Mumbai: Accel and Zerodha Co-Founder Nikhil Kamath-backed air taxi startup Sarla Aviation on Wednesday said it has completed the flight test campaign of its technology demonstrator electric aircraft Sylla ahead of the planned launch of the company's full-fledged air taxi for regional and urban air mobility Shunya in 2028.
As part of the testing, the aircraft lifted straight off the ground, hover under its own closed-loop control, and repeated the cycle, the company said.
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 monsoon arrives over southern India, the programme transitions to its next chapter, the Bengaluru-based platform said.
In aerospace parlance, any testing is called a campaign, the company clarified.
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, the company said it 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.
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, it said.
"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," said Rakesh Gaonkar, Co-Founder and CTO at Sarla Aviation.
The Sylla programme is the first in India to build and fly a 700 kg-class electric aircraft capable of vertical take-off besides first in India to fly a 400-volt electric powertrain architecture and demonstrate a distributed-propulsion wing system, the company said, adding that the programme is also the first in the country to complete full-stack ground testing in accordance with airworthiness regulations.
Sylla 1.0 went from design to flight in under 12 months, a development pace that few eVTOL programmes globally have matched, it said.
The successful completion of the Sylla 1.0 campaign marks the beginning of Sarla Aviation's next phase of flight testing. The company has begun development of Sylla 2.0, an upgraded technology demonstrator that incorporates engineering learnings from the current programme.
