Vertical Aerospace made history at Farnborough in July and then spent the autumn explaining its balance sheet. We looked at who else is keeping Britain’s electric aircraft industry in the air and who is waiting on a decision somebody else will make
On 13th July 2026, Vertical Aerospace told its investors that certification of Valo, its production passenger aircraft, had slipped from 2028 to 2029.
Then, seven days later, chief test pilot Simon Davies took the company’s prototype off the ground at Farnborough International Airshow, tilted its rotors forward into wing-borne cruise and brought it back down to a vertical landing in front of a public audience, the first time a full-scale aircraft of its kind had done so in the UK.
We think those two dates, a week apart, tell the eVTOL UK story more honestly than any market forecast, because the engineering is real and the clock is real too.
The aircraft that flew was the Vertical Aerospace VX4 prototype rather than Valo, the production design that still has to pass certification with the UK Civil Aviation Authority and its European counterpart. The company has been selling the second while flying the first, and the gap between them is where most of this year’s drama has played out.
What does a national champion do when its best technical week lands in the same quarter as its hardest financial one?
A record flight and a going-concern warning
Vertical closed a financing package of up to $850m in April, and the headline figure deserves a second look.
Most of it takes the form of equity facilities from Yorkville Advisors, a $250m convertible preferred facility and a $500m equity line, which the company can draw at its own option over two and three years, so what the money is worth depends on the share price on the day it is drawn.
After the deal, Vertical put its near-term working capital at about $160m, and by August, its interim filing carried a warning of material uncertainty over its ability to continue as a going concern, with liquidity expected to last through the third quarter of 2027.
Then in September it hired Jefferies to review strategic alternatives, and on 2 October the New York Stock Exchange warned that its shares had fallen below the $1 minimum.
By 13th October, they had dropped under 50 cents.
“Vertical is well positioned to continue executing against our roadmap to 2028 certification.” — Stuart Simpson, Chief Executive, Vertical Aerospace, April 2026
That sentence came three months before the roadmap moved by a year.
Certification programmes meet surprises, and we don’t doubt that the flight testing has advanced, but a runway that ends in the third quarter of 2027 sits well short of a 2029 certificate, and the company is the one telling us so.
Add a patent lawsuit filed in Texas by Archer Aviation in February, which alleges that Valo copies its Midnight design and which Vertical denies, and the cost of staying in the race keeps rising.
How long can a company fund a certification programme on the strength of a falling share price?
Where the money went
The easy explanation is a regional decline in eVTOL investment, and Europe offers evidence for it. Lilium filed for insolvency in October 2024 (followed by a secondary proceeding in February 2025), a commercial collapse that arrived just two months before Volocopter initiated its own insolvency proceedings in December 2024.
The global figures tell a different story. Private investment in eVTOL roughly doubled between 2023 and 2024, reaching $3.1bn by mid-December. Driven by this momentum, by mid-2026 Joby Aviation held about $2.3bn in cash and short-term investments, while Archer Aviation secured its financial footing with roughly $1.56bn. This massive capital consolidation was anchored earlier by Toyota, which committed a standalone $500m to Joby in late 2024.
Which eVTOL UK developer has a backer on that scale?
Capital gathered around a handful of developers with industrial parents and, increasingly, defence customers, and Vertical is following it.
Former Airbus executive Fabrice Brégier is now chair, and former FLIR chief executive Andrew Teich joined the board on 2 November as the fourth senior aerospace and defence appointment in recent weeks.
The company now describes Valo as a dual-use platform for commercial and defence markets. If the money follows defence, does a company that began as a UK flying taxi story end up as a defence contractor that also carries passengers?
“...we believe they are building the most technically advanced aircraft in the industry.” — Jason Mudrick, Chief Investment Officer, Mudrick Capital Management
Mudrick’s funds have backed Vertical since 2021 and hold its convertible notes, which means that belief carries money with it.
Two clocks, one deadline
The Department for Transport’s Future of Flight action plan, published in March 2024, hoped for the first piloted UK flying taxi flight in 2026 and regular services by 2028.
