Podcast: What We Saw Inside JetZero

Announcer:          

  Join us at AeroEngines Europe 2025 in Hamburg this September. Hear from leading experts about the challenges and opportunities in MRO, supply chain optimization and the paths to net-zero emissions and next-gen engine technologies. Featured items include a shop tour and hosted reception on the historic Cap San Diego. Check 6 listeners save 20% with promotion code Check 6. Register at aeroengineseurope.aviationweek.com. See you in Hamburg.

Joe Anselmo:

Welcome to this week's Check 6 podcast. I'm Joe Anselmo, Aviation Week's Editorial Director and Editor-in-Chief of Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine. Air travel has evolved greatly over the last 100 years, but one thing has remained the same, passengers still sit in a tube connected to wings. A California startup wants to change that.

In 2023 Aviation Week's Guy Norris broke the details of JetZero's plan to develop a 250 blended wing body airliner that could double as a military tanker- transport. Two years later, JetZero continues to move forward. Bolstered by $235 million dollars in US Air Force funding, JetZero has partnered with Northrop Grumman’s Scaled Composites to build a prototype to validate the blended wing body concept. The test the aircraft is on track to fly in late 2027. JetZero has also teamed up with Siemens to incorporate cutting-edge digital design tools.

 If it works out -- and that's still a big if -- JetZero hopes to be building 200 airliners a year in the 2030s. United Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Alaska Airlines have all said that they will order the airplane if it comes to market. Guy, Aviation Week's Steve Trimble and I attended JetZero's first Media Day last week at the company's headquarters at Long Beach Airport. They're here with me now to provide their impressions. Guy, let's start off for our listeners that aren't quite sure what a BWB airplane is, tell us what it is, and what the advantages of using it are.

Guy Norris:     

Good question, Joe. Honestly, the best way to describe it is, as the word suggests, blended, it's a blend of the fuselage and wings in a seamless way that creates this large lifting surface. So what you do is essentially is by eliminating the wing-body junction, you not only reduce drag that would be formed there, but you actually increase the lifting area of the whole aircraft, the whole vehicle. So the lift minus the drag if you like, make sure that you're sort of going to a new level of efficiency that's really never been achievable before with tube and wing. The other thing of course is that you create this massive internal volume sort of for free, which enables you to do all sorts of clever things inside, maximize the efficiency of the internal area, and carry a lot more fuel, for example, if that's what you want to do, or cargo, and so forth. So it really does just change the game.

Joe Anselmo:   

And they're claiming a 50% improvement in fuel burn?

Guy Norris:           

They are. Now, you've got to remember that that does include potentially advanced engines. So we're going to talk a little bit about where we are with engines here. But it does imagine that you're talking about the very latest in propulsion technology as well as aerodynamics. So a lot of things have to come together to get that magic 50%. But we will talk a little bit about how they get there.

Joe Anselmo:              

And one of the things that struck me, they have a mock-up of a cabin. So we're all used to getting on an airplane, and you walk through the first class all the way to the back. And this is more like a room. I mean, because it's sort of a square cabin that narrows toward the cockpit, but with a really wide door, it's a completely different concept from anything we've ever seen.

Guy Norris:             

 So JetZero's initial family versions are called the Z3, Z4, and Z5. And the four refers to the four bays or fuselage sort of cabin areas, which you kind of are describing there, Joe. And you're right, when you enter to the inside of this mock-up, you're presented with a atrium area, which again is an unusual thing in itself. It spreads itself. You can go left to what they would say would be first class, right into this area with four main bays. Each bay is, as you say, squared off. It's made up of four separate aisles and then divided it depending on how the configuration goes into coach and business type class seats. The main thing they're saying is that you can throw away all your concepts, the previous ideas of getting on board a tube, you're talking about reimagining in the interior what's possible in new cabins.

 And one of the things, for example, I say is every single seat regardless will have its own dedicated overhead baggage area. So you don't have that pre-flight nerves about whether you'll make it in time to your seat to find enough space for your carry-on. And stuff like that, it just does change the game in terms of what people can imagine with the interior. And the other thing is, of course, I said, "Well, is this going back to the great days of the early 1970s when Pan Am wanted to put a piano bar on the upper deck of the 747?" And the realism of economics soon got rid of things like that. Will you just literally fill this thing with seats? And they say, "Well, to a point can do that, but there are certain limits within this area, which will actually keep the airlines restricted in a way, in this particular configuration to around 250 seats maximum. And you'll still make money." That's what they're saying. It doesn't matter about that. But they will be resisting the temptation to say, put 500 people in there. You can't.

