Wessling, Germany
The autonomous flying taxi maker Lilium GmbH has the ambition to match Elon Musk’s pioneering electric carmaker.
Lilium GmbH was founded with a vision to create a widely accessible and competitively priced Regional Air Mobility service.
Lilium’s business case is this: fast, environmentally-friendly regional transport, with aircraft flying between “lili-pads” with charging facilities potentially covering as little area as a basketball court, and that can be placed in open areas or even on top of buildings in cities and towns they serve.
It’s the way of traveling closest to teleporting – you don’t touch anything in between.
Daniel Wiegand, chief executive of Lilium
Lilium hopes to transform transport, filling the skies with five-seat autonomous electric aircraft that can take off and land vertically by rotating their 36 small electric fans.
Eventually the manufacturer, which is test-flying an unmanned prototype, aims to rival high-speed trains for price of journey up to 300km (186 miles), and with the trips taking a quarter of the time than if made by car.
The highly-regulated nature of air traffic means self-flying aircraft are more likely to achieve autonomy first, meaning more of them can be packed into a small space, and they will eventually be able to challenge trains on price because they don’t need expensive tracks to run on and can go anywhere with space to land.
First and foremost, the aircraft must be uncompromisingly safe. In addition, we needed an aircraft with a low enough noise footprint to fly into urban areas, a high enough range to connect entire regions and the speed to make it a true time saving customer proposition. Payload is also critical since the number of seats directly relates to the cost at which tickets can be offered to customers. The more seats (payload) and the faster one can fly, the better the cost efficiencies (pilot, maintenance, landing infrastructure, etc.) can be distributed among future customers.
Multicopter architectures are relatively simple, they are very efficient during vertical take-off, landing and hovering due to the low disc-load. However, as they are missing wings, multicopters lack cruise efficiency which limits their application to use cases in Urban Air Mobility (UAM) markets. Furthermore, more battery is required to compensate the inefficiency during cruise flight, adding to overall aircraft weight.
Engines are the central performance enabler of an aircraft and are critical to the architectural eVTOL design.
The ducted turbo fans work on the same principle as a traditional jet engine, yet is far simpler, relying on just a single ‘stage’ rotor/stator system driven by an electric motor. There is no combustion required.
Like with any innovation, there are challenges to overcome in our journey to bringing the Lilium Jet and service to life. Some, like achieving full transition to horizontal flight, are more predictable and ones we will tackle ahead of achieving our goal of flying 300km in one hour on a single charge, while others are less so.
This is a further step towards electrification of flight (some smaller fixed wing non-VTOL planes were only just recently approved by the relevant authorities). With improved batteries, our insights will help us go further and open new concepts for different missions; larger planes for high density routes, smaller ones for more individual trips. Long term, a lot will depend on how fast the energy density of batteries improve, as the aerodynamics won’t change in the same way. Doubling the energy density of batteries will either double the aircraft range or allow us to increase payload and add more passengers, without a complete redesign of the aircraft itself.
For now, Lilium is focused on the innovation around safe, efficient and quiet vertical take-off, as it opens up a new field of high-speed mobility currently only served by high-speed trains, which requires enormous infrastructure investment and decades to complete, rendering them unsuitable for most communities.
Designer: Lilium GmbH
Manufacturer: Lilium GmbH
