Demonstration Flight at Lower Manhattan Heliport Hints at a Future of Neighborhood Airports
Even as the Downtown Skyport (the helicopter landing facility on the East River waterfront south of South Street Seaport) hosts cargo drone operations and tests for air taxis based on electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) technology, a third species of exotic aircraft made its debut there this week: a hybrid-electric ultra-short takeoff and landing (eSTOL) plane touched down at the heliport on Monday.
This marks the first time a fixed-wing aircraft without vertical takeoff capability has landed at the facility. The EL2 Ultra Short hybrid-electric that landed in Lower Manhattan (and took off a short while later) relies on “blown lift technology,” in which multiple electric motors drive an array of propellors, forcing air directly across the wing and flaps, creating significant upward air pressure without the high speeds or long runways required by traditional planes.
Aircraft startup Electro Aviation, the firm that developed the EL2 and sponsored Monday’s event, says this innovative design enables takeoffs and landings “in soccer field-size spaces, previously limited to helicopters and eVTOLs.” The company also says that it can operate the EL2 “at one-third the cost and with the improved safety and reliability of a fixed-wing aircraft.”
Able to take off and land in as little as 150 feet, the EL2 relies on electric propulsion, using four independent battery packs and a small turbine-powered generator to drive four electric motors on each wing. It is the experimental prototype for the EL9, which is slated to carry nine passengers and their baggage (or 3,000 pounds of cargo) more than 300 nautical miles, cruising at more than 200 miles per hour.
According to Electro, direct flights from downtown areas in major cities are the harbinger of a new business model in air transport known as “Direct Aviation,” in which major metropolitan centers can be linked to communities hundreds of miles away without requiring every trip to begin or end at a traditional commercial airport. In this scenario, the Downtown Skyport could someday host direct flights to Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., rendering obsolete the hub-and-spoke model, and saving passengers the many hours usually required to commute between airports and urban cores.
“Travelers have long organized their journeys around airports,” said Marc Allen, chief executive officer of Electra. “It’s time to change that and to organize journeys around travelers. Ultra Short aircraft open the possibility of bringing aviation much closer to where the journey actually begins and ends. Rather than requiring entirely new airports, Ultra Short performance can add a distributed layer of access to the aviation system, using infrastructure already located closer to where people live, work, and want to go. This capability opens up novel access points using existing infrastructure, like heliports, barges, fields, and parking lots – no runway required.”
“We showed what the infrastructure for that future looks like,” Mr. Allen continued, “in one of the most demanding places we could find: Lower Manhattan. The good news: the infrastructure already exists!”