Lightweight aerostructures for eVTOL platforms

The eVTOL structures is a lightweight aerostructure from GKN Aerospace with aerospace-grade and in-production specifications. GKN Aerospace supplies lightweight composite aerostructures for eVTOL aircraft, offered as airframe components designed and manufactured to the requirements of each aircraft programme. The product is aimed at developers of advanced air-mobility vehicles who need wing and boom structures made at aerospace quality and produced in rates suited to a series programme.

The structures are made of composite materials, chosen to keep airframe mass low so that more of the take-off mass can go to battery energy and payload. GKN Aerospace combines design capability with manufacturing: its engineers support the definition of the structure, the choice of configuration and the industrialisation of the parts, rather than only building to a customer drawing. For an integrator this means the supplier takes part in the design of the component from the first stage and carries it through to production.

GKN Aerospace has worked on a range of eVTOL platforms. The maker names the VX4, the Lilium Jet and the Supernal SA1 as aircraft with GKN technology on board. Trade press reports describe a full composite wing assembly and composite booms built by the company for the Supernal full-scale technology demonstrator at its sites in Bristol and Cowes in the United Kingdom, as well as wing structures for the Vertical Aerospace VX4. The company also supplies electrical wiring interconnection systems for eVTOL aircraft, so structure and wiring can be handled together by one supplier.

Because the configuration is defined per programme, dimensions, mass, fibre system and certification basis are set with the aircraft maker rather than listed as catalogue figures. Interfaces to the rest of the aircraft, such as fuselage attachments, control-surface hinges, propulsion mounts and systems routing, follow the airframe designer's architecture and are agreed during the design phase.

Typical applications are wings, booms and related primary structures of piloted and uncrewed electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft, including air-taxi and regional air-mobility vehicles. Buyers evaluating this product are airframers and programme managers who need a structures partner for composite airframe components.