|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Honda has completed the first flight of its full-scale eVTOL technology demonstrator, the company revealed last week via a video posted to X (formerly Twitter). According to Honda, the remotely piloted aircraft flew for about 90 seconds on April 1 at the company’s test facility in San Luis Obispo, California.
The nearly two-month gap between the flight and its disclosure is consistent with Honda’s approach to the program. Speaking at the Dubai Airshow last November, eVTOL vice president and executive chief engineer Susumu Mashio told AIN that the company had not felt the need to “proactively announce [its progress] to the public in a very immature state”—a posture that kept the program largely out of public view for several years after its 2021 announcement.
This first flight marks Honda’s transition from subscale testing to full-scale validation, following more than 400 flight tests conducted with a one-third-scale demonstrator and research and development efforts that date to 2020.
“With this milestone, development advances into the full-scale validation phase, where the foundational technologies of eVTOL are being verified at real scale,” the company wrote on X. “We will continue to build on this progress toward the next stage of development.”
The Japanese automaker’s lift-and-cruise eVTOL aircraft uses eight propellers for vertical lift and two for forward propulsion, and is built around a hybrid-electric powertrain employing a gas turbine generator. Mashio has said the company drew on its automotive background in making that call: “When we decided to start this project, we knew that battery technology might not be there as much as we had hoped,” he told AIN. “For the time being, the hybrid system is a really practical solution.”
Honda is targeting a range of 250 miles and an FAA type certificate in the early 2030s. Honda Research Institute USA, the company’s North American R&D arm, is conducting the flight test campaign at its San Luis Obispo County facility. The FAA granted Honda Research Institute an exemption in October 2024 to fly the subscale prototype for research and development purposes.
