Ken Karklin joins Opener as CEO, with company founder Marcus Leng stepping down from role

Open­er Aero has appoint­ed Ken Karklin as its new Chief Exec­u­tive Offi­cer, assum­ing day-to-day lead­er­ship of the com­pa­ny and join­ing its board of direc­tors, while founder Mar­cus Leng steps down from the role.

Ken Karklin served for the last 13 years in a range of lead­er­ship func­tions at AeroVi­ron­ment, a leader in unmanned air­craft and robot­ic sys­tems, includ­ing engi­neer­ing, oper­a­tions, qual­i­ty and pro­gramme man­age­ment. 

For the last sev­en years, he was an offi­cer of the com­pa­ny in his capac­i­ties as vice pres­i­dent and gen­er­al man­ag­er of the effi­cient ener­gy sys­tems seg­ment, senior vice pres­i­dent of oper­a­tions, and for the last two years as AeroVi­ron­men­t’s chief oper­at­ing offi­cer. 

Before join­ing AeroVi­ron­ment, Karklin served in engi­neer­ing lead­er­ship posi­tions at start­up Touch­down Tech­nolo­gies, Agi­lent Tech­nolo­gies, Hewlett Packard Com­pa­ny and Intel Cor­po­ra­tion.

Karklin said: “We have an excep­tion­al­ly tal­ent­ed team at Open­er, and I am tru­ly excit­ed to lead the com­pa­ny into the future.”

Open­er Aero claims Mar­cus Leng con­duct­ed the world’s first manned winged eVTOL flight on 5th Octo­ber 2011 with an air­craft built in the base­ment of his home and inno­vat­ed mod­ern bat­tery and motor tech­nolo­gies to pro­duce Black­Fly, claimed to be the world’s first fixed-wing, eVTOL per­son­al ultra­light air­craft. Leng found­ed Skykar Inc., which lat­er became part of the Open­er Group. 

Leng said: “Ken brings a breadth of cross func­tion­al lead­er­ship com­pe­ten­cies to Open­er that are excep­tion­al­ly aligned with our forth­com­ing tran­si­tion to cus­tomer ship­ments and rev­enue pro­duc­tion of the Black­Fly per­son­al air vehi­cle.

“The Board and I are con­fi­dent that Ken is the right per­son to build on this momen­tum.”

In July last year, Open­er per­formed the first pub­lic manned flights of its Black­Fly eVTOL air­craft at the Elec­tric Air­craft Association’s Air­Ven­ture in Oshkosh, Wis­con­sin.

First revealed in 2018, Black­Fly is described as the world’s first all fixed-wing, ultra­light eVTOL air­craft, mea­sur­ing 13’ 7” wide by 13’ 5” long with a range of about 25 miles and 20 per­cent reserve in the USA. 

Ear­li­er, in Feb­ru­ary 2021, Hyundai Motor Group appoint­ed Ben Diachun as chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer of its Urban Air Mobil­i­ty divi­sion to help devel­op its vision of bring­ing eVTOL air­craft to mar­ket by 2028.