Dassault Systèmes has sponsored this post.
The business of commercial aircraft has been dominated by a few big aviation companies. From the U.S., there is Boeing; from Europe, Airbus, and from Brazil, Embraer. But that may very well change. Several big thinking but small companies—many of them startups frustrated by congested roads and mass solutions from another century that ignore the problems of today—have grown impatient with the status quo.
These small companies, equipped with the latest generation of software and computing power, are remarkably agile and full of innovation and are unencumbered by tradition and rules. They collectively present us with a vision that extends aircraft and air travel beyond what we are accustomed to. For them, the sky is no limit.
What is the Problem?
After a century of commercial aviation (Boeing celebrated its hundred-year anniversary in 2016) and despite a pandemic that has limited air travel, we are used to big jets that take us across countries, continents and oceans, covering distances of thousands of miles in a single trip, all in the same day or the next (the dreaded red-eye). Shorter flights cover hundreds of miles without time to open a laptop or have a drink, but the time spent getting to and from the airports can take as long as the flight, if not longer.
Rankled are impatient young entrepreneurs, stuck in their Ubers for hours and getting late for their investor pitches. This is when the light bulb goes on. “I can fix this.”
Airports, requiring vast expanses of land, have to be built way outside the cities they serve. This makes for a logistical nightmare because thousands of business travelers a day have to get from one center of population, the airport, to another, the business center of the city. With the sprawl common to a metropolis, the roads between these two centers are long and congested on both ends. Hahn Airport (HHA) is over a hundred kilometers from Frankfurt. Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG) is 22 miles from Paris. Narita International (NRT) is 37 miles from Tokyo. Scandinavian countries are especially estranged from their airports. Torp Airport (TRF) is 68 miles from Oslo, both Skavsta (NYO) and Västerås (VST) airports are over 60 miles from Stockholm. Even shorter distances (JFK to Manhattan, about 20 miles) and Heathrow (LHR to central London, 16 miles) can take much longer than an hour.
The roads between airports and business centers are clogged by a ragtag assortment of ground-based vehicles: taxis, limousines, buses and ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft. This presents an opportunity not just to big aviation companies, but also to ridesharing services themselves and smaller companies and startups. They imagine an aerial conveyor composed of a fleet of aircraft, each one small (fewer than six passengers), clean (carbon and nitrous oxides emissions eliminated or reduced) and relatively quiet (most designs for air taxis are electric powered). They imagine roads relieved of congestion and a windfall of time saved. The two and a half hour slog from Torp to downtown Oslo, for example, would take less than half an hour in an air taxi. That alone puts two hours back in your schedule to be productive—or to get some much-needed sleep after a trans-Atlantic redeye.
Both Boeing and Airbus have taken note of the interest in air taxis and aviation on a smaller scale. Not wanting to be left behind, they have taken action. Boeing acquired Aurora Flight Services, a leader in autonomous aircraft technology in 2017 for an undisclosed amount. At that time, Aurora had produced and flown over 30 unmanned air vehicles and won a USAF contract for $89 million. In 2019, Boeing completed its first flight of an autonomous passenger air vehicle (PAV) using an Aurora-designed air taxi with a 50 mile range.
Airbus created an A3 (Acubed) R&D center in Sunnyvale, California (in an area commonly referred to as Silicon Valley) to study the “next age of aviation.” Here a 100-person team designed and built a prototype electric, self-piloted, VTOL aircraft called Vahanna (Sanskrit for “vehicle”). The aircraft flew over 130 test flights, with its final flight in November 2019. Airbus moved to another design, the CityAirbus, which was created by its helicopter division and was first flown in January 2020.
It makes sense for helicopter manufacturers to take the lead in air taxis. Helicopters are adept in the vertical takeoff and landing necessary for an urban landscape. It’s more of a stretch for manufacturers of fixed-wing aircraft to adapt their designs to go vertical. Bell (formerly Bell Helicopters), however, can do both.
As a leading helicopter manufacturer, Bell’s aircraft are widely used to shuttle executives between skyscrapers and airports. Bell has invested heavily in a future with eVTOLs (electric vertical and takeoff and landing) solidly into electric motors and batteries and autonomous control. To show it is serious, it has adopted the dragonfly (an insect that can fly, hover and dart in any direction like no other) as its mascot and dropped “helicopter” from the company name.
