2024 Corporate Aviation Leadership Summit

While Textron still clearly harbors strong ambitions in the electric aviation and wider advanced air mobility sector, the U.S. aerospace group has all but confirmed that its Bell business’s long-awaited Nexus eVTOL aircraft will not be its first product in this market, at least not in its current iteration. In a November 24 interview with FutureFlight, Rob Scholl, the senior Textron executive appointed nine months ago to lead its eAviation team, acknowledged that Nexus is not an active program and said that the company will not confirm plans to bring a passenger-carrying eVTOL model to market until it confirms a business case for doing so.
“Nexus has been in the works for five years and it has been a useful exercise to test the [all-electric] technology and market feedback,” Scholl explained. “Bell has continued to evolve designs internally and develop the technologies, and we have a good view of these in terms of the technology roadmap. We will continue to invest [in this area] as it makes sense, but we still have to see further development of the battery technology and the economic case.”
Bell unveiled the Nexus eVTOL concept in early 2019&nbsp;and the company was previously&nbsp;named by Uber as a partner in its Elevate urban air mobility plans. However, since around early 2020, when it introduced&nbsp;the revised 4EX version and announced a partnership with Japan's Sumitomo group just before the Covid pandemic broke out,&nbsp;the company has had little to say publicly about progress with the project.
By contrast, in late September, Airbus unveiled its long-awaited plans to develop a four-passenger eVTOL aircraft called CityAirbus NextGen. This project is being led by the European aerospace group's Airbus Helicopters division, which competes directly with Bell in the rotorcraft market.
Textron's rotorcraft division has worked on its Autonomous Pod Transport drone concept with similar motivations, but, again, does not yet see a clear path to market. “We’ve looked at working with [defense-orientated] Textron Systems on that, but we see the same challenges in terms of economics,” Scholl said. “A lot of these technologies that are in the early phases &nbsp;are very cost-sensitive.”
Essentially, Textron appears to feel no commercial time pressure from attention-seeking start-ups racing to bring eVTOL models into commercial service around 2024. “The economics of these models are the key,” said Scholl. “We could bring an aircraft to market, one that would be robust, pass the regulations, and work operationally, but it has to work for the public and that could take time; this market [for eVTOL passenger flights] could develop in waves.”
So far, most of the eAviation team's efforts have focused on discussions with possible technology and capital partners. Scholl’s role has been to understand what each Textron business unit is or could contribute to the group’s plans for electric aviation and assess&nbsp;“where and how we can participate.” He said that this exercise will continue into 2022, and Textron may announce further partnerships beyond those it has with Surf Air and Ampaire to convert the Grand Caravan aircraft to hybrid-electric propulsion, and with Xwing, which is working on remotely piloted operations with this ubiquitous utility model. Separately, MagniX is also advancing plans to convert the Caravan to electric propulsion.
Scholl said that the SkyCourier is another Textron aircraft that could benefit from electrification. Quizzed as to whether the company has similar plans for its King Air family, in view of start-up Bye Aerospace’s plans to develop an electric challenger called the eFlyer 800, he noted that the task is more challenging for an aircraft of that size.
That said, Textron’s customer base is increasingly pressing for the introduction of more environmentally sustainable aircraft.&nbsp;Scholl acknowledged that this market pressure, on top of momentum in the same direction from its own workforce, is a significant factor as it advances plans around reducing its products’ dependence on fossil fuels, while also trying to reduce the carbon footprint of its production process.
“There’s a lot of interest in sustainability from customers across the spectrum, and the industry would like to see fuels [like 100LL avgas] phased out,” Scholl said. “Electrification could be the way out for this, and we’re talking to customers involved in areas such as training and special missions, as well as individual aircraft owners.”
But autonomous flight, including remotely piloted operations, may take longer to adopt in Textron’s view, even though Bell is working on increased automation for some of its existing helicopters. “Technology isn’t the biggest challenge,” concluded Scholl. “It’s airspace integration and public acceptance. If we do autonomy too quickly, the public may not accept it for a long time and it could stunt its growth.”
The recent launch of the CityAirbus NextGen program follows extensive flight trials with the CityAirbus and Vahana technology demonstrators. The design unveiled during September 21 sustainability conference in Toulouse is a fixed-wing aircraft, with a V-shaped tail and eight sets of electric motors and propellers.
An engineering team led by Airbus Helicopters is working on the detailed design, with the aim of achieving the&nbsp;first flight with a prototype in 2023, en route to type certification in 2025. It will carry up to four passengers on flights of up to 80 km (50 miles) and at speeds of 120 km/h (75 mph).
In April, Italian rotorcraft manufacturer Leonardo&nbsp;confirmed plans to develop a hybrid-electric-powered light helicopter that could be available in the second half of this decade. The company said it will likely use the prototypes for its new AW09 aircraft as technology demonstrators for the new project.
Back in 2013, Leonardo announced plans to develop electric and hybrid-electric concepts for a new tiltrotor aircraft through its Project Zero initiative. This was based on a technology demonstrator that the Italian company, then called AgustaWestland,&nbsp;had already flown secretly in 2011 and 2012, but the project has since been abandoned.
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Latest news about Textron's eAviation division.

