Astro Aerospace’s leadership team provide feedback since airing first flight video of its Cavorite X5 prototype

Those who attend­ed eVTOL Insights’ last vir­tu­al net­work­ing event at the end of Sep­tem­ber will have seen first time footage of Astro Aero­space’s Cavorite X5 pro­to­type fly­ing.

The air­craft is being devel­oped by Hori­zon Air­craft but fol­low­ing the com­pa­ny’s acqui­si­tion by Astro ear­li­er this year, it has since become a sub­sidiary and the Cavorite X5 has joined Astro’s prod­uct port­fo­lio to com­ple­ment its ALTA and ELROY mod­els.

This video is the cul­mi­na­tion of many hours of hard work from the com­pa­ny and eVTOL Insights spoke to Astro Aero­space Pres­i­dent Bran­don Robin­son, who is also Hori­zon Air­craft’s co-founder and CEO, and Jason O’Neill, who is Exec­u­tive VP at Astro and COO of Hori­zon air­craft, to get more insight into how they got to this mile­stone.

O’Neill said: “It’s an excit­ing jour­ney to devel­op a new air­craft. It is the first time for me, but our team has a his­to­ry of devel­op­ing clean sheet air­craft designs. This depth of expe­ri­ence has been piv­otal to our suc­cess.

“It’s excit­ing for them to take some­thing that was just a con­cept and bring it to life in the real world. See­ing this 17 per cent pro­to­type fly for the first time con­firmed a lot of ini­tial com­put­er analy­sis, and helped refine the full-scale design. We now have over 250 suc­cess­ful flight tests and will begin flight test­ing our larg­er 50 per cent scale pro­to­type in a few months.”

Robin­son added: “From a tech­ni­cal per­spec­tive, the goals of those ear­ly tests were to con­firm some con­trol log­ic, that our patent­ed fan-in-wing tech­nol­o­gy is viable, and of course test aero­dy­nam­ics such as ear­ly tran­si­tion to for­ward flight.”

The video post­ed on eVTOL Insights’ YouTube chan­nel intro­duces the indus­try to the Cavorite X5 which Hori­zon says is the first eVTOL which can fly like a con­ven­tion­al air­craft for 98 per cent of its mis­sion. It has a patent­ed fan-in-wing sys­tem and can car­ry four pas­sen­gers plus the pilot (five peo­ple total) a dis­tance of 500km trav­el­ling at speeds of up to 450km/h.

Robin­son con­tin­ued: “Most of the feed­back we’ve received is extreme­ly pos­i­tive. We’re hum­bled by those who admire the design and can’t wait to see the full-scale air­craft; to get in it and trav­el on a flight. So, whether it’s from the video or oth­er arti­cles that have been pub­lished, the sen­ti­ment is that final­ly there is a prac­ti­cal eVTOL design that makes sense.

“So instead of a fly­ing some quad-copter-type con­fig­u­ra­tion, at its core it is sim­ply a nor­mal aero­plane that also can take-off and land ver­ti­cal­ly, if you choose. And it uses today’s tech­nol­o­gy.”  

The team aren’t rest­ing on their lau­rels though, with the hard work con­tin­u­ing into 2022.

Robin­son added: “We want­ed to show peo­ple that it’s not just a bunch of fan­cy ren­der­ings. We’re putting machines togeth­er and fly­ing air­craft.

“We’re build­ing the next pro­to­type: a 50 per cent scale machine that will have a 20-foot wingspan and weigh about 500 pounds. It’ll be done in a few months.  The mechan­i­cal sys­tems, the struc­ture, and aero­dy­nam­ics are close­ly mod­elled on the full-scale air­craft. 

“We’re also receiv­ing recog­ni­tion from many estab­lished groups, such as the US Air Force’s AFWERX ini­tia­tive which select­ed us as one of eight final­ist com­pa­nies out of more than 200 to explore high speed VTOL con­cepts, some­thing for which our par­tic­u­lar con­cept is unique­ly suit­ed.

“The bot­tom line is that we have an excep­tion­al con­cept root­ed in safe­ty, ver­sa­til­i­ty and oper­at­ing in real-world envi­ron­ments. We’re excit­ed that the pro­to­type test­ing is prov­ing our unique tech­nol­o­gy is not only viable, but it will also be game chang­ing in the indus­try.”