Charles Marsh, Bell’s chief of design, confirms the goal of an expanded market for short-hop air travel and to do for aviation what Uber did to ground transportation. Sure, it might cut into his company’s business of selling conventional helicopters as air taxis but he hopes that many more will take advantage of a less expensive, electric alternative. He tells of a friend who balked at taking his family from New Jersey by helicopter to their country home in the Hamptons for $100 x 4. We can do better than that, he suggests at a presentation during 3DEXPERIENCE Forum.
“We want to make the sky as accessible as the sidewalk,” says Marsh.
Bell’s eVTOL designs borrow from what the company has learned from designing, building and flying the V-22 Osprey (used by the U.S. Marine Corps). The Nexus, unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2019, has hybrid propulsion and can shuttle four passengers at speeds up to 150 mph.
Startups: Start Your Engines
Where big birds don’t fly, small birds look for opportunity -- and fixes. As a group, young executives are more likely to consider disruption as positive, a business opportunity, even a necessity for attracting investment. An airplane that is bigger or faster is an incremental improvement to the status quo, but a fleet of flying cars changes everything. For them, Uber is already the old answer, ready for an update, for a next-gen solution. In their eyes, Uber may have solved one problem (not enough cars/drivers for hire) only to cause another (too many cars/drivers on the road).
Attacking the status quo will give tradition-minded engineers pause. They know air transportation is a formidable challenge. But for every challenge they offer, the startups have a solution. Commercial aircraft are huge and complicated—how could a startup even think of making them? We’ll make small planes, say the startups. Jet engines and helicopters are too noisy and city officials don’t like them. We will use electric motors. Where will you find a thousand engineers, or wind tunnels? We only need a few good engineers -- and who needs a wind tunnel? There must be an an app for that.
Indeed, much of what was tested for can now be simulated. A lot has changed since Boeing started making airplanes 100 years ago, and even since Airbus was formed. CFD and multiphysics are able to model and predict much of how aircraft will behave in flight, able to analyze flow over external surfaces, through the cabin and even through the engines, lessening the need for wind tunnels and physical testing.
Dassault Systèmes Offers a Targeted Solution
Dassault Systèmes is the maker of CATIA, Abaqus, ENOVIA and other solutions critical to big aviation, and has estimated the size of the new air mobility market to be almost $8 billion—and they want to make sure that more than the big aviation companies can participate. It’s doing this with its 3DEXPERIENCE platform, which connects these industry-leading solutions in a seamlessly integrated collaborative environment.
While design, simulation, manufacturing and PLM are often thought of as separate disciplines, 3DEXPERIENCE brings these together in a cloud-enabled platform that is quick to deploy and scalable for any size business or team. Connecting everything in a single secure ecosystem makes it easy to do things such as collaborate across engineering disciplines, perform multi-physics and multi-scale simulations for novel aircraft or work with clients and OEMs.
Particularly relevant for air mobility are applications for concept synthesis, airframe composites, specialized fluid flow simulation for rotorcraft and eVTOL aircraft, acoustic simulation, model-based systems engineering (MBSE), wire harness, multi-disciplinary trade-off analysis, certification engineering and even a communication and live interactive presentation method it refers to as “reason to believe.”
In addition, structural simulation (necessary to ensure the lightest, safest aircraft) has become far more accessible for the aerospace engineer. Once kept under lock and key by highly educated and trained specialists, FEA software has become quite democratized. Arcane command lines have given way to user-friendly interfaces and wizards that guide you through even complex processes. Gone also is the high price of admission. What was once bought, emptying the corporate treasury, can now be rented for relatively tiny sums. This plays well with start-ups, who don’t have armies of specialized engineers, hangars to build large planes or corporate treasuries to buy software.
New Air Mobility More Than Air Taxis
Uber, once leading the race for an air taxi with its Uber Elevate and a vision of “hundreds of vehicles carrying hundreds of thousands of passengers per day that operated between dedicated skyports” has been followed by a host of smaller companies. Of those, Joby Aviation (which acquired Uber Elevate), Archer Aviation, Vertical Aerospace and Lilium Air Mobility all focus on eVTOLs. Dufour is concentrating on air ambulances. In addition to air taxis, but still part of the new air mobility, are General Aeronautics, Zuri and XSun.
