Company forecasts industry will generate $280 billion in revenue by 2045
ORLANDO, Fla. — The refined aircraft design that Eve Air Mobility unveiled yesterday at the Paris Air Show reflects all that the Brazilian company has learned about electric aircraft since it was spun out of Embraer in 2020.
The full-size mock-up on display in the Embraer pavilion differs in several distinct ways from the models the company has showcased in previous years. Perhaps the most notable is the number of blades on each of the aircraft’s eight lifting propellers — four, instead of two. Other changes include the removal of the left-hand pilot inceptor to simplify the cockpit, a shift to smaller seatbacks and a redesigned wing that can be disassembled into three parts for shipping, Eve’s Chief Technology Officer Luiz Valentini told me in an interview ahead of the air show. The company is targeting “this summer” for the inaugural flight of the first prototype, with sales starting in 2027 in Brazil, Valentini said.
For more about advanced air mobility, receive the True Mobility newsletter in your inbox.
Valentini is a 20-year veteran of Embraer, which retained an 83% ownership stake in Eve when the electric aircraft subsidiary was spun out as an independent company. The two entities remain close, Valentini said, and the design of Eve’s four-passenger air taxi has been heavily guided by Embraer’s 56 years of aircraft manufacturing and sales. This has been particularly helpful for Eve executives in terms of anticipating customer demands and adapting legacy technology, including Embraer’s electronic fly-by-wire flight controls.
However, Eve’s electric takeoff and landing aircraft also required new solutions, he said. For example, “We started with two-bladed rotors because they are simpler — we’re always trying to make the vehicle as simple as we can, right?” he said. “But during testing, we realized the two-bladed rotors bring a lot of vibration to the vehicle.”
Those vibrations could have been offset by adding more structure to the airframe, but that would have also added complexity and weight, he said. By contrast, adding mores blades to each propeller allowed Eve to “spread the lift to more blades as they rotate to decrease the asymmetry and therefore reduce the vibration. We chose that option because it was simpler.”
A similar discussion led to Eve swapping out the skis on the original air taxi for wheeled landing gear. “We left out wheels at first for simplicity, but we started receiving information from potential operators, and most of them said they need to be capable of taxiing,” Valentini said. “We still offer skis for those who want to simplify, but the wheels are an option, with braking and steering.”
Customer feedback also contributed to the decision to downsize the seatbacks. “When we started, we had seats with larger backs, but we found that made the cabin seem smaller, because more of their view was blocked, so we shaved it down a bit,” Valentini said.
Other changes were driven by the desire to simplify assembly and operations. For the 15-meter wing, Eve redesigned it to detach into three parts — two ends and a midsection — while leaving off any flaps or slats. This will make it easier to ship the aircraft from the manufacturing facility that Eve plans to build in Taubaté, Brazil, Valentini noted.
Likewise, eliminating one of the two pilot control sticks, also called inceptors, removed the previous requirement for pilots to use both hands for flying. With the new one-stick design, “we’ve put that all in the pilot’s right hand,” he said. “We don’t want the pilot to switch between helicopter control and airplane control [vertical and forward flight]. Also, the pilot doesn’t have to jump over the left side control to get in.”
This is similar to the approach taken by other air taxi developers, including Joby Aviation of California.
Market forecast
Alongside the design unveiling, Eve released its “Global Market Outlook 2025” forecast, projecting that the emerging advanced air mobility industry will have generated $280 billion in revenue by 2045. By that year, Eve estimates that 30,000 electric air taxis will be in service, with a combined 3 billion passengers carried to date. The company described the report as the “first comprehensive forecast” of the advanced air mobility industry from an electric air taxi manufacturer.
Eve believes that the majority of those air taxis will be shuttling passengers around cities for work commutes or to and from airports. Additional applications include emergency medical flights, corporate or charter flights, and tourism jaunts over natural areas.
“Urban point-to-point and airport shuttle use cases shall represent the biggest share of the market, driven by the sheer size of the actual urban mobility market and of the established air transportation market,” the report reads. Nearly half of the global fleet will be in megacities in the Asia-Pacific region.
Megha Bhatia, Eve’s chief commercial officer, told me that the forecast is based on predictions for ongoing “rapid urbanization” in the coming decades. “Two billion more people will reside in cities by 2050, and that will really stress the overall mobility systems in large cities,” she said.
Eve has received letters of intent for 2,900 aircraft, representing a potential $14.5 billion in revenue from 30 customers in 13 countries. No money has yet changed hands, but Eve said the orders amount to the “industry’s largest backlog.”
In addition to aircraft sales, Bhatia said, Eve is “also looking at services to support” the wider AAM industry because the company wants to make sure the whole industry is “set up for success.”
One such service is the Vector air traffic management system that Eve is developing, which would provide navigation and collision avoidance guidance for air taxis in crowded skies.
Bhatia said Embraer’s ownership and investment puts Eve in a strong position. “We are able to leverage decades of experience when it comes to designing, developing and producing aircraft,” she said. “Embraer has developed 21 aircraft types or platforms in the last 21 years. We’ve got over 800 Embraer engineers that are dedicated to the aircraft development program that work with Eve.”
Related Posts
