For the past few years, the Innovation Center at AirVenture is the place to visit if you’re even slightly interested in electric mobility, flying cars and UAVs. Sure, it’s a place for dreamers but dreams spark reality, I suppose. This year while doing a video shoot there on the Workhorse SureFly helicopter/VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) personal aircraft, it was obvious that some of the dream machines are getting bigger—as in big enough that people would actually fly in some of them. The majority in the steady crowd of onlookers waiting in the long line to climb into the sleek SureFly seemed like they would and that’s a good sign for market acceptance. The publicly traded Ohio-based Workhorse Group, which builds electric trucks for customers including UPS, FedEx, Brinks and Ryder, to name a few, is going big and steering clear of a too-radical design with its octocopter because it thinks it is time to reinvent the helicopter.
