Air taxi maker Lilium faces funding pinch in crowded AAM sector

All startups developing next generation air taxis and longer distance advanced air mobility (AAM) aircraft face a wide range of technical, engineering, and production challenges as they guide planes toward certification, but German company Liliumnow finds itself wrestling with increasingly tight financial reserves that better funded rivals do not.

Lilium has always been something of an outlier in the AAM sector with its wing-incorporated rotors and vectored-thrust design that eschews the drone-like exposed blades of most air taxi developers. Its plans also seek to produce craft capable of flying beyond the relatively contained urban limits of rival makers to operate longer commercial routes, while also marketing its electric-powered jets to well-heeled private users.

But even in an AAM tech and transport activity that defines entirely new parameters for itself as it matures, Lilium’s unorthodox approach is creating difficulties that may complicate…