INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Lilium, the Munich-based startup developing an on-demand “air taxi” service, has released its latest flight video — this time
demonstrating a successful transition from vertical flight (liftoff) to horizontal flight.The company is also announcing the completion of
its first manufacturing facility and plans for a much larger second factory in preparation for a 2025 commercial launch.In the flight
footage (embedded below), the five-seater all-electric Lilium Jet can be seen taking off and then transitioning to horizontal flight, where
it functions along broadly similar lines to a conventional airplane.Describing this type of transition as one of “aerospace’s greatest
challenges,” Lilium claims it gives the Lilium Jet a range advantage over some other competitors, with its two sets of wings contributing
to much higher levels of efficiency than in aircraft lifted solely by rotors.“Powered by 36 all-electric jet engines, the aircraft has
zero operating emissions and requires less than 10% of its maximum 2000 horsepower during horizontal cruise flight thanks to the lift
generated by having two sets of wings,” explains Lilium.The company — which we reported is currently raising a large round of funding,
thought to be between $400 million and $500 million — is also disclosing that its jet has now been flown at speeds exceeding 100 km/h and
undergone “increasingly complex” maneuvers
It says it is still on track to be able to complete journeys of up to 300 kilometre in one hour and on a single charge.In a call with Remo
Gerber, Lilium’s chief commercial officer (CCO), he reiterated the company’s plans for a “meaningful” 2025 launch and talked up the
300 kilometre target range
Specifically, he explained that this means Lilium will be able to operate an air taxi service that connects cities and country regions,
rather than simply speeding up travel time across a single city.“We’re actually quite clear in our mind what our goal is,” Gerber told
me when asked to elaborate on Lilium’s 2025 ambitions
“We want to be live and a real, meaningful part of transportation ecosystems in several cities around the world
So what does that mean? We’re having talks around the world with a number of different cities and governments and then entire regions to
look at how we best connect them.”Describing England in the U.K
as one example of an ecosystem, where the main hubs are reachable within a 300 kilometre range, he says we could imagine services between
London-Manchester, Manchester-Birmingham, Birmingham-London, “or maybe down to Brighton and several other places.”“So that is really a
meaningful new addition to transportation opportunities for customers and for people to use every day,” says Gerber
“And that wouldn’t be just something that will be useful for Londoners, but it would be just as useful for people living in the other
larger towns but also — and that’s where the timeline is [hard to predict] — how quickly other smaller cities jump on the
opportunity.”The upside for building the landing pads, which will need to be close to other transport links, is that it will require a
“manageable investment” compared to much larger and more capital intensive infrastructure projects
The smallest and most affordable sizes of a pad will cost as little as half a million pounds to build, says Gerber.“I can all of a sudden
make one investment into a pad the size of a football field and be connected to all of these other 10 different pads in the country
And that’s where we’re coming in,” he explains, revealing that Lilium is already having conversations with various different parties
who are interested in creating a landing site.“We are developing the blueprints for people and we will be advising people what they need
Of course, we cannot go and build all around the world all of these landing sites, but where we will come in is to work with these cities to
say ‘how do we connect you in a meaningful way into the network, into the Lilium service.’ That’s how you have to imagine it.”It
won’t all be tax payer-funded or public money, but private companies will also be courted
These could be shopping malls that want additional footfall or large businesses that want their business parks to be connected in different
ways or want a 10-minute transfer to a specific airport.However, Gerber says Lilium will remain “ultra-cautious” with regards to where
Lilium landing pads are created so there is “no negative impact” on communities.“We see the landing infrastructure to a very large
extent is the public good,” he tells me
“We see it a bit like on the scale of a train station, because it should have a use to the community that it serves and that’s where
really our whole philosophy comes in.”Meanwhile, Lilium’s first manufacturing facility is a 3,000-square-meter space located at the
company’s headquarters in Southern Germany
It will soon be complemented by a second, much larger, facility which is already under construction at the same site
The plan is to be capable of producing hundreds of Lilium aircraft per year by the time commercial services begin in 2025.“There’s a
tremendous opportunity when you have the manufacturing sitting next to the engineers because they can work together,” says Gerber
“Now we know the performance is right, how do we tweak it so that it’s actually also easy to make, so that we can get that scale?
We’re building the first manufacturing line to really produce this aircraft at scale.”
