Volatus Aerospace successfully achieves GPS-denied flight milestone with V-Cortex

Volatus Aerospace Inc., a Canadian-headquartered global aerospace and defence company, today announced the successful completion of initial flight testing of its proprietary V-Cortex AI Flight Controller and Autonomy Operating System.

The testing successfully demonstrated GNSS-denied navigation without reliance on external sensors, using onboard default sensors to maintain flight. This breakthrough represents a major advancement in autonomous operations in environments where GPS signals are unavailable, degraded, or intentionally disrupted, including contested environments, dense urban areas, and remote regions such as Canada's Arctic.

"At CANSEC, we introduced V-Cortex as Canada's sovereign autonomy platform. These initial flights move the platform from development to demonstrated performance," said Glen Lynch, Chief Executive Officer of Volatus. "Successfully navigating without GPS or external sensors is a major technical milestone that validates our approach to resilient autonomy. It brings us one step closer to delivering a Canadian-developed solution for defence, public safety, and critical infrastructure operators."

V-Cortex is designed as a common autonomy layer, platform agnostic and multi-domain, that can be integrated across multiple uncrewed aircraft platforms. Its open, modular architecture allows Volatus to advance new aircraft and mission capabilities without developing a separate autonomy system for each platform, supporting faster integration, greater scalability and sovereign control of critical flight technologies.

Designed and developed entirely in Canada, V-Cortex combines advanced flight control, AI-enabled autonomy, and an open, modular architecture to support a broad range of uncrewed aircraft systems. Development of the V-Cortex autonomy stack continues to be supported through advisory services and funding from the National Research Council of Canada's Industrial Research Assistance Programme (NRC IRAP) through its Defence Industry Assist initiative.

Additional flight testing and capability demonstrations are planned throughout 2026 as Volatus advances the V-Cortex platform toward operational deployment across its growing family of autonomous systems.