VerdeGo Aero Ships First VH-4T Hybrid Powerplant to Customer

VerdeGo Aero is now ship­ping its VH-4T-RD hybrid-elec­tric pow­er­plant to cus­tomers, mark­ing the tran­si­tion from inter­nal research and devel­op­ment to active cus­tomer deploy­ment for pre-cer­ti­fi­ca­tion appli­ca­tions.

Ini­tial deliv­er­ies of the VH-4T, deliv­ered on-bud­get and on-sched­ule, demon­strate repeat­able man­u­fac­tur­ing capa­bil­i­ty and readi­ness to sup­port OEM inte­gra­tion and test­ing. This rev­o­lu­tion­ary pow­er­plant enables high-per­for­mance elec­tri­fied air­craft and drones to have sig­nif­i­cant mis­sion capa­bil­i­ties for mil­i­tary and com­mer­cial mar­kets.

The VH-4T enables rev­o­lu­tion­ary gains in per­for­mance and effi­cien­cy in a wide vari­ety of use cas­es.

• Con­vert­ing a bat­tery-elec­tric 4–6 seat VTOL air­craft to a VH-4T hybrid typ­i­cal­ly improves range by
  10X, rais­es cruise speed, and adds hun­dreds of pounds of pay­load by opti­miz­ing around hybrids
  vs bat­ter­ies
• For winged VTOL aircraft/drones lever­ag­ing dis­trib­uted elec­tric propul­sion (DEP), the VH-4T
  enables long-range mis­sions and con­vert­ible flight modes with high­er reli­a­bil­i­ty than con­ven­tion­al
  tiltro­tors and greater cruise effi­cien­cy than heli­copters
• Air­craft or rotor­craft with a sin­gle main rotor or pro­peller can ben­e­fit from the VH-4T’s abil­i­ty to
  sup­port series and par­al­lel hybrid con­fig­u­ra­tions, lever­ag­ing the best aspects of liq­uid fuels and
  bat­ter­ies to enhance effi­cien­cy and per­for­mance
• Next-gen­er­a­tion drones requir­ing sub­stan­tial pow­er from onboard pay­loads are enabled by
  apply­ing this pow­er­plant

The VH-4T is a ful­ly-inte­grat­ed tur­bine-pow­ered hybrid elec­tric pow­er­plant that includes pow­er gen­er­a­tion and rec­ti­fi­ca­tion, con­trol sys­tems, mechan­i­cal inte­gra­tion, and inte­grat­ed cool­ing sys­tems that enable it torun at full pow­er con­tin­u­ous­ly with no addi­tion­al cool­ing required.

As such, the VH-4T is as sim­ple to inte­grate into elec­tri­fied air­craft as a Part 33-cer­ti­fied air­craft engine. VerdeGo has applied knowl­edge gained from five gen­er­a­tions of full-scale hybrids to ensure that the instal­la­tion and inte­gra­tion of the VH-4T into cus­tomer air­craft is faster and cheap­er than any oth­er option in this pow­er range.

The VH-4T-RD devel­op­men­tal ver­sion of the VH-4T gen­er­ates 375 kW of high-volt­age pow­er, and this
ver­sion is ship­ping now to accel­er­ate flight and ground test­ing at cus­tomers with aggres­sive time­lines.

The 415-kW VH-4T-415, the pro­duc­tion-intent ver­sion, is cur­rent­ly under devel­op­ment, with mat­u­ra­tion
fund­ed in-part from a USAF Phase III con­tract, this ver­sion begins ground test­ing lat­er in 2026.

Cus­tomers apply­ing the VH-4T can cut years of devel­op­ment time from their sched­ules and reduce
devel­op­ment costs sub­stan­tial­ly, while also ben­e­fit­ing from the capa­bil­i­ties and per­for­mance that are only
avail­able from the team that orig­i­nal­ly start­ed the aero­space hybrid-elec­tric mar­ket in 2011.

Cus­tomers can choose to pur­chase or lease the VH-4T-RD ahead of VH-4T-415 avail­abil­i­ty. Both sys­tems
use the same mount­ing points to ease the tran­si­tion from the ‑RD ver­sion to the ‑415, and VerdeGo’s
Hybrid Sys­tems Inte­gra­tion Lab (HSIL) in Day­tona Beach, FL is avail­able to sup­port rapid, cost-effec­tive
sys­tem-lev­el risk reduc­tion test­ing for the customer’s entire hybrid-elec­tric pow­er­train.

Ship­ment of the first VH-4T unit marks a sig­nif­i­cant mile­stone in the advance of hybrid propul­sion from
the lab­o­ra­to­ry to become a prod­uct line avail­able for cus­tomer appli­ca­tions.