Hello, good morning, everyone. My name is Austin Moeller. I'm one of the sustainability analysts here at Canaccord Genuity. And today, we've got a great urban air mobility panel here. We have Sebastien Borel, CCO of Lilium. We have Christian Bauer, the CFO of Volocopter, and, and Michael Cervenka, CTO of Vertical Aerospace. So, I just starting with Sebastien here, if you'd just like to give a brief intro on your company, and then we can launch into some of the great questions on urban air mobility and EVTOLs.
Great. Thank you, Austin. So yeah, I'm the Chief Commercial Officer of Lilium. Just joined two years ago. Prior to this, I was working for Honeywell as VP M&A, and I spent my entire career in aerospace, including Airbus, selling aircraft to Qatar and Australia. So that's a bit of my background. On the company, Lilium, you probably know we're based in Munich. I'm actually right now stuck in the snow in Munich. And we have, you know, created the company in 2015, raised, roughly speaking, $1.3 billion, and we just have received our DOA, yeah, you know, a few weeks ago, from EASA, meaning we are a certified design organization now from EASA.
And we are rolling out a, you know, six, eVTOL, you know, six-seater from passenger point of view, six seats, with a range of 175 km. With a slightly different architecture of that from our competition, because we have a full wing and canard and engines mounted on the flaps and of our aircraft. So we are really targeting regional air mobility with the highest capacity and the highest distances possible.
Michael, if you'd like to briefly talk about Vertical Aerospace?
Yeah. Hi. Thanks very much for hosting us all, and congrats on the DOA. So Vertical Aerospace actually got our DOA earlier this year through the UK Civil Aviation Authority. I guess, an unfortunate consequence of Brexit, we had to do it through them rather than the EASA. But I think the fact that we're now seeing, I think all three of us have got DOAs, then really brings some credibility to the serious players in this space. So Vertical is the UK leading eVTOL company. We're based in Bristol, which is the UK's aviation cluster. My background, actually, I've been at Vertical about four and a half years. Prior to that, spent over two decades at Rolls-Royce, most recently running all of the future technologies work.
So, actually led all of Rolls' activities, looking at all sorts of new electric aircraft, including eVTOLs. So I suppose I've been in this space for around eight years. We were founded by a successful British entrepreneur, Stephen Fitzpatrick, about seven years ago now. I will talk more, obviously, through the discussion, but we've adopted very much a classical aerospace approach of being an OEM, building out a world-class partnership ecosystem with the likes of Rolls-Royce, Honeywell, Leonardo, GKN, and then having, I think, a really fantastic order book globally, from lots of different operators. We've got a tilt rotor configuration that you can see behind me. This, in fact, was a prototype we flew earlier in the year.
So a winged vehicle with eight propellers, the front four tilt, the rear four fixed, and targeting certification in 2026, carrying a pilot and four passengers. So a little bit about Vertical.
Excellent. Christian, if you could just introduce us to Volocopter and talk about your aircraft.
Sure. Thank you, Austin. A pleasure to be here today. I'm the CFO and Chief Commercial Officer of Volocopter, now nearly six years with the company, and we started our endeavors in 2011, where we already lifted up a first-person, fully electric that looked different from an aircraft design than today, obviously. We are having a family of aircraft, so mainly two ones in passenger transport. We start getting certified in commercial launch next year, already with type certification of a two-seater, and then we'll have in 2026, also four to five seater out there for the urban market. In parallel, we are looking also to the regional market with a winged aircraft for longer distances, also flying them fully electric. And in parallel, we have been vocal also about our system, which is called VoloIQ.
That's why also Microsoft, for example, invest in us, because we build up also an ecosystem software that will orchestrate all the flights, makes also the maintenance easier that we already connected, and the customer service and customer booking, which is obviously very important for that new type of technology. On the technical advancement, as my colleague said, so we are also glad to hold a Design Organization Approval, and we are also a production organization approved organization. So we are already producing aircraft, so to say, in our premises, and now switching to eVTOL as we speak, with a production of around 50 units per year that we can deliver, which was inaugurated earlier this year.
So ready to rumble, so to say, for next year, starting in Europe, as we are a German company based one hour south of Frankfurt, and then going to countries like Japan, where we have partners like Japan Airlines and Sumitomo, or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with NEOM. And just lately, we have been also quite active in the U.S. because we received a G-1 certificate from the FAA that validates our European certificate, and we have done a couple of flights. Last was in New York, which was a dream, to be honest, because we had always New York on our-
... PowerPoint presentation, and now we were able to fly there. And that was a good sign that New York is also opening up for those new kind of aircraft. Thank you.
Excellent. And I would just mention, I was actually at that New York event, so it was great to see the aircraft out there at the South Manhattan Heliport. So just launching into questions here, for each of you, what do you view as the ideal use case application and flight distance for your specific EVTOL and, and why? And I can start with Michael, if you'd like to start.
Yeah, sure. So I think the first thing is there's a wide range of opportunities for this space. We focused on passenger carrying, and all the general market forecasts show that passenger carrying is gonna be the largest part of the VTOL sector. There are clearly medical. In fact, we've got medical customers. There are military cargo opportunities, but generally, people are more time sensitive. In our case, in fact, we've one of the things I think we've all focused on, on this call is aiming for the EASA certification standards, and that really opens up a global market opportunity, setting the highest safety standards globally. We've got quite a broad range of customers. In fact, we've got an order book of 1,500 conditional orders in North America, South America, Europe and Asia.
