While Textron still clearly harbors strong ambitions in the electric aviation and wider advanced air mobility sector, the U.S. aerospace group has all but confirmed that its Bell business’s long-awaited Nexus eVTOL aircraft will not be its first product in this market, at least not in its current iteration. In a November 24 interview with FutureFlight, Rob Scholl, the senior Textron executive appointed nine months ago to lead its eAviation team, acknowledged that Nexus is not an active program and said that the company will not confirm plans to bring a passenger-carrying eVTOL model to market until it confirms a business case for doing so.
“Nexus has been in the works for five years and it has been a useful exercise to test the [all-electric] technology and market feedback,” Scholl explained. “Bell has continued to evolve designs internally and develop the technologies, and we have a good view of these in terms of the technology roadmap. We will continue to invest [in this area] as it makes sense, but we still have to see further development of the battery technology and the economic case.”
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