The dream was an electric jet that would whisk you between cities in near silence, lifting off vertically from a rooftop and cruising on stubby wings packed with tiny fans. Lilium, the Munich start-up that raised well over a billion dollars chasing that dream, collapsed into insolvency in 2024. Now its two flying prototypes have found a final resting place — not a scrapyard, but a museum.

The Phoenix 2 and Phoenix 3 technology demonstrators, the uncrewed jets that proved Lilium’s radical ducted-fan design could actually fly, have been acquired by the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin and the Luftfahrtmuseum Wernigerode in Saxony-Anhalt. Phoenix 2 alone had logged close to 200 flight hours before the money ran out.

A jet like no other

Most air-taxi start-ups settled on a handful of large, open rotors. Lilium went the other way, burying dozens of small electric ducted fans inside the wings and forward canards. In hover they pointed down; as the aircraft gathered speed, they tilted forward until the little jet was flying on its wings like a conventional aeroplane. It was elegant, unusual, and fiendishly hard to prove.

Yet prove it they did. In 2022 the Phoenix 2 became, in Lilium’s telling, the first full-size electric jet to complete the full transition from vertical hover to wing-borne flight, later pushing past 250 km/h at a test range in southern Spain.

A billion dollars, then nothing

Money, not physics, killed Lilium. After years of burning cash the company ran short of funds in 2024, and when the German government declined to backstop a rescue loan, insolvency followed. No buyer was found for the assets, and the Phoenix prototypes — the very machines that had validated the design — were slated for the scrapheap.

It was a bleak coda to one of Europe’s most ambitious clean-aviation bets, and part of a wider reckoning that has seen billions poured into electric air taxis with, so far, precious little to show for it.

Saved by a crowdfunder

What the boardroom could not manage, enthusiasts did. A grassroots crowdfunding campaign raised roughly €10,000 to rescue the Phoenix demonstrators before they were cut up, and the two aircraft were handed to the museums, where they are now being reassembled for display.

The Lilium Jet will never carry a paying passenger. But behind glass in Berlin and Wernigerode, it will at least be remembered for what it was: one of the boldest and most beautiful gambles European aviation ever made.

Sources: FlightGlobal; Aviation Week; New Atlas; Lilium; electrive.