Aircraft

Heaviside becomes fourth eVTOL to receive military airworthiness approval

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The Heaviside follows in the footsteps of the Flyer, which emerged in 2017, and the Cora, a two-seat electric aircraft designed with short trips in mind
Kitty Hawk
The Heaviside follows in the footsteps of the Flyer, which emerged in 2017, and the Cora, a two-seat electric aircraft designed with short trips in mind
Kitty Hawk
The sleek orange and charcoal Heaviside features six rotors fixed to the wings and another pair mounted alongside the cabin
Kitty Hawk
Kitty Hawk demonstrates the Heaviside to AFWERKX and Agility Prime program personnel from the US Military
Kitty Hawk
Kitty Hawk runs mock medevac exercises for the AFWERX team
Kitty Hawk
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America's technological leadership is now viewed as an urgent matter of national security, and to make sure the country keeps its edge, the US Military is mustering its impressive resources to accelerate development on a range of commercial tech products that could keep the USA ahead of the game.

The AFWERX Prime programs are designed explicitly to "prime" and accelerate emerging commercial markets, using military missions and equities, as well as test infrastructure, certification authorities, inter-agency relationships and early operational use cases.

The first of these to roll out is Agility Prime, a play to ensure American eVTOL companies hit the market harder, faster and earlier than anyone else – but further Prime programs are planned to accelerate new tech in the energy, space, autonomy, gaming, supersonics and microelectronics sectors. If America has the technological edge, the theory goes, prosperity will follow, and the enormous US war machine will continue to get fed. Plus, there will be less potentially dangerous foreign technology around that might be weaponized in an "unrestricted warfare" scenario.

Four American eVTOL companies have received military airworthiness approval through Agility Prime: Joby Aviation, Beta Technologies, Lift Aircraft, and most recently Kitty Hawk, whose Heaviside aircraft has just been accepted.

Kitty Hawk demonstrates the Heaviside to AFWERKX and Agility Prime program personnel from the US Military
Kitty Hawk

The Heaviside is a two-seat electric plane with a reverse-sweep wing and a small canard. It uses eight tilting props – six along the main wing and two on the canard – to achieve vertical lift in a vectored thrust design. Interestingly, the props tilt to face downwards rather than upwards during VTOL. Where a runway is available, it's able to save energy using conventional takeoff and landing.

Range is over 100 miles (161 km), with significant reserves remaining, and the top speed is around 180 mph (290 km/h). It makes one hundredth the noise of a helicopter – just 38 dBA at 1,000-ft (305-m) altitudes, and in efficiency terms, Kitty Hawk says it uses less than half the energy per mile of a typical electric car.

Kitty Hawk runs mock medevac exercises for the AFWERX team
Kitty Hawk

Kitty Hawk demonstrated the Heaviside for the Agility Prime team in May, running mock medical evacuation and logistics drills and demonstrating fully autonomous and remotely-piloted use cases. Colonel Don Haley, Commander of Air Education and Training Command Detachment 62, stated “this collaborative commercial/DoD use-case exploration revealed common attributes that serve both urban air mobility and search and rescue operations: High-reliability, responsive launch & recovery, minimal logistical footprint, accessibility for mobility-challenged, low acoustic signature, and high levels of autonomy.”

Will this thing be useful to the military in the short term? It doesn't really matter. AFWERX director Colonel Nathan Diller told Janes the military airworthiness approval will allow the US Air Force to start paying Kitty Hawk for test flights in a range of different scenarios, giving the company a nice little revenue stream and a chance to expand its thinking on how the aircraft might be used. This is a remote operations approval, so it won't initially be for manned flights.

Military airworthiness is an opportunity to get eVTOLs built and into some form of service long before they're certified with civil aviation authorities. It'll be interesting to see how support from the Agility Prime program affects the overall progress of the companies chosen.

Check out a video detailing the Heaviside aircraft below.

Sources: Kitty Hawk, Janes

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4 comments
McDesign
Just freakin' amazing engineering - refined elegance!
jerryd
These are mostly heavy complicated expensive losers in the EVTOL field. You can't use systems that are so inefficient and heavy to boot in an E craft. Sure like drones they can get off the ground but fill them with a real payload of people, unlikely and if they do, little range.
You need large slow turning 1-2 rotor/s which have 4x the lift/kw of the example. You can't compete with those with a 4x advantage.
Note the Mars Helicopter was this way.
Aermaco
I think this video presentation is one of the best I have seen with its fairly comprehensive explanation of the engineering values in both its goals and its successes. EVTOL is certainly the future of flight with little doubt and this Heaviside will be a heavy weight in the field and may be as close to what heavy motors and hundreds of moving parts can achieve. However until the only moving parts are the electrons and the ambient fluid molecules being driven by electric charge will the current state of eVTOL be eclipsed to become the best imaginable in proven physics, if gets a chance to be proven.
ljaques
Wow, actual sound of the airplane without noisy background music! Those are very quiet beasties, indeed. Best of luck, Kitty Hawk.