Lilium has gotten off the ground. The German air taxi startup has completed a hover test of a full-scale prototype of its ambitious electric aircraft, which is powered by tilting ducted fans designed to allow it to take off and land vertically while cruising with the efficiency and speed of a winged aircraft.
Lilium says its aircraft will be capable of carrying four passengers and their luggage plus a pilot 300 kilometers (186 miles), roughly the distance from New York to Boston, at a speed of 300 kilometers per hour, farther and faster than most of the scores of other electric air taxi startups.
The Munich-based company envisions knitting regions together more tightly with a transportation service it plans to run itself, enabling quick, affordable on-demand travel between major cities and ones that currently aren’t connected by airlines.
“How far can you get in an hour? We want to fundamentally change that for everybody,” Remo Gerber, Lilium’s chief commercial officer, told Forbes.
Lilium has raised $101 million in venture capital, making it one of the best-funded air taxi startups. However, it’s going to need a whole lot more money to execute its vision say analysts who rate the aircraft’s design as ambitious, but its business model even more so.
One thing Lilium seems to have in spades: raw power. The company, co-founded by four German engineering students in 2015, has developed a proprietary electric engine with just a single moving part that drives a small ducted fan. The aircraft has 36 of the engines mounted over the main wing and a forward canard that the companys says generate 2,000 horsepower—a “massive” amount, says Philip Ansell, an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who’s working on distributed electric propulsion systems. By comparison, a four-seat Robinson R44 helicopter has 245 horsepower.
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