Air taxi flight performance and application

Urban air mobility encompasses the idea of extending urban transportation to the airspace. For this purpose, several aircraft manufacturers and start-up companies have developed aircraft concepts for flying completely electrical. Electric aircraft have different behavior concerning flight performance, which mostly depends on battery characteristics. Due to this, electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOL) are more limited in their flight performance concerning range and endurance than conventional aircraft. Nowadays data on that topic are mostly published by eVTOL manufacturers and seem to be quite ambitious concerning the current state of battery technology. This paper aims at determining flight performance by considering state-of-the-art battery characteristics. Each flight segment has a different influence on battery discharge, due to different power requirements. Based on an application case, the range capabilities of three eVTOLs are estimated. Therefore, the results reveal a range of around 115 km for vectored thrust eVTOL, around 70 km for lift & cruise eVTOL, and around 50 km for multicopter eVTOL.