Overair expands California headquarters and pushes on with developments of its Butterfly eVTOL aircraft

Overair has expand­ed its head­quar­ters in Cal­i­for­nia to pro­vide addi­tion­al space for the devel­op­ment plans of its five-seater eVTOL air­craft, known as But­ter­fly, which aims to achieve full FAA cer­ti­fi­ca­tion by 2025.

The expan­sion comes as an inflec­tion point in the com­pa­ny’s growth, as its But­ter­fly mod­el tran­si­tions from ini­tial type design to prepa­ra­tion for com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion and scaled pro­duc­tion. It will fea­ture two build­ings mea­sur­ing 94,000 sq ft and 109,000 sq ft respec­tive­ly, with new spaces also avail­able for indus­tri­al and man­u­fac­tur­ing teams and a built out cor­po­rate front office.

With prox­im­i­ty to John Wayne/Orange Coun­ty Air­port, ‘Build­ing 1′ will house the company’s cor­po­rate offices, shop lab and clean­room space for air­craft design, devel­op­ment and man­u­fac­tur­ing. ‘Build­ing 2’ will include space for air­craft inte­gra­tion and test­ing facil­i­ties.

Ben Tign­er, Overair CEO, said: “We’re excit­ed to dou­ble our foot­print and our com­mit­ment to Orange Coun­ty and the city of San­ta Ana. This new office space helps us pro­mote a cul­ture that allows every­one on the Overair team to achieve their per­son­al goals and the company’s vision of mak­ing the world a small­er, clean­er place.

“This expan­sion enables us to grow our tal­ent­ed team, add hun­dreds of jobs to our com­mu­ni­ty and accel­er­ate Butterfly’s intro­duc­tion as the most robust and qui­etest elec­tric ver­ti­cal lift air­craft in its class.”

Overair spun out of Karem Air­craft and is the fourth in a series of com­pa­nies found­ed by Abe Karem. Each of Karem’s com­pa­nies has expand­ed the bounds of the aero­nau­ti­cal tech­nol­o­gy land­scape, seek­ing greater air­craft per­for­mance and high­er lev­els of effi­cien­cy and safe­ty.

But­ter­fly is the cul­mi­na­tion of over 20 years of VTOL propul­sion devel­op­ment, guid­ed by a pas­sion to con­tin­ue improv­ing ver­ti­cal flight. These efforts led to a new class of propul­sion tech­nol­o­gy – Opti­mum Speed Propul­sion (OSP).

This pro­pri­etary VTOL tech­nol­o­gy under­pins But­ter­fly and allows for high­ly effi­cient oper­a­tion across all flight regimes – safer and qui­eter than heli­copters in ver­ti­cal flight and as effi­cient as fixed-wing air­planes in for­ward flight. Once oper­a­tional, But­ter­fly will have a top speed of 200mph and range of more than 100 miles.

In future, the com­pa­ny is look­ing to bring hun­dreds and even­tu­al­ly thou­sands of new, tech­nol­o­gy-focused jobs to Orange Coun­ty. Overair plans to hire 1,000 employ­ees over the next three to five years, includ­ing aerostruc­ture and propul­sion sys­tems engi­neers look­ing to cre­ate green ener­gy sys­tems.

Build­ing upon south­ern California’s exist­ing aero­space and tech­nol­o­gy hubs, the Overair cam­pus will fos­ter pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and cul­tur­al uni­ty across both cor­po­rate and engi­neer­ing teams to achieve a full-scale But­ter­fly pro­to­type by 2023, with com­mer­cial entry into ser­vice by 2026.