Airbus continues to work on developing eVTOL aircraft technologies, the European aerospace group’s CEO, Guillaume Faury, confirmed on Tuesday, but the company doesn’t expect fully viable commercial urban air mobility (UAM) operations to get underway until the second half of this decade. He insisted that the group remains committed to electric aviation, despite a shift in emphasis during 2020 towards developing hydrogen propulsion for larger airliners that it expects to enter service around 2035.
Speaking during the latest in a series of online interviews staged by air traffic management agency Eurocontrol, Faury noted that Airbus has already flown two eVTOL technology demonstrators, the CityAirbus and the Vahana. He said that he sees a future for smaller eVTOL models, not only in their own right but also for their potential use as a platform to develop technologies for applications of electric propulsion on larger commercial airplanes.
