Taiho Japan pre-orders SkyDrive SD-05 eVTOL

Sky­Drive today announced that Tai­ho engi­neer­ing com­pa­ny has pre-ordered its SD-05 for com­mer­cial use. Tai­ho is a mem­ber of the Pub­lic-Pri­vate Coun­cil for Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty in the Kagawa prefecture’s Shikoku region, new­ly estab­lished to address traf­fic con­ges­tion in urban areas and lim­it­ed acces­si­bil­i­ty to remote islands and moun­tain­ous regions.

The coun­cil serves as a plat­form for var­i­ous stake­hold­ers to share infor­ma­tion and exchange ideas on the deploy­ment of advanced air mobil­i­ty in Kagawa Pre­fec­ture. The Shikoku region where Tai­ho is head­quar­tered faces trans­porta­tion and region­al chal­lenges.

As a lead­ing infra­struc­ture provider, Tai­ho believes that the elec­tric com­pact SD-05 can be a solu­tion to these issues. Sky­Drive and Tai­ho will work with stake­hold­ers, flight oper­a­tors, ver­ti­ports and pow­er sup­ply infra­struc­ture providers to make this a real­i­ty.

Tai­ho sells and main­tains con­trol or mea­sure­ment equip­ment and per­forms elec­tri­cal, com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and civ­il engi­neer­ing works for cus­tomers in var­i­ous indus­tries, includ­ing elec­tric pow­er, chem­i­cals, oil refin­ing, nuclear pow­er gen­er­a­tion, and paper man­u­fac­tur­ing.

In recent years, the com­pa­ny has been active­ly invest­ing in new fields such as robot­ics, includ­ing the in-house devel­op­ment of auto­mat­ed dri­ving and mon­i­tor­ing robots for the live­stock indus­try. Tai­ho was found­ed in 1949 as an elec­tri­cal equip­ment whole­saler hav­ing pro­vid­ed elec­tri­cal or com­mu­ni­ca­tions equip­ment and civ­il engi­neer­ing works for infra­struc­ture sup­ply.

Its pri­ma­ry cus­tomer is Shikoku Elec­tric Pow­er Group with a sales net­work of 13 bases and an expand­ed busi­ness as a mea­sure­ment, con­trol, and analy­sis equip­ment sup­pli­er to var­i­ous cus­tomers, such as chem­i­cal plants, oil refiner­ies, nuclear pow­er plants, and paper mills.

The SD-05 is oper­at­ed by a dri­ver-pilot, with flight sta­bil­i­ty assis­tance from a com­put­er-con­trolled flight sys­tem, and is designed to trav­el up to 10 km at a max­i­mum cruise speed of 100 km/h. Sky­Drive is in the process of acquir­ing a type cer­tifi­cate for SD-05 from the Min­istry of Land, Infra­struc­ture, Trans­port and Tourism, as the first of its kind in Japan. Sky­Drive suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed its first flight test in Japan in 2019, with the SD-05 in the process of acquir­ing its Japan Civ­il Avi­a­tion Bureau cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.