Joe Anselmo:             

Steve Trimble, I think you, Guy and I all agreed that their media day was impressive. We came away, we learned a lot. Did you come away more impressed with JetZero's chances for being a viable business?

Steve Trimble:        

Okay, the thing that really got driven home on that media day is you see the investment that's been made in the past two years with a financing that they've been able to raise in two big areas. One is infrastructure for testing and simulation on the ground and a bit in the air with their Pathfinder subscale demonstrator series. And then also investment in people. They've gone out and hired a lot of very impressive people from all over the aerospace industry all over the world. And they've all come, and some of them are still in different places, but a large group is there in Long Beach. And that's very impressive. You do see that investment taking shape. We saw the various test facilities they have in there. They're testing control laws. They've got to get to a full scale demonstrator flight test by 2027.

 Scaled Composites is building the aircraft right now. And they're working on the flight control laws for the fly-by-wire system on that demonstrator. That's absolutely essential for them to move to the next phase, where they start developing the airliner version of it perhaps. There's also a chance perhaps that a military air refueling version of the aircraft could become viable if certain things happen in the Air Force modernization priority plan, which are not quite at the moment envisioned. But everything is steaming towards this 2027 first flight date for that full scale flight demonstrator of that aircraft. And Guy and I were talking before the call about all the things that they're going to have to prove, because this is a new configuration, it's a new aircraft. On top of all the things that Boeing or Airbus would have to prove every time they come out with the next tube and wing type aircraft, there's a lot of new things that are just inherent with a new aircraft design that they'll have to go over some very fundamental things.

And sometimes that can be easy. Usually it's very complicated, and often it's very expensive. So those are the big challenges. We can go into those in more detail too.

Joe Anselmo:            

Guy, I have to agree, when I put my skeptic hat on, it's just like Steve said, they're developing a brand new aircraft from scratch. And they're going to draw on the same supply chain as Boeing and Airbus. Boeing and Airbus are having a hard time building airplanes that they've done for decades, because of the supply chain. And I kept asking them, "Well, how do you think you can spool up and have everything go perfect?" And they just kept saying, "Well, we're just doing it from scratch."

Guy Norris:             

But I do think that their plan recognizes the fact that spooling up, as you say, is it's not going to be either easy or fast. And they do acknowledge that. In terms of production, they've narrowed down their search for a production site to the final three. I think they've looked at 24 locations around 13 states. Now, the reason they've deferred the decision on down select to the final one is because they've gone back to these three finalists and they're all coming back with incentivized packages.

So. I think they're going to be announcing the final site in the next few months. But what it does mean is that they know what the challenges are. And one of the things that they're sort of saying is that this phased build up to production is going to take in all of lessons learned that they've seen on other sites. So they're kind of looking at one bay that will produce five aircraft, building on a second that will add in a next phase, a further five. And then moving to the third phase where they'll double up both of those two, and replicate exactly the same production system. But they know this is going to take a few years. So it's going to be a steady approach, if you like. I'm looking for the numbers. I can't see them right now, but I'll try and get them to you before the end of the podcast.

Joe Anselmo:            

Steve, the one thing to echo what you said, I was impressed by the quality of the management team, Airbus, Boeing, Embraer, SpaceX, NASA, Gulfstream veterans, solid management team. Suppliers, Northrop, Siemens, Thales, Parker, Safran, Pratt & Whitney, Eaton, Woodward, good aerospace companies. These guys are for real, unlike some of the other ventures maybe we've come across.

Steve Trimble:         

Yes, they have the financing in place to make a proper go at this. But the supply chain is an interesting part of this, because it's so essential to their strategy, and also sort of fundamental to how you look at this new configuration. For decades we have, to advance the cause of commercial air travel and even military airlift and air refueling, there's always been this pursuit of the next big increase in fuel efficiency has to come from the propulsion. And you're just constantly trying to generate new miracles from that propulsive Brayton cycle process. And we've seen the challenges with continuing to rely on advances in propulsion technology, where it gets almost to the breaking point, literally. And so you see setbacks with engine certifications and in-service issues that have to be addressed and fleet groundings and fleet repairs. And so that issue has been a big problem for airlines and for everybody.

 And now you can go to this totally different paradigm, because you're going to a blended wing body where the efficiency doesn't come from that engine improvement. In fact, they're going to use that a 40-old-old engine on the demonstrator, and they might even use an improved version of that for the commercial airliner entry into service standard with the PW2040. So you can use that blended wing body configuration to get that generational leap in fuel efficiency plus operate at a higher altitude, a more efficient altitude. So that's the good things. But of course that comes with trade-offs.

