Take a ride inside Ehang's fully autonomous, two-seater air taxi

My name is Dong Wang. I’m E Hung’s vice President of Technical Research and Development. I’ve been very interested in science and technology since I was a child. Every boy dreams of flying, too. When I grew up, I also studied science and technology at university. When I learned of an opportunity to make my dream come true, I did not hesitate to join E Hung. E Hung’s mission is to enable everyone in the world to enjoy safe, automatic and environmentally friendly air transportation. Our aircraft is the first aircraft in the world to obtain the type of certificate issued by the Civil Aviation Administration of China. This is an emerging industry, so there are many things to do At the beginning. It may have to do with regulation as well as technical stuff that no one has explored. So I’m very fortunate to work in technology, research and development, then lead the team to actively explore, develop, test all kinds of flights from our first generation of small aircraft, then to our medium sized aircraft and all the way to our large aircraft. We are going to a test site in the Huangpu development zone. It is about 30 minutes drive from the company. WAMPU Development zone gives great importance to the development of low altitude economy and they hope to promote the operation and testing of some routes in the region. This is our EH216 model and it’s positioned for short distance transportation or sightseeing in the city. The aircraft has eight arms. There are 16 motors and propellers up and down. These propellers are made of carbon fibre. The vehicle is made of composite materials so it can achieve lightweight and high structural strength at the same time. Battery is placed under the chassis. It’s landing gear is made of steel which can provide a grounding environment for its take off and landing. We have to buckle up first, then put on the aviation headset that comes with it and close the cabin door. In front of us there’s a screen with some basic information. We don’t need to do any manoeuvring because the aircraft is unmanned. All passengers have to do is look through the window at the beauty of the surroundings and enjoy the flight experience. The operation is fully automated, it’s scheduling system runs on the server so it’s route is automatically loaded and then it carries out a completely automated route flight. Our ground operators are just doing security checks. The remote ground personnel only need to command it to take off. The engineering team will conduct A detailed inspection of the aircraft for each flight to ensure that its various systems and components are normal. At the same time, they will also be able to see the sensor information on the background interface of our scheduling system and the flight information of our entire aircraft to ensure that the entire aircraft is in the safe state of operation have reached a preliminary training qualification agreement with the Civil Aviation Administration of China. After our company’s training and assessment, ground operators can obtain the corresponding certificates issued by our company and then they are qualified for ground control. The price for our aircraft for our partners is $410,000 overseas and the domestic price is CN¥2.39 million. For end consumers, they can enjoy our services easily and quickly. We hope to apply this model to tourism, urban transportation and so on. We hope that all users will be able to place orders through mobile phone programs in the future to book a flight experience or travel. In addition to this aircraft, we also have a large aircraft for transportation between cities. Because of this other aircraft, we also need to build a vertical take off and landing flight site between cities. We plan to start commercial operations with our key partners in China in 2024. China is doing very well and have greatly promoted the development of this industry. According to the road map for development of civil unmanned aerial vehicles released by China, we will build a complete 3 dimensional transportation system for Urban Air traffic by 2035. I hope that through the continuous progress of our technology, we can make it safer and fly better.