HAL-9001

Not for serial production, and not yet flown. HAL-9001 is not a product — it is our in-house flight test rig, and it is still being brought up: the airframe is being built and reworked in-house, the autopilot is on the bench, and ground testing is where it stands today. Its job, once it flies, is to put the rest of our stack into the air — the UVS Link / UVS Link Pro radio links and UVS Vision computer vision — and validate them in real flight rather than only on a bench.

Airframe

HAL-9001 is designed as a fixed-wing aircraft with vertical takeoff and landing: lift rotors take it off the ground and a tractor cruise propeller transitions it into forward flight — no runway, no catapult, minimal setup. The tail is conventional — horizontal stabiliser on the boom with a single fin above it.

The fuselage and tail are one-piece; the wing is built from joining consoles. That buys fast iteration: changing the wing geometry or payload mounts touches only the affected console, not the whole aircraft.

HAL-9001 is the programme, not a single airframe. An earlier generation was built and tested; its lift margin proved too small for the payload we need it to carry, so the aircraft shown here is a new design with margin designed in from the start. Every image on this page is a render of that new airframe — we have no in-flight photography yet.

In August 2024 Ukraine’s Innovation Development Fund, which runs Brave1, reviewed HAL-9001 as innovation project 2727. It rated the project’s scientific and technical level as medium, on the basis of working mock-ups verified in laboratory conditions; concluded that the project may be considered promising for the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine; recommended bringing it to the experimental-prototype stage; and noted that the team then had no capacity for serial production. HAL-9001 has since been kept as an internal testbed, and the prototype stage is what we are working towards.

Why we keep it

Radio links, navigation systems, antennas — all of these have to be validated in real flight, not just on a bench with a channel emulator. A rented or third-party platform almost always involves a compromise: different antenna geometry, different payload mounting, different integration constraints. Our own aircraft is meant to remove that compromise — once it flies, we see how our systems actually behave in our conditions.

Where we’re taking it

The near-term goal is first flight. After that: deeper UVS Vision integration (GPS-denied navigation onboard) and the shortest possible “change the airframe → fly” loop. HAL-9001 deliberately stays an internal engineering tool that accelerates work on our primary products — not a product in its own right.

Engineering details