Honda has flown its full-scale eVTOL demonstrator for the first time. The company announced on May 28 that the test took place on April 1 at its research and development center in San Luis Obispo, California. It was a hover test, and the aircraft stayed up for around 90 seconds.
The prototype, called F1, weighs roughly 7,000 pounds and flew uncrewed. It is a lift-and-cruise design: eight lift propellers sit on twin curved booms that join shorter forward wings to longer aft ones. Power is hybrid-electric, with an onboard turbogenerator Honda developed itself. The target range is about 249 miles (400 km), and the stated capacity is four passengers plus a pilot.
Honda’s Global R&D division broke the news in a post on X. Research on eVTOLs has run since 2020, it said, including more than 400 flight tests with subscale models, and the F1 flight moves the program into a full-scale validation phase where core technologies are checked at real-world size.
Why the wait
The gap between flight and announcement was intended. Susumu Mashio, who leads the New Mobility Research Domain at HGRX, wrote in January that the team “intentionally said very little” after announcing its eVTOL work in 2021. In his words: “Rather than letting expectations run ahead while we were still halfway there, we wanted to focus first on building up the technology.”
Honda first showed its hand publicly at the Dubai Airshow in November 2025. It said then that it had been flying a one-third scale demonstrator for about two years at San Luis Obispo, logging more than 400 subscale flights that verified the flight control laws and achieved hover-to-forward-flight transitions.
The FAA granted Honda Research Institute an experimental special airworthiness certificate for that subscale prototype in October 2024, covering demonstration flights at the site through October 2026. Honda has not confirmed the certification status of the full-scale F1.
The company is aiming for FAA type certification in the early 2030s. It has not named launch customers or announced commercial financing for the program.
