HAL-9001

Not for serial production. HAL-9001 is not a product — it is our internal flight test rig. We iterate the airframe fast — reworking it in days, not months. Its only job 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, not just on a bench.

Airframe

HAL-9001 is a fixed-wing aircraft with vertical takeoff and landing. Lift rotors take it off the ground; a tractor cruise propeller then transitions it into forward flight — no runway, no catapult, minimal setup. The tail is a conventional cruciform.

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.

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 removes that compromise — we see how our systems actually behave in our conditions.

Where we’re taking it

Future iterations focus on deeper UVS Vision integration (GPS-denied navigation onboard) and an ever-shorter “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