German UAM company Volocopter has unveiled its newest aircraft, VoloConnect, at EBACE Connect. The eVTOL aircraft is designed to connect suburbs to cities and complements ­the company's existing family of aircraft for intra-city missions. VoloConnect's hybrid lift and push design is expected to achieve certification within the next five years.

With the capacity to travel longer distances, VoloConnect joins Volocopter's aircraft family and extends the company's UAM ecosystem coverage to the suburbs. The new aircraft will be integrated into Volocopter's existing portfolio of UAM ecosystem solutions: VoloDrone, VoloCity, VoloPort, and the digital platform, VoloIQ.

“VoloConnect embodies the next dimension of our mission to offer affordable, efficient and sustainable flight mobility solutions for cities around the globe,” says Volocopter CEO Florian Reuter. “Leveraging customer insights from our existing VoloCity and VoloDrone, VoloConnect's capacity to support longer missions and higher payloads serves another strong growing market demand. We are confident that this aircraft family and the years of experience and leading innovation on which it is founded will pioneer the way for electric UAM services to launch commercially and internationally.”

Volocopter takes a holistic approach to UAM by developing a full ecosystem that connects the necessary components to offer electric flight in cities. This ecosystem includes partnerships with Aéroports de Paris, Microsoft Azure, Lufthansa Industry Solutions and many more. Additionally, Volocopter is the only eVTOL developer with a product portfolio of multicopter and fixed wing designs that can be used for passenger and cargo transportation.

VoloConnect uses a hybrid lift and push design to transport up to four passengers electrically on routes of 100 km at a speed of 180 km/h, with a top speed of around 250 km/h. The compact aircraft layout, necessary for urban missions, is stable and highly efficient during forward flight while maintaining a low stall speed. Volocopter's Munich-based team of experts, led by chief engineer Sebastian Mores, have been working on the aircraft for over two years and filed several patents for its technology. They are already flying multiple scaled prototypes of the VoloConnect and are quickly progressing towards testing full scale prototypes.

VoloConnect is designed to increase Volocopter's total addressable UAM market while preserving the company's high standard of sustainable, safe urban flight. As the newest addition to Volocopter's aircraft family, VoloConnect carries on Volocopter's track record of developing high-tech, electric aircraft for the urban mission.

Volocopter is the first and only eVTOL company thus far to attain Design Organisation Approval from EASA. Through long-standing, fruitful relationships with cities like Singapore, Paris and Dubai, Volocopter says it has consistently and publicly demonstrated its expertise in electric flight for inner-city mobility.