Mayman’s VTOL testbed completes test flight series

Mayman Aerospace has completed flight tests of its Razor testbed VTOL aircraft at a military base in Southern California.

The Razor test bed is exactly the same dimensions and weight as Mayman’s planned production aircraft, the Razor P100. It also uses the same propulsion, engine gimballing, thrust vectoring and flight control systems.

David Mayman, founder and CEO of Mayman said: “Our recent flight tests were 100% successful and we are confident Razor will reach speeds greater than 450kts. As a multi-role, dual use technology Razor is already changing the way defence commanders and civilian leaders are thinking about autonomous VTOL applications. We are a software-driven hardware company and our team is achieving performance levels once only dreamed about.”

Supported by Mayman’s contract with the US Department of Defense, the flights tested avionics, thrust vectoring mechanisms, flight control laws, software and command and control. They also enabled early verification of operating procedures, while focusing on the transition of the engines moving out of hover mode.

Then company said the flight tests are a “major step forward” and additional test flights are scheduled for later this year.  

Dr Manu Sharma, chief engineer, at Mayman added: “In these flight tests we flew seven autonomous mission sets and all systems worked perfectly as planned. The primary objective was to validate recent flight-software and control-law updates, with particular attention to the change from hover mode with the engines canted outwards from the aircraft centre, to transition mode with all engines canted in the same direction, which is required to get us into winged flight.  It is also a benefit to get additional autonomous flight time on the vehicle, take-off and landing in particular, to increase our confidence in the system as a whole.”