December 2011

The last few months since our return from the Paris Airshow have been devoted to the following activities:

In parallel, we are continuing efforts to obtain more funding to enable us to sustain and even expand our scope of work next year. We have been successful in obtaining part of this funding and this effort is ongoing in order to secure the remaining financing necessary to perform full mission demonstrations for our future customers.

We have begun the airframe construction on a second prototype which will be equipped with the more powerful Turbomeca Arriel 2C2 engine (bringing this vehicle closer to our final production version configuration).  This prototype will also be 60cm longer to increase the payload bay volume.  

Having successfully completed the implementation of autonomous Takeoff & Landing algorithms, as well as high position accuracy in hover, we have now suspended flight testing until the beginning of 2012 to enable us to implement a number of upgrades. One of these is the shift to a fully redundant dual hydraulic rotor pitch control system.  We expect to have the aircraft back in the air in February.