Vela Alpha Could Be the Most Interesting eVTOL Developed in Indonesia

Vela was set up just four years ago, in the summer of 2020, but is ambitious enough to believe that it can move fast enough to catch up with its more established competitors. With the preliminary design of its flagship eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) already in place, Vela plans to conduct the first flight of its subscale technical demonstrator as soon as this year. With the feedback from this initial flight testing, it will then advance its design over the following years and welcome the first flight of a full-scale prototype by 2027.

If things go according to plan, Vela's aircraft should be ready to enter service before the end of the decade, possibly in 2028. That would be an impressive achievement for a tech startup that doesn't benefit from the wider industrial ecosystem that eVTOL makers in other parts of the world have. At the moment, the company is betting on a team of 40 engineers with previous experience in the automotive and aerospace industries.

Considering that this is only the preliminary design, which could be modified in the future, the Alpha eVTOL does sound good on paper. In terms of size and capacity, it looks like a typical eVTOL meant primarily for air taxi service, with four passenger seats and one pilot. This is what the Alpha aircraft is mainly intended for – speeding up regular urban transportation and lowering emission levels.

As an example, the Alpha eVTOL is said to reduce the journey between Jakarta's Central Business District (CBD) and Jakarta International Airport to just eight minutes, compared to the hour-long car trip and the 44-minute train ride.

Vela claims that the top selling point of its flagship eVTOL is that it provides both purely electric and hybrid-electric propulsion systems under a single configuration, which would make it highly adaptable to various needs on the market while also being affordable.

Performance-wise, the Alpha eVTOL promises a 100 km (62 miles) range in purely electric mode and up to 300 km (186 miles) as an hVTOL. Redundancy was also one of the main priorities in developing this aircraft; for instance, the nine-motor distributed power system enables Alpha to complete a flight safely after the failure of one of its engines. Faster flights and clean operations also come with the benefit of a lower acoustic signature, an essential asset for regular urban operations.

For now, Vela is just making its way into the global world of AAM, but this is already gearing up to be a milestone year not just for the startup but also for Indonesia's domestic electric air mobility industry.