Vertical Aerospace: New VX‑4 Prototype “Completes First Tethered Piloted Flight”

UK-based Ver­ti­cal Aero­space, has announced the first and suc­cess­ful teth­ered pilot­ed flight of its new VX‑4 pro­to­type eVTOL Air­craft, reports a press release.

As the craft begins the “wheels up” phase of test­ing, the VX‑4 “per­formed a pilot­ed take-off while loose­ly teth­ered to the ground, dur­ing which Ver­ti­cal mea­sured over 20,000 flight and sys­tem para­me­ters to ver­i­fy thrust, han­dling qual­i­ties and sys­tem per­for­mance,” explains the release. 

The tri­al took place last week (Thurs­day, July 25th) from 5.45pm (BST) after the UK Civ­il Avi­a­tion Author­i­ty (CAA) had issued the com­pa­ny with a Per­mit to Fly after eval­u­at­ing the engi­neer­ing, design and test data of the VX‑4, effec­tive­ly con­duct­ing a “mini cer­ti­fi­ca­tion” pro­gram.  

Fol­low­ing these ini­tial teth­ered flights, and once per­mis­sion has been received from the CAA to expand the flight enve­lope, the VX‑4 will enter the next phase of test­ing begin­ning with fur­ther thrust-borne tri­als. This will see the VX4 take-off and land ver­ti­cal­ly and con­duct low speed flight manoeu­vres with lift gen­er­at­ed by the pro­pellers, but only once the CAA’s approval has been grant­ed.  

Stu­art Simp­son, CEO of Ver­ti­cal Aero­space, com­ment­ed, “This first teth­ered flight of our new pro­to­type is the result of 14 months of hard work, tak­ing this eVTOL all the way from design, through to devel­op­ment, and now into the air.” 

He con­tin­ued, “Every­one at Ver­ti­cal Aero­space remains laser focused on achiev­ing pilot­ed tran­si­tion as we con­tin­ue to progress towards our ulti­mate goal of com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion and cre­at­ing a new lega­cy for avi­a­tion.”  

Mean­while, all eyes are on Vertical’s Chief Test Pilot, Justin Paines, who holds an impres­sive pedi­gree. 

Please Watch Video

Please Lis­ten to Pod­cast

https://aerospace.honeywell.com/us/en/about-us/podcasts/the-pilots-view-vertical-aerospace-justin-paines

Mean­while, the VX4 has suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed exten­sive ground test­ing, includ­ing pow­ered propul­sion tri­als of its advanced pow­er­train, which fea­tures pro­pri­etary bat­tery packs capa­ble of deliv­er­ing 1.4 MW of peak pow­er, designed and built at the state-of-the-art Ver­ti­cal Ener­gy Cen­tre. 

For more infor­ma­tion

https://vertical-aerospace.com/

(Top image: Ver­ti­cal Aero­space)

For the lat­est news, insights and con­tent regard­ing the glob­al Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty mar­ket, please join the fol­low­ing eVTOL Insights chan­nels: What­sApp, Face­book, Insta­gram, Spo­ti­fy, Apple Pod­casts, YouTube, X and LinkedIn.