Image: Vertical
British eVTOL developer Vertical Aerospace has opened a new aircraft assembly centre at Cotswold Airport as it prepares to start building the Valo aircraft for the next stage of its certification programme.
The £1.5m facility adds 60,000 sq ft of assembly and operational space to the company’s existing site in Gloucestershire. Assembly of the first aircraft that will be used for certification testing is expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2027 with Vertical targeting certification for commercial use in 2029.
Located alongside Vertical’s existing flight-test centre, the new facility will allow aircraft to move between assembly and testing at the same site.
“This facility gives us the capability we need to assemble our certification aircraft and support initial customer deliveries, while maintaining capital discipline as we prepare for higher-volume production,” said Vertical CEO Stuart Simpson.
More than 25 Valo aircraft a year could be assembled at the centre during the early production phase. That capacity is intended to support certification and initial deliveries before higher-volume manufacturing moves to a separate full-scale production facility, which Vertical expects to provide more details on later this year.
Vertical currently has around 20 technicians working on aircraft. Higher-volume production will require greater use of repeatable manufacturing processes and subassemblies, alongside a larger workforce.
The production push comes after Valo’s certification target slipped by a year to 2029. Vertical said it was incorporating lessons from flight testing into the aircraft’s final design, with Chief Engineer David King telling Zag Daily at Farnborough Airshow that the company was freezing the design based on what it had learned from testing.
Alongside the new assembly centre, an expanded Vertical Energy Centre near Bristol is due to open later this year. The company expects the facility to eventually triple its battery-production capacity, supporting the aircraft programme as production scales.
The company is also considering a separate production facility capable of producing up to 1,000 aircraft a year, alongside a dedicated battery gigafactory.
Vertical says it has around 1,500 Valo pre-orders from customers including American Airlines, Avolon, Bristow, GOL and Japan Airlines. Converting those commitments into deliveries will require Valo to complete certification and the company to establish the larger production infrastructure needed to build the aircraft at scale.
