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Polish startup Draco Aircraft is looking to secure a third investor that should give the company sufficient capital to launch a three-year development and certification program of its Wilga PZL-104-based platform targeting civil and military customers.
Draco in recent months has signed up two anchor investors: U.S. venture capital fund Founder’s Box and Kylla Corporate Transactions. “We are currently in discussion with a third investor, hopefully with a big enough investment to allow us to really get started,” CEO Johannes von Thadden said in an interview.
The company has set an aggressive timeline for what it bills as a hyper-short-takeoff-and-landing aircraft (HyperSTOL), aiming to have gone through approvals and be ready for customer delivery in three years.
Once the starting gun is formally fired, the company will focus on completing the design for the aircraft for license approval, von Thadden said. Draco plans design changes to the Wilga PZL-104, including using a more powerful Pratt & Whitney PT6A-135A engine and a five-bladed propeller from MT Propeller.
To help with the work while keeping in-house staffing manageable at the outset, Draco has teamed with the Polish Institute of Aviation, said von Thadden, who once ran Airbus operations in Poland. The company also aims to digitize the design drawings.
The second step will be starting up the certification process with the European Union Aviation Safety Agency and the FAA. Draco will pursue a major change certification process rather than a clean-sheet design approval to ease the process and in the hope of keeping costs down. The company will build two prototypes for ground and flight testing to support that effort.
Next comes the decision on a production location. That choice will be somewhat contingent on the wishes of the strategic investor. Customer location also could be a factor. The market for the aircraft is likely in countries such as the U.S., Canada, Australia, Brazil, South Africa and India, where back-country flying is relatively common. The company is targeting about 30 civil aircraft per year.
For now, Poland remains in a strong position for the work, though. While the country was long viewed as a low-cost production location, strong economic growth over recent years has changed that reality, von Thadden said, so local aerospace expertise is a bigger draw for doing the work in Poland.
Even before embarking on the baseline program, von Thadden also said there are growth plans. For instance, the Draco will be equipped with a safety backup system allowing the aircraft to land itself if the pilot is incapacitated, which would open the door to drone operations.
In its military application, the aircraft could carry drones, weapons or sensors, either in a crewed or uncrewed fashion, von Thadden said. The aircraft-maker said Draco could cruise at 285 mph, have a range of 1,000 nm, stay airborne 6 hr. and carry a 2,300-lb. payload.
Von Thadden also sees it as a potential counter-drone system, armed with machine guns for lower-cost intercepts of such threats. One advantage of the system, he added, is that it could operate near the front lines given its HyperSTOL performance characteristics.
“We are in discussion with some potential military customers,” von Thadden said.
Draco is in talks with several companies to help with the flight automation elements, including Skyryse and Mindset Technologies.
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