Broadly, the mission split into three main initial use cases. So the first, we see lots of repeated examples of connecting airports to the surrounding catchment area, so it's not necessarily into the nearest city, although in some cases it is, but often there are nearby towns or cities. There are clearly tourism opportunities, whether it's island hopping or sightseeing. And then there are lots of examples where actually there are just gaps in the ground-based transportation infrastructure, and it might be because there are geographic constraints like rivers or mountains or bodies of water in the way. So those are typically the three major use cases that we see, and we see that replicated across the world. Actually, in our case, they're relatively short missions, so typical missions are maybe 15-35 miles.
Not many missions are above about 60 miles. And the advantage of that is there are lots of places where you can actually offer really substantial time savings, and the price elasticity in terms of, passenger cost per, per mile is a bit more flexible when you're talking about shorter missions. That's led to the architecture that we've got. So we have a winged vehicle. We're ultimately saving time, so you need to be able to fly quickly. And the wing also enables you to carry a pilot and, with today's batteries, at least four passengers. And because the aircraft's very efficient with, eight large propellers and that big wingspan, that actually means on the shorter missions, we're not spending a long time on the ground recharging.
So the shorter the flight, the more critical that turnaround time is to really maximize the utilization and the economics of the vehicle. So those are the sort of typical use cases. In terms of customers, they range from major airlines like American Airlines, Japan Airlines, Virgin Atlantic. We've actually sold a lot of aircraft to Avalon, which is the second biggest leasing company in the world. Typically, aircraft are often sold to leasing companies. We've got tourism operators, you know, helicopter operators like Bristow, so wide range of customers, but essentially those three main use cases to start with.
Excellent. Sebastien, I'm sure you can tell us a little bit more about using an electric jet aircraft and regional air mobility, sort of the longer range applications.
Absolutely. I mean, I think Michael reasoned it well. There are a lot of different use cases, and it's great opportunities for all of us to be able to work on them. So of course, you got the smaller one would be the urban, within the city itself. I don't see many of them, simply because usually you have either prohibited area or safety concern on flying really above, like, large cities. However, the first and last mile, which is what Michael mentioned, when you go to the nearby airport, that's definitely a use case, which, of course, airlines are interested too, for their premium customers, but also high net worth individuals in regards to, you know, their private jets.
So the first and last mile is what everyone thinks first, but actually, the larger portion of the total addressable market is on the point-to-point connection between cities. So if you take the example of, you know, famous Abu Dhabi to Dubai, for example, it's roughly speaking, 130 km, right? Or if you're looking at Palm Beach to Miami, where, you know, the highway can be congested, again, you're in the range of, let's say, 100 mi. And so if we want to really address the issue of congestion and of course, terrain and water, by the way, it's exactly right.
That's why I tell my salespeople all the time, "When you have terrain, water, and congestion, this is perfect because you create tons of time saving." But you wanna have the flexibility to go either nearby, within 20 miles, let's say, or very far, where you can actually jump over to another island or something else. And when operators are placing firm orders, like you just did with us, they look at the economics. How many flight hours can I really get out of that aircraft? What are the use case? What's the price point? And you need to—in order to get to, you know, the famous, we've been all talking about the 2 EUR per seat kilometer. If you want to get to that point, you need to have the highest capacity, and usually you need to fly a bit further.
You want your aircraft to fly and not be on the ground. And so that increases your utilization. So we're going with between cities more than anything, and first and last mile in the metro area for airports. That's why, you know, I just mentioned Abu Dhabi to Dubai. We just sold 10 firm jets into the UAE with our customer, ArcosJet. But we're continuing to the same kind of like, you know, MOUs that Vertical has signed. We're continuing to, you know, transform those MOUs into firm orders. And to do this, you need to have unit economics at work. And to have unit economics at work, you usually have to have higher, you know, passenger capacity, load factors, and making sure that the aircraft flies all the time.
That's why we are targeting, you know, your question, what is your ideal use case? I would say between 50-100 miles, roughly speaking.
Christian, would you like to talk about your aircraft?
Yeah, thank you. I think I'm a bit in between, so to say, both because we have two products. One is really focusing on the urban mobility, one, so it's really, I would say, focusing, what you mentioned, Sebastien, on the airport shuttle missions, right? And inner city missions where you have congested areas like Michael mentioned, and so on. So this will have a range of around 30-50 kilometers, depending on the battery development, starting initially with a lower range and later going up there. And with that, sufficient to cover an entire urban area, so to say.
This has to do-- That's why we have chosen the design, which looks a bit more like a helicopter, to a multirotor design, which has high redundancy, less complexity to certify than a tilt wing, and obviously also better performance in hovering. So when you take off and land from a helipad or a skyscraper to the other one, those aircraft are more efficient in that, because with the less rotors you have, the more energy you need per rotor to show if one rotor fails, that you can still cope with the energy that drains down your energy lifetime. So that's on the one thing. On the other thing, I think then comes into what Sebastien says, connecting, I would say, areas like Hamptons Downtown, what we do then with the regional concept.
We rather see, according to our data, that the urban market, globally speaking, has the bigger potential, because you have more trips between 0 and 50 km that you can basically then also look at and take the demand there. On the regional one, you are at a certain time, you get into the competition already with short haul, if you screened out, and then you need to add really more payload, then it's more like a shuttle experience, that you have when you connect really longer distances, as say, not the one—the examples that Sebastien mentioned. So I would say we see it a bit differentiated. On top, what we like very much, we have a collaboration with Europe's biggest air rescue company, ADAC, in Germany.
