SkyDrive Builds Its Case for SD-05 eVTOL Certification

Japanese eVTOL aircraft developer SkyDrive says it has completed 300 flights of its SD-05 eVTOL air taxi without incident as the company works toward type certification and a commercial launch planned for 2028.

SkyDrive reached the milestone over 20 months, beginning in November 2024, using two aircraft flown at its test sites in Toyota City, Aichi Prefecture, and at Yamaguchi Kirara Expo Memorial Park in Yamaguchi Prefecture, along with other public venues, the company said. Of the 300 flights, 48 took place away from those test centers, including demonstration flights at Expo 2025 Osaka and the nearby Osakako vertiport last year and a demonstration campaign in Tokyo in February 2026.

Recent months have brought other milestones, too. On June 24, SkyDrive said the SD-05 had reached 100 km per hour (62 mph) in high-speed tests using an uncrewed prototype, verifying the aircraft’s stability and controllability, as well as the performance of its propulsion, flight control, and avionics systems near its target cruise speed. SkyDrive said the results matched its design predictions, drawing on a development campaign that has also included wind-tunnel testing at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and ground-vibration testing.

In April, SkyDrive became the first dedicated eVTOL developer in Japan to earn Approved Design Organization (ADO) certification from the Japan Civil Aviation Bureau (JCAB), an arrangement that allows a developer to verify part of its own design work rather than leaving all of it to the regulator, thereby speeding type certification. SkyDrive says the approval makes it one of only six organizations in Japan to hold ADO status, alongside long-established aerospace manufacturers.

Optimized for Urban Hops

The SD-05 is a multicopter that seats one pilot and two passengers. It is lifted by 12 rotors with no wings or tilting mechanisms, and runs a central flight control system from Thales with three redundant channels plus a fourth for backup, the company said.

At a virtual media briefing last week, SkyDrive CTO Arnaud Coville said the aircraft’s configuration follows from a choice to optimize for hover, because a vertical-takeoff aircraft draws its greatest power climbing straight up rather than in cruise.

How efficiently it hovers comes down to disk loading, a measure of how much weight each unit of rotor area must support. Spreading the aircraft’s weight across a large rotor area keeps that figure low and cuts the power needed to hover, which lets SkyDrive fit smaller motors and wiring while devoting more of the aircraft’s weight to payload. The trade-off is some forward-flight efficiency, which matters less on the short trips the company is targeting.

Coville and SkyDrive CEO Tomohiro Fukuzawa said the aircraft is built for high-frequency urban hops of roughly 30 kilometers rather than longer regional routes—a focus Fukuzawa said SkyDrive has validated through more than 400 letters of intent across three continents. “We aren’t trying to be everything to everyone,” he said.

Banking on Battery Advancements

The first production aircraft will fly on battery cells rated at 285 watt-hours per kilogram from Utah-based Electric Power Systems (EP Systems), which also supplied the batteries for the current demonstrators, Coville said.

SkyDrive has moved from conventional lithium-ion cells to a next-generation silicon-anode chemistry to increase energy density, giving the aircraft an operational range of about 15 kilometers (nine miles) once regulatory reserves are accounted for, Coville said.

Denser cells would extend that range in steps—roughly 30 kilometers at 400 Wh/kg and 40 kilometers at 500 Wh/kg—and Coville said the aircraft is being certified so the batteries can be upgraded as the technology matures.

Certifying a ‘Special Class’ Rotorcraft

In Japan, the SD-05 is being certified as a special-class rotorcraft rather than under a powered-lift category, an unusual approach to eVTOL certification with implications that the company is still discussing with the FAA.

An aircraft’s category determines the rulebook it must certify against. The FAA created a powered-lift category for eVTOLs that take off vertically but cruise on a wing—the configuration behind most U.S. programs, including those of Joby and Archer. Because the SD-05 has no wing and never transitions to wing-borne flight, SkyDrive contends that it is closer to a helicopter and belongs in the rotorcraft category, the route Japan has taken.

Rotorcraft are normally expected to show that they can land safely after losing power by autorotating, using airflow to keep the rotors spinning through the descent. A fixed-pitch multicopter cannot do that, and with no wings, the SD-05 cannot glide either. Coville said SkyDrive will instead meet the requirement through energy management and an algorithm that forces the aircraft into a controlled descent as power runs low, mimicking autorotation—an approach still being settled with the FAA.

SkyDrive is certifying with JCAB first and banking on a quick FAA validation, but Coville noted that the U.S. system is built around powered-lift, with little regulatory groundwork for wingless multicopters.

Coville said SkyDrive expects to finalize its certification plans with JCAB in July, after which an updated aircraft—reflecting aerodynamic refinements and the new battery—would enter production around the end of 2026 and begin flying in the summer of 2027 ahead of certification testing. Production runs through manufacturing partner Suzuki Motor Corporation at a plant in Iwata City, Shizuoka Prefecture, where SD-05 assembly began in 2024.

Fukuzawa said SkyDrive’s commercial plan rests on existing infrastructure, its partnership with Suzuki, and government support. “I’m not here to tell you a dream story,” he said. SkyDrive said it formed Japan’s first eVTOL vertiport consortium in May, joining Osaka’s prefectural and city governments, Osaka Metro, trading house Marubeni, and Soracle (a joint venture between Japan Airlines and Sumitomo) to commercialize the Osakako Vertiport on Osaka Bay. The company said it has also signed partnerships this year with highway operator Nexco West, Aeroauto in the U.S., 7 Drones in Taiwan, Tohoku Air Service in Japan, and Bangkok Airways in Thailand.

Planting Roots in the U.S.

In the U.S., where SkyDrive established a base in South Carolina in 2023, the company has pitched the SD-05 as an airport-to-downtown shuttle for congested metro areas such as Los Angeles, New York, and Atlanta. In South Carolina, charter operator SAI Flight—which has pre-ordered 10 of the aircraft—and Greenville Downtown Airport agreed in 2024 to develop air-taxi, cargo, and emergency-service routes, including connections to the city center and Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport.

SkyDrive has since turned to Florida. In March, it signed a letter of intent with Aeroauto, a Florida-based advanced air mobility company, for eight SD-05s—four for delivery in 2028 and four in 2029—and extended its SAI Flight partnership from South Carolina into the state, part of a broader push across the U.S. Southeast.

Reaching 300 flights was “a meaningful achievement made possible through teamwork, discipline, and commitment,” Christopher Rennie, director of SkyDrive’s test department, said in a statement. He cautioned that greater challenges lie ahead as the program moves toward type certification and its first production units next year.