Good morning. My name is Amy, and I will be your conference operator for today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Vertical Aerospace Business Update call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press the star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star and the number one again. You may begin your conference.
Thank you. Good afternoon or good morning, depending on where you're listening from, everybody. I am Charlotte Cowley, Director of Finance at Vertical Aerospace, and I'm delighted to welcome you to our business update call today. Before we get started, I would like to remind you that during today's call, we will be making forward-looking statements. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by the forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. We have posted an accompanying slide deck to the Investor Relations web section of our website at investor.verticalaerospace.com, which contains information and precautionary warnings on forward-looking statements.
For a more complete discussion about these risks and uncertainties, we have filed a 6-K with the SEC this morning. We understand there are currently technical issues with the EDGAR system, but we would hope that these are resolved shortly for you to be able to access the full document. Today, we're pleased to have with us key executives who will provide detailed insights into our business, technology, and outlook: Stuart Simpson, our CEO, and David King, our Chief Engineer. Before we dive into today's presentation and Q&A, we'd like to share something special with you.
Good morning or good afternoon. Thank you very much for joining. What you've just seen represents a key milestone in Vertical's recent journey, including our latest flight tests. These achievements underscore the remarkable progress we've made in bringing sustainable urban air mobility closer to reality. Today, we're giving a comprehensive update on our strategy and timelines following an extensive review of our business plan. Today's discussion covers the following key topics: strategic vision and market opportunity, technical progress and certification pathway, and outlook. By way of a background, before I started at Vertical, I got to know the company, and I joined this company versus all the other options because of what I learned. There were three key things: transformational technology contained within the business, which is leading edge, not bleeding edge. The reality of this coming to life is far closer than people think.
It really is a case of when and not if we succeed. Second, the exceptional caliber of team, with a deep aerospace knowledge and a deep knowledge of the certification process required to bring an aircraft to market, supplemented by the best of adjacent industries. I'm really pleased to be sharing this with David King, our Chief Engineer, today, a fantastic example of the knowledge within the business. And finally, our simple, focused, capital-efficient OEM business model. Having been with the business now for 16 months, I'm even more convinced I made the right choice to join Vertical and help lead it through to the launch of the incredible VX-4. Since taking the role of CEO in May, I've conducted a detailed bottom-up review of the business to ensure we're positioned not just to participate in the Advanced Air Mobility Revolution, but to lead it.
Today, I'm extremely excited to share our refined vision, Flightp ath 2030, that sets a clear way forward for the company's journey from prototype to production. This strategic plan builds on the foundations laid over recent years and capitalizes on our entrepreneurial culture, innovative thinking, and agility that has got us to where we are today. Flightp ath 2030 outlines Vertical's ambitious vision for where we aim to be by the end of the decade and the way we will achieve these incredible goals. First, let me address the fundamental question: why are we trying to transform how the world moves? The answer lies in the fact that mobility matters. We're facing unprecedented challenges in urban transportation and environmental sustainability. The Advanced A ir Mobility market represents a paradigm shift in how we will think about these challenges. This isn't just about creating a new form of transport.
It's about fundamentally reimagining the future of sustainable mobility through our mission of pioneering electric aviation. Our approach to addressing this opportunity is built on four fundamental pillars: a pioneering culture, redefining aerospace best practice, intelligent partnering, and being safety-obsessed. Starting with pioneering culture, it is all about our people, not just how we attract, retain, develop the best talent in the industry and surrounding industries, but also how we work together, being willing to be decisive, inventive, resilient, working with a pace and rigor, empowering the team to be brave, challenging norms, working together in a focused, aligned, committed manner. I've seen this before: what can be achieved way above and beyond anything anyone believes when everyone is aligned and focused on an outcome. That is what we're doing here at Vertical. Second, redefining aerospace best practice. This is a really important part of our future.
As a new company, we're not encumbered by legacy systems and processes. We have the ability to do everything in the best, fastest, most rigorous way possible. As we create this new type of aircraft, we are creating opportunities to work at a pace and with a rigor never seen before, always maintaining the safety focus required in the aviation space. Touching on that, our safety-first mindset has been embedded in our development processes from day one by building full-scale prototypes and learning from them before moving to our final aircraft design. We work hand in glove with our home regulator, exploring innovative ways to evidence progress and safety. We're ensuring each step of our certification journey is agreed, documented, and allows us to fly via the Permit to Fly regime. All of this supports us in redefining aerospace best practice for speed and safety capabilities. Next is intelligent partnering.
