Hybrid-electric propulsion specialist VerdeGo Aero has spent the past seven years building its team, honing its products and making a name for itself in niche circles. This summer, the Daytona Beach, Florida-based company broke out and presented its offering on a world stage.
VerdeGo exhibited at July’s Farnborough air show for the first time, bringing its 185kW VH-3 powerplant to the flightline – a unit that it is marketing as “hyper-efficient technology that enables electric aircraft to have the range and endurance needed for safe and practical operations”.
“It wasn’t our first show in Europe, but we’re now at the point where we’re showing full-scale hardware,” co-founder and chief executive Eric Bartsch says, with a flourish of pride.
The company is on a mission to prove that advanced hybrid-electric powerplants can be a gamechanger in the increasingly crowded advanced air mobility space. Bartsch, its primary evangelist, says pure battery-powered solutions will not suffice for some of the more complex uses of such aircraft, but hybrid solutions will.
VerdeGo began life in 2017 as an urban air mobility aircraft designer. Bartsch partnered with experts at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU) as well as Erik Lindbergh – a pilot whose grandfather was none other than Charles, famously first to fly across the Atlantic in 1927. But about a year in, the team pivoted from building a vehicle to profiting from its deep expertise in hybrid-electric powertrains.
While civilian applications for the propulsion units are fairly obvious, VerdeGo has also found an interested and grateful partner in the US Air Force, and increasingly the US Army, which have both supported the company as it develops the VH-3 and more powerful VH-4T. The latter is a 400kW, high-performance self-contained system that includes engine, generator, inverter, and thermal management.
“The VH-3 is an ideal powerplant for reconnaissance drones or things that need to loiter for a long time,” Bartsch says. “The efficiency that is great from a commercial perspective – because it lowers emissions and operating costs – is also great from a military perspective, because it allows you to have much longer missions over whatever location you want to be over.”
The VH-4T, meanwhile, could be ideal to transport people or cargo – between 226kg (500lb), to several thousand pounds – depending on the application.
Electric aircraft companies have done some significant preparatory work in this area, he says. “You can much more easily do convertible flight modes – vertical take-off and horizontal cruise – at high speeds, and efficiently.”
MILITARY INTEREST
“The military has been a great early adopter and early recogniser of the high potential for electric flight,” he says, but pure battery-powered electric aircraft would be impossible to use for any compelling military missions.
“The range compromises are too great for the military, which is typically worried about high performance missions. There is no recharging, refuelling, or any kind of infrastructure in a lot of the places they want to go.
“These powerplants are allowing the military to try out electric flight in different ways, and really to think about what is the next-generation aircraft that may take the place of some of the helicopters or tiltrotors or other things that are out there for vertical lift.”
A collaboration with US space agency NASA under the latter’s SBIR Ignite programme, announced in June, is completing conceptual design studies on four types of electric aircraft with the VH-3. SBIR Ignite funds US small businesses in early-stage, high-risk technology development, and so far, the results have been promising.
“What we have been able to show is that a VTOL [vertical take-off and landing] aircraft with two VH-3s, a battery pack and a hybrid-electric powertrain, and importantly, wings, compared to a helicopter with similar capability, we’re getting about a 60% reduction in fuel,” Bartsch says. “Or you can think of that as a 60% increase in range, depending on whether it’s a commercial application or maybe a military drone application.
“We’re using that industry-neutral design to really illustrate how all of these things are coming together. The big story is: electric motors plus wings plus hybrid-electric gets you something that is very different from the performance we’re used to seeing from a helicopter.”
The company is currently ground-testing full-scale engines at its Daytona Beach test centre, with some already installed and preparing for an imminent maiden sortie. Bartsch does not name names, but he says he expects the first VerdeGo hardware to fly in early 2025.
“We have some powerplants that are already installed in customer aircraft, and so I expect to see those test aircraft in the air very shortly,” he says. “They’ve been tested quite a bit, and now it’s the timeline of the airframer, and when they’re able to do their first flight, that is driving when that goes into the air.”
FLORIDA BASE
All of the company’s engineering and testing work currently takes place in its own facility near the ERAU campus, but with a growing order book and series production in the mid-term, it is going to have to look for new space.
Bartsch says VerdeGo has closed memoranda of understanding for “thousands of hybrid-electric powerplants, from a fairly large number of airframers [and] those aircraft range from military drones to civilian aircraft that have passengers on board”.
So far, the company has raised about $16 million in initial funding, plus “a substantial amount of non-dilutive funding through commercial programmes and partnerships with the military”. Most recently, it added more than $4 million to its coffers in July.
Bartsch and his team are preparing for the company’s next investment round, scheduled for mid-2025, when the firm will be targeting $40 million to support building its future production facilities. The location is to be announced, but Bartsch says it would make sense for VerdeGo to remain in Florida.
“We’re being approached aggressively by economic development organisations in other parts of the country, and we’re going to have to look at what those incentives are, and really figure out the right, final business model for where we locate that facility. But I personally would love to see that be in Florida, in close proximity to where our research and development and headquarters are, just because that makes collaboration across those two parts of the company a lot easier.”
As VerdeGo’s engines attract broader global attention and investors, Bartsch is focused on selling what he calls “the right tool for the right job”.
“I don’t think this next generation of aircraft is going to kill off the helicopter by any means, there’s a market and a mission for helicopters. But there are a lot of missions, both existing and new, that this next generation of vertical-lift aircraft are ideally suited for, too.”
