Lilium GmbH is a German aerospace company which is the developer of the Lilium Jet, an electrically powered personal air vehicle capable of VTOL flight. History Lilium GmbH was founded in 2015 by four engineers and PhD students at the Technical University of Munich, Daniel Wiegand, Sebastian Born, Matthias Meiner and Patrick Nathen. The Lilium Eagle, an unmanned two-seat proof of concept model, performed its maiden flight at the airfield Mindelheim-Mattsies near Munich in Germany on 20 April 2017. The Lilium Jet five-seater prototype Phoenix first flew in May 2019. The prototype was powered by 36 electrically-powered jacketed-propellers mounted in movable flaps that can point down for vertical takeoff and gradually moved to a horizontal position to provide forward thrust. The five-seat Lilium Jet is capable of achieving a top speed of 300km/h and targets a range of 300 km In January 2020 Aerokurier published a report which stated that Lilium could not meet its stated aircraft performance goals and would only be able to fly for two minutes at a time. The anonymously-authored report was dismissed by the company but later backed up by four German aerospace academics who wrote that Lilium was "using brilliant PR to create an illusory world to attract investors." In February 2021, Forbes published an article citing a number of former employees that stated the development of Lilium's aircraft was "dogged by problems and that the flight test campaign made minimal progress