Unlike some competitors, we're focusing purely on aircraft development and manufacturing, a focused OEM approach. We know we cannot bring our product to market alone. We are leveraging the expertise of our customers and suppliers. I genuinely feel we've built the best business model to achieve this. With our intelligent partnering approach, our tier-one aerospace partners provide us with the technology and insights to make the VX-4 possible. They have collaborated on our latest prototype and delivered decades of certification pedigree as they work with us to dramatically grow the AAM market. In addition, our intelligent partner approach allows us to be asset-light, focused, and capital-efficient. It also allows our customers, established aviation operators, to do what they do best: operate the aircraft efficiently and safely. This has allowed us to build an industry-leading pre-order book. Finally, we're not trying to be everything to everyone.
We're concentrating on being the best at what matters most, leveraging the best technology and partners in the world, innovating where we need to, such as batteries and propellers, and finally integrating the overall package to bring the aircraft to light. The final point, being safety-obsessed, I fundamentally believe when you bring in a new product into a new market, such as aerospace, we have to ensure that we've got regulator and customer support, and this is built on bringing the highest quality safety standards into the market. We are absolutely committed to achieving the highest safety standards in the industry. For our product, that means creating an aircraft to meet the highest bar for safety in aerospace, a 10 to the minus 9 certification.
But also, all through the business, from occupational health and safety through to the thought process of every engineer every day, we are designing the safest aircraft for this space. Now, taking a moment to introduce our team. We've assembled a world-class team that has certified dozens of aircraft or propulsion units in their careers, blending the best of aerospace with the best of other industries as we pursue our path to certification and production. To ensure we execute our strategy and make the pivot from prototype to certification, we are making improvements to a number of key enablers, including our design-to-operate process, our program management and governance, our organizational structure. We are also making a conscious shift in our ways of working to increase focus on execution and value creation. Consequently, through these changes, I have even more confidence in hitting our ambitious goals. Now, moving to customers.
This team is backed by the best customers in the industry, aviation experts that operate world over and know what passengers want, from helicopter operators, aircraft lessors, to airlines, tourism groups, mobility operators, and business aviation partners. We are learning from our customers every step of the way to ensure that our final product, our final certification aircraft, is designed for them, optimized for them and their passengers, and can deliver the payload and luggage requirements they need. Just to bring this to light, we have a Pioneers event when we bring all of our customers together two times per year. Happily, we're bringing them together next week to see the aircraft flying. During this, we take extensive feedback into what are the requirements for the final aircraft.
We work hand in hand with them, planning out how we bring the aircraft into service, undertaking analysis, including significant network mapping, to understand how the customers want to develop the compelling VX-4 services. We've mapped over 1,000 routes in great detail, including number of flights per day, passengers per flight, dispatchability, maintenance, turnaround time, all the way through to the detail of the cost per kilowatt-hour per customer and the cost per kilometer per passenger, underpinned by many types of use cases, specifically focusing on priority launch market routes, all the way through to revenue payload simulations and luggage capacity requirements. All of this ensures the product that we bring to market is right for the market and our customers. We understand the distinct opportunities the VX-4 will provide. Firstly, new growth, creating entirely new transport options for routes where traditional aviation isn't commercial or accessible.
Over 90% of these flights are under 30 miles. Secondly, existing travel displacement, whether that's rail, car, taxi, helicopters, the VX-4 offers a more sustainable, efficient, safer, and quieter alternative. Given the amount of work we've done with customers, we fundamentally believe that the demand for eVTOLs will far outstrip supply well into the next decade, if not beyond, and I believe our approach will enable us to deliver the highest quality, most scalable, most upgradable, and portable eVTOL in the market. Today, we are sharing our medium-term deliverables to making our vision a reality. Our strategic plan, Flightp ath 2030, builds on the progress made by the business to date and is underpinned by all of the learnings from our engineering team, our piloted test flight program, the incredible work with our home regulator, the CAA, and robust bottom-up planning.
