AutoFlight completes one of the world’s longest eVTOL flights with its new Gen 4 aircraft

Aut­oFlight has achieved one of the world’s longest eVTOL flight in his­to­ry with a dis­tance of 250 km (155 miles) on a sin­gle charge of the aircraft’s lithi­um-ion bat­ter­ies.

The flight took place at AutoFlight’s eVTOL test­ing facil­i­ty on 23rd Feb­ru­ary and con­sist­ed of 20 cir­cuits on a pre­de­fined flight track, with the plane remote­ly pilot­ed from the ground by AutoFlight’s flight Test team.

The com­pa­ny said the long-range test flight is ‘a key mile­stone in the devel­op­ment of the Pros­per­i­ty I air­craft’, as it under­goes con­tin­ued test­ing towards the goal of air­wor­thi­ness cer­ti­fi­ca­tion in 2025 with EASA.

A sim­i­lar mile­stone was achieved by Joby Avi­a­tion in July 2021, when it cov­ered a total flight dis­tance of 154.6 statute mile at its elec­tric flight base in Big Sur, Cal­i­for­nia

Aut­oFlight pres­i­dent Omer Bar-Yohay com­ment­ed: “This flight is both a great cel­e­bra­to­ry mile­stone, and a tes­ta­ment to the team’s incred­i­ble effort and progress in test­ing and incre­men­tal­ly push­ing the air­craft’s per­for­mance enve­lope. It is a remark­able achieve­ment that shows its capa­bil­i­ty.”

While AutoFlight’s Gen4 air­craft is fit­ted with the lat­est in state-of-the-art avion­ics, the air­craft also ran third-par­ty avion­ics to record and ver­i­fy the dis­tance flown on Fore­Flight, an inde­pen­dent sys­tem wide­ly used in the avi­a­tion sec­tor.

The com­pa­ny said. This long-range test flight is “a key mile­stone in the devel­op­ment of the Pros­per­i­ty I air­craft,” as it under­goes con­tin­ued test­ing towards the goal of air­wor­thi­ness cer­ti­fi­ca­tion in 2025 with EASA.

The air­craft used is AutoFlight’s newest Gen­er­a­tion 4 mod­el, which was designed by ‘leg­endary’ design­er Frank Stephen­son whose port­fo­lio includes suc­cess­es from brands includ­ing Fer­rari, Maserati, McLaren, MINI and now Aut­oFlight.

AutoFlight’s Pros­per­i­ty air­craft uses rotors to lift the air­craft ver­ti­cal­ly for take­off, then tran­si­tions to hor­i­zon­tal flight on the wing like a tra­di­tion­al air­plane. The air­craft is capa­ble of speeds in excess of 200 km/h, over a range greater than 250 km.

Aut­oFlight claims to be one of only a few eVTOL OEM’s to have mas­tered the ‘tran­si­tion phase’ from ver­ti­cal to hor­i­zon­tal flight hun­dreds of times, clock­ing thou­sands of flight miles on mul­ti­ple iter­a­tions of their air­craft.