Tuesday 22 August at 11 am Central Daylight Time is when LIFT’s chief pilot Jace ‘Digit’ McCown will conduct the world’s first eVTOL livestream flight from its new flight operations and development centre near Austin, Texas, following which he will take questions.
McCown formerly flew the UH1N helicopter for the US Air Force. He now lives near Austin, Texas, with his wife, Chelsea, and their six kids. He is also a skilled engineer and pilot.
He said: “Digit is the call sign I earned at the end of my Air Force career after I managed to put my hand into a power saw while I was doing some woodworking and I nearly lost some of my digits.
“Luckily, they were retained through the work of some really talented medical professionals. I do have pretty good use of my hand despite all that. The last two years I was in the Air Force I was not flying because of that injury. Despite eventually getting my flight clearance back, this led me to choose to leave the service to pursue unmanned aircraft.”
His favourite animal growing up was the peregrine falcon because of its speed. He focussed his entire high school career on that goal but when he got through the first phase of pilot training, the USAF was not looking for any fighters.
He then started a master’s degree in Agroforestry, integrating multiple farming systems together, and flying robotics seemed to be the way forward, getting into drones and using his background in computer engineering and problem solving.
That is how he ended up getting into drones, starting with a company flying large cargo drones with an eighteen foot wingspan. At the time he had never flown a remotely controlled plane or a multi-copter, having operated a little camera drone.
McCown added: “I learned a lot there about electric propulsion, control systems and manufacturing of carbon fibre, and that led me to LIFT Aircraft when it was looking for someone to fill a very similar role.
“With the US Air Force as a LIFT customer, it is definitely full circle. Where we’re testing out at Eglin Air Force Base, HEXA is actually alongside the UH-1N helicopter test aircraft.
“Working with the Air Force professionals has been just amazing. I did not get to go to test pilot school, but I’m now working with my friends who I flew with in the air force who did go down that path.
“In HEXA, the complexities of operating the aircraft are largely born by the computers and ground crew, and the safety and the redundancies built in make it unnecessary to think about difficulties the first time you climb in.
“HEXA has an open cabin so you’re just right there. Your field of view isn’t cluttered with innumerable instrument panels. You don’t need to feel like you’ve got to check on the engines and all these things to make sure everything is aligned because you know HEXA’s doing that for you.”