Critical Transition Flight Successfully Completed by TCab Tech E20 eVTOL

China’s TCab Tech has successfully completed transition flight tests for its full-scale E20 eVTOL demonstrator, a major milestone that proves its aircraft can handle the most complex part of its flight envelope.

That’s a big win for the Shanghai-based air taxi outfit, which has been working its way up to these trials since the transition flight tests of its sub-scale prototype back in 2022. It pulled off its first crewed flight a couple of months ago with its CEO on board, but stayed in hover mode for those tests.

The company notes it’s carried out some 1,000 flight tests since 2021 for various versions of its its six-rotor eVTOL air taxi, which uses a unique blend of different VTOL concepts in its propulsion system.

Lift-and-cruise designs like the one used by Autoflight use separate, statically mounted propellers for the vertical lift and horizontal cruise modes of flight. Vectored thrust systems as seen on the Joby S4 mount their rotors on nascelles that tilt 90 degrees to direct thrust anywhere between horizontal and vertical.

TCab has a bet each way, using four tilting propellers as well as two coaxial stacks of fixed vertical lift props like you’d see on a lift-and-cruise. In fact, the outer tilting props have a chunk of wing on the end too, so there’s a dash of tilt-wing thrown into the pot too.

Transition flights, in which the aircraft shifts from hovering vertically like a helicopter to flying forward horizontally like a conventional airplane, are among the most critical phases of eVTOL flight, because the aircraft has to smoothly change how it generates lift, building forward airspeed until the wings start generating enough lift for efficient cruise flight.

The challenge is maintaining stable control during this shift. The aircraft needs to coordinate multiple systems to pull this off, including tilting rotors or the entire aircraft body, adjusting power to different motors, and managing some complex aerodynamic forces as they change.

The full-size E20 is an impressive flying machine with plenty of redundancy built in, in the form of four battery packs and six motors and rotors. Designed to comfortably seat four passengers and a pilot in luxury, it features gull-wing doors, a separate luggage compartment, 270-degree panoramic glass, a top speed of 200 mph (320 km/h), and a range of 125 miles (200 km). TCab says its 800-Volt fast-charging system will juice the E20’s batteries up from 20% to 85% in just 20 minutes, allowing for quick turnarounds in between flights.

Once certified, TCab will join a bustling throng of competitors looking to commercialize eVTOL air taxi services in China. It’ll go up against the likes of eHang, which already has a pilotless commuter aircraft certified and taking paid passengers. PBS noted that eHang is in the process of building landing sites in dozens of cities across the country, starting out mainly with aerial sightseeing programs.

TCab Tech

For its part, TCab just raised US$42.4 million in its seventh funding round to further its certification and commercial deployment of the E20 in the next couple of years.

Source: TCab Tech via PRNewswire