From their website:
World premier: Volocopter is flying manned!
- A step forward in urban mobility
Karlsruhe, Germany in April 2016. The premiere of manned flights with the world’s first certified Multicopter, e-volo’s Volocopter VC200, marks a step forward in urban mobility. The Volocopter is a personal aerial vehicle designed to be so easy and safe to fly that anyone can command it. Due to its electric propulsion, it has no tailpipe emissions and is impressively quiet. For the first time humans’ dream of personal flight as a daily routine becomes attainable. As such it not only offers more widespread use in conventional aircraft domains, but brings us another step closer to air taxi services and entire transportation systems in the third dimension.
The Volocopter VC200 received the ‚permit-to-fly‘ as an ultralight aircraft from German aviation authorities in February 2016. In the context of the commenced test program, e-volo has started to conduct manned flights. The historic world premiere of a flight with a certified multicopter was made by e-volo managing director Alexander Zosel on March 30th, 2016 on an airfield in Southern Germany.
The fly-by-wire technology:
Technology assistance was provided by German drone manufacturer „Ascending Technologies“, which has recently been acquired by US chip maker Intel Corporation. “Intel congratulates e-volo on this accomplishment,” said Josh Walden senior vice president and general manager of the New Technology Group at Intel. “Technology developed by Ascending Technologies enabled the flight controls, motor electronics and key elements that extend multi-rotor UAV technology to this new type of aircraft. We look forward to aiding the development of more manned and unmanned vehicles in the future.”
And Intel will be around for a while - here is the video:
And a tip of the hat to Next Big Future for the link.
Leave a comment