LIFT Aircraft completing the first ever piloted eVTOL demonstration flights in Japan with their aircraft HEXA. The flights were conducted in partnership with Marubeni Corporation and with participation from GMO Internet Group.After about an hour of training and introduction to the aircraft, Masatoshi Kumagai of GMO Internet Group piloted HEXA, successfully completing three flight patterns. Nine flights were completed in Osaka.
The Hexa aircraft has asuper-simple and lightweight airframe, a manned multicopter with 18 smallish vertical lift props for massive redundancy, a small single-seat cabin, and a set of chunky floats on the bottom designed so it can land on the ground or the water if necessary.
The aircraft has 18 independently controlled propellers and 18 electric motors mounted on a motor strut assembly resembling a web of six inward-pointing sectors with twelve outer and six inner electrically-powered propellers. e aircraft has a cruise speed of 45 mph, a maximum cruise speed of 63 mph and has a maximum flying time of 15 minutes (plus reserve).
Advertisement
The HEXA is semi-autonomous piloting and its stability is accomplished by flight control computers.In addition to the redundancy in the autopilot system. The aircraft has been designed with a unique architecture conformed by a redundant network managing eighteen independent rotors. This architecture makes the eVTOL fail-operational and the extensive network of sensors permits early failure detection, so an automatic fail-safe is quickly activated.
