Sarla Aviation has successfully completed the integrated flight test campaign for Sylla, its half-scale electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) technology demonstrator.
Across six months of field testing, the 700 kg-class aircraft logged more than 500 tests and over 18 hours of flight testing. With a 7.5-metre wingspan, it represents the heaviest electric aircraft ever to take off in India. The programme evaluated the interactions between the electric propulsion system, battery architecture, distributed propulsion, flight-control algorithms, airframe, and landing gear under real operating conditions.
The development of Sylla 1.0 progressed from design to flight in under 12 months, utilizing less than $13 million in capital. This milestone follows the unveiling of a full-scale mock-up at the Bharat Mobility Global Expo in Delhi in 2025. The company’s rapid development pace and capital efficiency recently led IndiGo Ventures to acquire a stake in the business.
Sarla Aviation draws roughly 30% of its engineering team from global eVTOL companies such as Lilium, Volocopter, and Wisk. This concentration of aerospace experience helped compress typical multi-year development timelines into months.
Rakesh Gaonkar, Co-Founder and CTO at Sarla Aviation, said, “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. We achieved this in under a year, on a fraction of the capital our global peers have spent, with a team that has helped build some of the world’s most advanced aircraft. That combination of global engineering expertise and Indian speed of execution is our edge. 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’.”
With the monsoon season arriving over southern India, the program is transitioning to its next phase. The captured flight data will be incorporated into Sylla 2.0, an upgraded technology demonstrator currently under development. While the first iteration focused on validating integrated systems and controlled hover, Sylla 2.0 will target controlled transition between vertical and wing-borne flight. This milestone serves as a prerequisite for developing Shunya, the company’s eventual 6+1 passenger eVTOL designed for regional and urban air mobility.
