Vertical’s VX4 eVTOL prototype crashes during test flight

Ver­ti­cal mag­a­zine has report­ed that UK-based Ver­ti­cal Aerospace’s exper­i­men­tal pro­to­type air­craft crashed dur­ing a test flight yes­ter­day at Cotswold Air­port, home to Vertical’s flight test cen­tre. The com­pa­ny con­firmed the air­craft was remote­ly pilot­ed and there were no injuries dur­ing the acci­dent.

“Our flight test pro­gramme is designed to estab­lish the lim­its of the aircraft’s per­for­mance, and the inci­dent occurred dur­ing an uncrewed test of the aircraft’s manoeu­vra­bil­i­ty dur­ing a motor fail­ure test sce­nario, which is a key require­ment to progress to crewed oper­a­tions,” the com­pa­ny stat­ed in its SEC fil­ing.

In a recent let­ter to share­hold­ers, the com­pa­ny said it has ‘made great strides’ in its flight test pro­gram this quar­ter, includ­ing con­duct­ing the VX4’s first unteth­ered flights.

“The air­craft lift­ed, hov­ered, flew, and land­ed all by the thrust of its elec­tric propul­sion sys­tem and pow­ered only by Vertical’s pro­pri­etary bat­tery packs,” the share­hold­er let­ter stat­ed.

The com­pa­ny said the air­craft car­ried out 18 take-offs and land­ings, and reached its tar­get thrust-borne speed of 40 knots (70 kilo­me­tres per hour).

Ver­ti­cal is plan­ning to build a sec­ond full-scale VX4 pro­to­type at the GKN Glob­al Tech­nol­o­gy Cen­tre. The sec­ond demon­stra­tor is expect­ed to have greater capa­bil­i­ties than its first pro­to­type, includ­ing improved range and high­er per­for­mance, par­tic­u­lar­ly in hov­er.

Last month, Ver­ti­cal Aerospace’s first UK VX4 flight was part of its full-scale demon­stra­tor elec­tric air­craft test­ing and part of its cer­ti­fi­ca­tion by the Civ­il Avi­a­tion Author­i­ty air­craft, tak­ing off and fly­ing from the his­toric Cotswold Air­port in Kem­ble and ful­ly pow­ered by elec­tric bat­tery packs.

Vertical’s VX4 fly­ing taxi takes to the UK skies for the first time