Volocopter was going to fly passengers over the 2024 Paris Olympics. Its first product under new ownership is a two-seat ultralight with a 40-kilometre range, aimed at flying clubs and sightseeing operators.
That sentence is the whole story of the eVTOL second tier. While attention stayed on whether Joby and Archer would get a type certificate, three well-funded programmes behind them quietly reorganised. None of them collapsed. All three came down a rung.
Volocopter is certifying an ultralight
Volocopter filed for insolvency in December 2024 after missing the Olympics. In March 2025 its assets went to China’s Wanfeng Auto Holding Group through the Austrian manufacturer Diamond Aircraft, in a deal reported at around €10 million against assets valued near €42 million. Just over 180 of roughly 500 employees were kept.
What emerged from that is not a smaller air taxi company. It is a different kind of company.
In April 2026 Volocopter launched the VoloXPro, its first product under Diamond ownership: two seats, 18 rotors, 40 km range, 70 km/h cruise, 600 kg maximum takeoff weight, 154 kg payload. It is being certified in the German ultralight category, with approval and market entry targeted for the end of 2026 and parallel processes in other European countries. The stated customers are flight schools, flying clubs, air sports enthusiasts and sightseeing operators.
It reuses components developed for the VoloCity, which is how the programme survives at all — the engineering carries over even though the market does not.
The VoloCity itself has not been abandoned. Volocopter still expects type certification for it in 2027. But the aircraft that was going to run urban air taxi networks is now behind an ultralight for hobbyists in the company’s own roadmap, and the near-term certification target is a category that exists precisely because it demands less.
Ultralight certification is a genuine achievement and a real product. It is not what Volocopter raised roughly €590 million to build.
Supernal stopped and started over
Hyundai paused Supernal’s aircraft development in late summer 2025, after CEO Jaiwon Shin and CTO David McBride both left. In late February 2026 the company laid off 296 people — about 80% of its staff — across Irvine, Fremont and the Mojave Air & Space Port, leaving a core team of 70 to 80. It has had no permanent chief executive since.
The S-A2, the five-seat tilt-rotor unveiled at CES in January 2024 and shown at Farnborough that July, is explicitly no longer the product. Supernal says it will be used to refine design guides and technical foundations as it moves toward a next-generation aircraft.
In May 2026 Hyundai and Korea Aerospace Industries signed a memorandum of understanding to develop an advanced air mobility aircraft together, with Supernal as design authority and technical lead and KAI providing airframe manufacturing at scale and certification experience. No timeline, funding figure or hiring commitment was disclosed, and the original 2028 commercial target has no announced replacement.
A skeleton team writing requirements for an unnamed aircraft with a partner, four years after Hyundai committed to entering the market, is a restart rather than a delay.
Vertical kept the aircraft and lost the equity
Vertical Aerospace retired the VX4 name in December 2025. The certification-intent aircraft is the Valo, with an updated airframe, wing and propeller architecture, targeting four passengers over 100 miles and entry into service in 2028.
The engineering is real. Vertical flew on five consecutive days at Farnborough and expects a Critical Design Review by the end of 2026.
The financing is where the downgrade sits. In April 2026 the company closed a package of up to $850 million with Mudrick Capital Management and Yorkville Advisors, intended to cover an estimated $700 million cost of certifying Valo. The headline is large. Immediate working capital after a $50 million equity raise was around $160 million, and the company’s market capitalisation is roughly $103 million against a share price near $0.60.
A facility of up to $850 million drawn against a company worth $103 million is not a vote of confidence in the equity. It is a mechanism by which the aircraft can be funded and existing shareholders can be diluted to almost nothing while it happens. Both things can be true, and for anyone holding the stock rather than the technology, the second one is what matters.
What the pattern actually says
The easy reading is that eVTOL is failing. That is not what happened here.
All three aircraft programmes are alive. Volocopter will probably certify something this year, which is more than Joby or Archer can currently say. Vertical is flying. Supernal has a partner with real manufacturing capability.
What changed is the size of the promise. Urban air mobility was sold as a network business — thousands of aircraft, city-scale operations, ride-hailing economics. What survived the funding squeeze is a set of narrower propositions: a trainer and sightseeing aircraft, a requirements document, and a regional aircraft financed on terms that assume its shareholders are the least important stakeholders.
That is the same lesson the delivery side of this industry learned this year. Certification is expensive, slow and not the binding constraint. Money is. The programmes that adjusted their ambition to the capital actually available are the ones still operating.
What to watch
Whether VoloXPro certifies by the end of 2026. A German ultralight approval would make Volocopter the first of these three to put a certified electric aircraft into customers’ hands, from the weakest starting position of the three.
Whether the VoloCity 2027 target holds now that it sits behind a different product in its own company’s priorities.
Whether Supernal and KAI name an aircraft. Until there is a configuration, a timeline and a number, the partnership is an intention.
Vertical’s drawdown terms. The engineering milestones and the equity value are now separate questions. Watch how much of the $850 million is drawn, and at what price.
