PAL-V: Flying cars become a reality

“You’ll park it at your house, drive it to the nearest airstrip, unfold your vehicle, take-off, fly 500km, land again, and drive to your final destination.”

Flying cars have long been the poster child for the future - a sign that we’ve reached an incredible milestone in technological advancement. But that vision of the future has been confined to science fiction for many decades - until now.

PAL-V is building the world’s first road-legal flying car, and it’s extremely close to liftoff. The aim is to make general aviation practical for everyday mobility. In this episode we sit in the driving seat of the stunning PAL-V Liberty, a car that flies like a gyroplane. We meet PAL-V’s marketing director, Joris Wolters, who explains the engineering that’s gone into developing the Liberty, and what the car is capable of. 

We also hear from Mark Lobo, who heads PTC’s Windchill product lifecycle management division. He explains how PAL-V uses the PLM solution to deal with its rapid growth and strict data compliance needs.

Find out more about PAL-V here.

Find out more about Windchill here.

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. 

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Ollie Guillou. Location recording by Liew Niyomkarn. Music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

Welcome to Third Angle, where cars with wings take to the skies. I’m your host, Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. In this podcast, we share the moments where digital transforms physical, and we meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world, each powered by PTC technology. 

From Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to Back to the Future, Blade Runner and even Harry Potter, we’ve long been bewitched by flying cars on the big screen, longing for them to become a reality. In fact, people from across the decades have often said that the advent of flying cars will be the sign that the future has really arrived. Up until now that reality has been very much confined to the realms of science fiction. But what if I told you the future is closer than you think, and we’re just a few short years away from sticking your car in flight mode and taking to the skies? Pal-V is building the world’s first road legal flying car, and it’s really close to lift off. The Pal-V Liberty is a stunning feat of engineering. And to find out about it, our producer went to Pal-V’s tech centre in the Netherlands to meet marketing director Joris Wolters.

So the Pal-V flies like a like a gyroplane. And the gyroplane is different to a helicopter because the main rotor system is not powered by an engine. So we have a propeller on the back that pushes it forward. And the main rotor just spins by aerodynamic forces. It is a bit like a windmill, but then turned 90 degrees. That creates the lift. And it makes it a very stable aircraft to fly, and therefore easy to fly, and very safe to fly. We can fly up to three and a half kilometres if we want to, and the maximum airspeed is about 180 kilometres per hour. And once we land, we can fold it easily back into drive mode, and then we can drive it on the roads up to maximum speed of 160km/hr. 

What we do as a company is that we make, let’s say, general aviation, practical for everyday mobility. And with the flying car, you can really go from any door to any door in the world. So in this particular case, if we look to the Pal-V Liberty, you will park it at your house, you will drive to the nearest airstrip – and there are about 10,000 registered airstrips in Europe and about 14,000 in the US – and that’s where you unfold your vehicle and it’s where you take off, fly 500 kilometres in distance, land again and drive the last part to your final destination. And that’s something you cannot do with vehicles or aircraft that we have nowadays. That’s what we changed. So driving an aircraft allows you to use an aircraft for mobility. 

So if you look at the vehicle, and we start on the front, you will see there’s only one wheel in the front and two wheels in the back. And that has mainly to do with weight. And when we drive, we actually lower the vehicle to such a level that is still very stable when cornering. And when we fly, we can raise the complete vehicle to about 35 centimetres higher. It’s a two seater, so it fits two people and a bit of luggage, about 20 kilogrammes of luggage. 

When you drive, you use your normal steering wheel like in any other car, and when you fly, you use your flight stick, and use that for flying. To start from the front, at the top of the vehicle you will find the rotor system, which is now folded away, and makes the vehicle very compact – only four metres in length. But when it unfolds, it’s almost 11 metres in length. So it is also quite an engineering challenge to get it from that status to a compact car that you can comfortably drive on the road, and even more importantly, that you can just park at a normal parking space. Because if you have a flying car that doesn’t fit anywhere, when you drive it, the practicality of your flying car becomes a lot less. So then we have the cabin. It’s at the front of the vehicle, and the engines are actually in the back, which are powered by a Rotax engine. It’s a four-cylinder engine, which powers the drivers of the car, and, when we fly, the propeller. 

