eVTOL News In-depth Interview: Airbus UAM Vahana - Geoffrey Bower, Chief Engineer

This video is an in-depth interview with Geoffrey Bower, Chief Engineer for Vahana at Airbus Urban Air Mobility. Vahana is an all-electric, single-seat, tilt-wing eVTOL vehicle demonstrator originally developed by Airbus A3 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The first full-scale aircraft, dubbed Alpha One, first flew at 8:52AM on January 31, 2018 at a test range in Pendleton, Oregon and reached a height of five meters (16 feet) before descending safely. The Vertical Flight Society interviewed Bower at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh in July 2019. At the time, Vahana had flown about than 100 full-scale test flights and achieved a maximum cruise speed for 100 knots (190 Km/h). Vahana uses eight electric motors and a tandem tilt-wing configuration that converts between rotor-borne vertical and wing-borne forward flight. This configuration enables Vahana to achieve both vertical take-off and landing as well as cross-city flight range on battery power alone. Vahana is self-piloted, which is enabled by its onboard detec