SkyDrive Conducts “Public Demonstration Flight” at Osaka-Kansai Expo 

Japan-based Sky­Drive announced that on Wednes­day (April 9th), its eVTOL Air­craft SD-05, suc­cess­ful­ly car­ried out a demon­stra­tion flight as part of a Media Day event lead­ing up to the six month long Osa­ka Expo (April 13th to Octo­ber 13th), reports a press release.

In ear­ly 2023, Sky­Drive was select­ed as one of the eVTOL oper­a­tors tak­ing part in this event, as part of Japan’s ‘Future Soci­ety Show­case Project.’ Since then, the com­pa­ny has been focussing on fly­ing at the Expo, as one of its most impor­tant devel­op­ment mile­stones.

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Ahead of sched­uled point-to-point and cir­cu­lar flights planned for the sum­mer at Osa­ka, the SD-05 took off for a demo flight above the event’s Ver­ti­port.

The air­craft flew at an alti­tude of approx­i­mate­ly 5 metres for a total flight time of approx­i­mate­ly 4 min­utes. To ensure safe flight oper­a­tions, the air­craft, which incor­po­rates auto­mat­ic con­trol sys­tems, was pilot­ed remote­ly with­out a pilot on board.

Along­side today’s pub­lic flight, the com­pa­ny has also released footage of recent test flights con­duct­ed at its in-house devel­op­ment facil­i­ty in Toy­ota City.

The air­craft fea­tured in this footage is the first Sky­Drive SD-05 pro­to­type. The air­craft that flew above the Expo Ver­ti­port is anoth­er air­craft built with a sim­i­lar pre­de­ces­sor design.

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Tomo­hi­ro Fukuza­wa, CEO of Sky­Drive, com­ment­ed, “I am tru­ly delight­ed to unveil our eVTOL air­craft at the EXPO Ver­ti­port. I would like to express my deep­est grat­i­tude to all our part­ners and stake­hold­ers who have been sup­port­ing and col­lab­o­rat­ing with us in var­i­ous ways. Also to our Sky­Drive team who have faced numer­ous chal­lenges, yet have con­tin­ued to push our devel­op­ment for­ward every sin­gle day.”

He added, “At the Expo, which is about to begin, we hope atten­dees will dis­cov­er how, in future, peo­ple will fly through the skies in eVTOLs as a reg­u­lar part of city life.”

For more infor­ma­tion

https://en.skydrive202.com/

(Top image: SkyDrive/Kyodo News)

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