Vertical Aerospace Ltd. Ordinary Shares

Good morning. My name is Warren, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Vertical Aerospace's Q1 2026 Business and Strategy Update Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. I will now hand the conference over to Jillian Levine, IR Lead at Vertical Aerospace. You may begin your conference.

Good morning. I am delighted to welcome you to Vertical Aerospace's first quarter 2026 business and strategy update call. Before we get started, I would like to remind you that during today's call, we'll be making forward-looking statements. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statements we make are based on assumptions as of today. We undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. We've posted an accompanying slide deck to our investor relations website at investors.verticalaerospace.com, which contains detailed information on forward-looking statements. For a more complete discussion about these risks and uncertainties, we have filed our financial results for the quarter ended March 31st, 2026, with the SEC earlier today. Please now let me hand over to our Chairman, Donald Flehery.

Good morning and thank you all for joining us. Since you last heard from us in March, Vertical Aerospace has achieved the most significant milestone in our history, the successful two-way piloted transition of our prototype aircraft, placing us in a very limited group globally to demonstrate this capability. Transition flight from vertical lift to wing-borne flight and back is the fundamental technical barrier in eVTOLs. Successfully completing it validates our design, materially de-risks the certification pathway and marks the shift from development to real-world execution. Moments like this are rare. They are the inflection points where ambition becomes reality. This achievement is a direct result of outstanding execution across our engineering, flight tests and operations teams. Their precision and discipline made this possible. Today, we'll cover the transition flight, our next major milestone, critical design review, and finally conclude with our outlook and financing update. Before handing over to our Chief Test Pilot, Cy Davies, who was at the controls for this flight, I'd like to briefly frame for you what transition actually means in practice.