Just for Openers – BlackFly

Dean Sigler Batteries, Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

A Seven-Year Stealth Project Opener doesn’t sound like the name of an airplane company, and BlackFly doesn’t sound like a very charming name for an airplane.  Maybe that’s how the developers of an eight-motor personal flying machine got away with it for so long. Beth Stanton, who writes wonderful articles about futuristic projects for the Experimental Aircraft Association’s Sport Aviation magazine, alerted your editor about a project that sneaked under the radar for the past seven years. The airplane looks a bit like a single-seat Vahana, Airbus’s two-seat air taxi currently under test in eastern Oregon.  Where Vahana is just beginning flight tests, BlackFly has over 12,000 aerial miles carrying a payload in 1,400 flights.  BlackFly has gone through 40,000 cycles on its power system, equivalent to 25 circumnavigations of the earth, according to the company. Three fail-safe flight control systems manage redundant motors, elevens, and batteries.  Batteries are arranged in a distributed, isolated system. Pilots are constrained and protected from …