Vertical Aerospace begins testing its most advanced eVTOL aircraft prototype

Ver­ti­cal Aero­space has con­firmed it has begun test­ing its most advanced eVTOL air­craft, suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ing ini­tial pow­ered ground tests, includ­ing pro­peller bal­anc­ing.

In an announce­ment made today (Mon­day), the com­pa­ny will con­duct pow­ered, propul­sion sys­tem test­ing of its most advanced pow­er­train, which includes pro­pri­etary bat­tery packs capa­ble of pro­duc­ing 1.4 MW of peak pow­er. It has been designed and built to cer­ti­fi­ca­tion safe­ty stan­dards at its mul­ti-mil­lion-pound Ver­ti­cal Ener­gy Cen­tre.  

Pro­peller bal­anc­ing and spin­ning tests mea­sure weight dis­tri­b­u­tion of each pro­peller blade to ensure vibra­tions are min­imised for smooth, sta­ble fly­ing.  

David King, Chief Engi­neer at Ver­ti­cal Aero­space, said: “These tests are a cru­cial step for­ward in our mis­sion to cer­ti­fy the VX4 and make a clean­er, qui­eter, and safer way of air mobil­i­ty a real­i­ty.

“Every day we are see­ing amaz­ing progress from the team at our Flight Test Cen­tre, each test pro­vid­ing valu­able insights to help shape the next. We con­tin­ue to work along­side our reg­u­la­tor to devel­op the safest and most advanced eVTOL air­craft in the world. 

He added: “As the aero­space world meets in Farn­bor­ough this week, we could not be proud­er of the team and look for­ward to shar­ing more on our progress towards pilot­ed flights.” 

These next tests involve secure­ly anchor­ing the air­craft to pre­vent lift-off and run­ning the engines at var­i­ous pow­er lev­els to mea­sure thrust out­put, sys­tem inte­gra­tion, and struc­tur­al integri­ty. Togeth­er, these tests will ensure the VX4 meets the high­est stan­dards of oper­a­tional safe­ty which are need­ed for pilot­ed flights. 

The com­pa­ny will then move onto its “wheels up” phase with teth­ered flight tests before pro­gress­ing to low-speed unteth­ered flights, once it has been issued its Per­mit to Fly from the UK Civ­il Avi­a­tion Author­i­ty (CAA).