Everything I've learned, so everything we've learned so far, is baked into our new plan. We have absolute confidence in our path to certification of the VX-4 to support achieving the following targets for 2030. First, delivery of at least 150 VX-4 aircraft to our customers, achieving a manufacturing exit rate of more than 200 units per annum in Q4 2030, to have in place a ramp-up in manufacturing capacity to over 700 units per year in the medium term, sustainably cash-generative, achieving cash break-even in 2030, margin to grow to greater than 40% in the medium term, supported by certification of our first major product upgrade in 2030 and a pipeline of product enhancements thereafter. David will touch on some of these shortly. Now, I'll hand over to David, who can provide a deeper insight into our aircraft development and certification progress.
Thank you, Stuart, and good morning, good afternoon, everyone. I joined Vertical two years ago after spending a little over three decades designing, testing, and certifying new types of aircraft at legacy VTOL companies Leonardo, Bell, and Boeing. Now, similar to Stuart, when I joined Vertical two years ago, there were three differentiators that just stood out to me as highlights of the company and differentiators in the aerospace industry. The first is the aircraft technology. The second is the team, and the third is the strategy. But first, let's talk about the aircraft technology. The emergence today of eVTOL technology represents a huge opportunity in what is now an underserved market for point-to-point air mobility. In today's operating environment, noise, operating costs, perceptions of safety, and sustainability concerns are currently holding back demand of existing VTOL aircraft.
I'm confident that Vertical's VX-4 eVTOL aircraft will solve all four of these limitations and be set up to succeed in this huge underserved market. So thanks to recent advances in automotive and aerospace technologies, including what's brought to the table by Vertical's world-class partners, the VX-4 incorporates core technological blocks which are mature today and fundamentally provide the solutions to these limitations which are holding back VTOL demand. Some of these include lightweight composite air structures, advanced digital systems, lithium-ion battery cells, and powerful electric propulsion units. The VX-4 is a fit-for-purpose custom integration of these building blocks combined with Vertical's proprietary powertrain and propeller systems. Our proprietary powertrain architecture of the VX-4 consists of eight independent propeller systems, eight independent electric propulsion units, and eight independent battery systems architected and designed to the highest safety standard of commercial aviation.
This is the same safety standard applied to modern airliners to ensure that the probability of a failure condition that could preclude continued safe flight to a landing is less likely than one in a billion. Using this proprietary battery and propeller architecture, we are aiming to deliver the most powerful powertrain in the eVTOL industry. Today, we are demonstrating this on our second full-scale VX-4 prototype, aircraft number two, which has been shown to deliver 1.4 megawatts of peak power. Now, for comparison purposes, that's the same amount of power in the EC155 medium helicopter, which can accommodate 13 passengers with a twin turboshaft engine configuration. And power margin equals safety margin, especially for emergency conditions. Power margin also means that we are oversizing the powertrain for our entry into service aircraft, which will be initially delivered with a roomy payload for one crew, four passengers, and ample baggage.
And by having a roomy cabin and excess power, part of our strategy at Vertical is to deliver and certify an aircraft that can be upgraded to increase payload, increase the number of seats, and increase range, which means increased productivity for our customers while still maintaining safe power margins in critical failure conditions and a comfortable cabin. The VX-4 is sized so that six passengers can be added with only minor changes and minor recertification and within the capability of our current powertrain and our cabin size. The VX-4 design represents an innovative new category of aircraft designed to the highest safety standards, which takes me to the second differentiator, the team.
One of my first impressions after joining Vertical, after three-plus decades at legacy OEMs, is how energizing it is to work on a world-class team that has blended the rigor and structure of a mature aircraft company with the rapid learning culture needed to turn brilliant innovations into market-leading products. Everything we do on the engineering team at Vertical is driven by that final absolute requirement to deliver an aircraft that meets the highest safety standards as required for certification. And we plan to accomplish this with an innovative aircraft design by being the most effective learning organization in aerospace. These safety standards applied to the VX-4 design go beyond what's traditionally applied to similarly sized VTOL aircraft. We are applying the established eVTOL regulations that were put in place by Europe's Aviation Safety Agency, EASA, and adopted by the British Civil Aviation Authority, the CAA.