So if you open the doors, you will see the two seats, the steering wheel that we use for driving and the flight stick folded away into the seat. You will see the dashboard with a lot of different buttons. If you go into here you will feel a little bit like James Bond, I assume. We don’t have the ejector seats, but it looks like it. And then we have the electronic flight instruments that we use for flying, we have the driving display that we use for driving. And the two engines in there, so a left and a right engine, we use both when we fly and only one when we drive. 

So the seat itself is not adjustable, but the pedals will be, because it’s also has to do with weight. So if you want to make seat adjustable, you will, again, add weight. So we made the pedals and the steering wheel adjustable, to still make you feel comfortable, but decreasing the weight a lot. And also, if you look around, you will see a lot of carbon. So if you look for example, at the doors, it’s all made from composites, which we have to use to really reduce the weight of the vehicle. So if you look at the dashboards, from right to left, you will first see all the engines. So we have two engines on board, and you will find the buttons for, for example, the fuel pumps, then you will find your transponders and communication. And then you will see a bigger screen, which is the instrument flight information system. Next to that you will see a driving display. And then, above your steering wheel, you will find your altitude meter and also your speedometer.

We did fly already with our prototype, in 2012. And that’s actually the vehicle that you’re seeing here. So that’s built between 2009 to 2012. And it was really to show to investors, but also to the world, that it was possible to not only build a flying car, but also to do so within existing regulations. And the last part is extremely important when you want to get a vehicle to the market in a realistic timeframe. Because changing the regulations will take forever, and building a vehicle within existing regulations is, to our opinion, the only viable way to get a vehicle to the market.

So in this hall, we make all the different test equipment. You might think that we do a lot of testing in the air, but in fact we do a lot of testing on the ground. Because safety is something you want to test on the ground, and not something you test in the air. So we have a lot of different test vehicles that we use, apart from the Pal-V Liberty itself, of course. For example, what you see here is a pickup truck, which weighs almost four tonnes. That’s where we actually use the rotor system, for example, up to a force of 3G’s, so 3,000 kilos. And that’s how we can test different systems and different parts of the Pal-V before we really start fly testing them. So what you see in the back is a Porsche that we have. And it’s not like any Porsche that you’ll see driving around, because it has an aircraft engine in it. 

And so we actually are testing this Porsche on the roads to test the variations on the engine, because it differs from how you would use it in the air. So in the air, you would fly at a constant rpm, but while driving, you will have a different RPM continuously. So there’s a different load to the engine. And that’s why we actually use a Porsche for testing the engine on the road. And as I say, this is how we test the different components of the vehicle before we start the test flight. 

If you ask about how well this works in terms of regulations and that side of the story, you can drive them on the highways, and yes, you can take it from airports. So as soon as you convert it into an aircraft, it’s an aircraft. You have your transformer, you have your communication on board, and you have all the gear that you need to safely fly from A to B. So in the air you will be classified as a normal aircraft, not a special category or so on. And it has to do that because we comply to existing rules and regulations. So everything to allow this vehicle to be on the market is there. The infrastructure is there. Regulations are there. Licencing for pilots is there. So we don’t have to create that. We only add a vehicle – and that part is already difficult enough. And we have been working on that since 2012 to get this vehicle to market. 

So at the moment we are using two piston engines, and regular gasoline. And in future, of course, we want to electrify the whole system. But at the moment, the weight of the batteries is just too heavy to be used in aviation. So to give you a brief overview of the vehicle itself, it’s 660 kilos, and for every kilogramme that we add, we lose about seven kilometres in range. So you can imagine if we would instal batteries into the vehicle, we would reduce from 500km to maybe 100km in range. So at the moment, it’s not feasible to make a flying car that can have an acceptable range, although we are speaking to a few parties to implement synthetic fuels, so carbon neutral fuels or e-fuels. So that might be the first logical step also for aviation, to implement and to really decarbonize the aviation industry. So it’s not just our goal to sell a product onto the market, we also want to be turning aviation from this high-carbon industry to decarbonize the industry. And we can do that by these little vehicles a lot easier than by the huge volumes that are required for different applications. 

