LAT Aerospace has completed its first ultra-short take-off and landing (uSTOL) technology demonstrator, founder Deepinder Goyal said on Wednesday in a post on LinkedIn. The fully electric, fixed-wing UAV is “almost ready for flight,” marking the company’s first significant milestone since it began building the aircraft and its flight lab earlier this year.
Goyal said the team built “every bench, every tool, every fixture” in the lab to move the aircraft towards flight. He added that the UAV can take off from a distance of 40 metres, fly for 60 minutes, and cruise autonomously between Mumbai and Pune.
Ground roll tests are complete, and the team is preparing for the first flight attempt in the coming weeks.
Goyal said the aircraft uses a “massive CL of 5,” which he noted is more than twice that of most aircraft. The company finished the initial build in a short period, with the team working on the lab and the plane in parallel.
He said the team is “pushing hard to get the bird in the air,” adding that they will share videos of the attempt soon.
Alongside the demonstrator, LAT Aerospace has initiated research on hybrid-electric propulsion and is assembling a team to develop gas turbine engines. Goyal called the effort “one of the hardest engineering challenges possible,” but said the team remains committed to making it real before the end of the decade.
In another post on LinkedIn, co-founder Surobhi Das mentioned that the company “started setting up in-house labs: building a full-fledged powertrain lab, HILS, wind tunnel (yes, our own), and more.”
She also mentioned that the team is working on figuring out how to reduce weight, building their own Monte Carlo simulator, developing a ground architecture for hybrid-electric vehicles, designing physics models from scratch, and more.