One of the things Guy and I were talking about right before the call is, you look at that aircraft and you just wonder, how is that going to stall? How is an aircraft like that going to stall in flight? Is it going to pitch down like the FAA wants? Because if it pitches down, your problem becomes your solution. Because how do you recover from a stall, is you pitch the aircraft down, you get more speed and you get air over the control surfaces, keep going. But on an aft-weighted aircraft with those big engines in the back, you feel like it might be more like a 727, where you risk it going into a deep stall where the aircraft pitches up and the aircraft itself blocks the airflow from going over the control surfaces. So, you can't recover.

Now, the JetZero aircraft is not a 727, it's a fly-by-wire aircraft. And as the test pilot assured me, they have envelope protections built in. Of course that would make it almost impossible for a pilot to stall the aircraft. And I would emphasize that word almost, because pilots always find a way to do this. And so the FAA is going to look at that. And they need to figure out a way to show that even if it does pitch up, that the recovery will be smooth and predictable and you won't get into that deep stall regime that they saw with the 727 decades ago. So that's one part of it.

The CEO is talking about how this is not a clean sheet aircraft, it's a clean slate aircraft. And by that he means yes, it's a new airframe, but they're not asking suppliers to invent new systems, or new architectures to fill that airplane with all the stuff it needs, the hydraulics, the pneumatics, the propulsion, the avionics. Everything is going to come off the shelf, and you don't need to extract every little ounce of performance from each of those subsystems to get to that higher level, as some of the tube and wing aircraft configurations have to do as they introduce new and improved versions of them. But even then, what do these improvements look like, or what do these off the shelf subsystems look like?

We were talking about the PW2040. Great example. Yes, you can take this 40-year-old engine, put it on a JetZero, and you're still going to get this reduction in fuel efficiency, because of this aerodynamic configuration, because you're operating at a higher altitude. But at the same time that combustor is a 40-year-old combustor. And airlines aren't going to want to buy it unless it's got the NOx emissions reductions of a modern combustor. So you're going to have to change the combustor, you're going to change the FADAC. And as the head of engineering for JetZero also talked about, they're mounting in a new place. It's not under the wing anymore. It's now on top of the aircraft at the very back. And so that means they have to change the mounting structure, which changes a lot of things about how you put together all those internal components in the engine.

 And extrapolate that to all the subsystems. There's going to be tweaks here and changes there to adapt each of those existing off the shelf subsystems for this new configuration. This all can be done, but these are all the complications, these are all the challenges that they have to go through, and the things that they have to prove. And proving it to me or proving it to Guy or proving it to the airline is one thing, but to prove it to the FAA's satisfaction, that's the real standard that they have. That's the real challenge. And that can be a very expensive challenge.

Guy Norris:             

 Just jumping in. So first of all, on the production side, I just wanted to go back quickly before I forget. The plan is to, by the end of the fifth year of production, be making 20 a month. That's their plan. And they said, "We know this sounds like a lot, but it's a step-up approach." And what they're looking at is making, they call it the four corner approach. They're basically saying wings, the back deck and the nose can all be given out to other manufacturers and they're going to put those out to bid. Their main part is obviously building that massive big center body. So that's their focus for production. And they're saying, "Yes, it's a long wingspan, but it's a short-body airplane with fairly simple architecture.” All the control services are hinged, for example. There's no big forged titanium parts.

 And as we've said, there's lots of commercial off-the-shelf parts within the system within the aircraft, well understood. So anyway, that's what they're trying to say, The 787 at its height managed to get to 14 a month. And they're saying they can do better than that, because they're coming in from this clean slate approach that Steve said. And the couple of things that Steve raised, the FAA, Part 25, 2003 stipulates very specifically that the aircraft must be controllable during and after stall with roll and yaw being correctable via ailerons and rudder of course. But no abnormal nose-up pitching must occur. And that's written in stone these days, especially after the terrible experiences that Boeing MAX and the MCAS system went through. So there's no changing that, they're going to have to figure it out.

So my final area I was just going to quickly address is on the engines. And Steve again mentioned the fact that the Ye Olde Pratt & Whitney 2000, it's a great engine. It's been remarkable, and it's done fantastically well. On the C17 it's still in low-level production for spares, I believe. So resurrecting that, but with some improvements. Who'd have thought that in 2030 almost you'd be looking at an engine by then is going to be 50 years old that might be the perfect solution. It's so counterintuitive when for the past three decades, all the engine manufacturers and the airframers have been banging on about greater and greater bypass ratios, 11 to 1 with things like the Leap and going to even greater bypass ratios with the Rise and the Ultrafan or the GE9X.

