Richard Alexander joins Vertical Aerospace as Head of Flight Physics

Ver­ti­cal Aero­space has appoint­ed Richard Alexan­der as its new Head of Flight Physics, who will play a key role as the com­pa­ny pro­gress­es with the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of its VA-1X eVTOL air­craft.

Alexan­der has three decades of aero­space expe­ri­ence and is the for­mer Chief Flight Dynam­ics Inte­gra­tor on the Mit­subishi M100 Region­al Jet and Head of Flight Sci­ences at Bom­bardier Aero­space.

He has com­plet­ed the con­cep­tu­al design, devel­op­ment, test­ing, cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and entry into ser­vice of many air­craft designs, includ­ing the BAE 146-RJ, Bom­bardier CRJ700 and 900, Bom­bardier CSeries, and all the most recent ver­sions of the Bom­bardier Glob­al fam­i­ly.

Most recent­ly, Alexan­der has been lead­ing the air­craft con­fig­u­ra­tion devel­op­ment of the CAE projects to achieve zero car­bon emis­sions in their glob­al flight train­ing fleet.

Com­ment­ing on his new appoint­ment, he said: “Join­ing Ver­ti­cal Aero­space at such an excit­ing time in the devel­op­ment of the eVTOL mar­ket seg­ment will be a great chal­lenge for me and I am look­ing for­ward to meet­ing the team and start­ing to con­tribute.

“I am also moti­vat­ed by the zero-car­bon emis­sions aspect: our vehi­cles will replace pol­lut­ing, dinosaure-burn­ing modes of ground and flight trans­port. My recent elec­tric air­craft activ­i­ties at CAE have already ignit­ed an engi­neer­ing pas­sion to move the plan­et for­ward and devel­op­ment the green­est, most com­mer­cial­ly suc­cess­ful prod­uct in its class.”

In his new role at the Bris­tol-based firm, Alexan­der will ensure the flight physics aspect of the VA-1X — includ­ing noise, per­for­mance and han­dling — are safe and opti­mised for oper­a­tion.

Cur­rent­ly on course to start ini­tial com­mer­cial ser­vices in 2024, the VA-1X will be capa­ble of seat­ing a pilot and four pas­sen­gers and the com­pa­ny sets it is set to be the world’s first cer­ti­fied winged, all-elec­tric eVTOL air­craft. Build will begin short­ly, with man­u­fac­tur­ing tak­ing place in the UK.

It will have a cruise speed of 150 miles per hour and a range of 100 miles, mean­ing pas­sen­gers can trav­el from Brighton to Lon­don in approx­i­mate­ly 30 min­utes — as opposed to two hours when dri­ving.

Eric Sam­son, Head of Engi­neer­ing at Ver­ti­cal Aero­space, added: “Richard’s broad aero­space expe­ri­ence will con­tribute excep­tion­al tech­ni­cal and lead­er­ship capa­bil­i­ties to our grow­ing world-class engi­neer­ing team.

“He brings exten­sive expe­ri­ence earned by suc­cess­ful­ly lead­ing key air­craft per­for­mance across a wide range of very well-known devel­op­ment pro­gramme. Richard join­ing the team is a sig­nif­i­cant step for­ward in car­ry­ing our ambi­tions to cer­ti­fy the most tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced all-elec­tric eVTOL vehi­cles.”

Ver­ti­cal Aero­space is already a glob­al pio­neer in sus­tain­able avi­a­tion tech­nolo­gies and one of only a hand­ful of com­pa­nies to have flown and flight test­ed two full-scale all-elec­tric eVTOL pro­to­types with UK Civ­il Avi­a­tion Author­i­ty approval.

The com­pa­ny is con­tin­u­ing to build strate­gic part­ner­ships, with Hon­ey­well devel­op­ing the flight con­trol sys­tems for the VA-1X.