CycloTech receives Austrian operational authorisation for outdoor flights

Fol­low­ing EASA reg­u­la­tions, CycloTech has received per­mis­sion from Austria’s Aus­tro Con­trol nation­al avi­a­tion safe­ty author­i­ty to per­form out­door flights with its 85kg demon­stra­tor start­ing March 2023.

The com­pa­ny claimed this as anoth­er land­mark for its nascent CycloRo­tor tech­nol­o­gy after the demonstrator’s first flights were accom­plished in August 2021 indoor in the com­pa­ny ́s flight test hall.

CycloTech will now start an out­door flight cam­paign at a gen­er­al avi­a­tion air­port in Upper Aus­tria fos­ter­ing its role as the world ́s lead­ing devel­op­er of the cyclo­gy­ro tech­nol­o­gy.

“The Oper­a­tional Autho­ri­sa­tion for the out­door flight test cam­paign is a major mile­stone and will be key to demon­strat­ing CycloRo­tor tech­nol­o­gy to the avi­a­tion world,” said Deva Har­sha Yarramshet­ti, Flight Test Engi­neer at CycloTech who filed the appli­ca­tion for oper­a­tional approval in Octo­ber 2022.

In the process, CycloTech gave evi­dence of its capa­bil­i­ty as emerg­ing avi­a­tion propul­sion sys­tem com­pa­ny, such as Spe­cif­ic Oper­a­tion Risk Assess­ment (SORA) accord­ing to UAS Reg­u­la­tion (EU) 2019/947 and Con­cept of Oper­a­tions (ConOps) accord­ing to UAS Reg­u­la­tion (EU) 2019/947), includ­ing sys­tem design descrip­tions, con­fig­u­ra­tion man­age­ment, main­te­nance, train­ings, oper­a­tions, safe­ty, risk man­age­ment pro­ce­dures and emer­gency response plans.

Aus­tro Con­trol award­ed UAS oper­a­tional autho­riza­tion for the ‘spe­cif­ic’ cat­e­go­ry and there­fore CycloTech is now qual­i­fied to oper­ate its demon­stra­tor as unmanned aer­i­al vehi­cle in visu­al line of sight (VLOS) under the respec­tive reg­u­la­tions and pro­ceed­ings in a con­trolled test area of 2,500 square metres and a secured envi­ron­ment of 100,000 square metres.

The out­door test area offers now the right set­up to speed up the devel­op­ment process, short­en time to mar­ket and show the unique capa­bil­i­ties of the CycloRo­tor.

“CycloTech and CycloRo­tors have now suc­cess­ful­ly entered the reg­u­lat­ed world con­trolled by avi­a­tion safe­ty agen­cies” said Markus Steinke, Chief Devel­op­ment Offi­cer at CycloTech.

As a result, the com­pa­ny is con­tin­u­ing to grow and plan­ning to dou­ble the num­ber of employ­ees by the end of 2023 to more than 60 peo­ple.

In April 2022 CycloTech and Yam­a­to Hold­ings suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed a joint fea­si­bil­i­ty study on apply­ing the new CycloRo­tors thrust vec­tor­ing propul­sion tech­nol­o­gy to cre­ate a mid-class car­go eVTOL air­craft capa­ble of pre­ci­sion land­ing in con­fined areas.

CycloTech and Yam­a­to reveal inno­v­a­tive car­go eVTOL con­cept with CycloRo­tors and com­plete fea­si­bil­i­ty study