Announcing full-year financial results for 2020, EHang's management said that in 2021 the company will transition to a full-service urban air mobility operating model as It intensifies efforts to complete type certification of its short-range EH216 aircraft. The Civil Aviation Administration of China has established a team dedicated to handling the type certification application, which was formally accepted in January 2020.

Volocopter's new joint venture with Geely will likely involve the Chinese group's general aviation subsidiary Aerofugia, which is now developing the Transition flying car program started by U.S.-based Terrafugia and has plans for a four-seat eVTOL design called the TF-2A. The partners want to launch air taxi services in several Chinese cities.

Canada-based AMPERe and its subsidiaries are developing an autonomous, hydrogen-powered VTOL aircraft that will be able to carry four people on urban air mobility missions.

NFT is marketing the hybrid-electric Aska primarily to private owners who it says will be able to fly the vehicle with just a private pilot's license. However, the FAA and other regulators have yet to determine exactly what training requirements will apply for eVTOL aircraft with multiple electric motors, and most other market entrants anticipate that operations will start with more experienced pilots at the controls.

MightyFly says that it can operate a fleet of cargo eVTOL aircraft almost completely autonomously, with just a small team of controllers monitoring flights from the ground. Packages will be transferred autonomously between aircraft at dedicated transfer stations located close to its business customers, with trial operations due to start in 2022.

Horizon's survey of private equity and venture capital investors supports estimates of at least 160,000 eVTOL air taxis in commercial service by 2050. However, the projected IPO valuation for its prospective new parent company Astro Aerospace seems far less clear with its current OTC stock price well below its target for a transaction that is due to close in the second quarter of 2021.

With around 13 million people, Bavaria is Germany's second-most-populous state, after North Rhine-Westphalia, where Lilium already has an agreement in place to launch regional flights in its six-passenger eVTOL aircraft.

In flight trials, a pilot monitors the autonomous operations of a Cessna 208B Grand Caravan equipped with Xwing's Autoflight System from the company mission control center in Concord, California. The company is working to get FAA clearance for unmanned commercial cargo services on regional routes of up to around 500 miles.

A flock of new companies are developing eVTOL aircraft and for many of these start-ups it's their first time bringing an aircraft to market. Some skeptics say they have underestimated the difficulty of this task, resulting in overly optimistic timelines for completing type certification and getting the models into mass production. Most of the front-runners in the eVTOL race-to-market have recruited aerospace engineering talent from other aviation companies to tap their experience on other programs. To try to explain the steps to be taken to transform an idea for a new type of aircraft into reality, we interviewed Archer's chief engineer Geoff Bower to learn more about the approach his company is taking.

Dufour Aerospace has completed the flight test program for its planned aEro eVTOL family but has provided no further details about how the program is progressing.