Falck to Explore eVTOL Aircraft Use for EMS

PRESS RELEASE

Emergency response and healthcare company Falck announced February 24, 2021, a collaboration with Silicon Valley’s Kitty Hawk, a company pioneering all-electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft. The companies will establish a joint innovation platform creating a framework for Project Heaviside, Kitty’s Hawk’s latest high-performance aircraft, to be used in emergency response operations.

The new collaboration adds to Falck’s drone initiative, Vertical, which aims to assess the potential of drone technology in the prehospital and ambulance services of the future. With Kitty Hawk’s Project Heaviside, the company plans to test and evaluate new technologies on a large scale, making emergency healthcare more accessible and affordable. Kitty Hawk brings a world-class team with decades of experience in commercial aviation, aerospace, automotive engineering, flight test and industrial design to the partnership. Project Heaviside is designed to be fast, small, and exceedingly quiet. Kitty Hawk has built 13 prototypes of the eVTOL aircraft and has completed over 700 test flights.

“The agreement with Kitty Hawk takes us to the next level in our commitment to integrate eVTOLaircraft into our ambulance operations. Kitty Hawk brings the technology, while we at Falck contribute with our ambulance service area as a use case. This combination gives us the best conditions to investigate how we can jointly unleash the potential of new technology and develop the ambulance-borne health solutions which are likely to set the standard in the near future,” said Jakob Riis, CEO of Falck.

“We are excited to be working with Falck to collaborate on bringing our Heaviside aircraft for emergency services, first in Denmark and then to other areas," said Sebastian Thrun, cofounder and CEO of Kitty Hawk. “Falck is an innovative leader in the area and this agreement marks a first and important step in making eVTOL available to more people.”

The priority of the new partnership is to develop a framework for the integration of Heaviside into emergency services. This will enable eVTOL aircraft to be an addition to Falck’s services, increase flexibility and reduce emergency response time, and overall contribute to Falck’s continuous development of their services within the prehospital and ambulance area.

Falck expects to introduce Heaviside in a close collaboration with customers in Denmark, Europe followed by the United States.

For more than a century, Falck has worked with local and national governments to prevent accidents, diseases and emergency situations, to rescue and assist people in emergencies quickly and competently and to rehabilitate people after illness or injury. Falck operates in 30 countries and has more than 27,000 employees.

Kitty Hawk was founded in 2010 with the mission to free people from traffic. The company, located in Palo Alto, designs, develops and builds groundbreaking all-electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft.