Volant Aerotech: Teams Up with AirEdge to Boost Low-altitude Economy Takeoff

As a representative of the low-altitude economy, electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOL) have attracted much attention in recent years. Volant Aerotech's VE25 eVTOL, which can carry one pilot and five passengers, has a cruising speed of 235 km/h and a range of 200-400 km, making its technical parameters and performance leading in China.

AirEdge, as a one-stop R&D management platform (PLM), empowers VE25 in data management, project management, requirements management, and process navigation, breaking data silos and enhancing end-to-end data and project collaboration capabilities.

Ming Dong

Founder & CEO of Volant Aerotech

“Volant Aerotech's product is a commercial passenger eVTOL aircraft, where safety design and process compliance are crucial. Therefore, we strive to develop and use standardized processes and tools to ensure that every step of our R&D and management aligns with CAAC, industry standards, and company processes. AirEdge is such a tool that meets our end-to-end R&D compliance needs.”

Customer Profile

Shanghai Volant Aerotech Technology Co., Ltd., established in June 2021, is a high-tech company specializing in the development of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. Volant Aerotech focuses on the R&D, design, and manufacturing of passenger-grade eVTOL technology, boasting a top-level professional team. As a Chinese tech company providing sustainable solutions for advanced air mobility (AAM), Volant Aerotech is dedicated to contributing Chinese wisdom to reshaping human travel methods.

The VE25 manned eVTOL of Volant Aerotech has completed conversion test flights. In September 2023, the type certificate application was accepted, making it the first passenger-carrying eVTOL project accepted by the East China Regional Administration of the Civil Aviation Administration of China.

The VE25 manned eVTOL is expected to receive its airworthiness certificate in 2026.

Challenges and Solutions

• Challenge 1: Lack of Visibility and Control in R&D Stage and Gates

The development of eVTOL is a long-term, high-cost project. It is essential to clearly define project phases, clarify project processes, manage requirements and goals for each phase, and identify and manage risks in advance to ensure the project remains controllable at each stage, reducing the risk of project failure or delays.

Solution 1

AirEdge's GateFlow is a leading stage-gate process modeling and implementation system in China, based on the Stage-Gate meta-model. It graphically models aviation compliance standards and enterprise R&D processes into stages and gates within the tool, setting key control points and checks in the project. This ensures that each stage of the R&D process has well-defined goals and milestones, and can only proceed to the next stage after detailed checklists and review by the decision committee. This approach shortens the time to market, increases project transparency and controllability, and reduces the risk of project failure or delays.

Challenge 2: Complex and Non-Correlated Change Control

Aircraft design is a complex multidisciplinary engineering task involving multiple teams, departments, and technologies. The VE25 aircraft consists of seven major systems and dozens of subsystems, with tens of thousands of parts in total. Managing the related data for these systems and parts, including their versions, history, and records, makes clear and controllable change management crucial.

• Solution 2

AirEdge, as a one-stop lightweight platform, plays a critical role in change management for Volant Aerotech. AirEdge provides a unified platform where teams can control changes throughout the product lifecycle, ensuring that all changes are recorded and tracked, with appropriate approvals and supervision. This helps the team understand the product evolution and change history.

AirEdge manages the entire R&D object by establishing and managing the relationships between different objects, such as parts, documents, and tasks. When an object changes, AirEdge automatically identifies the related objects and assists in managing the linked changes.

Flexible approval processes can be set based on different types of changes and their impact, streamlining the approval of non-core safety data and improving efficiency.

Challenge 3: High Volume and Diverse Requirements Management

The VE25 aircraft development involves seven major systems and dozens of subsystems, with numerous functional, performance, safety, and environmental adaptability requirements that need to be effectively collected, recorded, reviewed, and managed. Additionally, system requirements must be distributed to many internal teams or external suppliers, making cross-collaboration control challenging. "Foreign tools are expensive and inconvenient, not meeting current needs," said a senior system engineer at Volant Aerotech.

Solution 3

AirEdge Links provides a comprehensive requirements engineering solution. Links covers the entire lifecycle of requirements capture, decomposition, derivation, tracking, analysis, and change management, ensuring the integrity of the requirements baseline.

Links visualizes the relationships between requirements, helping Volant teams understand these connections clearly. The vast number of aircraft-level requirements for the VE25 are categorized and prioritized through Links, ensuring that the most critical and high-safety requirements are developed first. Additionally, the online peer review functionality of Links allows efficient and accurate distribution, commenting, discussion, and decision-making for requirements peer reviews.

Lastly, the flexible permission control feature of Links makes it easy to manage the permissions of internal teams or external suppliers. Its import and export functionality supports formats like Excel and PDF, enhancing collaboration efficiency with suppliers.