MintAir Chooses Electra for Regional Air Mobility Services in South Korea

MintAir has signed a Let­ter of Intent with Electra.aero to pur­chase 50 hybrid-elec­tric ultra-short take­off and land­ing (eSTOL) air­craft to its fleet and launch region­al air mobil­i­ty oper­a­tions for pas­sen­gers and air car­go in South Korea.

MintAir’s ser­vice will ini­tial­ly cov­er exist­ing domes­tic routes and lever­age region­al air­ports, lat­er expand­ing to new infra­struc­ture made acces­si­ble by Electra’s eSTOL capa­bil­i­ty.

For exam­ple, MintAir engaged Seong­nam-si, a satel­lite city of Seoul, as a new AAM hub to pro­vide region­al air ser­vice direct­ly from a major met­ro­pol­i­tan pop­u­la­tion cen­tre, sav­ing trav­ellers valu­able time by avoid­ing long dri­ves to and from tran­sit through major air­ports.

Locat­ed in Gyeong­gi Province near the Han Riv­er, 26 km from the Gang­nam dis­trict of Seoul, Seong­nam City is a vibrant metrop­o­lis nick­named Kore­an Sil­i­con Val­ley thanks to the con­cen­tra­tion of Kore­an tech giants such as Naver, Kakao and KT, as well as start­up com­pa­nies.

MintAir CEO Eugene Choi not­ed: “Our mis­sion is to devel­op the safest advanced air mobil­i­ty (AAM) ser­vice in both urban and region­al routes, con­tribut­ing to decar­bon­i­sa­tion of the avi­a­tion indus­try.

“We select­ed Elec­tra’s eSTOL because of its supe­ri­or safe­ty, the ener­gy-sav­ing lift effi­cien­cy of its blown-lift tech­nol­o­gy, low­er oper­at­ing costs, and clear path to cer­ti­fi­ca­tion as a fixed-wing air­craft.”

Electra.aero founder and CEO John Lang­ford said: “MintAir joins over 20 oth­er cus­tomers in recog­nis­ing the per­for­mance and cost ben­e­fits of Electra’s next-gen­er­a­tion elec­tric air­craft.

“We are excit­ed to work with MintAir as they trans­form South Korea’s trans­porta­tion mar­ket using Electra’s eSTOL air­craft to pro­vide con­ve­nient air ser­vices from the small­est spaces.”

Elec­tra’s eSTOL air­craft can oper­ate from spaces as small as 300 x 100 feet (90 x 30 m) and is cur­rent­ly being designed to trans­port up to 1,800 pounds (816 kg) of car­go or move nine pas­sen­gers up to 500 miles (800 km).

Electra’s cus­tomers span world­wide AAM providers with oper­a­tions rang­ing from urban and region­al air mobil­i­ty to VIP and char­ter flights, car­go logis­tics and med­ical ser­vices.

Last month, MintAir signed with Jaunt Air Mobil­i­ty to pur­chase up to 40 eVTOL air­craft to serve as its exclu­sive advanced air mobil­i­ty (AAM) part­ner in the Kore­an mar­ket.

In Novem­ber 2021, a con­sor­tium fea­tur­ing Mobius.Energy, MintAir, Sky­works Aero­nau­tics, Lotte Rental and Lotte Cor­po­ra­tion was estab­lished to help launch eVTOL air­craft ser­vices in the city of Incheon, South Korea.