Elroy Air expands partnership with U.S. Air Force to advance its Chaparral VTOL aircraft to acquisitions

Elroy Air has won a Phase 3 Small Busi­ness Inno­va­tion Research (SBIR) con­tract with Agili­ty Prime, which will fund tech­ni­cal demon­stra­tions and per­for­mance val­i­da­tions of the com­pa­ny’s Chap­ar­ral VTOL air­craft.

The con­tract also intends to knock down any remain­ing bar­ri­ers to adop­tion and acqui­si­tion of Chap­ar­ral for use by the U.S. Air Force, and opens a chan­nel for addi­tion­al US Gov­ern­ment busi­ness with Elroy Air.

David Mer­rill, CEO of Elroy Air, said: “We are enthu­si­as­tic to expand our exist­ing part­ner­ship with the US Air Force. The Agili­ty Prime pro­gramme has a man­date to field a sub­stan­tial fleet of elec­tric and hybrid-elec­tric VTOL air­craft sys­tems in the next three years, to address oper­a­tional sit­u­a­tions that are chal­leng­ing with today’s air­craft.

“Elroy Air’s Chap­ar­ral will enable a new con­cept of oper­a­tions (CONOPS) for fly­ing car­go and obser­va­tion equip­ment in dif­fi­cult-to-access areas. These sys­tems will make ultra-respon­sive logis­tics pos­si­ble, trans­form­ing the capa­bil­i­ties of the sup­ply chain for the Air Force’s defense and human­i­tar­i­an aid mis­sions.”

Elroy Air’s end-to-end logis­tics sys­tem can trans­port pay­loads of up to 300lbs a dis­tance of about 300 miles, and requires no air­ports or elec­tric charg­ing infra­struc­ture.

The com­pa­ny is one of a recent cohort of com­pa­nies devel­op­ing unmanned VTOL sys­tems for aer­i­al mobil­i­ty. Chap­ar­rel won Gold in the Auto­mo­tive and Trans­porta­tion cat­e­go­ry at this year’s Indus­tri­al Design Excel­lence Awards (IDEA). It was one of only 20 designs to receive a Gold award, from near­ly 2,00 entries sub­mit­ted. Pre­vi­ous entries include Apple’s orig­i­nal iPhone (Gold, 2008), Tesla’s Mod­el S (Gold, 2013) and the Ocu­lus Rift VR gam­ing head­set (Bronze, 2016).

Unique to Elroy Air’s Chap­ar­ral plat­form is its deploy­ment of spe­cialised sys­tems for car­go, includ­ing a hybrid-elec­tric pow­er­train enabling long range deliv­er­ies, and auto­mat­ed car­go-han­dling for rapid and unat­tend­ed load­ing and unload­ing.

These devel­op­ments are a response to a glob­al pilot short­age and grow­ing demand for more flex­i­ble and rapid logis­tics capa­bil­i­ties for the company’s gov­ern­ment and com­mer­cial cus­tomers.

Kofi Asante, Head of Strat­e­gy & Busi­ness Devel­op­ment at Elroy Air, said: “The same prod­uct devel­op­ment effort that is required to build a high-per­form­ing aer­i­al car­go sys­tem for the com­mer­cial logis­tics sec­tor will result in a sys­tem that can be read­i­ly put to use by the air force.

“Our part­ner­ship with the air force will help us opti­mise our sys­tem to serve life-crit­i­cal mis­sions glob­al­ly. In the com­mer­cial mar­ket, our cus­tomers are sign­ing up to use the Chap­ar­ral for express par­cel trans­port, human­i­tar­i­an aid, and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and dis­as­ter relief mis­sions. All of these sce­nar­ios require a high lev­el of reli­a­bil­i­ty, flex­i­bil­i­ty, and through­put to ensure that crit­i­cal sup­plies and goods reach the com­mu­ni­ties where they are need­ed.”

Major John “Wasp” Tekell, deputy of Agili­ty Prime and point of con­tact for Elroy Air’s new con­tract, added: “The Air Force sup­ports a wide range of mil­i­tary and human­i­tar­i­an mis­sions, and our objec­tives can often be dif­fi­cult or dan­ger­ous to accom­plish with manned air­craft. We have a man­date to field an ini­tial oper­a­tional capa­bil­i­ty by 2023 of the next gen­er­a­tion of unmanned VTOL aer­i­al sys­tems.

“Elroy Air typ­i­fies the kind of inno­v­a­tive com­pa­ny Agili­ty Prime is part­ner­ing with, and they are already well down the path in devel­op­ing a sys­tem that we believe can meet both com­mer­cial and gov­ern­ment needs.”

eVTOL Insights spoke to Kofi Asante in a recent pod­cast about Elroy Air’s Chap­ar­ral and what impact he thinks it can have on air logis­tics in future. You can lis­ten to the episode by click­ing here.