Transport

Rising opportunity

As aerospace people, we’re careful about promising that we can fly over traffic jams,” insists Rafi Yoeli, founder and CEO of Urban Aeronautics. Though the Israeli entrepreneur denies he’s out to make a flying car, the idea has captured the imagination of everyone who has ever read a comic or has sat on a gridlocked highway.

Urban is developing the AirMule, an unmanned aerial vehicle that weighs less than a tonne, and can carry a little more than 500kg at up to 180kph for military customers. Flying low under power lines and down urban alleys or at altitudes of up to 4,000m, means the AirMule can be used for humanitarian or rescue missions in places too tight for a regular copter’s rotor. And though it’s still up to five years from production, armies in the US, Europe, India and Israel – and presumably emergency services too – are excited by the prospect.

Urban – based in Yavne, near Israel Aerospace Industries where Yoeli once held a senior post – has worked on rotorless aircraft for a decade, firstly designing the slightly larger X-Hawk as a flying ambulance. With grants from the US military and other partners, Urban – now in the midst of a second financing round – concluded its first successful full-scale AirMule test fl ight last October.

Yoeli stresses that he has not developed new technology. The engines are off the shelf from Turbomeca Europe, the flight controls from Israel’s RADA Electronics, the gearboxes from another firm. What he considers a breakthrough, however, is manipulating air on both sides of a fan to guide a flying machine. “Everyone knows that one side of a propeller creates wind, and the other doesn’t. But no one realised that when a propeller is in a closed space you can do things with the suction.”

Although, as Yoeli acknowledges “it’s not a great discovery, like penicillin”, it may have paved the way for an aircraft that could eventually save many lives.