These eVTOL regulations require the VX-4 to satisfy the highest standards of architectural redundancy, which requires that a combination of failures that could affect flight safety to be less than 1 times 10 to the minus 9 per flight hour. We are currently proving out these architectures through rigorous tests and analysis on our prototypes. By targeting certification with an aircraft designed to these highest safety standards, we aim to deliver an aircraft with global portability that can be certified by the CAA here in the UK and then validated by foreign authorities for operations in any region of the world. We've applied for type certification of the VX-4 with the UK CAA, and we have already received our Design Organisation Approval, or DOA.
The DOA provides us the opportunity to earn increasing privileges as the CAA gains more and more experience with us, equating to further autonomy that will expedite the certification project. In fact, our DOA certificate number with the CAA is 001, meaning that we are the first DOA granted by the CAA under their new category of rules. As I've said, the CAA has decided to adopt this highest safety standard that was first introduced by EASA, and we and our customers wholeheartedly endorse that as the right standard for the VX-4. Right now, we are using these DOA processes that have been approved by the CAA to establish the airworthiness of our full-scale prototype aircraft.
At each step of our flight test program, the CAA determines that we have shown compliance to a subset of certification rules as we receive permits to fly for each of our flight test phases. This process of working side by side with the CAA under a strong collaboration and partnership for safety means that we are essentially conducting certification dry runs in advance of testing the final production configuration that will be conformed to type design. The U.K. provides an ideal environment, from our perspective, for the development of an innovative aircraft such as the VX-4 for several reasons. The U.K. in general, and Bristol area specifically, has a proud history of innovations in the aviation industry. In fact, this is where the jet age began, and this is where the Concorde was born.
This region that we're located in right now, the southwest of England, provides access to world-class aerospace talent and a mature aerospace supply chain. This is also a highly cost-competitive region to develop and build aircraft. Also, the UK government is a strong supporter and backs development of sustainable aviation initiatives, which has amounted to GBP 37 million of UK government grants so far to support our R&D efforts. And finally, the UK has a proud history as a leader in the development of aviation safety standards, including as part of my experience in the VTOL industry, including the UK CAA as a primary author in developing the operational regulations for safe offshore helicopter operations. The third standout differentiator I wanted to talk about is Vertical's strategy, our strategy of teaming up with world-class tier-one aerospace partners, finding that right balance between intelligent partnering and leveraging our own in-house capabilities.
We've chosen to partner with the highest pedigree aerospace partners. These partners deliver the critical, mature technological blocks which are integrated into the VX-4 to provide the solution that our customers need, while allowing us to be a lean, agile, and focused company to deliver the whole aircraft design. Our aerospace partners are already working with us on our prototypes. Our latest prototype, aircraft number two, has 60% of its technology from our strategic tier-one aerospace partners, including GKN, Hanwha, Honeywell, Molicel, Syensqo, and this is up from 10% on our first full-scale prototype, which was tested last year. Today, we are thrilled to show you that we have embarked on phase two of our flight test program with untethered, piloted thrust-borne operations in the low-speed flight regime.
Our confidence in the Flightp ath 2030 strategy, which Stuart has shared with you, is our strategy to reduce the certification risk through this full-scale prototyping and piloting testing. Flying with a pilot on board using a full-scale aircraft provides that added value of receiving that first-person perspective of the way the aircraft performs so that we can take the data from the pilot and the data from thousands of sensors on board, learn from it, optimize the certification design, and deliver an aircraft that can readily get through the certification process. And we have learned so much over the last few months. We've moved from phase one, which was our tethered flight this past summer, and we've moved on to phase two, which is our thrust-borne low-speed flight conditions. While doing that, we have been continuously correlating the flight data with our mathematical models.
Those are those predictive methods that allow us to extrapolate to our certification design. And what we've shown is that we have accurate forecasts of the critical power margins and handling characteristics for the low-speed flight regime. And we have shown what we believe to be the most powerful powertrain in the eVTOL industry. And we have proven out the precision control that is critical for vertical takeoff and landing conditions. We were also able to evaluate critical engine-out conditions in the hover regime during our phase one, which provided us the learning to optimize the flight control software algorithms that will ensure safe flight for the continuation of our flight test program in the improbable event of an engine failure. As we progress through phase two, the low-speed regime, we will then move to phase three, the high-speed regime, which is wing-borne flight.
