John Manning is the founder and the director of development of ElectraFly, a startup working to make package delivery by drone and personal flight a reality.
What inspired you to found ElectraFly?
My whole life I’ve been passionate about aviation. I am involved in aviation professionally as an ATP-rated pilot, but my interest started young. I would say I am part of the original Top Gun generation and always thought airplanes were cool. As a kid, my parents took me to this world’s fair, and there was this airplane that was so small it looked remote-controlled, but there was an actual person inside. From there, I’ve always been fascinated with the minimum feature set it takes to get a person into the air.
I always thought if I didn’t fly airplanes, I would want to design and build them. Before ElectraFly, I was working in professional aviation and real estate. Although I was finding success, I was not loving it. One night I thought about how as parents, we always tell our kids that dreams are meant to be chased, but then we don’t follow through ourselves. Since then, I have been tinkering with different drone ideas and concepts. When the time arrived, I left real estate and started ElectraFly. My friend looked at what I was working on and decided to have a go at it with me, so he is my partner. We also have a couple of minor investors, but we’ve mainly worked through the Air Force’s AFWERX program and were awarded two Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) phase ones and one STTR phase two.
Why does ElectraFly’s VTOL craft look so different from other approaches?
Some people call our original aircraft design a “Star Wars speeder bike” or a “motorcycle with wings.” We are flattered by that because we are used to seeing drones in the traditional sense carrying a camera, but now we’re also seeing the other end of the spectrum, which is the air taxi segment. While there are companies creating air taxis, we trimmed it down to one person and a minimum feature set to get one person in the air. Anytime you have a runway involved, there is a certain amount of skill and prepared area needed to do that, but in this, we feel that a vertical takeoff and landing machine will be the next generation of aviation.
The reason it looks different from other VTOL vehicles is because for years I was looking at drones that were coming out and thought their design was terrible. So I created novel designs to optimize vertical takeoff and landing and optimized it for forward flight. We were awarded a patent for this design. On top of that, the energy density of batteries is not great, so we made a hybrid electric system. This allows us to use fuel to reduce the number of batteries required, offsetting our lifting requirement or need to generate electricity. We also optimized the aircraft for forward flight and used wings which are more efficient than hanging on a pillar of thrust like a helicopter. These were the things we started to attack to ensure our aircraft could carry a meaningful load and fly a meaningful distance.
Lots of companies are incorporating these ideas now but at the time we were developing our machine they were novel concepts.
ElectraFly offers machining services in addition to the VTOL craft you’re building—why have a service component to your hardware startup?
We started looking for people who could help us create the composite molds for our drones, and the prices people were asking were astronomical. From there, we started thinking, what if we brought our own machine tool and were able to machine our own molds? We could do a few of these and be cost ahead. That is where the machining side came from. Then for batteries, a custom battery is very expensive, and at some point, we will have to build our own battery packs. Right now, we are not building our own cells like Tesla is, but we are tooling up to at least be able to assemble our own battery packs and things like that.
Since these machines are essentially flying robots, out of necessity, we have to be in these silos. Additionally, since our funding comes from the Air Force, funding is very binary. Therefore, we needed to sell machining services and things to have sustainable revenue going forward as our product is not yet open to the public.
What is the current technology readiness level of your aircraft?
We have flown all of our machines in at least a tethered environment. All of the machines have been off the ground, and the biggest machine has carried 75 pounds. They are capable machines, but we have not put a person on them yet. We’re working through the process of going through exemptions and authorizations with the FAA, but as a small company with limited bandwidth and resources, we don’t have a person to chase these authorizations. Things are moving slower than we’d like at times, but we are doing everything in a sustainable manner. We have no venture capital funding, but we believe that our slower growth will be more sustainable over time.
Did you build your technology from scratch, or did you incorporate existing components?
We did not build much from scratch. Since we are not an electronics company, we had to use a lot of other existing parts. But in terms of the aircraft itself, I taught myself CAD and designed it myself. I was at a 3D printing conference years ago and thought this technology was going to change the world. I came home with a 3D printer and had no idea how to use it. I started learning how to use it and started selling 3D prints as a service, and then designed my own parts. That is how I was able to come up with the design of ElectraFly.
What is the approval process like for bringing your EVOTL to market?
For the longest time, drones have been the wild west. 90% of what you saw online was illegal, and the FAA was struggling to handle unmanned aircraft. Now that has changed you can get an experimental certificate for an unmanned aircraft. Moving forward, that is what we see for a single-person flying machine like ours. If a vehicle is carrying more than one person as an “air taxi”, you will be looking at FAA part 135 authorizations. Those are significantly more complicated. While the FAA has come a long way, there is a lot of work to be done. But for our aircraft, I do see a path forward for both unmanned and manned operations.
Will you start by launching uncrewed delivery drones or crewed personal aircraft first?
We’ve developed two different categories of aircraft. One is a personal flying machine, and the other is package delivery. We intend to lead with the package delivery machine, where there are fewer regulatory challenges, safety concerns, and costs, among other things. We will lead the way with that and then follow with our manned aircraft.
What is your long-term vision for ElectraFly and personal aviation technology—will everyone be flying one of these someday?
This is probably not for everyone. While the Air Force AFWERX program is leading this community, the Air Force is likely not going to be the leading consumer of our product. Their mission is different, but I see the Army, Navy, and certainly Special Ops that could be adopting this technology. As for the civilian side, who doesn’t want to be Ironman? For people with lots of money, they will want to recreate in ways that others cannot. They will take this opportunity, as we already see with jetpacks and things like that. These people will be early adopters, but ultimately, our technology has practical applications and purposes. It will be a viable means of transportation at some point, but that may be further down the road as there are very few people who are going to spend several hundred thousand dollars necessary to buy an early flying motorcycle. However, once production increases, the cost will come down. First, we can see our vehicles being used recreationally by the wealthy, but once we have demonstrated our technology’s ability, we see the military coming into play. I think this will trickle back into civilian use as it will be more mainstream and lower cost.
People have enough trouble driving a car, to say nothing of piloting an aircraft. Do you have any concerns about making personal aviation accessible to a wider population in the future?
First, driving a car is surprisingly dangerous. If you are going down a two-lane highway, you are going 65 or 70, and the same with the other person. In some places, there are no barriers, and you have a 120 mph closure rate, and the cars are inches apart. It is a dangerous operation, and yet we manage to do that safely. Now, aviation is considered a technical skill. At first, flying a remote-controlled helicopter was extremely difficult, but computers came into the industry and changed it. Now you don’t have to think about anything, and you can pull the drone out of the box, charge it, and push some buttons to get it to fly. Pilots of these aircraft don’t need to stabilize the aircraft, correct for wind drift, or any of those things that pilots normally do. All of a sudden, people with no skill are able to do amazing things in the air thanks to these technologies. Therefore, I think that this drone industry will be one of the safest industries we’ve ever seen being adopted. Since we are not relying on the skill of the operator, these machine-controlled, pilot-directed drones will open aviation to the masses. That is what allows adoption and makes this all possible.