Sarla Aviation has completed the flight test campaign for Sylla, its half-scale eVTOL demonstrator, following six months of trials in India.

Sylla logged more than 500 tests and over 18 hours of flight time during the campaign, making the 700 kg-class, 7.5-metre-wingspan aircraft the heaviest electric aircraft to fly in India. The programme evaluated the interaction of the aircraft's electric propulsion system, battery architecture, distributed propulsion, flight-control algorithms, airframe and landing gear as an integrated unit. Sarla also completed India's first flight of a 400-volt electric powertrain architecture and its first demonstration of a distributed-propulsion wing system, alongside full-stack ground testing conducted in accordance with airworthiness regulations. Sylla progressed from design to flight in under 12 months, at a total programme cost of less than $13 million.

Rakesh Gaonkar, co-founder and CTO at Sarla, says: “Sylla 1.0 was never built simply to hover, it was built to answer engineering questions that simulations alone cannot. Flying Sylla is the moment a thousand simulations become real, validating our aircraft architecture under real flight conditions. Sylla has given us the data we set out to capture, and those learnings are already shaping next gen aircraft as we move towards transition and sustained wing-borne flight on our journey to our 6+1 air taxi Shunya.”

About 30% of Sarla's engineering team has previously worked at eVTOL developers including Lilium, Volocopter and Wisk, a concentration of experience the company credits with compressing a development timeline that typically runs for years into months. The capital efficiency and pace of the programme have drawn a stake from IndiGo Ventures.

Sarla has now begun development of Sylla 2.0, an upgraded demonstrator that will pursue controlled transition between vertical and wing-borne flight, the technological step required ahead of a certifiable passenger eVTOL. Every flight completed by Sylla 1.0 reduces technical uncertainty for Shunya, Sarla's six-passenger eVTOL planned for regional and urban air mobility.