They are called the Yellow Angels, and they will bring the doctor to the rescue point, and I like that project because for them, it's basically that they say those new aircraft, or eVTOLs, can bring more safety and less costs to the play. That's why they're interested, and that's why they also pre-ordered 150 aircraft, and next year we will deliver two of them binding, where they have two locations in Germany, where they will test eVTOL in their, in their chain, which is quite good, because then it's not only saving time for us, but maybe also saving lives at the end, which is quite good.
Fantastic. So I think an important thing to discuss with eVTOLs relative to helicopters or airplanes or other aircraft, is acoustics. And so whoever wants to start can start, but can you discuss why noise and also needing a runway are key impediments to operating airplanes and helicopters near major city centers?
Being polite. Go on, I'll fire away. I mean, I think the first thing, we're trying to save people time, and by definition, that means flying into areas where there's a reasonably large number of people. If you're flying into a very remote area, you're not gonna save a large number of people or the time. Noise is a very kind of personal thing. It varies all around the world. Different countries, different populations, have got different kind of perceptions about existing aircraft noise, different tolerance to that. But if you just look globally, one of the impediments of helicopters being a mass transport mode is definitely the noise footprint, and we're all familiar with the sort of wa, wa, wa, wa, the noise that they make.
eVTOLs fundamentally enable you to overcome that, and I think all these aircraft do it in different ways. But the dominant factor in a helicopter is it has one main lift rotor, has to generate lift both in hover and as it flies forward. And to do that, it needs actually quite a high tip speed on the rotor. Otherwise, essentially, the airfoil, as it comes round, would be moving away from the wind, and it would stall, and the helicopter literally would roll over. So the beauty of having a Distributed Electric Propulsion system is you can avoid that problem by spreading the lift across the platform, and either you do that with fans or you do it with propellers, and you avoid that high tip speed. So I think that's one of the key factors. It's not the only factor, though.
If you look at many cities in the world, helicopters have been banned because of safety issues. And while they're incredible machines, they've got probably 60 different single point failures. So lots of heavily stressed mechanical components through the gearbox, the rotor systems. If any one of those fails, the aircraft can't maintain safe flight, so it'll auto rotate, it'll come down, but it's coming down. And that's actually caused many helicopters to be banned from kind of key areas. And then I think the other factor is cost. You know, Christian touched on it from the medevac point of view. We've got Babcock in the UK. If you look at many of the helicopter operators, actually, the medical ones typically are charities. And helicopters are... You know, incredible machines, but if you've got the budget to be able to afford them.
So with all those single point failures, that means enormous scrutiny in the manufacturing controls, lots of regular maintenance. Many of the critical components are live, so you have to swap them out after so many flights. So that, combined with the fact that the efficiencies of helicopters flying in forward flight are really quite low. Gas turbines of that size are not very efficient. You're reliant on that rotor to keep the thing airborne, means actually the economics make it very, very difficult. So I think all three factors in terms of noise, safety, and economics, really, mean that helicopters will always have a use, but they're never gonna be a mass transport mode. They're always gonna have that limitation.
I fully agree, and I think the three of us would agree, vehemently together on the fact that, you know, our aircraft are gonna be much better from a noise point of view. Michael touched upon the safety level. We're gonna be certifying that aircraft at 10⁻⁹ from a safety standard, whereby helicopters are 10⁻⁷. That's the EASA regulation, and that's really important, right? You know, going back to the Kobe Bryant story, a lot of people are telling us they will not fly into a helicopter anymore. There's so, so many points of failure. But going back to the noise question, a number of airports in Europe have started to ban not only helicopters, but in private jets, for noise or CO2 emissions.
Because, you know, Christian said, you know, those are more of a jet, and we are positioned more of a, you know, small jet, which takes off and land vertically. You know, if you take a Citation Mustang or equivalent, makes a lot of noise as well, right? So we're not only comparing to a helicopter, but also to small private jets that people are using for very short missions. They go golfing or they go somewhere else. So if you take that pressure, there's a lot of pressure, especially in Europe, to truly depend on each country. But also in New York, we know sometimes there is complaints about the noise in the city. Definitely, we have a major advantage. And you mentioned the runway.
Runway, sometimes you just cannot touch a runway because you're gonna take a slot from someone else, and it's gonna be way too expensive. So if you look at Teterboro, when it's really busy time, you're not gonna get any slots in there. But with vertical modes of flying, you can actually land in places closer to the city, of course, but also not impacting the runway throughput. And that's what everyone is... You know, every single airport, I'm sure it's the same for Christian and Michael, when we talk about first and last mile, like, you can do anything you want, just don't touch our runway throughput, right? So we've got major advantages, in my opinion, to replace helicopters. That's why, by the way, we have an MOU with Azul in Brazil.
There is, like, 750 flights a day, helicopter flights a day into São Paulo. And you can replace that tomorrow very easily because it's gonna be much cheaper than those Augusta or you know, Airbus helicopters. It will make zero noise, zero operating emission.
And maybe just to add, because all of what you said is totally true. I think the good news is we bring a silent technology, all of us, right? Compared with what's there before. Because if all our aircraft, I would assume, I have not seen, obviously, all of you, but if we fly 150-200 meters above, you know, the people, you will not hear it basically, where you will hear a helicopter or something else. So everybody of us, rather engineers, how strong is the noise at takeoff and landing? And noise is a public perception topic, right? So I think that's why we also do those public flights globally or everybody of us. So we have been in U.S., we have been in Asia, to show the people because they cannot imagine how silent it is.
