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INTERVIEW: Brandon Robinson of Horizon Aircraft provides fresh update on company’s continued progress

It’s been anoth­er year of steady progress for the team at Hori­zon Air­craft. While news show­cas­ing the momen­tum being made in the eVTOL air­craft and Urban Air Mobil­i­ty mar­kets has been con­stant, the Cana­di­an start-up has been hard at work in the back­ground.

It has suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed Phase 1 of AFWERX HSVTOL and is now ramp­ing up its efforts for Phase 2, while also com­plet­ing the assem­bly of a 50% pro­to­type mod­el of its Cavorite X5 air­craft and embark­ing on a Series A Financ­ing Round.

eVTOL Insights spoke to Hori­zon Air­craft CEO, Bran­don Robin­son, who pro­vid­ed an update on all of these achieve­ments and what they mean for the com­pa­ny’s roadmap.

It’s great to hear Hori­zon Air­craft has suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed AFWERX HSVTOL Phase 1. How was the over­all expe­ri­ence for you and can you tell us more about the key suc­cess­es and learn­ings you picked up along the way?

Bran­don Robin­son: “The AFWERX HSVTOL expe­ri­ence was excel­lent. Sim­ply put, this was an exam­ple of a pub­lic pro­gram effi­cient­ly accom­plish­ing its goals to strength­en US mil­i­tary capa­bil­i­ty while sup­port­ing domes­tic inno­va­tion.

“Through­out the process, we were con­nect­ed with indus­try lead­ing minds from AFRL, NASA, JPL and oth­er lead­ing insti­tu­tions that helped us refine our design. Over­all, we were able to accel­er­ate the devel­op­ment of our 50 per cent-scale pro­to­type, received excel­lent feed­back on many crit­i­cal design ele­ments, and are well ahead of where we would be with­out such sup­port. We are real­ly look­ing for­ward to the start of the HSVTOL Phase 2!”

Plans are now in place for a Phase 2 effort. Can you tell us what this will entail and how it will fol­low on from Phase 1?

“HSVTOL Phase 2 will involve a fur­ther com­pet­i­tive process. There has not been much infor­ma­tion pro­mul­gat­ed as of yet, but as we under­stand it there will be a full RFP process with sub­mis­sions from the Phase 1 com­pa­nies.

“Phase 2 will look for teams to demon­strate over a nine-month peri­od that they can fur­ther reduce risk that a full scale pro­to­type will work as adver­tised. After Phase 2, Phase 3 of the HSVTOL chal­lenge will over­see the con­struc­tion of a full-scale pro­to­type over a 30-month peri­od. Our Phase 2 effort will focus on prov­ing our key tech­nol­o­gy that was ful­ly test­ed at the 50%-scale will work prop­er­ly as we scale up.  

It’s also great to see devel­op­ments of Horizon’s 50%-scale pro­to­type and hear that it is now ful­ly assem­bled. Can you tell us more about the test­ing roadmap and what the next few months will involve? 

“We will begin basic hov­er test­ing in the next cou­ple of weeks. We’re going to take our time with that, begin­ning in ide­al con­di­tions and then push­ing the enve­lope with adverse wind con­di­tions (gusts, off-axis, etc.). Once we’re hap­py with hov­er we will move on to nor­mal air­craft flight test­ing, so take­offs and land­ings from a pre­pared run­way. One advan­tage of our Cavorite con­cept is that it can do exact­ly that – fly around in a con­fig­u­ra­tion just like a nor­mal (canard) air­craft.

“Final­ly, we will move on to tran­si­tion test­ing from ver­ti­cal to for­ward flight. Dur­ing this phase we will begin by explor­ing var­i­ous for­ward speeds with the wings open. Once we reach our tar­get­ed for­ward tran­si­tion speed, we will sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly inves­ti­gate wing pan­el clos­ing.

Then the reverse will hap­pen when we explore tran­si­tion from nor­mal air­craft mode to ver­ti­cal mode.“Finally, we will move on to tran­si­tion test­ing from ver­ti­cal to for­ward flight. Dur­ing this phase we will begin by explor­ing var­i­ous for­ward speeds with the wings open. Once we reach our tar­get­ed for­ward tran­si­tion speed, we will sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly inves­ti­gate wing pan­el clos­ing. Then the reverse will hap­pen when we explore tran­si­tion from nor­mal air­craft mode to ver­ti­cal mode.

“So, in sum­ma­ry, hov­er test­ing first, fol­lowed by nor­mal air­craft oper­a­tions. Tran­si­tion test­ing will then weld those two pre­vi­ous flight test regimes togeth­er!”

The momen­tum con­tin­ues with Hori­zon and the begin­ning of an excit­ing Series A Fund­ing Round. Can you tell us more about this and how this will help your efforts going for­ward?

“As you may know, we recent­ly sep­a­rat­ed from Astro Aero­space and are a new­ly-mint­ed pri­vate cor­po­ra­tion. As such, investors who want­ed to sup­port Hori­zon Air­craft and our inno­v­a­tive Cavorite con­cept can do so with­out dilut­ing their cap­i­tal in the larg­er Astro pub­lic cor­po­ra­tion. Astro con­tin­ues to be a strate­gic part­ner and will retain a small own­er­ship frac­tion of the re-pri­va­tised Hori­zon Air­craft.

“In order to con­tin­ue our for­ward progress we are now putting togeth­er a Series A round with a num­ber of inter­est­ed par­ties. Some of these poten­tial investors have been watch­ing us for a while and with the USAF AFWERX val­i­da­tion fol­lowed by com­ple­tion of our 50%-scale air­craft, they are excit­ed to become part of this suc­cess sto­ry with a team that is mak­ing excep­tion­al progress on a prac­ti­cal design.”

Is there any­thing else that you’d like to say that you haven’t already men­tioned, and you feel it would be worth adding to the arti­cle?

“One inter­est­ing thing that has been iden­ti­fied through AFWERX and some pri­vate logis­tics com­pa­nies is an inter­est in our 50%-scale air­craft. Essen­tial­ly it is a large drone that we cal­cu­late could com­fort­ably car­ry 100 lbs of use­ful load.

“We have iden­ti­fied a suit­able hybrid pow­er sys­tem for it as well, which would back some very sig­nif­i­cant range and speed num­bers, able to trav­el 250 km/hr+ and trav­el over 1,000 km. And it has its own built-in launch and recov­ery sys­tem! Many larg­er drones like this must oper­ate from run­ways while ours is much more flex­i­ble.

“We had pre­vi­ous­ly viewed our 50%-scale air­craft only as a step­ping stone test plat­form to inform a full-scale design. But this could rep­re­sent an ear­ly and unex­pect­ed rev­enue stream for the com­pa­ny.”

“In any case, we are excit­ed to con­tin­ue on our cur­rent devel­op­men­tal tra­jec­to­ry, putting engi­neer­ing first and devel­op­ing a prac­ti­cal VTOL that is built for the real world.”

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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.

eVTOL Insights is part of the Industry Insights Group. Registered in the UK. Company No: 14395769