Now all of a sudden you've got a manufacturer who says, "No, you don't need to worry about that. We can get away with it. We don't have to worry about the noise because the engines are on top of the top deck. We don't have to worry about the efficiency, because of the built-in low drag and improved performance of the blended wing body. So what we need is an engine that gives us a constant, no more than 80% max continuous thrust rating all the way from sea level to our new higher altitude cruise capability at 45,000 feet.” That's where the sweet spot is for the blended wing body in terms of cruise. So the specification they're asking for the engine makers is a higher top of climb thrust, which you can only get with a relatively smaller bypass ratio. That's why they're driving towards back to the future as it were with an engine like the PW2000, or even further an RB211 if such a thing could be resurrected.

 And I think finally, I should say that they know Pratt is in the driving seat, certainly for the demonstrator as Steve said, but also for the production version at this stage. But the airlines say they want a competition, they want a choice of engines. So somebody else has to come in.

Steve Trimble:        

What engine could that be? The only other engine in that class with that kind of bypass ratio would be the RB211, which doesn't really have a FADEC.

Guy Norris:               

No. And would be massively expensive to, I don't think Rolls could even consider bringing it back into production. I don't know. But weirdly, four engine makers proposed at the last airline meeting that they had in just a few weeks ago. Yes, Pratt & Whitney, of course, Rolls-Royce. GE/CFM was the third one, but who was the other one? Kratos FTT, which of course is the engine maker developing the Symphony for Boom's Overture supersonic airliner. So you know we're in to a changing world of potential suppliers here, and this is just another paradigm shift. I don't know whether it'll come off, who knows? But it shows the ambitions of FTT. It shows the ambitions of new players like JetZero.

Joe Anselmo:        

 Guys, we're just about out of time. I did want to ask you, it costs billions of dollars to develop a new airplane. They have not raised billions of dollars yet. Do they have enough to see them through the test flight of the demonstrator, and then hope the investment follows? Is that the plan?

Steve Trimble:    

 So I did have a conversation about this with [CEO and cofounder] Tom O'Leary. And yeah, they're doing their series B around finance, they're gathering that at the moment. And with that, that unlocks the next tranche of financing support from the US Air Force. You may recall that US Air Force awarded them a $235 million contract that is awarded in tranches. And each tranche is aligned with matching private fundraising. So with that, that's how they get to fund that demonstrator.

But here's just one last point I want to make, because this is really important, I think. Let's just say, let's give them, they've got certification. All these challenges that we've talked about, they get that through the FAA. Before they get the airline support, the question is, what does Boeing and Airbus do? Boeing is in a tight position right now. I don't know if they've got the money or the wherewithal to respond directly in the near future. Airbus may be a different story.

If you rewind the clock 10 years, Boeing had the new mid-market airplane, the NMA concept. And that was going to be a clean sheet aircraft, tube and wing, going after the exact same market that JetZero is aiming for that middle of the market segment. And Boeing was going to have to pay tens of billions of dollars to bring that aircraft to market. Just like JetZero is probably going to have to raise that much money to do that. And at the time, every time we wrote that story, we always wrote that the response could come from Airbus with an A322, another derivative, a pretty advanced derivative. They were going to have to do something new with the wing, probably. They were going to have to do something different with the engine, go from a planetary gear to a star gear if it was a turbofan for example. Those are big changes, but not quite a clean sheet aircraft.

And the question is, what will Airbus do if JetZero is successful in bringing this to the market? At that point, you're going to have to have airlines say that they want a third option in the market in this category. And that's the only way a company like JetZero can survive, I think.

Joe Anselmo:          

Guy, I'll give you the final word. Go quick.

Guy Norris:      

I talk to Dan Da Silva, the COO, and he says, "If Boeing and Airbus at the moment, as they do look like the next generation's going to be single-aisle, he says, "Bring it on.” Because no airline wants to put their passengers in yet another single tube and wing when it comes to the replacement market.

Joe Anselmo:       

Guys, great conversation. We could go on for another hour, but we are out of time. So that is a wrap for this week's Check 6 podcast. A special thanks to our podcast producer in London, Guy Ferneyhough. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to Check 6, so you never miss an episode. If you found today's discussion helpful, consider leaving a rating or review. Better yet, share this episode with a friend or colleague. That's all the time we have for now. Thank you for your time. And join us again next week for another Check 6.

Announcer:      

 Join us at AeroEngines Europe 2025 in Hamburg this September. Hear from leading experts about the challenges and opportunities in MRO, supply chain optimization and the paths to net-zero emissions and next-gen engine technologies. Featured items include a shop tour and hosted reception on the historic Cap San Diego. Check 6 listeners, save 20% with promotion code Check 6. Register at aeroengineseurope.aviationweek.com. See you in Hamburg.