US aircraft developer Electra has secured a contract with NASA to explore future aircraft concepts that could dramatically scale its technology by the middle of the century.
The Virginia-based start-up disclosed on 12 November it had landed the deal under NASA’s Advanced Aircraft Concepts for Environmental Sustainability (ACCES) 2050 initiative.
Chief executive Marc Allen tells FlightGlobal that the company remains “maniacally focused” on developing a nine-seat passenger aircraft capable of ultra-short take-off and landing. But he believes that Electra’s technology can be scaled for commercial airline applications.
“How do we take the underlying tech stack, where we’ve got this differentiated capability – we’re the only ones in the world who have really done this – and how do we think about other places that technology can go? That is what we’ll do in the study for NASA,” he says.
”They put us down in line with the largest award for a reason,” he continues. “They want us to help think through, for example, how battery energy-density changes what we can achieve in a distributed electric-hybrid propulsion aircraft system, and they want to think about the value that brings to a 200-seat level.”
Allen, a former Boeing executive, succeeded founder John Langford as CEO of Electra in August. At the time, he told FlightGlobal that the start-up’s proposed hybrid-electric, short take-off aircraft has a “realistic baseline” and will eventually deliver a “unique mission set”.
The company has in recent months been flight-testing a two-seat EL-2 Goldfinch demonstrator, completing its first “ultra short” take-off and landing in May. It claims the aircraft can take off in distances as short as 46m (150ft), potentially allowing for operations in austere locations upon planned service-entry late this decade.
In September, Electra completed a series of demonstrations flights at Marine Corps Air Facility Quantico and Felker Army Airfield in Virginia as part of its contract with the US Air Force’s AFWERX Agility Prime programme.
Now, the company is working with NASA – alongside partners American Airlines, Honeywell Aerospace Technologies, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan – to look at broader applications through the ACCES contract.
“You can’t just build the tech because the tech can be built, there has to be a business model that supports it and a regulatory framework in which it sits,” Allen says. “And that’s really what the study work is all about: to see how it all comes together, to see first what the technology can do.
”In the nine-seat category, we feel quite confident that these four values – emissions, noise, cost, access – create a working business model where we can go into existing markets and expand and disrupt them, and ultimately create new markets, too.”
Allen declines to say whether Electra will pursue development of a regional aircraft between nine and 200 seats that could compete with, for example, Embraer’s E Jets. He maintains that the company is focused on its nine-seat blown-lift design, while acknowledging that ”future concept work will always be a part of who we are and what we do”.
“We’ll start with obvious changes moves… like put in a plug and expand the cargo capacity, and here are the set of trades that will yield [extra] payload range,” he says. “It’s not immediately obvious to me what the next step is, whether it’s 19, 30, 72, 95 [seats]. Those arguments will play themselves out over time, but we are not ready at this point to do anything other than focus fanatically on the nine-seater.”
