Speeding up everyday travel’: Lilium prepares for takeoff

Daniel Wiegand, CEO of air-mobility company Lilium, believes that electric passenger aircraft will be commonplace by 2030.
e didn’t expect aircraft development to cost a billion dollars. When Daniel Wiegand and his team at German aviation company Lilium first set out to make electric flying vehicles a reality, he was “a bit naive” about the cost and scope of such an undertaking. Much has happened since Wiegand and three other graduates of the Technical University of Munich founded Lilium in 2015. Today, Lilium is one of more than 250 entities developing electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft.
The Lilium Jet has a spacious cabin. Our jet technology has a very low vibration, so it will be a comfortable ride, with low noise emissions. We want to deliver an experience that corresponds to what customers expect in the 21st century. 

It’s also important to us that all of this is connected within a network—so we’re not only looking at the Lilium flight itself but also at embedding these flights into a bigger transportation network that covers an entire country. That means being connected to ground transportation—taxis, car services, trains—and all the way up to the big airlines, to which Lilium flights would act as feeder flights. 

One thing I’d like to clear up is that Lilium won’t be an air-taxi service—at least not in the first ten years or so. Instead, we will be providing scheduled shuttle services from one city center to another. The business model is comparable to a high-speed train that connects two cities. 

We believe low noise emissions is one of the key enablers for the entire eVTOL sector. Low noise is crucial to community acceptance and to accessing the spots in urban environments where we want to take off and land. Helicopters have been able to do vertical takeoff and landing for a very long time, but they are very noisy and costly. The eVTOL industry won’t be truly successful unless it solves those two fundamental issues.