generates public frustration which in turn removes a regulator’s trust in the product.

“So we wanted to find a way to break this vicious cycle, and we realised there is value in offering a remotely controlled solution.” That system, currently in development, is called Intellydrive. It combines the remote operation of any kind of vehicle within a coordinated driving convoy operated from a driving centre by a remote controller. Potential sites include large infrastructure projects, airports and logistics distribution hubs.

“You cannot drive on the public roads yet in large part, but there are a number of places you can set up a control centre in a restricted environment. This allows you to build a business case, mature the technology, turn the driver into a white-collar role and increase societal acceptance ahead of the regulator being ready to let us roll it out on a wider scale. It also helps us generate cash as a company before our aircraft is in production.”

What Chinese autonomy could mean 

Whilst there is a growing level of harmonisation between the US and the EU, the FAA and EASA, the world is bigger than just those two continents. What is happening in China could be a game-changer for much of the world, according to Heredia. “If there are 11,000 aircraft on order, where are the pilots to fly them? In China, last year they certified a first autonomous aircraft – so we see the world going in two opposite directions and we need to pay attention to all of it,” he says.

“Right now, it is hard to see what is going on in China from the outside, but if successful domestically, these aircraft will begin to operate elsewhere. Then two things can happen. Either they demonstrate safe operations and we in the West have a problem because we will need to react very quickly. Or, and I personally think we could start to see this happen, they have issues. This is also bad news for us because we will need to go back to the investor community and the public at large to explain that certified in China does not mean certified in the West – they have different requisites. That will be a difficult conversation to have.”

The first recorded case of a red flag being used as a warning date back to 1777 when it was used to raise awareness of a flood risk in Calais harbour, northern France. Nowadays, a red flag more commonly refers to meme culture to warn of peculiar, off-putting traits in a potential romantic partner. As the eVTOL industry moves closer to commercialisation, there are likely to be some more red flag acts along the way; developers will be hoping these won’t make investors fall out of love.