“There isn’t a playbook for this sector,” said Michael Cervenka, chief technology officer of U.K. eVTOL firm Vertical Aerospace, during the AIRTAXI World Congress event in San Francisco, California, last week.
The event brought together around 500 eVTOL stakeholders from more than 70 countries around the world to discuss key issues in the nascent sector and hear updates from some of the top eVTOL developers in the industry.
“We want to sell the aircraft all over the world,” Cervenka told the audience at the AIRTAXI event.
The company chose to focus on being an original equipment manufacturer rather than an operator of its own aircraft — a different approach from rivals like Joby or Archer. Vertical now has one of the largest orderbooks in the sector, working to secure letters of intent with various customers, including American Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, Avolon and Bristow, among others.
“We very much see this as a global opportunity,” Cervenka said, adding that the partnerships provide the company with opportunities around the world, as aviation authorities work to finalize eVTOL certification rules.
Vertical has also built up its supplier list, turning to Tier 1 suppliers for key components. The company calls Honeywell, GKN Aerospace, Hanwha, Solvay, Leonardo and Molicel among its partners. Cervenka said these partnerships help “bring huge certification pedigree and know-how” to the company as Vertical eventually transitions to manufacturing what it hopes to be thousands of aircraft at scale.
“One of the myths is that these [aircraft] are just electric helicopters,” Cervenka said. With sophisticated flight controls and electrical power, the aircraft can do much more than that, he said, including the ability to take off and land like a helicopter and transition to cruise like an airplane.
Vertical’s piloted, four-passenger VX4 aircraft is designed to fly at top speeds of 200 miles per hour (322 kilometers per hour), and a range of more than 100 miles (161 kilometers), but Cervenka said most of its flights will be short 35-mi (56-km) missions or less.
Following the accident involving the company’s full-scale prototype on Aug. 9, Vertical is planning to build a second full-scale VX4 prototype at the GKN Global Technology Centre, which it expects to fly early next year.
The eVTOL firm said it is on track to type certify its aircraft by around the middle of the decade, and if it achieves that timeline, it will be one of the first to claim a spot in the market. But as Cervenka described, the journey to get to that position wasn’t as straightforward when the company started seven years ago.
“We definitely had the wrong aircraft design. We didn’t have a business model,” Cervenka said, who joined Vertical in 2019 after nearly 15 years at Rolls-Royce. Cervenka witnessed the startup grow from 70 employees four years ago to 300 employees today.
But through the years of research and development and flight testing that followed, the team came up with a vehicle design that was “very capable,” accumulating “useful noise data,” along with “whole aircraft learnings … that ultimately enabled us to come up with a better product,” Cervenka said.
“We’ve reached the tipping point where we now have a technology that’s commercially viable,” he said.
And because this is novel technology, Cervenka predicts the aircraft will start out as a premium product, but that won’t be the case forever. Believing eVTOLs will become a widely used mode of transport one day, Vertical is designing its VX4 to adhere to the most stringent safety standards of ten to the minus nine (10-9), or one catastrophic accident in a billion flight hours.
The company is targeting type certification with the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority, followed by concurrent validation elsewhere, including Europe, the U.S., Japan, South Korea and Brazil.
