Horizon Aircraft reaches flight test milestone with its sub-scale Cavorite X5 prototype

Hori­zon Air­craft has com­plet­ed more than 200 test flights using a sub-scale pro­to­type of its Cavorite X5 hybrid-elec­tric eVTOL air­craft.

The Cana­di­an com­pa­ny has designed, engi­neered and over­seen all test­ing of the air­craft, and recent­ly acquired by Astro Aero­space last month as it looks to posi­tion itself as a leader in the eVTOL mar­ket. Astro expects to com­plete the acqui­si­tion of Hori­zon in April.

Com­ment­ing on this lat­est achieve­ment, Bran­don Robin­son, co-founder and CEO of Hori­zon Air­craft, said: “Com­plet­ing more than 200 test flights is extreme­ly excit­ing for the entire teams at both Hori­zon and Astro. Soon, our merged com­pa­ny will have the cap­i­tal and resources to bring our exten­sive­ly test­ed Cavorite to-mar­ket, offer­ing urban cen­ters a reli­able, com­fort­able and high-effi­cien­cy eVTOL.”

The Cavorite X5 has a patent­ed fan-in wing design, which enables it to be the world’s first eVTOL that can fly the major­i­ty of its mis­sion exact­ly like a nor­mal air­craft. It will trav­el at speeds of up to 450km/h for a dis­tance of 500km, car­ry­ing up to five pas­sen­gers.

The pri­ma­ry objec­tive for the sub-scale eVTOL pro­to­type test flights is to ver­i­fy aero­dy­nam­ics, con­trol sys­tems and tran­si­tion flight. The Cavorite X5 fea­tures ful­ly autonomous self-learn­ing autopi­lot soft­ware and an array of spe­cial­ized 3D-print­ed lift­ing fans in the wings that pro­vide addi­tion­al thrust for ver­ti­cal take­off and land­ing. For ver­ti­cal flight, the wing sur­faces retract to open its duct­ed fans before clos­ing again, max­i­miz­ing the craft’s aero­dy­nam­ic effi­cien­cy.

Astro CEO Bruce Bent added: “The test­ing of the Cavorite X5’s sub-scale pro­to­type has exem­pli­fied to the glob­al eVTOL mar­ket that Horizon’s engi­neered design is the new stan­dard. “The soon-to-be com­plet­ed acqui­si­tion of Hori­zon is expect­ed to add tremen­dous val­ue to the com­bined enti­ty as we move towards the expect­ed com­mer­cial launch of the X5 into the grow­ing $46.7 Bil­lion eVTOL air­craft mar­ket.”

Robin­son spoke to eVTOL Insights about the com­pa­ny’s vision for the mar­ket as part of an in-depth inter­view. He also gave a sim­i­lar inter­view, where he spoke in more detail about the acqui­si­tion.