And when we have then been there with authorities, with the public, they are really excited because they cannot imagine that, and it's very hard to send audio via a video. So you have to be there, and that's why we do those topics. That's why we do noise campaigns in Paris. That's why we do public perceptions in Rome, and so on, so throughout our all our countries, we are launching, because this is the factor that people cannot assess, and they have to see and experience, basically. And when they see and overcome that, there's always a positive reaction by most of the people, which is great, and that's why we are seeing now cities like New York opening up. This does not say that we underestimate safety.
Like Michael said, same thing, safety and noise are the most emotional and to-be-explained factors for public perception.
Great. Now, in order to build an aircraft and sell it or operate it so that passengers can fly on board, all these new eVTOL designs will need both a Type Certificate from the aviation regulator in their respective country and also a manufacturing certificate. So, is one of those, either the Type Certificate or the manufacturing certificate, more challenging to obtain than the other on the road to commercial service?
I mean, I can start. I think it's all challenging. It's a whole way of prototyping, iterating, and so on. And I think with it comes different licenses, at least in Europe, and we are here, Europe slash, you know, acknowledging to EASA rules for CAA, UK. So it means we need a design organization. Then you can, let's call it, prove that you can develop. You need a production organization approval, which is, at the end, a lot of documentation, processes, and safety that you have to show, and that you have the right qualified staff. This is the most important thing, obviously, and you have to show it regularly to EASA. I think the harder piece right now is the type certification, because it has not yet been done before, right?
Later, I would say there's no, let's call it, it's hard to get a Production Organization Approval and a type certification, but it, as it has not been done yet, I think this is the thing to overcome now, obviously, next year.... And the thing there is obviously to show compliance throughout your whole processes, from starting the requirements to flight testing at the end. And that's what takes time and takes maturity of a company, so to say. I think we are lucky in Europe with EASA, that EASA has brought out the SC-VTOL, so a clear norm against which we can now certify.
But there is still, with the powered lift, not yet enacted in U.S., so with FAA, still uncertainty that we don't have in Europe, where we have a clear, let's call it, norm in place, which is very positive.
I think I'd just echo the advantage I think we've got with the EASA. I mean, I guess if we sort of take this right back to its bare bones, essentially, at the one in a billion failure rate, the type certificate is us having to demonstrate to the authority, not just that our aircraft works, but essentially that it won't fail. As Christian says, that's actually quite a challenge on a novel type of aircraft. I'd really applaud the approach EASA has taken. They've obviously used, where relevant, existing bits of regulation. But they've actually taken, I think, a very collaborative and open approach to the novel bits. So as an example, clearly one of the novelties of these aircraft is the battery system.
Vertical happens to chair the European EURO CAE Working Group that has been defining those regulations, but not only have we got Volocopter and Lilium, we've got Airbus, we've got Rolls-Royce, we've got many other companies bringing all of their know-how and expertise, including, in fact, Pipistrel, who certified, obviously, a small electric aircraft, but very different safety standards. And I think we've had six out of the nine issue papers already published, starting with the most difficult ones, and anyone can go and read them. And so it's a level playing field, but it's really trying to harness the collective industry know-how, and we shouldn't be competing on safety. So I think we're in a really strong place in Europe.
The fact we've got those higher safety standards means the bar is rightly high, but certainly all our engagements with the FAA and elsewhere, we think that those standards will envelop. So that gives us a, if you like, a clear set of exam questions that we know how, what we're gonna need to meet. I mean, Vertical's approach has been very much one of trying to leverage some of the best tier one aerospace suppliers in this challenge. So trying to do all of that on your own as a startup is pretty difficult, and I think we've seen over time, many of the other credible players starting to migrate towards a similar approach.
So clearly we're doing the overall aircraft, anything that is whole aircraft, all the systems integration, but then really leveraging companies like Honeywell, that have got decades of doing sophisticated flight control software and hardware, Rolls-Royce for motors, Leonardo for fuselage, GKN for wing and harnesses, et cetera. So I think by taking that approach, it's a shared problem. And that also really plays to your point around production, because these are all organizations that have a POA, have decades of experience of producing aerospace standard hardware for Transport Category aircraft, which is effectively the safety standard we're after.
With the added advantage, actually, the ironic benefit for us as a result of COVID, they've got quite a bit of spare capacity, so they're also not having to invest vast amounts of money in brand-new facilities just for this market to start with. So I think there's lots of ways that as an industry, we can leverage existing regulations, existing know-how, but then we really need to collaborate as much as possible, I think, on the novel bits and learn from each other and make sure ultimately, we want safety to be a given in the way it is for aerospace today, even when we're bringing new products to market.
Yeah, I mean, the only thing I would add, because I again agree, first of all, on the EASA comment, the certification basis was firmed up, I think, in 2020. And the ops approval side is pretty much on the way to be certified as well by Brussels or approved by Brussels. So we are lucky in a sense that we have we know what to go against, right? That's really, really good to know where we're going against. It's a bit more difficult to understand the U.S. side right now with the FAA. I think it's getting better and better every day. But EASA has taken a great lead by creating a new set of regulations along with industry peers. And that's really important because we...
For example, on the reserve policy or on the licensing of a pilot, we have, you know, great flexibility given, because we are, you know, gonna certify the aircraft system that 10⁻⁹. So certification a lot clearer from the EASA today, and it's great. We're lucky, the three of us. But I think if you are honest about the industry, I think you can see two phases, right? A phase where a lot of us were doing still research, working with the supply chain. The supply chain have also had to react on how to adapt their product into something usually lighter, because that's the nature of the game, is to go as light as possible on our aircraft. And then, which I think we have reached.