This will be the first time that we fly outside the bounds of our flight test center located at the Cotswold Airport. After phase three, which will include conventional takeoff and landing on a runway, we will move on to phase four, which is the full transition with a pilot on board. That is the transition from thrust-borne flight conditions to wing-borne and back from wing-borne to thrust-borne. That flight test phase, which we will complete early next year, is a key critical technical milestone for us to fully expand the envelope and be prepared to fly public piloted flights later in 2025 in mission representative profiles. Now, before I hand it back to Stuart for the financial update, I wanted to emphasize that while we are efficiently and readily moving through our flight test program, we're never compromising on safety.
Every test, every iteration, every design is made with safety as our top priority. Stuart?
David, thank you. I'd just like to take the opportunity to thank you and the team for the fantastic work that you're doing as we bring the aircraft to life, in particular the piloted thrust-borne we achieved last week and as we look to expand the flight test envelope through wing-borne and transition. An incredible job that we are doing here. As I said earlier, looking ahead, we have a clear plan to build a sustainably cash-generative business. The 2030 targets we have shared today are underpinned by a robust, detailed bottom-up plan and the learnings we have taken through all of our comprehensive development program today, up to and including all of the work with our regulator to get into piloted thrust-borne test flying.
This step materially de-risks the path to certification, and that is further de-risked as we complete the piloted wing-borne and transition flying over the coming months. Key assumptions underpinning our targets for Flightp ath 2030 include certifying the VX-4 in 2028 in line with our current development and testing roadmap, underpinned by our experience of many certification programs as we expand our piloted test flight envelope. A production ramp-up schedule, including supply chain scaling, our leading pre-order book of approximately 1,500 orders, giving us confidence on revenue visibility through the first five years of production. An expected gross margin building to greater than 40% in the medium term, and as I said before, we'll be achieving cash break-even in 2030. Turning to 2025 and the operational milestones that support this longer-term plan. The first one is to fly a full-scale piloted transition in 2025.
We will also build and fly our third full-scale VX-4 prototype. This will be used to fly full-scale piloted real-world use cases. It will also accelerate our engineering learning. We will earn further Design Organisation Approval privileges from the CAA, including targeting flight conditions. We'll initiate production with long-range parts purchasing and strengthen our operating model with a shift and an increased focus on execution. As I said before, we have a focused OEM business model, which enables a high level of capital efficiency. Our asset-l ight strategy has several key advantages: lower capital requirements compared to both peer group and traditional aerospace programs, reduced operational complexity, and accelerated evolution of risk leading to the potential for superior returns on invested capital. While we have maintained industry-leading capital efficiency, it is no secret that our plans will require additional funding.
As of 30 September 2024, the group had approximately $60 million on hand. To help with your understanding of our short and medium-term needs, we currently expect the capital required for the business to deliver the operational goals I mentioned over the next 12 months will be broadly consistent with the spend over the last 12 months, circa $100 million. This spend will increase over time as we approach certification and then production. Regarding funding, we have confirmed that we are in discussions about potential third-party investment. We are optimistic that these results will be positive in outcome, and I look forward to updating you on those discussions as soon as they are complete. As is prudent, we continue to explore all alternative options available to us. Given the stage of the discussions, there is nothing more I'm able to share at the moment.
However, I will update you as soon as possible, and in the meantime, the business stays focused on delivering the flight test campaign and beyond for VX-4. We believe there is ample space for multiple winners in this sector, given the demand we see, but we believe our approach gives us significant advantages. The investment case for Vertical is compelling. We have a leading aircraft certified to 10 to the minus 9, providing global portability. We have a focused OEM business model, and we're backed by an outstanding team already delivering the greatest bang for the buck in the sector. With our asset- light strategy and clear path to profitability, efficient capital deployment, and geographic expansion provided by targeting the highest levels of safety in aviation, we have set ourselves up for the long-term success of this business.
We're not just building a new aircraft and business. We are helping to create a new industry. The future of sustainable urban air mobility is closer than many realize, and Vertical is positioned to be a leader in this transformation. Thank you, Charlotte, and over to you.
