Satya Chakravarthy, a professor at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, has started a homegrown air-taxi service company, christened the ePlane Company. He aims to ferry passengers soon in air taxis and, in the process, is set to build India's first flying electric taxi. The company is focused on developing electric planes for short-range intra-city commutes.
On Tuesday, July 19, he informed that his company, a start-up, would enable up to ten times faster passenger commutation and cargo transportation. It is now in the final stage of building a sub-scale version of the flying aircraft and the professor expects to start flight trials in the next two months. The ePlane Company has raised $5 million funding in a pre-series A round earlier this year, as per an IANS report.
"We are developing the full-scale prototype, the ePlane e200, and aim to have the e200 cargo variant built towards the end of 2022 and undergo the certification process through the next year for it to be ready for commercial deployment approximately by late 2023," Chakravarthy told IANS. The passenger version of the ePlane e200 would undergo additional development and flight tests for a more rigorous certification process, "which would take us until 2024 for its certification and their commercialisation as air taxis will happen subsequently," Satya, the Founder and CTO of the company, stated.
"As with everything in life, ups and downs are a part of the process. Fortunately, we have been able to pique interest in potential consumers and investors and continue to do so. The funding we raised has been crucial in developing the prototypes, performing tests and attracting the right talent along with building awareness," he added, as per IANS.
"The technological challenges of developing a product that is safe, reliable and efficient is something we are addressing with innovation in all the key areas. The pandemic and its subsequent effects, including the global supply chain slowdown, were also deterring factors but things are looking up in that regard now," he said further.
According to a recent study by Morgan Stanley Research, the market for flying cars or electric air taxis can reach $1.5 trillion globally by 2040. The professor stressed that his company was striving to offer on-demand, door-to-door flying at affordable pricing and aimed to make flying the new ubiquitous mode of transport.
"One of our key differentiating factors is that we're focused on making the ePlane (e200) one of most compact eVTOLs (electric vertical take-off and landing) in the world that would cater to the mid-mile and last mile urban air mobility market segments, thereby alleviating traffic congestion in cities," he said.
"The design and compactness of the e200 ensures that there is no additional infrastructure required at the takeoff/landing sites, making it more accessible and will allow quick on-boarding and offboarding," Chakravarthy said, as per IANS.
"The Indian government has already declared different zones for drone operations. A similar exercise would be adopted for aerial mobility for the class of e200 and above in due course. Until then, the present operating procedures for helicopters would suffice to handle a few tens of aircrafts per city and its vicinity. We are also closely involved with policy-making and certification right from the early stages," the IIT professor said further.
Bakthakolahalan Shyamsundar, Artificial Intelligence and Navigation Engineer at the ePlane Company, said that cloud technology has a multi-fold role to play in today's development ecosystem. "We believe that autonomous technology will be one of the key factors in reducing operational costs and will help in making eVTOLs more commercially viable. Development of AI-based algorithms and processing large amounts of data is a crucial activity in the pursuit of Autonomous navigation," he informed.
"AWS, with its broad set of cloud-based products — from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances to Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed machine learning service — enables us to build and develop systems at a nimble pace. AWS also aids us financially as an early-stage start-up by reducing the need for upfront capital expenditure on compute solutions. The kind of support, guidance and exposure we get by being a part of the AWS Activate Program for Startups is invaluable for us," he added.
