Air Taxi! Bell Courts Consumers With New eVTOL Aircraft Design

In 2018, Bell dropped the “helicopter” from its name and adopted a dragonfly as its logo to emphasize a move away from traditional rotorcraft toward new, innovative means of vertical flight.

That same impulse drove Bell to use the Consumer Electronics Show, rather than an aviation industry event, as the venue for rolling out its new Nexus electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, which should be ready to ferry passengers above clogged city streets by the mid-2020s.

Bell unveiled the basic fuselage design at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show, but “kept the flying bits to ourselves,” according to Scott Drennan, the company’s vice president of innovation. At this year’s CES in Las Vegas, Bell unveiled a full-scale model of the prototype, creating much social media buzz and drawing the likes of Kanye West to sit in the blue-mood-lit cockpit.

Six ducted fans, every eight feet in diameter, are arranged with two attached to the fuselage forward, two attached to the fuselage aft and two at the end of stub wings. Each fan can rotate forward to provide thrust and lift in forwarding flight. Read more