Vertical Aerospace Selects Hyundai WIA as Landing Gear Partner for its Valo eVTOL Aircraft

Ver­ti­cal Aero­space has signed a new long-term part­ner­ship with Hyundai WIA, a sub­sidiary of Hyundai Cor­po­ra­tion and a lead­ing mobil­i­ty and man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­ny, to sup­ply the land­ing gear sys­tem for Ver­ti­cal’s Valo eVTOL air­craft.

Under the agree­ment, Hyundai WIA will devel­op and man­u­fac­ture a bespoke land­ing gear sys­tem for Valo, with end-to-end design and pro­duc­tion respon­si­bil­i­ty.

Stir­ling Dynam­ics, a UK-based engi­neer­ing com­pa­ny with more than 30 years’ expe­ri­ence sup­port­ing cer­ti­fied air­craft pro­grammes, will sup­port Hyundai WIA as a key design part­ner.

Stu­art Simp­son, CEO of Ver­ti­cal Aero­space, said: “As we advance toward cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and indus­tri­al­iza­tion, secur­ing world-class sup­pli­ers remains cen­tral to our strat­e­gy.

“Hyundai WIA brings deep exper­tise in advanced man­u­fac­tur­ing and high-integri­ty sys­tems, fur­ther strength­en­ing the indus­tri­al foun­da­tion sup­port­ing Valo’s path to com­mer­cial ser­vice.”

The announce­ment fol­lows Vertical’s suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion of two-way pilot­ed tran­si­tion flight, a key tech­ni­cal mile­stone val­i­dat­ing the aircraft’s tech­nol­o­gy and core oper­at­ing mode. 

Ver­ti­cal is now pro­gress­ing toward Crit­i­cal Design Review (CDR), which estab­lish­es the cer­ti­fi­able design base­line and enables the build and test of cer­ti­fi­ca­tion-con­form­ing air­craft.

Com­ple­tion of CDR will lock key design ele­ments, sup­ply chain con­fig­u­ra­tion and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion part­ner selec­tion ahead of full-scale cer­ti­fi­ca­tion test­ing and com­mer­cial pro­duc­tion.

Ver­ti­cal has now secured key sup­pli­ers across major air­craft sys­tems, includ­ing Hon­ey­well (flight con­trol and air­craft man­age­ment sys­tems), Aci­tur­ri (air­frame struc­tures), Evoli­to (elec­tric propul­sion units), Syen­sqo (com­pos­ite mate­ri­als), and Iso­cli­ma (trans­paren­cies). The Hyundai WIA agree­ment marks anoth­er impor­tant step in estab­lish­ing a world-class aero­space sup­ply chain for scaled pro­duc­tion.

Found­ed in 1976, HYUNDAI WIA has been devel­op­ing and pro­duc­ing cut­ting-edge prod­ucts in auto­mo­bile parts, mobil­i­ty solu­tions, aero­space and defense indus­try solu­tions to become a glob­al leader in the com­pre­hen­sive machin­ery mobil­i­ty indus­try. 

Ho-Young Lee, Vice Pres­i­dent of Hyundai WIA, said: “We are proud to part­ner with Ver­ti­cal Aero­space on the Valo pro­gramme and sup­port the devel­op­ment of next-gen­er­a­tion elec­tric avi­a­tion.

“We look for­ward to work­ing close­ly with Ver­ti­cal and Stir­ling Dynam­ics to deliv­er a robust, inno­v­a­tive land­ing gear solu­tion that meets the high­est safe­ty stan­dards and per­for­mance.”

Stir­ling Dynam­ics is an advanced engi­neer­ing com­pa­ny that pro­vides high-end engi­neer­ing prod­ucts and ser­vices and is renowned for its spe­cial­ist land­ing gear design ser­vices to cer­ti­fied plat­forms and the Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty sec­tor.

With more than three decades of expe­ri­ence the com­pa­ny has accu­mu­lat­ed a wealth of knowl­edge on mul­ti­ple air­craft and marine plat­forms, deliv­ered to civ­il and mil­i­tary pro­grammes around the globe.