Certo Aerospace has secured £5 million in new investment to accelerate development of its Capstone autonomous heavy-lift aircraft, adding further capital to a British programme that has moved through three years of flight testing, Ministry of Defence demonstrations and integration work with BAE Systems.
Capstone is a 600kg-class coaxial vertical take-off and landing uncrewed air system developed for missions including logistics, casualty evacuation, maritime operations, construction and defence. Two contra-rotating main rotors are mounted on the same axis, removing the conventional helicopter tail rotor and allowing the aircraft to retain a compact footprint while directing propulsion power through the main rotor system.
The aircraft has been flying since 2023 and completed its third year of flight trials during 2026, with Certo testing the platform under Civil Aviation Authority operational authorisation at several UK locations. Current reference figures published through BAE Systems give a maximum payload of 280kg in the integration configuration, endurance of up to ten hours and maximum range of 300 miles, while Certo’s own wider product material quotes payload capability of up to 300kg depending on configuration.
Development has progressed through missions that exercise substantially different parts of the aircraft rather than repeating basic flight demonstrations. Under the Ministry of Defence’s Project MORRIGHAN, Capstone carried logistics and casualty-evacuation systems through autonomous take-off, waypoint navigation, descent and precision landing, while later Royal Navy work combined sonobuoy carriage, acoustic processing and data transmission for an anti-submarine warfare demonstration.
BAE Systems is working with Certo through FalconWorks to develop Capstone for more demanding military integration, including the British Army’s Project NYX programme for next-generation autonomous aircraft capable of operating alongside Apache helicopters. The joint proposal has been down-selected, with BAE identifying 2030 as the target for initial operational capability across the wider programme and contributing expertise around autonomy, intelligence and surveillance systems, digital engineering and mission integration.
Certo retains a modular open-system approach around the aircraft, allowing payloads, avionics, mission computers, communications links and other subsystems to be changed without redesigning the complete vehicle. The same modularity extends into major airframe elements including rotors, transmission, engine, undercarriage and payload interfaces, giving the development team a route to update individual modules as flight testing exposes limitations or customer requirements change.
Additional investment becomes more significant as the programme moves away from proving that the aircraft can fly and towards establishing an engineering baseline suitable for repeat production. Prototype aircraft can tolerate frequent design changes, extensive inspection and specialist intervention between flights, whereas a production system needs stable drawings, controlled suppliers, defined assembly procedures, test standards and maintenance documentation that allow equivalent aircraft to be built without relying on the development team to resolve every variation individually.
Coaxial rotorcraft create their own manufacturing and maintenance demands despite removing the tail-rotor installation of a conventional helicopter. Rotor-head geometry, transmission components, vibration control, blade tracking and flight-control systems all have to manage two large counter-rotating rotor systems in close proximity, while the aircraft’s autonomous operation adds software, sensors, communications and redundancy requirements to an already mechanically complex platform.
The latest £5 million follows an earlier £3 million equity raise announced in April 2025, when Certo said the capital would accelerate flight testing. Since then, the programme has accumulated additional demonstrations, a BAE Systems teaming relationship and a broader set of payload integrations, placing the new investment into a development programme with considerably more flight evidence than at the previous funding round.
Manufacturing scale remains the next difficult threshold because customer interest in a demonstrator does not automatically provide enough volume to establish a stable supply chain. Engines, rotor components, transmissions, avionics, structures and mission equipment each need qualified sources, while production tooling and skilled staff have to be justified against orders that may arrive programme by programme rather than through a single high-volume contract.
Certo’s civil and commercial plans broaden the potential production base beyond defence, with the company identifying logistics, construction, firefighting, disaster response and other missions where vertical lift is required without carrying a crew. Those applications impose different payload, certification and support requirements, although using a common aircraft architecture across several roles could provide greater manufacturing continuity than building a dedicated airframe for each market.
The £5 million raise gives Certo further resources to close the gap between a flight-tested aircraft and an industrial product that can be manufactured and supported repeatedly. Capstone already has several years of flying behind it; the harder phase now lies in converting that accumulated engineering work into a controlled production configuration capable of meeting operational, certification and customer requirements without losing the flexibility that has supported the programme’s development.
