Following our progress in 2018 – the Sky Hopper team look forward to 2019 with enthusiasm.
We are presently refining our CAD model to develop a fully detailed manufacturing design of our ACD-200S variant. This allows us to plan the process of creating small groups of Sky Hopper’s at economic cost. The development effort is using the engineering and structures demonstrator as its knowledge-base; with a fully detailed and specified parts list now being used.
This in turn will allow us to develop our supply chain for sub-components and parts; while we are sourcing as much as we can within the West of Scotland, in accordance with our “second agenda” to help re-build aerospace capability in the region. We are also procuring from around the UK and overseas for specific sub-components.
As this manufacturing refinement continues we have also begun work on our electrical and avionics specification and initial build. This effort will lead up to the development of our third flight control vehicle (FCV3) which we will use to verify the flight physics of the vehicle.
We hope to begin early flight tests in the summer of 2019. There is groundwork to be done on the core flight control program to ensure that our core software and firmware structures are properly extensible for our iterative approach to advancing our design from early 200 series variants up to our target size 400 series vehicles.
We are also, of course, focussing on finding more investors to support our equity release. Progress is being made with a growing number of pledges helping us to get further towards our target of £150,000.