US Air Force leaders watch LIFT Aircraft’s HEXA eVTOL take flight in first Agility Prime demo

The top three lead­ers from the US Air Force watched an eVTOL air­craft in flight on Fri­day, when LIFT Air­craft CEO and Founder Matt Chasen gave a demon­stra­tion of the com­pa­ny’s sin­gle-seat ultra­light, HEXA.

As report­ed by the Ver­ti­cal Flight Soci­ety’s Elec­tric VTOL News, the four-minute flight took place at Camp Mabry in Austin, Texas and includ­ed hov­ers, turns and for­ward flights — with the air­craft remain­ing 40ft (12 metres) off the ground.

The event coin­cid­ed with a vis­it to the Air Force’s Inno­va­tion Hub, AFWERX in Austin, Texas, by Sec­re­tary of the Air Force Bar­bara Bar­rett, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr., and Chief Mas­ter Sgt. of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass.

The vis­it was host­ed by its direc­tor, Col. Nathan Diller, who also leads the Air Force’s Agili­ty Prime ini­tia­tive. An offi­cial vir­tu­al launch to help sup­port the rapid com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion of the eVTOL indus­try in the USA took place in April 2020.

Speak­ing at the time, Bar­rett said: “Agili­ty Prime is a pro­gramme with a vision of world impact. The thought of an elec­tric ver­ti­cal take-off and land­ing vehi­cle — a fly­ing car — might seem straight out of a Hol­ly­wood movie, but by part­ner­ing today with stake­hold­ers across indus­tries and agen­cies, we can set up the Unit­ed States for this aero­space phe­nom­e­non.”

LIFT Air­craft’s HEXA air­craft resem­bles a large drone with 18 sets of pro­pellers, motors and bat­ter­ies. It has one seat for the pilot and weighs 432 lbs — which qual­i­fies it as a Pow­ered Ultra­light by the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion (FAA), so no pilot’s license is required to fly.

As report­ed by Elec­tric VTOL News, more than 15,000 peo­ple have reg­is­tered to fly the air­craft, but the start date has been pushed back because of the ongo­ing Covid-19 pan­dem­ic. Three pro­to­types are cur­rent­ly fly­ing, with based two in the USA and a third near Budapest, Hun­gary, where LIFT has a research facil­i­ty.

LIFT Air­craft is also one of the first of its size to join Agili­ty Prime’s ‘Air Race to Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion’, and has also secured a Small Busi­ness Inno­va­tion Research (SBIR) con­tract.

Diller said: “We now have over fif­teen of the lead­ing air­craft man­u­fac­tur­ers in the world apply­ing to part­ner with Agili­ty Prime, with many of them already on con­tract. This flight marks the first of many demon­stra­tions and near term flight tests designed to reduce the tech­ni­cal risk and pre­pare for Agili­ty Prime field­ing in 2023.”

The US Air Force is also look­ing into oppor­tu­ni­ties for larg­er air­craft too, and ear­li­er this year it announced that Beta Tech­nolo­gies and Joby Avi­a­tion had pro­gressed to Phase III of the Ini­tial Capa­bil­i­ties Open­ing. 

Accord­ing to the ICO, a suc­cess­ful Phase III can result in, ‘fur­ther pro­to­typ­ing, resource shar­ing, test­ing, pro­duc­tion, and field­ing as a launch cus­tomer.’