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Four years ago this week, Hyundai Motor Group unveiled its first electric vertical take-off and landing concept, the S-A1, at CES 2020 in Las Vegas. This year, Hyundai’s rebranded advanced air mobility division, Supernal, is back at the consumer electronics show with a substantially modified concept, the S-A2, that reflects what the company has learned about eVTOL aircraft in the interim.
“In 2020, it was a vision concept where we’re calling this a product concept,” explained Supernal Chief Technology Officer Ben Diachun, who provided The Air Current with a deep dive into the fully electric S-A2’s design and underlying philosophy. “The significant difference is the maturity level of where we’re at, what we’ve put into the design, the level of rigor and work that we’ve done.”
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The S-A1 had four tilting propellers for vertical and forward flight, plus four sets of stacked co-rotating propellers for vertical flight only. Multiple eVTOL developers including Archer Aviation, Wisk and Vertical Aerospace are similarly using a combination of tilting propellers and lifting props that are not powered in cruise flight.
By contrast, the S-A2 takes a novel approach with eight tilting props on booms attached to the wing — four that tilt upward in the front, and four that tilt downward in the rear, all of which are powered during all phases of flight.
“We’ve learned a lot about the dynamics of fixed rotors in forward flight and there are a lot of, we believe, unfavorable characteristics when you have to stop lift rotors or try to stow lift rotors,” Diachun said. “You get large asymmetries on the blades; you can have large moments on the hub assembly that’s holding those blades. So, one of the key differences you see is that we’ve gone to an all-tilting configuration.”
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