An emergency trip to a hospital due to a traffic accident, for example, could deliver an injured person to a hospital the quickest by flying over streets that would slow down ambulances. It is likely to be the most expensive flight the unfortunate victim will ever take—as much as a staggering $50,000. We can do it for far less, says Dufour.
Despite the enormous per-flight charges, the overall market for air ambulance is estimated to be only a $10 billion market, and (thankfully) required by few.
Quite a few more are in need of routine airport to downtown connections. Investors see this as a trillion-dollar market in 20 years, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Zuri
Czech-based aviation startup Zuri sports a very streamlined design for its hybrid vertical take off aircraft. Its 16 propellers allow vertical takeoff and landing, then lock into a least-drag position as a big rear mounted propeller takes over for horizontal flight. Using separate propellers for vertical and horizontal flight may not be as elegant as using the same propellers with a tiltwing design, as does Bell’s tilt rotor design, but it is certainly less complicated.
The three to four passenger Zuri has fixed wings and hybrid propulsion (hydrocarbon fuel and battery power) that maximizes range and overcomes the shortcomings of pure battery power. Battery technology has not yet advanced to the point that it can power small passenger aircraft for more than a hundred or so. Batteries are heavy and stay heavy, unlike fuel that is consumed, taking less energy for the aircraft to stay aloft.
Part of the new air mobility are solutions to city and near-city travel, the 100-250 mile trip between cities. New York City to Washington D.C. is a case in point.
Entrepreneur Michal Illich, like many a frequent flier, chafed at getting stuck in traffic on the way to airports, spending more time on the ground than in the air when travelling between cities separated by a few hundred miles.
“Today, we spend far too much time before we even get in the airplane,” said Illich. “When you have smaller airplanes and more available heliports, we can avoid long waiting and travel times.”
Zuri had been using various software to design and manufacture its aircraft, including SOLIDWORKS and another CAD program used for “small parts.” Moving data back and forth between applications was a pain point, so when they heard of Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE, which offered a single cloud-based platform for product development, they jumped at the opportunity.
Using enterprise-level tools as a start-up did wonders for Zuri’s image.
“CATIA is the world-wide standard in aircraft design,” said Illich. “And the cloud version is ideal for a startup like us to benefit from the same solution as bigger players in our industry.”
With 3DEXPERIENCE on the cloud, the design team was able to start designing right away, without waiting to have IT install it and set it up. As startups must often pivot, the flexible licensing allows Zuri to quickly change to and from tools they need.
With everyone being able to access the same data on the cloud, versioning is under control and collaboration is assured, says Illich.
More sophisticated tools for simulation available in 3DEXPERIENCE also played a role in the development of the Zuri aircraft, as did enterprise-level PLM in the form of ENOVIA.
After part design and manufacturing comes test and verification. While big aerospace companies may be able to build and test multiple times, smaller companies like Zuri cannot afford to do the same. To make sure the testing and certification goes well, Zuri will first test and certify the digital twin.
General Aeronautics
General Aeronautics, a startup that makes drones for agricultural use as well as for other civilian and military use in Bangalore, India, will be using model-based system engineering (MBSE) and multi-disciplinary optimization (MDO) from the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to develop its next generation of aircraft.
“The 3DEXPERIENCE platform has been key to the development of both fixed-wing hybrid and multicopter UAV systems,” says Dr. Kota Harinarayana, Founder Chairman of General Aeronautics. “We are excited to collaborate with Dassault Systèmes to implement a comprehensive design and development process comprising design, engineering, integration, manufacturing as well as digital twin for mirroring physical and digital representatives of UAV systems.”
Vertical Aerospace
U.K. startup Vertical Aerospace’s air-mobility solution also uses a fixed wing design and eight wing mounted engines; but unlike Zuri, the aircraft tilts its engines.
It is also totally electric powered. The electric power will make a big difference with noise, says Eric Samson, head of engineering at Vertical Aerospace. Cities like London have a lot of noisy helicopters and their operation is receiving increasing scrutiny and regulation.
“We’re developing an electrically distributed propulsion system, which offers redundancy, is cheaper to run and maintain and will be about 30 times quieter than a helicopter and doesn’t have to sacrifice the planet,” said Samson.
Being battery powered limits the range of the VA-X4 to a hundred miles—still more than enough to go from the furthest reaches of London to Heathrow (about 30 miles), though it may be too close for comfort to fly London to Birmingham and back (100 miles).
