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Astro Aerospace announces acquisition of Horizon Aircraft and looks to propel itself in the eVTOL market

Astro Aero­space has entered into a bind­ing agree­ment to acquire Hori­zon Air­craft — the Cana­di­an com­pa­ny which is cur­rent­ly devel­op­ing its Cavorite X5 eVTOL.

The trans­ac­tion is expect­ed to close on or before the start of Q2 2021 pend­ing cus­tom­ary clos­ing con­di­tions. In a press release, Astro has said the acqui­si­tion ‘will only push the com­pa­ny fur­ther, with the abil­i­ty to reach greater heights work­ing in tan­dem with Horizon’s excep­tion­al team’.

Astro CEO Bruce Bent, said: “The acqui­si­tion of Hori­zon will allow the visions of both Hori­zon and Astro to align, cre­at­ing a pow­er­ful force in the eVTOL mar­ket. Astro share­hold­ers can soon antic­i­pate expo­nen­tial growth as we enter this next chap­ter as an even greater play­er in the aero­space indus­try.”

In 2018, Astro was at the time one of the first elec­tric air­craft devel­op­ers to suc­cess­ful­ly fly a pilot­ed eVTOL air­craft, which was named ‘Elroy’. In the same year it bought Pas­sen­ger­Drone, which was the brain­child of Boy­an Zhelev and Ivay­lo Nikolov and con­duct­ed its first manned flight in Sep­tem­ber 2017 in Bul­gar­ia.

Accord­ing to an eVTOL.news arti­cle by Ken Swartz, which goes into detail about the ori­gins and progress of the Pas­sen­ger­Drone, Astro con­duct­ed three unmanned flight tests in Sep­tem­ber 2018 at Markham Air­port, north­east of Toron­to in Cana­da. Dur­ing a four-and-a-half minute flight, Elroy reached heights of more than 60 ft and speeds of over 30mph (50 km/h) while fly­ing a fig­ure eight pat­tern.

Hori­zon Air­craft is led by CEO Bran­don Robin­son — a retired CF-18 fight­er pilot — and his father Bri­an, who built his first air­craft at the age of 14. The Cavorite X5 has been designed to have reduced hydro­car­bon emis­sions, and is built for oper­a­tional cas­es includ­ing bad weath­er, traf­fic avoid­ance, and low-time pilots. Its patent­ed fan-in-wing patent enables it to become be the world’s first eVTOL that can fly the major­i­ty of its mis­sion exact­ly like a nor­mal air­craft.

Bran­don spoke to eVTOL Insights last month as part of an in-depth inter­view, which talked about how Hori­zon’s jour­ney began and its vision for the mar­ket — going into detail about its Cavorite X5.

Speak­ing about this lat­est announce­ment, he said: “My father and I have long admired the unprece­dent­ed advances Astro has achieved in the aero­space sec­tor. Astro is a pio­neer in the indus­try, and its work has remained incred­i­bly rel­e­vant amongst the rise of eVTOL pop­u­lar­i­ty.

“Hori­zon could not be hap­pi­er to join forces with such an influ­en­tial com­pa­ny who will con­tribute its high-cal­i­bre exper­tise to bring our design to mar­ket.”

“Astro’s depth of expe­ri­ence and his­to­ry will pro­vide the foun­da­tion for future growth with the addi­tion of the Cavorite X5. As you know, we will have a func­tion­al pro­to­type very short­ly and now we will give investors the oppor­tu­ni­ty to par­take in this incred­i­ble growth sto­ry.

He added: “We will add our exten­sive aero­space engi­neer­ing team in order to dra­mat­i­cal­ly accel­er­ate the devel­op­ment pro­grams of Astro Aero­space, among which the Cavorite X5 will be cen­tral.”

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Jason Pritchard

Jason Pritchard is the Editor of eVTOL Insights. He holds a BA from Leicester's De Montfort University and has worked in Journalism and Public Relations for more than a decade. Outside of work, Jason enjoys playing and watching football and golf. He also has a keen interest in Ancient Egypt.

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