Sarla Aviation, backed by Accel and Zerodha Co-Founder Nikhil Kamath, has successfully completed the flight test campaign for its Sylla electric aircraft demonstrator, marking a major milestone in its journey to launch the Shunya air taxi service by 2028.
During the test campaign, Sylla 1.0 successfully performed vertical take-off, hovered under its own closed-loop control, and completed repeated flight cycles. According to the company, the demonstrator achieved all the engineering objectives it was designed to validate under real operating conditions.
Built as a half-scale technology demonstrator, Sylla 1.0 was developed to test aircraft-level and system-level integration. Throughout the programme, Sarla Aviation evaluated the performance of its electric propulsion system, battery architecture, distributed propulsion, flight-control algorithms, airframe, and landing gear as a fully integrated aircraft.
With the required flight data now collected, the Bengaluru-based startup will use the findings to develop Sylla 2.0, a next-generation demonstrator designed to achieve controlled transition from vertical hover to sustained wing-borne flight.
Commenting on the milestone, Rakesh Gaonkar, Co-Founder and CTO of Sarla Aviation, said, “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.”
The company said the Sylla programme has achieved several national firsts, including building and flying India’s first 700 kg-class electric aircraft capable of vertical take-off, the first to fly a 400-volt electric powertrain architecture, and the first to demonstrate a distributed-propulsion wing system. It also became the first programme in India to complete full-stack ground testing in line with airworthiness regulations.
According to Sarla Aviation, Sylla 1.0 progressed from design to flight in less than 12 months, a development timeline matched by only a few electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) programmes globally.
With the successful completion of the Sylla 1.0 campaign, the company has now entered the next phase of development and has officially begun work on Sylla 2.0, bringing its vision of urban and regional electric air mobility one step closer to reality.
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