“Electric Aircraft Startup Eviation Lays Off Employees While Seeking New Funding”

The finan­cial real­i­ties of start­ing a new avi­a­tion busi­ness has once more reared its ugly head with news last week that elec­tric air­craft start­up, Evi­a­tion, has laid off most of its 60+ staff while it strug­gles to raise new funds. Accord­ing to a report, the com­pa­ny is not shut­ting down, but “tak­ing this mea­sure to eval­u­ate the right oppor­tu­ni­ties going for­ward.” 

Formed in 2015 by Israeli entre­pre­neurs Omer Bar-Yohay, Omri Regev and Aviv Tzi­don, Evi­a­tion has become a bea­con of light for the field of elec­tric avi­a­tion. Dur­ing the last decade the com­pa­ny has gone through sev­er­al ver­sions of its orig­i­nal air­craft con­cept. 

Its first major land­mark was fly­ing a pro­to­type of its Alice all-elec­tric nine-seater air­craft for the first time in Sep­tem­ber 2022. The craft took off from Grant Coun­ty Inter­na­tion­al Air­port (MWH), in Moses Lake, Wash­ing­ton and com­plet­ed an eight-minute flight, dur­ing which it reached an alti­tude of 3,500 ft. Yet, it hasn’t flown since.

Then, in Decem­ber 2023, sur­pris­ing news broke that Eve Air Mobility’s high­ly respect­ed, André Stein, had left Embraer’s sub­sidiary and joined Evi­a­tion as its CEO, offer­ing a stamp of grav­i­tas for the com­pa­ny.

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In a state­ment last week, Stein explained “a tem­po­rary pause was nec­es­sary” in order to focus on “iden­ti­fy­ing the right long-term part­ner­ships to help us make elec­tric com­mer­cial region­al flight a real­i­ty.” He stat­ed, “We at Evi­a­tion are proud of what we have accom­plished in advanc­ing elec­tric flight. This deci­sion was not made light­ly.”

Sad­ly, Evi­a­tion is the lat­est in an increas­ing line of eVTOL and elec­tric air­craft star­tups expe­ri­enc­ing finan­cial hard­ships. These include Ger­man devel­op­ers Lil­i­um and Volo­copter who have both recent­ly filed for insol­ven­cy; although the for­mer has report­ed­ly a new con­sor­tium of investors will­ing to inject EUR200 mil­lion into the com­pa­ny and the lat­ter (it is rumoured) has Chi­na auto­mo­bile com­pa­ny, Geely, inter­est­ed in tak­ing Volo­copter over.  

Evi­a­tion is major­i­ty-owned by the Sin­ga­pore-based Cler­mont Group. A spokesper­son com­ment­ed, “We remain com­mit­ted to rev­o­lu­tion­is­ing air trav­el through inno­v­a­tive elec­tric solu­tions and will con­tin­ue to seek long-term strate­gic part­ners who share our vision and pas­sion for build­ing the future of flight.”

The all-elec­tric air­craft whose name was inspired by the famous book ‘Alice in Won­der­land’ is designed to car­ry nine pas­sen­gers on trips in the range of 290 miles. There are also plans for a car­go ver­sion. At the time of Alice’s one and only flight test, Evi­a­tion stat­ed it planned to enter ser­vice as ear­ly as 2027.

The com­pa­ny says more than 600 of its planes have been ordered by cus­tomers includ­ing Air New Zealand, Cape Air and DHL, with a total val­ue amount­ing to over USD5 bil­lion.

André Stein

Stein remarked, “We would like to extend our deep­est grat­i­tude to our cus­tomers and part­ners for their sup­port for the Alice pro­gram. And we would espe­cial­ly like to thank our employ­ees for their hard work in accel­er­at­ing the elec­tric rev­o­lu­tion in avi­a­tion.”

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.eviation.com/

(Top graph­ic image: ‘Alice’)

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