AAM Spotlight: John Langford, Electra.aero

Based in Manassas, Virginia, Electra.aero is an advanced air mobility (AAM) startup looking to certify a nine-passenger, hybrid-electric short-takeoff-and-landing (STOL) aircraft for the regional air mobility market. John Langford, Electra’s founder and CEO, recently sat down with the AAM Report to discuss the rollout of the company’s technology demonstrator. Excerpts follow.

AAM Report: Where does the rollout of the technology demonstrator fit into the company’s overall certification effort?

Langford: It’s the third big step of what is roughly a five-step process. Step one was arriving at the idea that blown lift and hybrid-electric was a winning combination that could really make advanced air mobility work in a practical sense. So, we started with a third-scale model, did a bunch of analysis and wind tunnel testing that allowed us to put together a business plan and raise a seed round of investment in 2020. That funded our second step, development of the hybrid-electric propulsion system, which was primarily done at our propulsion test lab in Switzerland in 2021 and 2022. That’s the propulsion system that’s on our demonstrator. So, the third step is to fly the tech demonstrator, which is a two-passenger, roughly 3,000-lb., 38-ft.-wingspan aircraft that serves as a testbed for all the key systems that will go into our final production aircraft. 

What comes next?

The next step is the full-scale nine-passenger prototype, and that’s what the Air Force is funding through its Stratfi [Strategic and Tactical Funding Increase] program. We think of it as the Y-plane, which is the commercial prototype, and then the certified product will come after–that’s step five. Now, one of the major challenges we’ll have is finding a certified engine. We did the turbogenerator for the tech demonstrator ourselves, and that works fine for an experimental airplane, but it’s not a certified product. The turbine we have in there now is designed to be low-cost; it’s not quiet, it’s not particularly fuel-efficient, and it’s not designed to be certified. We never intended to be in the turbine development business–that’s a job for very specialized, big companies. Another thing that’s missing from the tech demonstrator is fly-by-wire, so we’ll have to have those systems in place for the Y-plane prototype. 

What went into the decision to develop a nine-passenger plane? 

It’s what our customers are interested in. We held hundreds of conversations over the last three years and concluded that nine seats was about the smallest we could get any interest in. That said, we’ve had a lot of interest from people who have seen the tech demonstrator and noticed that it’s about equivalent to most of the eVTOLs [electric-vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles] out there. So we’ve thought about just putting another row or two of seats in the back and using it as basically a prototype for our next product. That said, we’re waiting to see the market response, because I’m really quite skeptical about demand for four-seat airplanes. But if there’s enough interest, we think there probably could be a direct path to market for the demonstrator as a product that could compete directly with the eVTOLs from companies like Wisk, Joby or Vertical. 

But the S-1 is intended as a regional air mobility aircraft. What do you think about the urban air mobility concept?

If that turns out to be a market that people can make money in, then we think we have a great way to do that. But generally, I’m a bit skeptical of that concept as a business plan. There are enormous market projections for urban and advanced air mobility, but they are still paper projections that remain to be validated. Our business plan is completely sustainable on simply the replacement market alone for stuff that’s already in the field. Then from there we go to the next step, which is expansion of regional air mobility. We’re not just trying to decarbonize aviation; the whole idea is to expand the reach and access new markets. From there, we can look at urban mobility too, but it’s not our base market. 

Why did you choose to focus on the STOL capability as opposed to VTOL? 

The aircraft is designed to operate to and from the Wall Street Heliport, which is where the 300-by-100-foot requirement comes from, or just about the size of a soccer field. But taking a step back, I don’t really buy the infrastructure requirements that go along with what many of the eVTOL companies are doing. Our commercial customers would be severely constrained by the need to land at a place with a significant recharging station–and certainly our military customers won’t even hear of that. The things that are going to recharge planes–they’re not like electric car charging stations, they’re much bigger than that. So the idea that you have to put in a lot of infrastructure either on the landing site or the charging site is a big handicap to many business plans, and we work very hard to minimize that. You can never get rid of all infrastructure, but being infrastructure-light is a critical part of our business plan. We don’t need new airports or charging stations, just a small, soccer-field-sized airfield to take off and land from.

What is the advantage of blown-lift propulsion for an ultra-STOL aircraft?

The basic idea is that if you integrate propulsion and aerodynamics, you get an effect on the wing that essentially makes it much bigger than it physically is. Essentially, what you’re doing is bathing the wing in high-speed air from the propulsion system and, through a combination of effects, you can get very high lift coefficients of around three times what you can get on a normal airplane. So through this jet sheet that surrounds the wing, that essentially makes the wing look physically larger to the airflow than it actually is. You can use that in a number of ways, but for Electra, we’re trying to get helicopter-like versatility, and we use the blown lift to do that. So, it looks like we have a much larger wing when we’re using the blown lift for takeoff and landing, and that big wing allows you to fly slowly, and the slow speed is what allows you to get in and out of very small spaces. 

So, why hasn’t blown lift been used much in the past for this kind of application?

The big breakthrough is distributed electric propulsion, which is what really enables the blown lift technology to work economically, and the blown-lift is what allows you to do the extreme-STOL. So, we couldn’t do this without the combination of the blown-lift and the distributed electric propulsion. Generally speaking, electrification makes aircraft performance worse, excepting for a few limited circumstances, and this is one of them. Most electric airplanes out there can easily be beaten by a conventional counterpart in terms of performance. So, what we’re doing here is making an electric airplane that makes good business sense–with the underlying premise being that most electric airplanes don’t actually make sense.