Thank you, Stuart and David, for your presentations. For the Q&A, we would please ask that questions are limited to the Flightp ath 2030 strategy. We note we're limited in our ability to respond to any questions relating to the current status of liquidity and the funding situation. As Stuart has mentioned, we will provide a separate update in that respect at the appropriate time. I would, on that note, reiterate Stuart's comments. We had about $60 million of cash at the end of September, and we are optimistic that our ongoing discussions around potential third-party investment will result in a positive outcome.
We're mindful that we do have a number of people on the call today, so please, in the interest of fairness, could you limit yourself to asking just a couple of questions at a time? And if you have any more, please just add yourself back into the queue. Thank you. Over to you, Amy.
Thank you. Just as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star and the number one on your telephone keypad. To remove your question, you may also press star and the number one. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Savi Syth with Raymond James. Your line is now open.
Hey, good afternoon, everyone. It's clear that you have a very advanced and robust flight test program here, and the 2030 plan seems very realistic, a kind of assessment of what you can deliver. That said, it is a long runway to start generating cash and maybe a couple of years behind what we had anticipated. So I was curious what your thoughts were. At a very kind of high level, the cash required to get to that 2030 target, and perhaps your views on kind of the timing and magnitude of cash inflows outside of capital raises, such as kind of grants and PDPs.
Savi, great question. We're not committing to a cash envelope today. I think I'll just reiterate what I said. Next year will be plus minus this year around $100 million and a ramp-up from there.
I think the way to think about this is to really look at our capital efficiency versus our peers. And there's a massive step change and massive difference between us and them. So I think you'd be surprised at the number when you do a little bit of analysis around keeping those proportional. We will target doing a Capital Markets D ay in the first half of 2025, where we may bring a bit more of this to light. But for the purposes of today, that's all I'd like to comment on that, if that's okay.
Understood. And maybe just on the, you alluded to changes in kind of governance and execution. Could you provide a little bit more color on what's changing today after this review?
Yeah, of course.
I think one of the things I talked about with Stephen before I even joined the business, Stephen being our founder, who's done such an incredible job bringing the business to this point. There comes a point where the entrepreneurial bleeds into a much more rigorous, focused execution phase where you're really driving through certification. Now, we will still have another engineering spin. We're still going to be incredibly innovative and agile, but it's got to be in a more rigorous and structured way. So we're making a few changes in organizational structure. I won't talk about those today because we're launching them internally. We've got a team day tomorrow where we'll be laying that out. But a good example is we're promoting someone, bringing them in. They've got great manufacturing experience. They're going to join our leadership team.
So instead of that being done on the side of someone's desk, we've got someone full-time, dedicated, committed to ramping that up as we move forward. We're also bringing in a very, very experienced program manager who's worked with David for many years and David's past. So again, we're putting this really into a tightly controlled, rigorous, focused structure and process to drive us going forward. So hopefully, it gives you a bit of color commentary around it. And again, when we have a Capital Markets D ay, we can talk a bit more fulsomely. It's certainly my intention to introduce a lot of my top team to the market because I think when people get to know us, they are absolutely blown away by the quality of people we've got. So that's the intention for early next year. Thanks, Savi.
I appreciate it. Thanks.
Your next question comes from the line of David Zazula with Barclays. Your line is now open.
Hey, good afternoon, and thanks for taking my question. I guess first one, I know you'd kind of kept the long view on fundraising, but in the short term, I guess one of the advantages you guys have had, I think, is that you have very tight relationships with your suppliers and an excellent supplier base. At what point in the fundraising process and in kind of the cash balance process would they start getting concerned about where you are? Have they given you any feedback as to when kind of the financial picture that you're in, which is what it is, would start to impact you operationally?
So David, thanks for joining us today. Really appreciate it. Thanks for the question.
We work absolutely hand in hand with our suppliers day in, day out. They're fully embedded with us. We're fully embedded with them. I've seen no worries or concerns about that at all. We're very transparent with them. They're all under NDAs. We can be a little more open around the fundraising position. We've never been closer to getting a deal, and I think once we get a deal in place and we can announce that publicly, we'll bring that to you, and one of the things we'll do, Charlotte, who's hosting the call today, has joined us as the Director of Finance. Charlotte's got years of experience in fundraising and tapping markets, so that's something we'd be doing consistently going forward. It'll be a different kind of model from maybe we've had in the past, so in summary, no issues that we see yet with suppliers.
