20 April 2017
+VIDEO The German Lilium Jet electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) two-seat prototype made its first flight today.
The Eagle prototype performed a range of complex manoeuvres including the mid-air transition from hover mode to wing-borne forward flight, said Lilium. Here’s the video of the flight…
https://youtu.be/ohig71bwRUE
“Seeing the Lilium Jet take to the sky and performing sophisticated manoeuvres with apparent ease is testament to the skill and perseverance of our amazing team,” said a spokesman.
“We have solved some of the toughest engineering challenges in aviation to get to this point. The successful test flight programme shows that our ground-breaking technical design works exactly as we envisioned. We can now turn our focus to designing a 5-seater production aircraft.
“We are now developing a larger, 5-seater version of our Lilium Jet, designed for on-demand air taxi and ride-sharing services.
“A typical journey with the Lilium Jet will be at least 5x faster than by car, with even greater efficiencies in busy cities. So a flight from Manhattan to New York’s JFK Airport will take around 5 minutes, compared to the 55 minutes it would take you by car.”
