Lilium's return to flight testing and the week that could restart Europe's eVTOL race

Lilium, the German eVTOL company that filed for insolvency in late 2024, is scheduled to resume powered flight testing of its seven-seat jet at its Oberpfaffenhofen facility near Munich. The reconstituted company, acquired out of bankruptcy by a European investor consortium in early 2025, returns to flight with one of the most technically differentiated designs in electric aviation — and a regulatory head start that could reshape the competitive landscape.

How Did Lilium Come Back From Bankruptcy?

Lilium’s insolvency was never a technical failure. The company burned through roughly $1.5 billion in funding, went public via a SPAC merger in 2021, and watched its stock collapse alongside the broader eVTOL sector. By fall 2024, bridge financing fell through. Germany’s federal government and Bavaria both declined to provide loan guarantees, and the company filed for insolvency in October 2024.

In early 2025, a consortium led by European mobility investors acquired the company’s assets at auction: intellectual property, production tooling, and — critically — its existing certification basis with the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). That regulatory foundation is the piece most observers underestimate.

Why Does the EASA Certification Basis Matter So Much?

eVTOL aircraft don’t fit neatly into existing certification categories. They’re not helicopters and they’re not airplanes. Both EASA and the FAA have been developing special conditions specifically for these vehicles.

Lilium spent years working with EASA to define those special conditions — a process representing thousands of engineering hours and hundreds of regulatory meetings. That work isn’t something a new entrant can recreate quickly. The new owners didn’t just buy an aircraft. They bought a regulatory head start that would take competitors years to replicate.

EASA published its Special Condition for VTOL aircraft (SC-VTOL) back in 2019, putting the European agency ahead of the FAA, which is still working through its powered-lift rulemaking.

What Makes Lilium’s Design Different?

Most eVTOL designs use large open rotors or propellers for lift, which creates significant drag in cruise flight. Lilium took a fundamentally different approach: 36 small electric ducted fans embedded in the trailing edges of the wing and canard surfaces. The fans tilt via flap deflection to transition between vertical lift and wing-borne cruise flight — no separate lift-and-cruise systems, no complex tilt-rotor mechanisms.

In cruise, the flaps retract and the fans sit mostly enclosed within the wing. The aircraft flies on its wing like a conventional airplane. Lilium has claimed cruise speeds of approximately 300 km/h (162 knots), significantly faster than the roughly 100-knot cruise speeds most multirotor eVTOL designs target.

That speed difference transforms the business case. A 100-knot air taxi serves metro routes of 30–50 miles. A 160-knot aircraft opens up regional routes of 100 miles or more — Munich to Stuttgart, Los Angeles to San Diego, New York to Philadelphia. The addressable market grows substantially.

Their fifth-generation demonstrator, the Phoenix 2, previously completed full transition flights: vertical takeoff, cruise, and vertical landing. The aerodynamics are proven.

What Are the Engineering Challenges?

The ducted-fan architecture brings real complexity. Each of the 36 fans requires its own electric motor, power electronics, and monitoring system. The flight control system must manage 36 independent thrust sources in real time. Redundancy is excellent — multiple fan failures are survivable — but every connector, cooling line, and software interface is a potential failure point that must be analyzed for certification.

The battery challenge looms over the entire program. Lilium’s seven-seat configuration with its target range and speed pushes the boundaries of current lithium-ion energy density. The company has been working with Customcells, a German battery manufacturer, on aviation-grade cells, but the gap between laboratory energy density and certified, crash-survivable production battery packs remains one of the hardest problems in electric aviation.

Where Does Lilium Stand Against Competitors?

The eVTOL competitive landscape as of April 2025:

Joby Aviation is furthest along in the U.S., deep into FAA type certification with a five-seat tilt-rotor design
Archer Aviation is pushing its Midnight aircraft through certification
Volocopter has been struggling with funding challenges in Europe
Lilium, if flight tests resume on schedule, re-enters as the most technically differentiated design in the field

A European company resuming flight tests under an established EASA certification basis is significant for the global competitive picture, particularly as the FAA continues working through its own powered-lift regulatory framework.

What Should You Watch For?

Three signals will indicate how this restart is going:

Whether flight testing happens on schedule. A delay wouldn’t be fatal, but it would signal the technical restart is harder than expected.
Certification timeline statements. Previous Lilium management projected type certification by 2028. Whether the new team holds or resets that target reveals how realistic they’re being.
EASA’s response. A public statement affirming continuation of the certification program under new ownership would be a strong positive signal.

The new ownership group has reportedly secured funding to continue flight testing through late 2026 and into the EASA certification campaign, though eVTOL timelines have a well-documented history of slipping.

Why This Matters Beyond eVTOL

There’s a workforce dimension that deserves attention. When Lilium went insolvent, the company had roughly 1,000 employees. Many engineers scattered to other aerospace firms, taking institutional knowledge with them. Intellectual property and tooling can be purchased. The engineer who remembers why a specific design decision was made three years ago is much harder to recover.

More broadly, the certification standards being developed for eVTOL — special conditions for fly-by-wire, distributed electric propulsion, autonomous flight controls — will eventually flow into the wider aviation ecosystem. The technology managing 36 electric motors in real time is closely related to what could one day enable full-authority fly-by-wire with envelope protection in general aviation aircraft. The batteries built for air taxis are the same technology going into electric trainers from companies like Beta Technologies and Pipistrel.

This restart also arrives against a backdrop of elevated global jet fuel prices. High fuel costs don’t directly accelerate electric aircraft timelines, but they strengthen the long-term narrative for alternative propulsion with every crude oil spike.

Key Takeaways

Lilium’s return to flight testing marks one of the most significant corporate resurrections in recent aerospace history, powered by new investors who acquired not just hardware but a years-long EASA regulatory foundation.
The 36-ducted-fan design offers roughly 60% higher cruise speed than most eVTOL competitors, opening regional routes that fundamentally change the business case.
EASA’s SC-VTOL framework gives European eVTOL programs a regulatory advantage over U.S. competitors still waiting on FAA powered-lift rulemaking.
Certification remains the hardest challenge — the process is iterative, unpredictable, and the battery technology gap between lab and production is still significant.
Watch for on-schedule flight tests, updated certification timelines, and official EASA statements as the clearest indicators of whether this restart has real momentum.