FARNBOROUGH—Eve has used the Farnborough Airshow to unveil a mock-up of the proposed cabin and a revised external configuration for its in-development electric vertical-take-off-and-landing (eVTOL) aircraft.
Previous artists' impressions released by the Embraer subsidiary have shown its eight rotors distributed across canards and a higher, longer wing. The new configuration places all eight on one wing, with the canards removed, and a more conventional empennage, including vertical and horizontal surfaces. The cabin features a cockpit separated from a four-seat passenger area.
Speaking to ShowNews immediately after the unveiling of the cabin mock-up, Eve co-CEO Andre Stein explains that the new wing-and-empennage configuration was one of several alternative designs the company has been exploring internally, and which it has been able to better evaluate following the funding injection provided by going public.
"We're not changing direction," Stein says. "We have been working with more than one configuration, and as we've engaged more and more engineers, particularly after the spin-off, we were able to deep-dive and select one. We needed a baseline to show to the world, and we've been showing [the version with canards], but now we were able to select the configuration, the direction we're going to go. It's not a change—it's disclosing what we have been doing in the last few months.
“That was one of the rationales for us doing the spin-off: we can engage engineers who can detail the solutions, who can understand better, as well as everything we've done so far—all the rigs, the proof of concepts—that allow us to understand better the trade-offs between noise and performance."
The company also presented a full-size mock-up of the proposed cabin, which foregrounds sustainability in the choice of materials used.
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