Electra.aero secures investment from Lockheed Martin Ventures and plans to fly its eSTOL tech demonstrator later this year

Electra.aero has received an invest­ment in its Series A fund­ing round from Lock­heed Mar­tin Ven­tures (LMV), the ven­ture cap­i­tal arm of Lock­heed Mar­tin Cor­po­ra­tion.

The fund­ing will sup­port Electra’s plans to begin flight test­ing a full-scale hybrid eSTOL tech­nol­o­gy demon­stra­tor air­craft lat­er this year.

Chris Moran, Vice Pres­i­dent and Gen­er­al Man­ag­er of LMV, said: “We invest­ed in Elec­tra because of its focus on hybrid-elec­tric tech­nol­o­gy. Electra’s tech­ni­cal approach to sus­tain­able avi­a­tion is dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed, and we are excit­ed to see this con­cept mature.

“Hybrid-elec­tric air­craft have the poten­tial to deliv­er oper­a­tional and envi­ron­men­tal advan­tages over oth­er air­craft, includ­ing increased pay­load and range with­out gam­bling on bat­tery improve­ments. We look for­ward to work­ing with the Elec­tra team and hope to part­ner on oppor­tu­ni­ties in the future.”

Elec­tra’s eSTOL air­craft can oper­ate from spaces as small as 300x100 feet using its patent- pend­ing dis­trib­uted elec­tric propul­sion and blown lift tech­nol­o­gy. A small tur­bine-pow­ered gen­er­a­tor also recharges the bat­ter­ies mid-flight, elim­i­nat­ing the need for new ground charg­ing infra­struc­ture.

The qui­eter and more envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly air­craft is cur­rent­ly being designed to trans­port up to 1,800 pounds of car­go or move 7 to 9 pas­sen­gers up to 500 miles.

Electra’s air­craft can oper­ate in a vari­ety of envi­ron­ments rang­ing from busy urban areas to remote land­ing strips, and fly mis­sions rang­ing from on-demand intracity flights to med­ical mis­sions, car­go trans­porta­tion, sched­uled pas­sen­ger ser­vice, and more.

John S. Lang­ford, Founder and CEO of Elec­tra, said: “We are excit­ed to wel­come Lock­heed Mar­tin Ven­tures as one of our strate­gic and key investors in our Series A fund­ing round. Lock­heed Mar­tin is a leader in aero­space and defense and we believe this rela­tion­ship is a com­ple­men­tary one for Elec­tra and Lock­heed Mar­tin. We’re hon­oured to have them on our team.”

Elec­tra is build­ing clean, hybrid-elec­tric, ultra-short take­off and land­ing air­planes that fly peo­ple and car­go qui­eter, fur­ther, and more afford­ably. It says its tech­nol­o­gy deliv­ers 2.5x the pay­load and 10x longer range with 70 per cent low­er oper­at­ing costs than ver­ti­cal take­off alter­na­tives with much less cer­ti­fi­ca­tion risk, prov­ing that cli­mate friend­ly tech­nol­o­gy can also be cost-effec­tive.

Elec­tra is col­lab­o­rat­ing with air trans­port and ground infra­struc­ture oper­a­tors to achieve turnkey solu­tions for any mar­ket. Elec­tra’s team includes some of the most respect­ed and suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neurs and engi­neers in nov­el air­craft design, includ­ing Randy Grif­fiths, who joined as Head of Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. Its tech­nol­o­gy devel­op­ment is sup­port­ed by NASA and the US Air Force’s Agili­ty Prime.

In terms of part­ner­ships, Elec­tra has teamed up with com­pa­nies across the world. These include Flap­per in South Amer­i­ca and Sky­portz in Aus­tralia, flyv in Europe and Bris­tow Heli­copters in the USA.