SAMAD aerospace hits e‑Starling milestone with first flight of 50 per cent scale demonstrator

SAMAD aero­space has con­duct­ed the first flight test of a half-scaled pro­to­type of its e‑Starling busi­ness air­craft, rep­re­sent­ing a key mile­stone as the com­pa­ny looks to com­mer­cialise the world’s first eVTOL hybrid mod­el.

The CTOL flight test, which took place last month, saw the air­craft take off at a length of 250 meters to show­case the e‑Starling’s poten­tial for short take-off and land­ing (STOL). Take-off and land­ing were smooth, and the vehi­cle main­tained a com­fort­able cruise at a speed of 90 mph for more than five min­utes.

Tests also includ­ed eval­u­a­tions on air­craft flight dynam­ics, per­for­mance and han­dling qual­i­ties.  As the e‑Starling adopts a semi blend­ed wing body (BWB) design, it requires a low angle for take-off so it is impor­tant to under­stand when the air­craft is capa­ble of tak­ing-off and at which speed. 

Com­ment­ing on the flight tests, Nor­man Wijk­er, SAMAD aero­space’s Chief Tech­ni­cal Offi­cer, said: “CTOL tri­als are an essen­tial step towards VTOL air­craft devel­op­ment. Tick­ing off the CTOL flight capa­bil­i­ty is a cru­cial step towards the val­i­da­tion of all flight modes.

“With CTOL tri­als com­plete, we will begin hov­er­ing tri­als and the flight tri­als will be con­clud­ed by tran­si­tion between hov­er­ing flight and aero­dy­nam­ic flight in both direc­tions”

Apart from slow and fast taxi­ing on the run­way as well as take-off and land­ing; the half scale demon­stra­tor also per­formed bank­ing manoeu­vres in addi­tion to tests on yaw, pitch and roll. The results show very sta­ble in terms of han­dling qual­i­ty.  

Among oth­er tests of sub­sys­tems were brake, teleme­try, redun­dan­cy links, and ensur­ing the cen­tre of grav­i­ty (CG) of the air­craft is at the cor­rect design place. The aircraft’s per­for­mance matched the pre­dict­ed cal­cu­la­tions made dur­ing pre­lim­i­nary and detailed design stages.

When asked why a CTOL test is need­ed for a VTOL air­craft, SAMAD Aero­space’s Air­craft Design Advis­er, Pro­fes­sor John Field­ing said the abil­i­ty to take off and land con­ven­tion­al­ly is an impor­tant part of the safe­ty jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for VTOL air­craft.

“Safe­ty is key. We have inves­ti­gat­ed var­i­ous safe­ty chal­lenges via CFD analy­sis and now through the flight tests using this 50 per cent scaled CTOL pro­to­type,” he said.

SAMAD aero­space has also said prepa­ra­tions are also under way to con­duct a flight of a half-scaled eVTOL ver­sion of the e‑Starling. The mod­el will be com­plet­ed next year.

Based on the Cran­field Tech­nol­o­gy Park in Bed­ford­shire, UK, the com­pa­ny has been devel­op­ing its manned and unmanned air­craft with two scaled pro­to­types — 10 per cent and 20 per cent — suc­cess­ful­ly built, flown, and show­cased in rep­utable inter­na­tion­al air shows such as Farn­bor­ough, Gene­va and Sin­ga­pore.

For more infor­ma­tion about the e‑Starling fam­i­ly of air­craft, vis­it https://www.samadaerospace.com/