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In November 2025, Vertical Aerospace chairman Dómhnal Slattery proclaimed on the company’s third-quarter earnings call that the U.K.-based electric vertical take-off and landing developer was “within weeks” of completing a successful piloted transition flight with its prototype VX4 aircraft. Four months later, Slattery acknowledged that his declaration had been premature.
“The reality is, it’s taken us longer than we anticipated,” he told analysts on Vertical’s full-year earnings call on March 24, explaining that the milestone would be a catalyst for deepening conversations with potential strategic partners. “On our last earnings call, I specifically said it’s weeks not months. Well actually … it’s months not weeks. But we are very, very close at this juncture.”
This time around, Slattery wasn’t wrong. On April 2, Vertical achieved a successful one-way transition of its VX4 when test pilot Paul Stone transitioned from a hover to wingborne flight, followed by a conventional runway landing at Cotswold Airport near Kemble, England. Less than two weeks later on April 14, chief test pilot Simon Davies completed a full transition flight, going from a hover to wingborne flight and back again before landing vertically.
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In an interview with The Air Current, Davies explained that the delay in achieving the milestone was attributable to bad weather and “an abundance of caution” as the company repeatedly updated its models with new flight test data.
“Where we found areas that maybe predictions didn’t match the model, we’d stop and review, rather than just continuing,” he said. “From the chairman and the board down to the leadership team, our direction has been very clear that we need to do this the right way: no big leaps into the unknown; just measured, assured progress at every step is the right way to do it. And that’s really paid off, I think.”
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