The world’s first zero-emissions electric plane, developed by Lilium, a start-up supported by EIT Climate-KIC, has taken to the skies.
Lilium‘s aim is to design the world’s fastest and highest-range commercially available electric aircraft.
The two-seater light aircraft is made of carbon fibre, has 36 jet engines powered by several thousand Lithium-Ion batteries, consumes half the energy of today’s most efficient electric cars and even has a parachute as the ultimate safety back-up.
The plane is so quiet that it can’t be heard flying above 1 km altitude.
As Lilium says, ‘We have incredibly exciting news to share. The Lilium Jet successfully completed its maiden test flight series in the skies above Bavaria. The 2-seater Eagle prototype executed a range of complex maneuvers, including its signature mid-air transition from hover mode to wing-borne forward flight.
‘Seeing the Lilium Jet take to the sky and performing sophisticated maneuvers with apparent ease is testament to the skill and perseverance of our amazing team. We have solved some of the toughest engineering challenges in aviation to get to this point. The successful test flight programme shows that our ground-breaking technical design works exactly as we envisioned. We can now turn our focus to designing a 5-seater production aircraft.
‘We are now developing a larger, 5-seater version of our Lilium Jet, designed for on-demand air taxi and ridesharing services. A typical journey with the Lilium Jet will be at least 5x faster than by car, with even greater efficiencies in busy cities. So a flight from Manhattan to New York’s JFK Airport will take around 5 minutes, compared to the 55 minutes it would take you by car.’
The EIT congratulates Lilium on this incredible success.