ZURI shares latest video which shows company’s highest and longest test flight of its hybrid-electric VTOL prototype

ZURI has shared a video from the lat­est flight test of its 11-metre tech­nol­o­gy demon­stra­tor, which is the high­est and longest record­ed so far by the Czech Repub­lic start­up as it con­tin­ues to make strides towards devel­op­ing its hybrid-elec­tric VTOL air­craft.

This lat­est flight test took place last month at an air­port in Zbraslav­ice, about 50 miles south east of Prague, and the video starts by show­ing the ZURI team care­ful­ly pack­ing up the air­craft pro­to­type and mak­ing the jour­ney to the test site.

Talk­ing in the video en route to the air­port him­self, Michal Illich, ZURI’s CEO and founder, said: “We have been work­ing on the ZURI 11-metre tech­nol­o­gy demon­stra­tor for the last four years. The devel­op­ment, man­u­fac­tur­ing and flight test of a large-scale demon­stra­tor with an 11-metre wingspan sig­nif­i­cant dis­tin­guish­es ZURI from oth­er VTOL star­tups.

Speak­ing about the com­pa­ny’s objec­tives, Illich added: “We want to col­lect as much flight data as pos­si­ble, which will be used for for the devel­op­ment of the next-gen demon­stra­tor, ZURI 2.0 with tilt rotors.”

Marek Jalu­v­ka, devel­op­er at ZURI, said: Com­pared to pre­vi­ous tests, the air­craft was lighter this time. We also mod­i­fied the land­ing gear and made changes to the flight con­trol sys­tem — updat­ing the feed­back loops to improve han­dling in the roll axis.

“The data we col­lect­ed indi­cates that this was a step in the right direc­tion. The plane han­dled much bet­ter, enabling us to reach new heights and achieve the longest flight time to date. The land­ings, sig­nif­i­cant­ly soft­er com­pared to the past, were also a notable achieve­ment.”

ZURI’s goal is to change the way peo­ple expe­ri­ence on-demand, door-to-door mid-range flights. It is work­ing to devel­op a hybrid-elec­tric five-seater VTOL air­craft, with a range of 700km and which can trav­el at cruise speeds between 300 and 350km/h. For land­ing, the air­craft can do so in an area mea­sur­ing 26mx26m.

Illich said: “When I found­ed ZURI in 2017, as with my oth­er tech­nol­o­gy star­tups, I set an ambi­tious goal. The air­craft will not require recharg­ing infra­struc­ture on every land­ing spot and thanks to sus­tain­able avi­a­tion fuel, we will have low­er emis­sions than pure bat­tery-pow­ered planes. We are proud to say we have made sig­nif­i­cant progress towards this goal.”

ZURI is con­tin­u­ing to look for sig­nif­i­cant investors who can help accel­er­ate its progress. For more infor­ma­tion or to get in touch, vis­it www.zuri.com