We're very open, honest, transparent. We're working hand in hand. And we've put in place a team that is ready to go to market and raise funds in a consistent manner going forward. So hopefully, that gives you a bit of color com mentary, David.
That is very helpful. Excuse me. And then very impressive, some of the customer work that you had talked about doing. I think you guys have long had one of the, if not the biggest order book in the industry. We had kind of expected that to mean that based on your business model being less vertically integrated, you would not be doing as much of the customer work at this phase. So I guess, what is the advantage of what you're doing with network mapping and that sort of thing?
How do you think that sets you up for a future to where it's worth spending kind of the time, money, effort right now?
Great question. I think fundamentally, I have a huge belief that when you bring a product to market, it needs to meet the customer's demands. So bringing the customers in, all of them, twice a year for three or four days to roll around in our product design, the thoughts we're having massively influences the product we're bringing to market. So we know when we bring this to market that it's a product that is absolutely usable in the use cases that they have, whether those are emergency aviation, moving medical devices, people, parts around, or whether it's tagged on to the end of a business class passenger flying London to New York or Tokyo, São Paulo, whatever.
So mapping that out in great detail gives them the confidence that, wow, we know what we're doing, and this product is really going to land well with them. It's not launching a beta product. This is launching a 10 to the minus 9 aircraft that they can drive into service quickly. It also helps us understand what are the challenges we've got in terms of infrastructure and how that needs to be built out both from a regulatory perspective and a physical perspective. So all of that communication and time spent with the customers gives us, I genuinely believe, the best foundation, the best understanding of how you bring this product to market and put it into market in real use cases. Is that okay? Does that answer the question?
Thank you. Great.
Thanks, David.
Much appreciated. Great color. I'll pass it on.
Yeah. Thanks a lot, David.
Thank you. And the next question comes from, excuse me, the line of Edison Yu with Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open.
Great. Thank you for taking our questions. First off, I want to ask about the design of the aircraft. You've obviously had some time to do more testing. You seem to be making good progress there. Are we feeling very comfortable with the kind of the structural, the basic design? And I believe you're having some decisions to make around the powertrain supplier. Has that been resolved as well?
So I will hand this off to David. And I can tell you I am unbelievably comfortable with it. When I look at the expandability, the growth opportunities in the airframe, a nd then I'll hand it off to David to give you a more comprehensive answer.
Yeah. Edison, yeah, thanks for your question.
What we're learning is primarily based on the test program: the aeromechanics and taking the data from the sensors that are giving us the flight characteristics and the structural characteristics of the aircraft and feeding it back into our predictions and using that to make the adjustments that we need to our predictive capabilities. So that's been the one area that we've been doing a lot of learning and updating, which gives us that confidence. It gives us the confidence that then we have a set of analytical predictions that are extrapolatable to the modifications that we're making for the certification configuration. Now, the modifications for the certification configuration are small relative to the overall design because we're carrying forward the principles. What we're also doing is we are doing in-depth testing of the integrated powertrain.
A lot of that testing is based on proving the architecture meets the safety standards, proving that the components as integrated in the aircraft meet the safety standards, such as crashworthiness, shock, environmental, but also the thermal runaway considerations for a lithium-ion battery system, so we're learning that as we go through the testings, and that has led us to our certification configuration battery sizing, and with that sizing and the validated predictive models, we have a high level of confidence that the aircraft that we are going to deliver to our customers with a type certificate from the U.K. is going to meet the performance requirements.
Was there any update on the powertrain supplier?
Oh, so for the powertrain supplier, we're still evaluating. If you look at the powertrain, we have the batteries which we're providing ourselves.
The integrated battery systems with the high-voltage architectures and the power distribution system, that's proprietary to us. What we're looking at right now is various suppliers for the electric propulsion units. So we have EPUs that are under test right now. However, we have not made a selection yet for our certification configuration for our motor supplier.
