#25 – Vertical Aerospace CCO Michael Darcy on the UK's first full-scale eVTOL and the growing urban mobility market

Michael Darcy is the Chief Commercial Officer of the British eVTOL company Vertical Aerospace. Vertical Aerospace has set out to change the way we fly short-haul distances and to reduce the time required for end-to-end journeys. Their vision is to develop an intercity air taxi service that gives customers the freedom to fly from local neighbourhood directly to the final destination. To achieve this, Vertical has assembled a world-class team with veteran engineers from Airbus, Boeing, Rolls Royce and leading Formula 1 teams to design a fully certified eVTOL aircraft starting from first principles. Since their founding in 2016, Vertical Aerospace has already built the UK's first full-scale eVTOL (electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing) aircraft, and is iterating quickly to build the next generation of larger aircraft. One aspect that really stands out in this conversation is that Vertical Aerospace focuses strongly on quickly iterating through the design, manufacture and test cycle to improve their design in the most efficient way. In this episode, Michael and I discuss:

• Vertical's particular approach to designing eVTOL aircraft
• how Vertical Aerospace see the electric aviation sector developing
• and which hurdles need to be overcome by the industry to build certifiable aircraft

If you want to learn more about the topics discussed in this episode, then you can find show notes with links to more in-depth material on the aerospace engineering blog. If you want to support the show then please leave a review; share it on social media with your friends and family; or support us directly on Patreon. Thanks a lot for listening!

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