Question: Have youe ever destroyed a helicopter or plane whilst testing it?

Sarah Beasley answered on 15 Jun 2015:

I haven’t, but it has definitely been done. Or at least, they’ve crashed whilst testing, it’s dangerous because it’s so experimental. Did you see the A400M aircraft crashed recently? The reason we’re testing aircraft is because we don’t know how it works, so something like that can go wrong and there’s nothing we can do about it.

The only things we can do beforehand are try and make the risks as low as possible. It’s unlikely we’ll be able to do a trial if it’s classed as high risk. For example, if we’re going to put an aircraft in the air and we don’t know if we can trust its software, we’re not going to do it!