- Versatile
- Superior design
- Safety redundancies
- Affordable – low purchase price and running costs
- Clean, quiet and sustainable
- Easy to fly
- Innovative route to market
The Axe by Skyfly is a two-seat electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft designed around you: the private user: more versatile, more efficient, safer and more affordable than other EVTOL aircraft or helicopters, all while being environmentally friendly and easy to fly.
Unlike a conventional aircraft, the Axe is designed to be kept at home, enabling you to take off from your garden, and fly direct to a hotel, your friend’s house, or workplace. The Axe gives you more time to live, shortening your journeys, and giving you the 3 dimensional freedom that only flying can offer.
Unlike other EVTOL concepts, the Axe does not use rotating wings or engines, which are complex, heavy and failure-prone. Instead, we have opted for a lightweight, simple and efficient design, with fixed-angle rotors and high-lift canard wings. This allows the Axe to take off and land vertically, before transitioning into airplane-style forward flight.
As well as improving efficiency, the Axe’s wings also allow the aircraft to glide to safety in the event of a total power failure, and land like a conventional fixed-wing aircraft This is a unique capability among EVTOL aircraft. The Axe has glide performance more than twice as good as a helicopter, and equal to market standard fixed-wing aircraft like the Cessna and Cirrus SR22.
This is one of four layers of redundancy that the Axe has, helping to ensure that it is one of the safest aircraft in the sky.
The cost of all this is lower than you might think. The Axe’s simple design, and our chosen path to certification, allows us to offer a purchase price of just $180,000 – similar to a high-performance sports car, and half the cost of an industry-standard two-seat helicopter. Running costs are up to 80% lower than in comparable aircraft.
Thanks to its flight control systems, similar to that of a consumer drone, the Axe is extremely easy to fly, with auto-stabilisation while in the hover, and automatic landing and parking. With its ability to take off and land either vertically or on a runway, existing fixed-wing and helicopter pilots will immediately feel at home. This will also make the Axe an ideal trainer aircraft for fixed-wing pilots transitioning to other VTOL and EVTOL aircraft.
Our innovative route to market avoids traditional commercial certification. Instead, the Axe will operate as a private home-built aircraft, with production due to begin in 2024.
Versatile, efficient, safe, affordable, sustainable and easy to fly, the Axe truly is the next generation of personal mobility, giving you more time to live. To learn more, you can find more videos exploring each of these topics on our YouTube channel.