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53 E levonX, an unmanned aircraft company based in Slovenia, has gained increasing recognition over the past few years for its SkyEye series of fixed-wing UAVs. They feature modular wing and tail configurations that are interchangeable around a common fuselage, easing maintenance and greatly broadening mission capabilities and efficiencies. The latest and most advanced iteration of the SkyEye family is the Sierra VTOL, named for being the first of the series to be able to transition between vertical and forward flight. Numerous teams in commercial, civil, medical, and academic organisations are now deploying this craft, which ElevonX has positioned as its flagship UAV. The SkyEye series was effectively spawned from brainstorming sessions between a group of engineers who knew each other through a shared love of RC model construction and flight. The group comprised mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, professional pilots and physicists, who had realised that between them they had all the necessary skills and experience needed to create a UAV manufacturing company. As Janez Langus, CEO and CTO of ElevonX, recounts, “It was in 2014 that we saw companies such as UAV Factory, or C-Astral in our own country, performing very well in all sorts of missions around the world. It hit us that if we tried to do the same, we’d already have a highly capable team that knew how to communicate and work together – an advantage not all UAV companies start with.” The brainstorming sessions took place between October 2016 and January 2017, and were aimed at identifying niches in the professional UAV market. The group’s goal was to build on experience gained since 2014 from converting their RC planes into autonomous craft, to gain familiarity with all the necessary subsystems. “We initially came out with the flying- wing SkyEye Delta for short, low-cost missions, and high aspect ratio wings for longer professional missions, but we quickly saw that what businesses and other organisations really wanted was VTOL functionality in a fixed-wing, electric aircraft,” Langus recalls. “But here too we had an advantage over other companies, because the modularity of our craft meant we could quickly pivot its design into a VTOL- capable one. In short, we took what was known as our Sierra UAV, installed VTOL arms and configured the software.” ElevonX timeline In September 2014, Langus and his colleagues first flew a fixed-wing UAV that would eventually morph into the SkyEye Delta, the first of ElevonX’s product line. These test flights aimed to experiment with different payload masses and shapes to gain an understanding of how carried objects affect performance. “Our first delta-wing UAV prototype was flying in August 2015,” Langus says. “The size and weight of that craft was popular at that time, but we soon decided that the payload capacity needed to increase. In the end, data is always what matters, ElevonX Sierra VTOL | Digest Rory Jackson looks at how VTOL functionality was incorporated into this fixed-wing electric aircraft challenge Unmanned Systems Technology | February/March 2022 Most of the hull is carbon composite, although some fibreglass is used where RF transparency is key