Electric Aircraft Are Quietly Sneaking Up on Us

When the electric air taxi revolution arrives, you probably won’t it hear coming. A remarkable feature of an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft is how quietly it flies, scarcely noticeable amid typical city traffic sounds. Unlike a helicopter, there’s no pounding, 90-decibel “thwop, thwop, thwop.” In contrast, eVTOL aircraft use multiple small propellers that spin half as fast as a chopper’s rotor—avoiding the annoying, low-frequency sound pulses created by the big whirling blades.

Huge funding deals involving Silicon Valley billionaires and big corporations followed, with more than $1 billion raised in the first quarter of 2020 alone. But after a turbulent period of hype and overexpansion, Uber’s air taxi venture nosedived that same year, forcing the company to sell its Elevate division to Santa Cruz, Calif.–based electric aircraft company Joby Aviation.

The engineers and designers creating these craft couldn’t, however, simply swap turbines for electric motors. “Replacement with electric power would mean less performance in many cases,” Langford points out. “The low energy density of batteries means that electric aircraft are best suited to short-range missions—less than 200 miles, often way shorter than that.

Germany’s Volocopter and China’s EHang are two companies that produce small, multicopter-type eVTOLs. At the upcoming Summer Olympics in Paris, Volocopter hopes to fly passengers between five recently completed municipal vertiports in its two-seat VoloCity demonstrator. Meanwhile the Civil Aviation Administration of China recently cleared EHang to mass-produce its pilotless EH216-S eVTOL, which can operate autonomously while carrying two passengers.

One notable contender among the new air taxi designs is not an eVTOL at all but an eSTOL—an electric short takeoff and landing aircraft, under development by Langford’s current venture, Electra.aero, based in Manassas, Va. Electra’s two-seat, hybrid-electric eSTOL demonstrator, the EL-2 Goldfinch, resembles a nimble, slow-flying crop-duster plane.

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