Video shows development progress of ZURI hybrid VTOL aircraft

A new video show­ing the actu­al stage of the devel­op­ment of the ZURI hybrid VTOL air­craft has been released show­ing key mem­bers of the ZURI team dis­cussing work progress in var­i­ous seg­ments, such as mechan­i­cal, elec­tri­cal, and flight con­trol sys­tems.

The cur­rent set of live tests aims to ver­i­fy pre­vi­ous com­put­er sim­u­la­tions and see how the air­craft behaves in real-life con­di­tions, includ­ing crit­i­cal parts of the air­craft, such as bat­tery packs and motors.

Hov­er tests pro­vide a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to ver­i­fy the struc­tur­al rigid­i­ty of the air­craft by ana­lyz­ing data col­lect­ed from many sen­sors dur­ing hov­er tests, from which the team can deter­mine which parts require fur­ther strength­en­ing, how to improve weight dis­tri­b­u­tion, and where actu­al weight sav­ings may be made.

The ZURI team will inten­si­fy its test­ing and the result should be a key com­po­nent of the con­trol sys­tem, the so-called angle mode, which enables auto­mat­ic cor­rec­tion of indi­vid­ual engines so that the con­trol of the machine is eas­i­er for the pilots.

For the pur­pose of test­ing the unique demon­stra­tion on a large scale, the team also arranged new facil­i­ties at Zbraslav­ice Air­port near Prague, where the full-scale demon­stra­tor with wingspan of 11 m had its very first hov­er test last fall.

A team of 20 experts is cur­rent­ly work­ing on the devel­op­ment of the hybrid VTOL air­plane, where the range com­pared to pure­ly bat­tery-pow­ered air­craft will be fun­da­men­tal­ly increased by a liq­uid fuel gen­er­a­tor. In addi­tion to data from the large-scale demon­stra­tor, they are col­lect­ing data from test­ing a mod­el with a wingspan of 3.5m.

In Jan­u­ary, ZURI revealed the next con­cept of its hybrid VTOL air­craft, which will have a range of more than 700km, and also includes a car­go mod­el. The ZURI 2.0 air­craft is based on the expe­ri­ence which the team gained after more than three years of devel­op­ment and suc­cess­ful ground tests with a tech­nol­o­gy demon­stra­tor.

In Novem­ber 2021, ZURI closed a suc­cess­ful round of fund­ing worth €1.3 mil­lion, led by suc­cess­ful Czech entre­pre­neurs includ­ing Jaroslav Beck, Jakub Nešetřil and Rastislav Turek to bring the total invest­ment raised to €2.4 mil­lion.