VIDEO: AIR’s cargo eVTOL aircraft completes advanced night flight demonstrations in latest milestone

AIR’s uncrewed eVTOL air­craft for the logis­tics mar­ket has suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed advanced night­time flight demon­stra­tions.

The com­pa­ny has described the flight as a crit­i­cal mile­stone in solid­i­fy­ing stan­dard oper­at­ing pro­ce­dures (SOPs) for night oper­a­tions and ver­i­fy­ing seam­less inte­gra­tion with ground crews for load­ing and unload­ing the air­craft.

Addi­tion­al­ly, the demon­stra­tions fur­ther advance the company’s efforts to bring its car­go-focused eVTOL and pilot­ed AIR ONE to mar­ket for both con­sumer and com­mer­cial logis­tics use, show­cas­ing its suit­abil­i­ty for diverse appli­ca­tions.

Rani Plaut, CEO and co-founder of AIR, said: “Oper­a­tions don’t stop once the sun goes down. We rec­og­nized ear­ly on that ensur­ing safe­ty and effi­cien­cy at night is just as essen­tial as in the day­time. We’re proud to have com­plet­ed this rig­or­ous round of night­time flight oper­a­tions show­cas­ing that AIR’s eVTOL for car­go use is ready for 24/7 use.

“The air­craft adapts to almost any envi­ron­ment due to its sim­ple ground han­dling require­ments and the ease with which any ground crew can quick­ly get up to speed. The new SOPs we estab­lished lay the foun­da­tion for a future of unin­ter­rupt­ed, on-demand car­go mobil­i­ty.”

In a remote, non-air­port site with min­i­mal infra­struc­ture, the uncrewed air­craft demon­strat­ed its abil­i­ty to oper­ate in real-world con­di­tions with lim­it­ed resources.

This phase was designed to val­i­date the platform’s abil­i­ty to oper­ate seam­less­ly in both day­time and night­time con­di­tions, with a key focus on ensur­ing that even ground crews pre­vi­ous­ly unfa­mil­iar with it can seam­less­ly han­dle the air­craft with min­i­mal train­ing.

Fol­low­ing sim­ple SOPs, ground crews suc­cess­ful­ly loaded 550 pounds (250 kgs) of car­go into the air­craft and observed its depar­ture via remote oper­a­tion, demon­strat­ing the eVTOL’s abil­i­ty to inte­grate with any ground team.

AIR’s launch cus­tomer, who was present dur­ing the night flight demon­stra­tion, was impressed with the aircraft’s smooth per­for­mance and eager­ly antic­i­pates the deliv­ery of addi­tion­al units lat­er this year.

This marks the lat­est mile­stone for AIR, which has dou­bled its team size over the past year and expand­ed its prod­uct line with the intro­duc­tion of its unmanned vari­ant tai­lored for enter­prise and logis­tics use, along­side its pilot­ed eVTOL for per­son­al flight.

The pilot­ed AIR ONE is on track for deliv­ery to gen­er­al avi­a­tion (GA) cus­tomers after cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, with more than 2,200 pre­orders for per­son­al use already secured and a grow­ing wait­list.

You can view the suc­cess­ful night flight demon­stra­tion by click­ing here.