I think a lot, you know, the three of us who just mentioned, we all have a DOA. We've secured a lot of our supply chain, you know, with great names such as UTC, Honeywell, Diehl, and Aciturri and Toray. I mean, we're working with only people that are, you know, have certified aerospace product. And now it's just a question of time and money. It's just like, okay, we are all working through a design, and we're gonna have to demonstrate, as Christian said earlier, we're gonna have to test, you know, start ground testing, usually use a simulator, what's called the Iron Bird, to do the simulation on the ground and then do the flight testing. And, you know, I worked for Airbus for 10 years. I've seen 3 aircraft being certified during that time.
It just takes rigor, which we all have because we have the DOA process, a bit of time and money to get to the point.
... Now, if we could just take a minute, and could you all discuss the designs of your respective eVTOL aircraft, the wings, the control surfaces, the number of rotors, canards or no canards, and why these design choices were made for the aircraft for maneuverability or stability purposes?
Shall I kick it off?
Yeah, great.
So on our urban aircraft, it's a multirotor design. Multirotor means, so it has multiple rotors on top. It's so designed that, you know, a human can walk beneath it, so 2.20-meter height, and then at 2.40-meter, the rotor starts, so that you also have, from a safety topic, no issues there. We have 18 motors. With that, we have a high redundancy, so if 1 motor or 2 motors would fail, or even 3, with any configuration, we can still safely fly and perform then also a landing without any causing. So I think this is unique for us. We are very efficient throughout that design, obviously, in hovering, as I said. Our aircraft is then not made for high speed, so to say, because it has no wings to lift up.
We, so to say, always had the paradigm to make our aircraft as high redundant as possible, but also in the same time, from a design choice, as less complex as possible to get certified. Because certification, as we have mentioned before, is a long process, and the better you can shorten that to have that certification, we aim for that. We have lithium-ion batteries for powering that. Standard cells are coming, and we are doing the production of our batteries in-house. That was a choice also to have that competence and to react quickly, even also in the past, to changing environments and requirements, or if new technology comes out, then we can quickly adopt thereof.
As I said in the beginning, we will have two people, so one pilot, one person transporting, and we'll have then a 4-5-seater end of 2026. So that will be our evolution, but we wanted to enter the market as quickly as possible next year. Again, also to learn and work with our customers on operations. Our second product is a winged one. It's called an VoloRegion. And this will be a lift and cruise, so 6-8 lift-up motors, 2 pushers, and then wings that cater for the uplift, so to say. So that's an more design, which is a bit more going to the direction of my colleagues and friends here, Sebastien and Michael. So we have those two designs and chosen for different missions.
Very iconic axis. We could maybe have the opposite architecture. And again, I think the three of us have a different one, which fits into what we're going after from a market point of view. And we want to go regional air mobility, that means we want to go fast, and we want to, you know, absolutely, you know, take as much as, you know, as many people as possible. But also have the best aerodynamics and having the highest lift-to-drag ratio, which is something in the industry, which tells you, you know, how much you're going to be flying from a range perspective, usually.
And so we have ducted fans mounted on the flaps of our wings and canard, which obviously, you know, changes, you know, from a vertical to a horizontal position as you're transitioning into your flight. That brings tremendous advantage for the aerodynamics, right? The Bernoulli's Principle will are like really working well when you have the motor mounted on the surfaces. And so we get the highest lift-to-drag ratio, and this is why we can go to the range that I mentioned earlier, 175. And that's, by the way, taking into consideration the reserve, right? So it's when you've taken out the reserve, you still have 175 kilometers to fly, right?
Something important, once you have that architecture, we know that battery technology, and we are probably the three of us already working on the next battery technology, the density is going to keep increasing. And that amount of energy that you have on top of what we're going to have today is going to translate directly when you have such a, you know, finesse aircraft into range, to a great amount. And so our aircraft performance will get better over time, with the maximum range impact, positive range impact, with new density coming up. Some people would argue, "Yeah, but you need more energy when you take off because you have a higher disk load, and therefore it's more difficult." But the hover time is, roughly speaking, 25 seconds.
25 seconds, then you start transitioning, and you go into, you know, horizontal mode. And so the extra energy that we are burning in on takeoff and landing is really nothing compared to what you get to cruise, when we only use, roughly speaking, 10% of our available power. And that's where we went to and for that architecture. And by the way, ducted fans gives you other major advantages, noise, because it's ducted. Obviously, it keeps the noise within the, the motor. And from a safety point of view, you're containing, those big failures that could happen, and you're going to have to demonstrate from a safety point.
So I guess we're perhaps, I don't know if we're between the two, slightly different. Firstly, a winged vehicle, and I think we've touched a bit on that, fits within the 15-meter or 50-foot wingspan, so that fits somewhere between 80% and 90% of the vertiports or heliports that are around today. The wing for us was essential, not just because of speed, bearing in mind there's also headwinds that you sometimes have to fly into, but also with today's battery, it enables you to carry 4 passengers rather than the 1 or 2 passengers that you're limited to on a multicopter. And it gives you that efficiency.
