Aircraft companies around the world are throwing the old design book away in an attempt to gain an edge in the potentially lucrative urban commuter market. With the advent of lithium ion batteries, designers no longer need to pair rotors to bulky combustion engines whose size and weight crimp design options. Multiple rotors can now be distributed across the airframe to maximize thrust, lift or energy efficiency, and wings can be reconceived. This design flexibility is exciting to engineers, but it also presents aerodynamic modeling and hardware challenges, especially given all that an urban air mobility aircraft must do. They will need to whisk passengers safely over neighborhoods and to and from vertiports, the landing pads that planners envision erecting in suburban neighborhoods and atop city buildings.
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