Unmanned Aerial Vehicle The latest drone news
“We started saying, ‘Could we reach other customers?’” said Scott Drennan, vice president of innovation at Bell. And he said the team began thinking with the mindset of a technology company instead of a helicopter manufacturer.
The company dropped the word “helicopter” from its name in early 2018. It debuted a new logo featuring a shield, to represent safety and defense, and a dragonfly, one of the most sophisticated flying creatures.
And Bell, usually at home at air or helicopter shows, also sought out new consumer audiences at South by Southwest and CES as a way to get out its name and recruit talent.
The innovation team has grown from 25 people to 125. It’s expected to grow to 175 by the end of this year, Drennan said. It acts as an in-house incubator, working on ideas that may later be pushed out to the entire company.
So far, it has unveiled two major aircraft: an urban air taxi called Bell Nexus and the Autonomous Pod Transport, or APT, an unmanned aerial vehicle or commercial-grade drone that can carry cargo or packages.
Drennan said Bell aims to get the APT to market in the early 2020s and the Bell Nexus to market in the mid-2020s.
Hot projects
One of Bell’s most high-profile projects is the Bell Nexus. This month, Bell announced the aircraft’s name and showed off a prototype at CES in Las Vegas, the same place it showed off an earlier design of the air taxi a year ago. The show drew a crowd of techies, startups and corporate executives who could sit inside the prototype and take flight through virtual reality.
Bell is one of several companies developing aircraft for Uber Air, a new service that Uber aims to offer starting in 2023. Uber chose Dallas-Fort Worth and Los Angeles as the first U.S. cities for the new service.
Mark Moore, a former NASA engineer who now leads Uber’s aviation division, said the Bell Nexus prototype shows that “the day when Uber riders will be able to push a button and take a flight is closer than you think.”