In terms of the configuration then, so we've got a high wing, again, for keeping everything out of the way of passengers, but then eight rotors, and we tilt the front four and the rear four stow. Stowing the rear four means actually we achieve a very high lift-to-drag ratio in cruise. We haven't publicly said, but we've recently done some wind tunnel tests with some very encouraging results. Tilting the front four, actually what you tend to find is the actuation systems are much lighter than motors. So if you go for a lift and cruise where you have effectively a set of motors pushing the aircraft forward and a different set lifting you, you've got some compromises in how you trade that weight. So we found that tilting them gave us the highest performance.
And then in terms of 8, well, if you're fixing the footprint of the area around that 15-meter wingspan with a central wing, essentially you need the center of lift in hover in about the same location as where the wing is providing lift and cruise. So that means you essentially end up with propellers in front and behind the wing. If you go for 8 and you draw it out, you actually find as open rotors that gives you the maximum possible area both in normal and in failure scenarios. Yes, it is true, Sebastien says that you don't spend a long time in hover, but you have to achieve that hover at the end of flight with a battery when it's a low state of charge, low state of health.
We in fact, I think we looked at probably somewhere between 60 and 80 different battery providers today. We were the first company in the eVTOL space to select Molicel. In fact, a number of other players in the broader electrification space have selected Molicel. One of the big reasons we did that was we wanted an aircraft that, yes, was future-proof with the wings, so will get better as batteries get better, but also works with cells that are in mass manufacture today. Molicel is producing of the order of 1 million cells of the type that we are using today, whereas the more advanced cells that are required in some of the other configurations are in much smaller volumes.
Firstly, I think that creates some challenges in terms of industrial scale-up and cost of those batteries, but it also creates some challenges in terms of the high-quality, repeatable manufacture and the amount of testing. We will have done about 3.5 million hours of cell testing by the end of this year, and that's only really possible from cells that are in mass manufacture. So overall, we've tried to find a design that can work with existing technologies. It's still super difficult to bring all of those together into a commercially viable vehicle, and that's the sort of learning curve we're all going through.
But by having a combination of wing that enables us to carry a commercially viable payload with a pilot and four passengers to fly useful commercial missions, but to do that with battery technologies that are already available, means I think we've got a really good initial product, and one that as cells inevitably will get better, means we can just keep enhancing and refining the aircraft over time.
Just to follow up on that, Sebastien and Christian, can you discuss the specific battery technology, either pouch or cylindrical, and the electrical transmission chemistry that you've chosen for your eVTOL aircraft, and the amount of lab testing and flight testing that's already been conducted on those battery designs?
Absolutely. Glad to do so. By the way, so starting with the chemistry mix, probably a lot of the industry players right now are moving into silicon anode, which is exactly what we have selected. It, you know, provides a lot of density. You know, we are, roughly speaking, talking about 300 watt-hours per kilogram. On top of that, it has a lot of good KPIs. You know, battery is super complex. I'm not the best one to talk about it, but I can tell you, you know, from a charging point of view, a thermal resistance point of view, all of the testing we've done with Ionblox, which is the company we work with to do the R&D, has proven that this battery is perfect for eVTOL, right?
It's, it gives good output, very fast charging, along with a lot of density, and that density will actually keep increasing. From a production point of view, we made an announcement, a pretty big announcement, that we're gonna be working not only with Customcell, which is our original partner, but also with InoBat, which belongs to Gotion. I think, you know, you probably have seen the news that they are building a gigafactory in Slovakia as well, and they are reserving, some portion of that for us.
So we are totally secured, not only from a chemistry mix poin of view, which again, has been tailored to eVTOL, which is great for us, but also for the production side of the business, which of course you have to lock this in advance when you're looking at a high production rate in furious timeframe. The last point I will mention is something which my apologies for my competition, I don't know exactly the architecture, but we are gonna have, and we just announced it a few hours ago, a cooling system for battery inside the aircraft, which allows us to control the temperature of the battery and allows us, from a landing point of view, for example, to be at the right temperature and keeping the aging very, very slow.
And so we are really thrilled because that technology, onboard thermal management system, which Honeywell is going to be providing, and by the way, it's a technology coming from the F-22 Raptor, you know, vapor cooling system, which is absolutely amazing to take care of a battery. And I believe we're the only one not having, you know, the ground cooling system. Maybe helicopter, you will precise it on Vertical, you have it or not, but at least that is part of our, you know, powertrain strategy, is also to have the onboard cooling system for the batteries.
... Yeah, and just to add, and I think before I start with the battery, I think also important to note that the design choice also was also to fit on every helipad for us from a diameter. We are around at 11 meters, so quite small on the surface to cater for that, to fit for that. So on the batteries, I think as my colleagues here already said, similar as Michael said, we analyzed the whole market, right? And we know all the players, and like Sebastien also mentioned, we are looking to lithium-ion, what is off the shelf in big volumes at the market and can get certified. That's even more important.
That's why as we get certified next year, we cannot now look at the technology that will be out in 1 or 2 years. It must be here right now. And also, on that respect, we are—we chose cylindrical cells that are there from an Asian player, and we have around 250 watt-hours per kilogram. That's what we see right now in the market in that respect. And this will improve over the next 1 or 2 years, obviously, without adding a big weight. But right now, we do not see big volumes more on a commercial or a certifiable base there in the market. I think this is now developing in the next phase 26, we see then greater potential.
That's why we then add also more capacity, and seat, and range, which is not there for us or in our configuration today. On what we touch based hovering times and so on, and so on, we were surprised, and very often when you go now, and what we did also in Paris, when you go into the concept of operation planning with the local authorities, right? So also with the DGAC in Paris, which approved our first 4-5 routes, where it was also clear, we thought maybe certain times are acceptable, but then the authorities found, okay, you need 20 seconds more hover time because maybe you're at a busy airport, you have to wait. So also then the requirements for that then increase what you have not expected before. Though, so those operational topics come on top.