The CAA’s eVTOL Delivery Model, published in September 2025, set a more careful ambition: a regulatory framework and operational systems in place by the end of 2028 to allow initial commercial passenger flights.
The first milestone arrived on schedule, in the form of a piloted demonstration at Farnborough.
The eVTOL certification UK timetable now runs on two calendars.
The CAA’s points to the end of 2028, while Vertical’s points to type certification of Valo in 2029. For eVTOL UK operators planning around the regulator’s date, the question of which aircraft they will fly matters as much as the rulebook.
The Vertical Aerospace VX4 has shown in public that a British tiltrotor can transition between hover and cruise, but the certification-conforming Valo aircraft have yet to be built and tested.
The CAA’s own guidance adds a wrinkle: aircraft intended for commercial operations will need either UK type certification or validation of a certificate issued by another state.
That leaves a route for aircraft certified elsewhere and an uncomfortable question for industrial policy. If the first fare-paying passengers in Britain fly in an American-built aircraft, will the country have met its 2028 ambition and still missed the prize the ambition was meant to create? And who then builds a UK electric air taxi at scale?
Read next: Can UK Nuclear Companies Beat the Regulator’s Clock?
What Britain builds, and what it borrows
Valo’s supplier list reads like a map of global aerospace: Honeywell, Sonaca, Hyundai WIA, Syensqo, Isoclima and Astronics, joined in October by ANH for seating and Northrop Grumman LITEF for inertial navigation.
The British content includes electric motors from Evolito, batteries built in Bristol and the engineering of a company with fewer than 500 employees. Now, Vertical says its second full-scale manufacturing facility will be in the US, while London remains among its planned launch locations.
“...a landmark moment for UK aerospace, built on British engineering.” — Richard Oldfield, Chief Executive, National Composites Centre
The National Composites Centre helped Vertical identify UK manufacturers able to produce components at scale, which gives that sentence substance. Scale is the operative word.
How much of that engineering stays in Britain once Valo moves from certification aircraft to production line, and where will the second factory’s jobs sit?
The ground infrastructure tells a similar story as well.
Skyports built the UK’s first vertiport testbed at Bicester Motion in Oxfordshire and raised $110m in 2024 in a round led by ACS Group, but most of its eVTOL ambition points at Dubai, where it holds an exclusive agreement with the Roads and Transport Authority to build and operate vertiports.
A UK vertiport that functions as a testbed while the paying customers sit in the Gulf prompts a question about how large the eVTOL UK market really is.
So, where will the next UK vertiport be built, and for which aircraft?
Elsewhere, government money is backing aircraft built abroad, and on 23rd July the Department for Transport announced £7.3m across eight zero-emission flight projects, part of a wider £43m package, including Project SEAN, which will trial BETA Technologies’ Alia CX300 electric aircraft from Inverness Airport from August.
The largest single award went to a ZeroAvia-led hydrogen refuelling project, even as ZeroAvia cut roughly half its workforce this year, lost its founder as chief executive on 26 May and pushed back its certification plans.
For the wider group of electric aviation startups UK backers have funded, the open question is whether public grants of this size can bridge the years between a demonstration and a certificate.
What we’d still like to ask
This piece is based on secondary research.
We still want to establish what Vertical’s strategic review means for where Valo is built and which regulator it answers to first, and how much of the up-to-$850m package can realistically be drawn at today’s share price.
We also want to know whether the Department for Transport and the CAA still see regular services by 2028 as the goal and what the government wants from the sector if the first commercial passengers fly in foreign-certified aircraft. We also seek some clarification on who will operate the first UK flying taxi routes and on which aircraft.
Investors, meanwhile, should answer whether any UK backer is large enough to play the role Toyota plays for Joby.
We have not yet spoken to the companies named in this piece, but we would always welcome the chance to.
Sources: Vertical Aerospace and Archer Aviation company filings and announcements; UK Civil Aviation Authority and Department for Transport publications; reporting from Aviation Week, FlightGlobal, AIN, Zag Daily, UKTN, The Air Current and other aviation industry outlets.