Understood. Understood. Follow-up, much higher level, I would guess, strategic question. We've seen what's going on in Germany with some of the eVTOL names. I'm curious on your thoughts just in general about the appetite for supporting eVTOL in Europe. And I know you've gotten almost GBP 40 million in grants. That's obviously encouraging. But do you worry at all about kind of a lack of whether it's government support or even just the public sentiment around eVTOL not having enough traction and trying to overcome that?
Edison, good question. This is not 2021 when there were the two SPACs taking place. It's a different funding environment. That being said, and there has been a shakeout in the industry, I think we are going to be one of the winners. And there's space for a few of us. But what we've done here is laid out, I think, a robust, bottom-up, rigorous plan that is underpinned, bought into by our engineering community. We know we can do this. When we do the Capital Markets Day next year and expose a little bit more in terms of the funding and the financing, this is eminently investable. Absolutely eminently investable. We're a global business. The aircraft will be done globally. We've got masses of engagement with the CAA. We work hand in hand with them.
We are learning every day what it takes to certify this new type of aircraft, and as David mentioned, we are #1 in this space, so we're getting a lot of help, support, and commitment, so I genuinely think this is something where we are going to be successful. Is that okay? Thanks, Edison.
Really appreciate it. I'm glad. Thank you.
Thank you. Before we take our last question, I do want to remind you, if you'd like to enter the queue, press star and the number one on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from the line of Austin Moeller with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is now open.
Hi. Good morning, so I just have a question on the prototypes. How many prototypes do you expect to build in the next year beyond Aircraft 3? Could you just go into a little detail on the status of Airc raft 3?
I'll take the second question on Aircraft 3, and then David can comment on the next. Aircraft 3, we will have 90 well, as of today, we've got 97% of the parts on board with us in our warehouse. We'll have 99% well, we'll have 100% by the end of the year. But we'll have 99% imminently. And then we'll start production off in Q1. So that aircraft will come online well into H1 next year. David, if you'd like to comment on the plans for the VX4 build, etc.
Yeah. Yes. Thanks for the question, Austin. Yeah. So as Stuart said, Aircraft 2 and Aircraft 3 are full-scale piloted prototypes that will be used for envelope expansion, risk reduction testing, and public demonstration flights.
So both of those aircraft, we expect to be flying consistently throughout 2025. Then we are going to build six more aircraft, Aircraft 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, that are going to be used for the certification program that will then be conformed to the type design that we are certifying with the CAA. And those six aircraft will be conducting tests in parallel to prove that the aircraft meets all of its safety standards, including tests that will be done in a ground configuration to prove out its endurance and its static and fatigue strength.
Great. And just a follow-up on the 2030 plan. Are you looking at building the factory for volume production in the UK? And how much do you expect to be able to produce in Bristol at the existing facility?
So good question. So first of all, yes, we anticipate doing assembly in the UK. We've looked at various things. And as I say, we've just moved someone onto my leadership team who will be focused on bringing that to life for us. And sorry, Austin, what was the second part of that question?
Oh, just how many units do you expect to be able to produce in terms of build rates at the existing facility in Bristol versus the units that you're talking about building in 2030?
Yeah. Great. So the first facility we stand up will be able to hit the output I quoted as a target for 2030, which is an exit rate annualized at over 200 units per year. So that's the first facility. Then we'll very quickly, on the back of that, be standin g up a second.
Great. Thanks for the details.
Thank you very much for the questions, Austin.
At this time, there are no further questions. So Stuart, I turn the call back over to you.
Great. Thank you. So Savi, David, Edison, Austin, thank you very much for joining and asking questions. I really, really appreciate it. I'm incredibly proud of what the team have delivered for me over the last three or four months, coming in as a new CEO and really stressing the organization to come up with a robust, bottom-up, detailed, rigorous plan that we all commit to has been an incredible amount of work, then building all the finance requirements around that as well so we're ready to go to market and do fundraising. It's been a phenomenal amount of work for the team. But I'm really proud to launch it today.
This is the starting gun firing for the next phase of Vertical and our commitments as we move from a prototype company to a certification focus, the launch of the aircraft, and then really building a long-term, sustainable, profitable business here in the UK. So thanks again for joining us. I really look forward to talking to you all again and hosting a Capital Market event in 2025 where we'll get everyone across to the UK to see the aircraft flying. So thank you very much and talk soon. Bye-bye.
This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.