Due to operation in urban areas, air taxis compete, unlike most conventional aircraft, with individual transportation systems like cars and public transportation systems. Safety and comfort are important for potential air taxi customers. This work highlights the importance of eVTOL’s crashworthiness and introduces a development and evaluation approach. It is done by deriving eVTOL-specific full‑vehicle crash load cases analogue to the automotive approach and introducing a corresponding crashworthy design concept, using an analytical approach supplemented by a multi-body-dynamic simulation. The multi-body-dynamic simulation confirms that the analytically developed crash concept fulfills the previously derived crash load case’s test criteria. In contrast, the simulation demonstrated that lumbar loads could exceed certification limits for an advanced crash load case with higher impact velocity.

FH Aachen: Lukas Laarmann, Lukas Welfens, Thilo Röth; RMIT University: Simon Watkins, Mohammad Fard