Elroy Air commercial demand to exceed 1,000 Chaparral eVTOL cargo drones

Elroy Air claims the demand back­log for its Chap­ar­ral end-to-end autonomous hybrid-elec­tric ver­ti­cal take-off and land­ing (VTOL) car­go air­craft will exceed 1,000 in 2023.

Elroy Air has secured com­mit­ments from part­ners in com­mer­cial, defence and human­i­tar­i­an mar­kets includ­ing Mesa Air­lines, Bris­tow and FedEx. In Sep­tem­ber, it announced a deposit-backed agree­ment with Bris­tow for five of Elroy Air Chap­ar­ral VTOL car­go drones, an expan­sion to Bristow’s let­ter of intent to pre-order 100 Chap­ar­ral sys­tems in July 2022.

Bris­tow secures ear­ly deliv­ery for five Elroy Air Chap­ar­ral air­craft

The demand back­log for Elroy Air’s Chap­ar­ral sys­tems now rep­re­sents mul­ti­ple years of scaled pro­duc­tion, and ear­ly deploy­ments are expect­ed to pri­ori­tise defence and oper­a­tions out­side the Unit­ed States.

“Over the past sev­er­al years, we have seen excite­ment build about Chap­ar­ral and its appli­ca­tions. To sur­pass 1,000 air­craft demand this year is an incred­i­bly excit­ing mile­stone,” said co-founder and CEO Dave Mer­rill.

“We are so grate­ful for our part­ners who have joined us at the fore­front of an emerg­ing chap­ter for logis­tics. We look for­ward to deliv­er­ing these air­craft to points around the globe for a range of uses includ­ing express com­mer­cial ship­ping, human­i­tar­i­an aid and resup­ply for the US and allied forces.”

The Chap­ar­ral is a ‘lift plus cruise’ hybrid-elec­tric eVTOL car­go air­craft that lever­ages the ben­e­fits of elec­tric propul­sion and tur­bo-gen­er­a­tion, for effi­cient autonomous oper­a­tions and longer range mis­sions.

Designed with an advanced car­bon com­pos­ite air­frame, Chap­ar­ral can be con­fig­ured to ship inside a stan­dard 40-foot con­tain­er or car­go air­craft such as a C‑130 for rapid glob­al deploy­ment.

Elroy Air has intro­duced advanced mod­u­lar car­go pods that com­ple­ment the Chaparral’s capa­bil­i­ties, pre-loaded by ground per­son­nel and autonomous­ly retrieved by the Chap­ar­ral air­craft before take­off.

Upon arrival, the air­craft autonomous­ly low­ers the pod to the ground and then retrieves the next pod, cre­at­ing a bi-direc­tion­al con­vey­or belt through the sky.

In July, Elroy Air expand­ed its exec­u­tive lead­er­ship to include Alex Blake, uncrewed aero­space exec­u­tive from Wing (for­mer­ly Google X), Ama­zon Prime Air, and Kit­ty­hawk, as Chief of Staff, and Zach Lover­ing as Vice Pres­i­dent of Engi­neer­ing.

Elroy Air Expands Exec­u­tive Lead­er­ship