So as a company, of course, we have a roadmap that we will see different products, different variations of the vehicle. So for now, we have the Pal-V Liberty, which is a two seater, which can be modified with different power trains – so hybrid versions, electrical – and we expect to see that in the coming years. And then of course, in the far future, but then I’m speaking about 2028-2030, we could possibly see a bigger version or a different type of vehicle. But as in all things in aviation, everything takes time. Developing an aircraft from scratch to getting certified will take you at least 10-12 years. And it doesn’t really matter whether you’re Pal-V or Boeing or Airbus, it’s just a lot of paperwork that you have to go through to make sure that the vehicle is actually safe to fly. So designing something is one part – but getting a certified is definitely the biggest hurdle that you have to overcome. If we look at our company, we spend about 60% of our investments on certification.

That was Joris Wolters from Pal-V. Now, outside of actually making the Liberty, Pal-V spends a lot of time doing paperwork, getting certification. To deal with the company’s rapid growth and new-found need for strict data compliance, they needed a product lifecycle management software that could serve as a foundation for their business to build on. And they chose to host PTC’s Windshield PLM solution in the cloud. Let’s find out more. Time to meet our expert, Mark Lobo. 

So Mark, we’ve spoken about Windshield previously with Volvo Construction Equipment. But here we’re talking about Windchill in the cloud. Can you give the listeners an overview of what that actually means?

Sure, Paul. So PTC has offered a cloud offering to our customers for the last 10+ years. We do have industry verticalized offerings for federal aerospace and defence, as well as medical device manufacturers, given the high regulatory and compliance needs of those businesses. And this is important, I think, as we talk about Pal-V. 

So we refer to this as a private cloud offering for Windchill to differentiate it from the Windchill+ SaaS offering on Atlas that we launched in April last year. So what’s Windchill in the cloud? It’s a comprehensive PLM solution for data governance and traceability, providing this authoritative source of truth for all kinds of data, whether it’s product data or process data. It’s open architecture enables easy integration with other enterprise systems because we know product development is a team sport, and there’s a ton of other systems that you need to connect with. And this then serves as the foundation for the product-driven digital thread. So this cloud managed service offering that we have makes the PLM solution easier to configure to scale, and very importantly, it’s secure. It really helps around facilitating this collaboration and agility across the enterprise, both internal and the extended enterprise, including how to work in remote environments. 

It was the only out-of-box implementation that they found which closely aligned with CM2 methodology. And what is CM2? It’s a global enterprise standard for change and configuration management. And for many verticals like the one that Pal-V is in, this is a key piece. So why is this important? When product changes are needed, Windchill provides this ability to capture the issues or enhancements as they are coming in from the product development teams, it helps to document and implement related updates, and then send out information through a prototype change notice to all the stakeholders, whether they’re internal to the company, or maybe outside of the company. So, Windchill connects systems, and all effective teams are automatically updated across the enterprise. And at the end of the day, it’s really allowing them to focus resources on high-value business opportunities and business outcomes.

So, understandably, there’s a lot of compliance issues within the aviation industry. Everything has to be safe, it has to be traceable. As to who supplied it, who designed it, when was it certified? So what part does Windchill in the cloud play in helping Pal-V achieve their certifications?

Yeah, compliance and aviation requires a lot of people. I know we’ve joked in the past and said if you print out all of the paper that goes into the certification and compliance, it’s taller than the aircraft itself. Lucky for us and the planet, this is now mostly all digital. So Pal-V’s unique design process needs mean the highly capable PLM system is a necessity. It’s like (??16:12) for them. So how did they start? They started by studying the regulations they would need to comply with, and then designed the flying car with those regulations in mind. This encouraged them to use a data system that would be compliant with both local and international regulations as they made design changes in a controlled manner. Before they implemented Windchill in the cloud, maintaining this compliance and making design changes required tons of manual processes and paperwork. Now they’ve combined both PLM and quality management into a single system. Now, as these processes are digitised, change management is really at the forefront of driving compliance – both for local standards and for international regulations as well. In fact, Pal-V established this foundation for compliance across the entire company, but having this one system implemented in the right way means they’ve successfully complied with majority of the regulations all at once – and Windchill did 80-90% of what they needed to be compliant. And through this, they had a foundation for compliance across the company.