Sarla Aviation to Invest in Anantapur

Visakhapatnam: Sarla Aviation, a startup from Bengaluru, signed an MoU with AP government during the CII Summit here for establishing a 500 acre aerospace campus with a promised investment of ₹1,300 crore.The factory would come up in Thimmasamudram in Anantapur district.Spread across 500-acres, this would be a next-generation integrated urban air mobility giga facility that would manufacture electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOL) and power India’s entry into the era of aerial mobility.With an initial investment of ₹1,300 crore and significant additional investment planned in the future, the project positions India as a global contender in future aviation technologies.Once operational, the giga campus would become India’s first fully integrated ecosystem for manufacture of such aircraft, their flight testing, certification, training and maintenance.Designed to international aerospace standards, the facility will have the capacity to produce up to 1,000 aircraft every year, making it one of the largest eVTOL manufacturing hubs worldwide.The sky factory would bring together advanced manufacturing lines for composites, power-train, wire harnesses, landing gear systems, flight control computers and embedded systems, supported by India’s largest wind tunnel and a dedicated two-km runway and purpose-built VTOL testing pads.The campus is being designed with sustainability at its core, integrating renewable energy systems, water-recycling and zero-liquid-discharge mechanisms and circular-economy practices for composites and metals.Sarla Aviation is working closely with the AP government to co-develop infrastructure for certification, R&D, and operational readiness. The collaboration would help build dedicated UAM corridors and vertiports, laying the groundwork for commercial air-taxi services across major southern cities by 2029.“With the world’s biggest sky factory, we want to make India a nerve centre for the next era of flight. This giga facility would shape the aircraft of the future, create thousands of high-skill jobs and establish India as a global force in sustainable aerial mobility,’’ said Rakesh Gaonkar, co-founder and CTO, Sarla Aviation.



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