Page 22 - LUA May - June 2023 for Magzter

INTERVIEW

LOGISTICS WOULD

PROBABLY BE OUR

FIRST CUSTOMER

As the first-ever conference on Advanced Air Mobility(AAM) recently got
underway in Bangalore, we caught up with one of its delegates Professor
Satya Chakravarthy, a faculty at IIT Madras and the founder of The ePlane
Company, an electric plane startup that was incubated at IIT Madras
and is slated to start flying logistics cargo by 2023-24 and is looking
to conduct the first passenger flights via flying taxis by 2025 that can
transport both passengers and cargo. Chakravarthy does some real talk
about the rise of eVTOLs in the AAM landscape, India’s new drone policy,
and regulations in India and the opportunities this sector holds for urban
air mobility and moving cargo, Lakshmi Ajay reports.

? What are some aircraft you are under drone rules. One can call the e50
working on and where do your
an eVTOL, especially by international
company’s commercialisation efforts standards, and conceptually even the e6 is
stand at the moment? also an eVTOL because it has wings, and
The prototype we have worked on is called vertical take-off capabilities like a drone
the e6, which can carry 6 kg payloads. The and these are typically what we call an
e6 is what we are commercialising now, eVTOL. So we essentially are working on
once we find a customer. There are two eVTOLs starting from the e6. The e6 is the
applications for it including camera-based size of a drone, whereas the e200 is the size
applications for specifically long-distance of an airplane and has a payload of 200 kg.
inspection, surveillance, and mapping
of things like power lines, pipelines, or ? What can you tell us about the cargo
railways lines and it can fly for 30-40 km plane and the flying taxi that you
at a stretch. The other applications are are working on?
cargo deliveries. We still have to explore We are making a two-seater eVTOL called
e-commerce at that level, but we are in the e200 and have completed its design and
process of doing pilots of last-mile logistics will be doing the engineering part
and deliveries as well. in the next two months.
We have the capabilities for The e200 is a two-
BVLOS (Beyond Visual Line of
Sight) and autonomous flights. We
are in fact exploring a third level of
communication with SATCOM (Satellite
Communication), with a combination
of RF (Radio Frequency) and using 4G
networks to localise the drone and that is
already in place.
We are also in the process of flight
testing the E50 that can carry 50 kgs of
payload. In India, this variant comes

20 LUA MAY - JUNE 2023