Last but not least, I think where we made also progress in the last months is really on component side with the EASA to get already our tests done, our battery tests against the requirements we have set in our program. So be it thermal runaway test, drop test, we already passed them on component level, which is good, which was the entry now to enter into the flight test campaign with the EASA.
I just want to, if you really want to go to the details of battery, our founder, Daniel Wiegand, did a webinar three weeks ago that you find on YouTube that explains all of the details of that high energy, battery that we're going to be producing at a mass level in a few years.
Yes, definitely, a very interesting webinar he did. I, I participated in that as well, so that's great to, to catch for anyone who's interested. On the regulatory side, do you see the differing approaches that specifically EASA, Civil Aviation Authority, and the FAA have taken on eVTOL Type Certificate as being a significant obstacle to achieving widespread distribution for this new aircraft type? I know aircraft lessors and operators generally favor an asset that is more portable across geographies, so would love your take on that.
Yeah, I mean, I think I touched on that earlier. Avalon has been one of our biggest customers, has ordered 500 aircraft, and leasing companies absolutely care about residual asset value and portability of the asset. So the ability, once it's finished its stint with its first operator, then to be moved elsewhere. And somewhere between 40% and 50% of aircraft are bought today by leasing companies. So if you think you're gonna be financing these things on so they can value venture money, then I think that's quite a challenge that would upset quite a lot of financial norms in the aerospace industry. I mean, we talk a lot to the FAA and EASA and other authorities.
In fact, we've just gone through technical familiarizations with the UK Civil Aviation Authority, EASA, FAA, ANAC in Brazil, coming up soon, JCAB also done. I mean, I think sort of a couple of things. It's great that EASA and FAA are now talking to each other a lot more, and that has actually, frankly, only been opened up in the last probably three months or so. I think what is very clear is we're not gonna have a fully harmonized rule set for the first certification of these vehicles. Last time I saw the FAA, only 2-3 weeks ago, their sense was maybe 60% harmonized rules. The two authorities are maybe coming a bit closer together on the overall safety standards, but they're not gonna be aligned.
EASA is setting a higher overall safety standard, as we've touched on, 1 billion commensurate with transport category. There may be some movement from the FAA, there may be some movement from EASA, but, but it, it's certainly not gonna be aligned. I think what they are talking about is ensuring portability. So certainly, if you've certified to the higher standard, well, you don't have to then go and completely reinvent a new rule set when you go to the FAA. You can lift and drop largely the EASA standard, and certainly everything we're seeing is, there's nothing really that sticks out. So, my sense is it's gonna take several years before ultimately we harmonize.
And some of that will also be operation specific, so I think we will see varying safety standards if you're flying, you know, over rural areas compared to over built-up areas. We've already seen EASA propose different standards depending on different categories of aircraft, and I think that will get formalized a bit more. There is clearly different risk appetites in different parts of the world. And I think part of what has been driving this in the starting point was EASA taking a view, this is going to be mass transport. You look at the disruptive opportunities of these vehicles, you look at the interest and investment.
Well, we need to look forward to actually having lots and lots of these vehicles flying commercial passengers over built-up areas, and the only way to do that with the stats is to have those at transport category levels of safety. I think America has taken a bit of a different approach, partly driven by, I think, a mindset where, and we've seen this with lots of government support in America. The US, frankly, has lost out to China in the drone space, and they don't want to do the same in the eVTOL space. And so I think they've perhaps taken a bit more entrepreneurial approach, which is this is a nascent market. How do we help the industry start to sort of grow, not setting the bar too high?
Certainly, if you're trying to do everything on your own as a fully vertically integrated start-up, then transport category levels of safety are pretty difficult. If you're doing it like we are in partnership, I think that becomes a much more manageable hurdle. But therefore, I think that's sort of perhaps driven some of the initial shifts between the FAA approach and the EASA's approach. But hopefully, over time, that will coalesce. Certainly, all the customers we talk to, the industry at large, yeah, doesn't really benefit by having different standards. None of us should compete on safety.
We haven't touched on China, which I guess we could do, which is a whole different game, and EHang is certified in autonomous aircraft in a way that is not fit with any regulatory pathway in the West. So, China is probably a different ballgame, but hopefully, over time, we do see that harmonization in the rest of the world.
Yeah, I, I think we agree. I, I think the, only thing I would add, whether it's 60 or 70%, we don't know, but I would agree it would not be 100% from the get-go. And it's not new, right? Every time there was a new technology disrupting, like whether it was GNSS, like GPS kind of navigation and any type of things, the FAA takes a different approach than the EASA, and it's almost natural. You would expect it because of culturally, the approach to, to getting into a new business, right? So, by the way, I, I hold commercial FAA licenses, and I know that the training I went through in the US was very different from the theoretical way of work- doing things in Europe.
Having that said, I think what's important, because the three of us have DOAs in Europe and are certifying to the highest standard, is that when we're going to be going into the FAA and having to negotiate on the means of compliance and the final certification plan, we should be looking at a better advantage compared to our competition from the US, simply because we can cope with more usually failure cases and redundancies that you have to plan for EASA. It's not always true, right? But let's be careful. But we do feel very confident going to the US with our EASA regulations behind us in regards to finalizing the certification plans with the FAA.