Vertical Aerospace has relied on 3DEXPERIENCE on the cloud for all of its product development.
“It’s a one-stop shop and single source of truth,” says Samson. Plus, not having to buy its software let the startup conserve their capital.
With heavy batteries on board, light weight everywhere else on the aircraft takes on a singular importance. Composites are used extensively.
Using CATIA, Vertical was able to analyze the structure of the aircraft made with composite parts.
“This is a composite aircraft primarily,” said John Russell, senior design engineer at Vertical Aerospace.
With other CAD software, you have to simplify the composite structure, but with the sophisticated simulation tools available in the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, Russell was able to model the composite accurately, taking into account the plies, orientations and layers of composites.
“We could build a composite part using a composite workbench to build up the layers and plies,” he said. While this does make for a longer simulation, from start to finish it’s a quicker process. “In the future, we will be able to give this digital data to manufacturers and go straight to manufacturing.”
Using an industry standard product design platform facilitated communication with not just other departments at Vertical Aerospace, such as manufacturing, but also with partners like Honeywell, who is developing the flight control system, and the external world, such as the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).
Xsun
Xsun has solved the problem of hoisting heavy, low-energy density batteries into the air by not relying on them. The SolarXOne, as its name would suggest, uses energy from the sun to power its single forward mounted propeller. As it is able to get its energy while flying (maximally about a kilowatt/m2) the drone can stay in the air for all the time the sun is shining—and a bit longer, having stored the excess energy with a few batteries it carries. As you might imagine, maximizing the area to collect solar radiation and minimizing drag is critical. The top surfaces of two pairs of wings are covered with solar cells.
The French startup has taken advantage of the 3DEXPERIENCE cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE platform.
“The 3DEXPERIENCE platform enables us to design and consolidate all our data on a single location, to keep a unique, clear and clean configuration of all the subsystems,” says Benjamin David, founder of Xsun.
Using one set of data for all (a single source of truth) is vital for each engineer working simultaneously on their aircraft subsystem. Denis Pitance, a test engineer at Xsun, made a change to the propeller which was instantly detected by another engineer working on landing gear who was able to make the necessary change before production. Frequent travel to a partner site, for example, takes David away from the office, but he can always be sure to access the latest design.
Xsun uses CATIA for design and SIMULIA for both CFD and FEA, solving for fluid flow, heat transfer and structural integrity. The programs are closely linked, allowing changes required by simulation to be easily accommodated in the design—and vice versa.
The solar drone can stay aloft for 12 hours currently, already far longer than battery operated drones whose flight time is measured in minutes. But Xsun aspires to do even better. We want to stay in the air for 20 hours, says their founder.
Flight time is inversely proportional to weight. To lower weight, the SolarXone is almost entirely made of composites. In addition, a maximum weight of 25 kg is emerging as a regulatory limit for drones worldwide, says David.
Flying Into the Clouds on a Cloud-Based Platform
Big aviation may have taken the big routes, built the big airports, bought big planes and made a big business. Look at the current market share pie chart and you see big aviation companies have most of it. The dominant are two companies: Boeing and Airbus. Boeing, headquartered in the U.S., generated $77 billion in sales and employed 161,000 people. Airbus, headquartered in Europe, had €78.9 billion in sales and employed 135,000 people. These are 2019 figures—not a good year for Boeing. Boeing’s popular 737 Max was grounded that year, which affected annual revenues from 2019 on.
Did dividing the pie between Boeing and Airbus leave only crumbs for everyone else? As we have shown here, many entrepreneurs think the pie could be a lot bigger and they will get a piece. They are betting that though the flights are shorter and the planes smaller, the sum of all of them is bigger.
For those who are betting on success, the cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE platform is a natural environment to support their growth: scalable and secure, allowing them to easily add seats for team members anywhere in the world and use the most cutting-edge design capabilities in aerospace as soon as they are released. This could prove to be critical not just for the entrepreneurs who are getting in the game now, but for the future of air mobility itself, as startups change the way we think about travel.
Indeed, with many small aircraft buzzing about, doing far more than we have come to expect by providing air taxi services between airports and downtowns, efficient connections between cities hundreds of miles apart, and using electricity and solar power to do smarter agriculture and long-range reconnaissance, are just some examples of a new air mobility that promises to make the airways as simple to travel as land and water in a global connected world.
To learn more, visit Dassault Systèmes.