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Charles Alcock

Textron Confirms Bell's Nexus eVTOL May Not Make It to Market

Bell Textron this week demonstrated its Autonomous Pod Transport 70 (APT 70) vehicle as part of NASA’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems in the National Airspace System program. The flight on September 28&nbsp;was made using detect-and-avoid (DAA) hardware and software developed by autonomous technology specialist Xwing, which is separately advancing plans to certify a Cessna 208B Grand Caravan aircraft for unmanned operations.
Xwing’s DAA system consists of cameras, radars, and satellite-based automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast, with these situational awareness and positioning inputs being integrated by the California-based company’s software. The technology can be used by a ground-based remote pilot or be coupled with an aircraft’s flight-control system to provide automated collision avoidance.
The APT 70 flight, which was conducted in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, marked the first time Bell’s new unmanned vehicle was able to fly in controlled airspace without a pilot. According to Bell and Xwing, a significant portion of the flight was made in Class B airspace, which surrounds major airports and requires authorization and coordination with air traffic control.
The flight took off from Bell's Floyd Carson airfield and flew a 10-mile circuit along the Trinity River at an altitude of 500 feet. According to Bell, the route included a road crossing and transition in and out of Class B airspace. Communication between the ground station and the aircraft was maintained through a redundant datalink.
The Bell and Xwing teams have been working together for two years, and they have previously tested the DAA technology on one of the U.S. manufacturer’s helicopters. Over the summer they transitioned to the APT 70, which has now made several flights, including one during the last week of September to demonstrate full integration for the purposes of the NASA program.
"This successful demonstration highlights the great potential for the APT 70 to complete complex missions for businesses and healthcare providers," said Michael Thacker, Bell's executive vice president for Innovation and Commercial Business.&nbsp;
“The final flight was the first that involved going into Class B airspace and getting authorization from air traffic control,” Xwing chief technology officer Maxime Gariel told FutureFlight. “There was plenty of traffic coming close [to the APT 70].”
Bell’s APT 70 is intended to be used for autonomous operations, such as medical deliveries, third-party logistics, offshore support, and humanitarian relief. The helicopter manufacturer, which is also working on a passenger-carrying eVTOL called Nexus, intends to develop a family of freight-carrying unmanned APT aircraft with a payload eventually as high as 1,000 pounds. The APT 70 can carry 70 pounds up to around 35 miles at speeds of around 125 mph.
Meanwhile, Xwing says it is on track to start freight operations in its modified Grand Caravan aircraft by the end of 2020. The company plans to run a commercial operation on a trial basis for about a year to prove the DAA system as part of its complete Autoflight system, which will also include flight controls.
The Grand Caravan has a payload of 4,000 pounds, and Xwing intends to operate on sectors of between 100 and 500 miles. The company indicated that it may soon announce a launch customer for its trial cargo operations.
“We want to unlock the potential for BVLOS [beyond visual line of sight] flight,” explained Gariel. He said that by running its own flight trials to demonstrate the technology’s performance under different flight conditions, Xwing aims to solve the “chicken and egg” problem in which early adopters are reluctant to take a risk without first seeing evidence that the system will work in real-world conditions.
Initially, Xwing’s system will be used for safety enhancement to improve situational awareness for the Grand Caravan, which will still use its standard avionics suite and have a pilot on board. This gradual approach makes it easier to get FAA approval for the flight trials, and the data gathered will support the certification of the system.
In August, Xwing reported that it had already made more than 70 pilotless takeoffs and landings in the converted Grand Caravan. Subject to FAA approval, the company&nbsp;hopes to begin autonomous operations in&nbsp;early 2022, although these will initially be conducted with an&nbsp;operator on the ground, mainly to handle interactions with air traffic controllers.
The company claims that autonomous flight can resolve what it says is still a growing pilot shortage, while also increasing the productivity of aircraft operators&nbsp;by a factor of three, potentially resulting in cost savings of 20 to 30 percent.
NASA’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems flights in the National Airspace System program started in 2018 when the agency began selecting partners to test the enabling technology. Its goal is to support the safety case for routine autonomous flights for commercial aircraft operations.
The APT 70 trial flights were also supported by the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of Atmosphere, which developed an intuitive, integrated display to provide remote pilots with local weather risk awareness and route-based weather alerts.
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