VIDEO: Sarla Aviation Completes Flight Test Campaign of Sylla — India’s Largest and Heaviest Electric eVTOL Technology Demonstrator

Sar­la Avi­a­tion has con­firmed the suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion of flight-test cam­paign for Syl­la, its half-scale eVTOL tech­nol­o­gy demon­stra­tor.

Across six months of field test­ing, Syl­la logged more than 500 tests and over 18 hours of flight test­ing — mak­ing the 700 kg-class, 7.5‑metre-wingspan air­craft the heav­i­est elec­tric air­craft ever to take off in India.

What Just Hap­pened

Syl­la 1.0 is a half-scale tech­nol­o­gy demon­stra­tor built to val­i­date air­craft-lev­el and sys­tem-lev­el inte­gra­tion under real oper­at­ing con­di­tions.

Through­out the pro­gramme, Sar­la suc­cess­ful­ly eval­u­at­ed the inter­ac­tion between the air­craft’s elec­tric propul­sion sys­tem, bat­tery archi­tec­ture, dis­trib­uted propul­sion, flight-con­trol algo­rithms, air­frame and land­ing gear as a ful­ly inte­grat­ed air­craft.

With the suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion of its inte­grat­ed flight test cam­paign, Syl­la 1.0 has suc­cess­ful­ly achieved the engi­neer­ing objec­tives it was designed to accom­plish. As the mon­soon sea­son arrives over south­ern India, the pro­gramme now tran­si­tions to its next chap­ter.

Hav­ing cap­tured the com­plete set of flight data required, Sar­la will incor­po­rate these learn­ings into its next-gen­er­a­tion tech­nol­o­gy demon­stra­tor designed to achieve con­trolled tran­si­tion from hov­er to sus­tained wing-borne flight.

A String of Indi­an Firsts

The Syl­la pro­gramme estab­lish­es a series of nation­al firsts in elec­tric avi­a­tion:

•      First in India to build and fly a 700 kg-class elec­tric air­craft capa­ble of ver­ti­cal take-off

•      First in India to fly a 400-volt elec­tric pow­er­train archi­tec­ture

•      First in India to demon­strate a dis­trib­uted-propul­sion wing sys­tem

•      First in India to com­plete full-stack ground test­ing con­duct­ed in accor­dance with air­wor­thi­ness reg­u­la­tions

Com­ment­ing on the mile­stone, Rakesh Gaonkar, Co-Founder and CTO at Sar­la Avi­a­tion, said: “Syl­la 1.0 was nev­er built sim­ply to hov­er, it was built to answer engi­neer­ing ques­tions that sim­u­la­tions alone can­not. Fly­ing Syl­la is the moment a thou­sand sim­u­la­tions become real, val­i­dat­ing our air­craft archi­tec­ture under real flight con­di­tions. We achieved this in under a year, on a frac­tion of the cap­i­tal our glob­al peers have spent, with a team that has helped build some of the world’s most advanced air­craft.

“That com­bi­na­tion of glob­al engi­neer­ing exper­tise and Indi­an speed of exe­cu­tion is our edge. Syl­la has giv­en us the data we set out to cap­ture, and those learn­ings are already shap­ing next gen air­craft as we move towards tran­si­tion and sus­tained wing-borne flight on our jour­ney to our 6+1 air taxi ‘Shun­ya’.”

Designed, Built and Flown in Under 12 Months

Syl­la 1.0 went from design to flight in under 12 months — a devel­op­ment pace that few eVTOL pro­grammes glob­al­ly have matched. More strik­ing is the cost. Sar­la reached this mile­stone — a full-scale mock-up unveiled at the Bharat Mobil­i­ty Glob­al Expo in Del­hi in 2025, and now a fly­ing half-scale demon­stra­tor — on less than $13 mil­lion.

Rough­ly 30 per cent of Sarla’s engi­neer­ing team comes from the world’s lead­ing eVTOL com­pa­nies, includ­ing Lil­i­um, Volo­copter and Wisk. That con­cen­tra­tion of fron­tier flight expe­ri­ence, com­bined with an India-based engi­neer­ing cul­ture built for speed, is what allowed the com­pa­ny to com­press a devel­op­ment time­line that typ­i­cal­ly runs for years into months.

What Comes Next

The suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion of the Syl­la 1.0 cam­paign marks the begin­ning of Sar­la Avi­a­tion’s next phase of flight test­ing.

The com­pa­ny has already begun devel­op­ment of Syl­la 2.0, an upgrad­ed tech­nol­o­gy demon­stra­tor that incor­po­rates the engi­neer­ing learn­ings from the cur­rent pro­gramme. While Syl­la 1.0 focused on val­i­dat­ing inte­grat­ed air­craft sys­tems and con­trolled hov­er, Syl­la 2.0 will pur­sue con­trolled tran­si­tion between ver­ti­cal and wing-borne flight—the defin­ing tech­no­log­i­cal mile­stone required before devel­op­ing a cer­ti­fi­able pas­sen­ger eVTOL.

Head­quar­tered in Ben­galu­ru and named in hon­our of Sar­la Thukral, India’s first woman pilot, Sar­la Avi­a­tion says it is on a mis­sion to rev­o­lu­tionise intra- and inter-city trav­el — mak­ing it faster, clean­er, and more afford­able, aligned with the nation’s ambi­tions for Viksit Bharat 2047.

Found­ed in 2023 by the ex-Lil­i­um duo Rakesh Gaonkar and Adri­an Schmidt, Sarla’s flag­ship pro­gramme is a six-seater elec­tric fly­ing taxi designed to dra­mat­i­cal­ly reduce com­mute times in India’s most con­gest­ed cities — includ­ing Ben­galu­ru, Mum­bai, Del­hi and Pune. Sar­la is backed by investors includ­ing Indi­Go Ven­tures, Accel and Nikhil Kamath.