Ravi Tamta’s test flight in Almora has done exactly what it was designed to do: go viral. A grassroot innovator from a Himalayan village, an electric “flying car” called the HAPIDA SKYNEX, a flawless demo, and a pitch about cutting a 90-minute mountain drive down to 10 minutes in the air. It’s a great story, till you compare it with more advanced players like the ePlane Company.
What Ravi Tamta actually showed us
On ground what exists is a single-seater prototype built on modified drone technology, flown untethered over an open ground in Almora. That’s a real and non-trivial engineering achievement for an independent innovator.
However, the coverage itself admits the gaps: no published battery capacity, no flight duration, no payload figures, no charging time, no motor or rotor specs. There’s no indication of DGCA (India’s civil aviation regulator) engagement, no certification roadmap, and no disclosed safety systems beyond “no tether was used.”
What other India eVTOLs are building
Now put that next to The ePlane Company, an IIT Madras-incubated eVTOL startup founded back in 2017. ePlane isn’t flying a modified drone in a field — it has secured India’s first Design Organisation Approval from the DGCA, opened a 60,000 sq. ft. serial-production facility, and unveiled a full-scale prototype (the e200X PT-01) after nearly five years of progressively larger flying demonstrators.
It has raised over $21 million, signed manufacturing MoUs with aerospace suppliers, and claims commitments for more than 800 aircraft, with air ambulance services as the planned first commercial use case by mid-2027.
That gap isn’t cosmetic. It’s the difference between a garage-scale demonstration and a regulated aerospace program that has to prove structural integrity, redundant power systems, controlled airspace integration, and passenger safety before a single paying customer ever boards.
Why the comparison matters
None of this is to dismiss Tamta. India needs more grassroots hardware innovators willing to build and fly things themselves, and a self-funded team pulling off an untethered manned flight is a genuine feat. But “flying car” headlines tend to erase the enormous distance between “it lifted off the ground” and “it is a safe, certified, everyday transportation product.”
The risk with stories like SKYNEX is that virality outruns verification. A dramatic video plus bold claims about slashing travel times can generate funding interest and press before the underlying engineering. Uttarakhand’s terrain genuinely could benefit from aerial mobility. But “we flew it once, untethered, over a field” is the first sentence of a very long story, not the ending.
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