Yeah, maybe just to add, I think looking also a bit more east. So I think EASA, FAA are the two big standards, and now when we, when we have now EASA cleared, we can also, you know, go into bilaterals, which we have done, be it with Singapore, with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, JCAB in Japan, which are acknowledging the EASA approach. So this is the other ballgame next to US, that you have a market opening up immediately for you. And similarly, like you did, Michael, we have ACG, so Tokyo Century subsidiary, one of the big aircraft leasing companies that underwrote, you know, a $1 billion facility for us to lease, then also to potential customers, our aircraft, I think, which is good, and they also have this global approach.
On the US side, I think, Lilium, you were also very, let's call it vocal and positive. They are working with the FAA. We are also received our G-1 under rotorcraft, which is good because there is an existing norm, for us, starting. But I completely agree, the means of compliance and how to operate, this is then the, the one we have to work and harmonize and set the standards, be it on infrastructure and so on. And I think what is good, like Michael also said, I can confirm that, that in the last 3-6 months, there has been now a good dialogue between the big two certification agencies they wanted, and FAA is a powerhouse. So if they want it, they can be quick, but then it's more also political, decision.
They had changes now in the administration and so on, and when they can stabilize now, hopefully, they also can be very efficient. And in 2024, I think that's also just good for all of us if two big certification agencies bring out their standards or have them also aligned.
Great insights there. So just one final question from me, just to try and squeeze this in, but can you discuss the major maintenance advantages of using eVTOLs over helicopters and ultimately moving on to electric, conventional takeoff and landing jet aircraft in the case of Lilium? But as battery technology improves, just what the major maintenance advantages are of using eVTOLs relative to a traditional aircraft design.
Well, perhaps I'll go first, because I think I touched on quite a bit of this earlier. So helicopters are phenomenal machines. They were one of the things that intrigued me most at university, but with all those heavily stressed mechanical components and single point failures, that drives a huge scrutiny in the manufacturing of those components and also the ongoing, continued airworthiness of the aircraft. So it requires significant regular inspections, which are very labor intensive, and many of those components are lifed components, and therefore, they're very expensive to produce, and then they don't last very long, and they have to be replaced. In electric distribution systems, we don't have any single point failures. In fact, that's a cert requirement for EASA. And so we don't have the same criticality on any individual component.
In fact, there's no critical parts in the aircraft. If any one fails, the aircraft can keep flying. And also, if you think about an electric motor, it essentially has one moving component that isn't very heavily stressed. And so you avoid all of the mechanical wear that you would see on the typical helicopter systems. And so you would, you know, you expect those components to last considerably longer, maybe even the life of the aircraft. Of course, we do use the batteries quite heavily. And so all of our aircraft will need battery replacements. I think, you know, I'm sure my compatriots on this call have similarly done lots and lots of testing.
We've done loads and loads of testing to understand actually, you get quite a lot of life out of the batteries, partly because of the efficiency of the aircraft. So you're flying very fast, you're flying a number of passengers, so there's probably some myths around the batteries. Well, they last a lot longer than a car battery in terms of the number of passenger miles that you can get between replacing the batteries. And actually, we have a huge advantage for the kind of battery systems we're doing, in that we have amazing data about how the aircraft has been used throughout its life, and there are really good opportunities to then use those batteries in other applications when you don't need that sort of very high power demand that an eVTOL does in hover. The batteries will need replacing.
Actually, that gives you an inherent upgrade opportunity for the aircraft certifying new battery cells. But if you look at the cost of that battery replacement, it is tiny compared to the cost of a helicopter. And so overall, these are really disruptive in terms of much easier maintenance, much less frequent maintenance, much less skill involved in the maintenance, and a substantially lower cost as a result.
Yeah. Another thing I would add is, because obviously everything is right, right? We finally agree again, but it's the availability of the, of the asset as well, right?
Yeah.
People tend to forget that the helicopter will spend weeks on the ground because you have to replace the shaft, the turbines. And so with our aircraft, you know, all of us have different type of architecture on this, but we can swap the batteries. It can be done, done very quickly. And that's pretty much your biggest maintenance action. The rest, you know, the, from our supply chain, what we're getting in terms of, you know, maintenance intervals for, for an electric motor or for those kind of actuators, it's absolutely phenomenal. So we're gonna be much cheaper, and our assets are gonna be much more available.
Yeah. And I'd add, you know, maintenance is an overnight thing rather than a multi-week thing-
Exactly
for those kind of vehicles, so really different.
Maybe to quote also the CEO of ADAC Luftrettung, you know, he was at a panel with us and said, "Look, typically, such a medical helicopter costs him EUR 8 million-EUR 10 million, and then he has another EUR 40 million in maintenance throughout the lifetime." Yeah, just to show that, you know, really factor, where he estimates that our aircraft that are coming is 60% less, right, from that what he expects. Again, those are the estimates of an operator. They are more in the medical space, but it gives you a view. I think overall, I think we also agree, it's not always for us looking at the helicopter, because you only have 22,000 civil helicopters globally.
So, we also look obviously for the competition on the ground with taxis and so on, to replace or take a market share out of that. This is at the end, I think, the goal also, with the different, through safety use cases we can bring to the table.
Excellent. Yeah. EUR 40 million is a huge maintenance price tag over the life of an aircraft, so be great to reduce that substantially. I just wanna thank our panel for joining today, Michael, Sebastien, and Christian, for coming to talk about eVTOLs and urban air mobility, regional air mobility. Thanks again for joining, and I hope to speak with you again soon.
Thank you very much. It was a pleasure. Thank you.