Forget the Airport! Electra Wants to Change How You Travel Between Cities

The future of regional air travel just took off in New York City and it didn't even need a runway. Electra has just demonstrated its latest technology that could transform how people travel. Joining us now is Mark Allen, CEO of Electra. Thank you so much for being here, Mark. Thank you for having me, Justine. Great to be with you. Yeah, so this is so exciting. We want to learn all about it. You just demonstrated your aircraft taking off and landing at a Manhattan heliport. So tell us why this is such a significant milestone and what it really proves about the future of regional air travel. Well, this was just a historic moment. We've been working toward it for years, confident that this third era of aviation built on electric propulsion lets us do things you've never been able to think about doing before. In this case, taking an airplane. And landing it like a helicopter on a super small runway. I mean, we're talking a runway that's only a couple hundred feet. And that's what we did in the middle of downtown Manhattan, proving that we can bring air service close to where you work, close to where you live. We do it quietly, like a Tesla. It's an electric architecture. And we do it safely with a fixed wing and with all of the rigor that goes into aviation. So it's a transformative opportunity for us to help people get off the ground. And into the air for their travel in regional mobility. Yeah, it's just incredible to think about. It's so amazing that you just had this test that you guys just did. Tell us a little bit more about how the technology actually works and how you're able to operate in these spaces that traditional airplanes just really can't use. It's all about going slow. Now, when you're up in the air as an airplane, you get to go fast. That's the beauty of an airplane. But the hardest thing is when you land, how slow can you go? We built a system that we can land at about 30 miles an hour. That's ridiculously slow for an airplane. But what it lets us do then is have such little momentum that we can stop in very short distances. And we do it by using distributed electric propulsion. We have eight propellers across the wing, which you can only do because of the electric architecture. And we blow the wing. We accelerate air over the wing. The wing really thinks it's going faster than it actually is. And so it generates lift. And so it's lifting that aircraft seven, eight times the ordinary lift that an airplane generates. That all comes together in this technology package that lets us have helicopter-like access, but all the efficiency benefits of a fixed-wing airplane. Payload, carry a lot of weight, carry all your baggage. Range, we go far, wherever you want it to go, a thousand miles. Safe. Affordable. You know, helicopters, eVTOLs cost four times as much as a fixed-wing airplane. So this is the advantage. We take that access, we make it quiet, and then we give it efficiency and we deliver it to you. Yeah, it really seems like you're bringing all of these different factors together to make this be an efficient and affordable way to travel. Tell us a little bit more about the way that it works in terms of being a hybrid electric, right? Not a fully electric vertical takeoff aircraft. So why did you choose that approach? And what advantage does that offer in terms of range cost performance like you're talking about that kind of hybrid approach versus fully electric? Well, nobody wants to have range anxiety in the air. We have to be confident that we can get where we're going. The hybrid approach lets us use jet fuel as the principal fuel, but still the hybrid turbo generator transforms the jet fuel into electricity so we can run the electric engines that are necessary if you're going to blow the wing the way we do to create this ultra-short performance. So the hybrid makes it practical, lets you rely on jet fuel to go far. The electric architecture remains essential. Give you access like a helicopter. That's why we do it. And if you think about a Prius, it's really no different than that. You pour fuel in, it generates electricity, which charges the electric engine, and away the airplane goes. Yeah, I mean, it's just incredible the way that you've been able to kind of bring all of these different technologies together and therefore you can use these existing heliports and other small spaces instead of building brand new runways. So talk to us a little bit about how that reduces the cost to kind of the complexity of having to expand the air travel. You're not having to build all of these new runways and new systems for that. And also tell us what the cost is so that if people do want to start taking this in the hopefully near future, what they would be looking at there. You know, we've been sacrificing communities for generations now because we pave over entire communities when we build new airports. That's what we do. So the opportunity to have air service close to us without sacrificing the neighborhood is a big deal when we only need the same space that already exists in the mall, the parking lot, in the barge by the city. There are all these great spots we can get into and out of. We took our airplane. We flew into the middle of Philadelphia. We landed at the Marine Terminal, just like a mile or so from downtown. We flew into the middle of Atlantic City. We landed right there in the middle of the city, a mile from the Tropicana Casino, using a field there called Bader Field. So we're demonstrating we don't have to sacrifice neighborhoods to get access. That's huge. Okay. The other piece is cost. It has to be affordable. It has to be affordable. Otherwise, it remains in the realm of helicopter-like access that only the rich can afford. To make it affordable, we have a system here that will deliver a cost on a per-seat, per-mile basis that's less than a dollar. Think about 80 cents per passenger mile. And that's a cost. So by the time it turns into a ticket price, it may be $1.50 per passenger mile. That's still less than your Uber. They run about $2 per passenger mile. And so we're able to create a real answer here for people who have trips that are too long to drive easily, but too short to make commercial airplanes right now a meaningful solution. And by the way, that's not a few people. Every day in the United States, there are 32 million people every day taking a trip Between 50 and 250 miles, and that's the sweet spot for this kind of air service to transform how we move. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense about these kind of shorter-term or shorter-range trips that really could benefit from something like this. Talking about the cost there, thinking about how many miles it is to different destinations, what if you have someone who's in New York and wants to go to Boston or D.C. or something like that? What would those trips approximately cost per person? And tell us a little bit more about what that approach would look like in terms of time they might save instead of going to an airport or other factors like that. Yeah, but time is the reason, right? We're going to get you home in time for the soccer game because you're going to save two or three hours on a one-way trip. That means you can do a round trip from DC to New York in a day that doesn't have you leaving the house at 3 a.m. and getting home at midnight. You can actually live life on either end of that trip if you can save a total of four or five hours over the day of your travel time. That's big. You talked about a couple of great examples, Boston to New York. That's a place where we'll save you about two hours. Why? Because today, if you take the train, you have all these stops. If you take the car, you're fighting traffic. If you fly it, you've got to drive all the way out to the airport. You've got to fight through the security system, wait at the gate. And of course, 70% of all of our airplane traffic goes through only 30 airports. Totally congested. If any of you have suffered a ground stop at Newark airport, you know what I'm talking about. So how do we solve that? Well, we bring air service to you so you don't have a long drive to the airport. I mentioned 32 million people every day go 50 to 250 miles. Well, 85% of that group, they start or finish their trip more than 40 miles from an airport. Where are you going to drive 45 miles to an airport just to wait for an airplane just to fly 200 miles? It just doesn't make any sense. But when we can bring airplanes to you close to where you work, close to where you live, do it quietly so the neighborhood accepts it, do it safely on a fixed-wing basis, do it affordably, cheaper than Uber, we can transform what you have an opportunity to say yes to. Yeah, I definitely can. Talk to us a little bit more about that pricing when you take that per mile price, if you wanted to do then like a New York to Boston or New York to DC, what would be the approximate price for a customer? On a trip like New York to Boston, I think that's probably around 120-ish miles. So I can imagine a ticket price being around $200, $225. Down to D.C., it's a little bit farther, $250, less than $300, I expect. The prices you'll see will really be on parity with a lot of what you'd expect to pay if you're buying an airplane ticket. Exactly. That sounds like it makes a lot of sense though, because you're also not having to take an Uber all the way out to the airport or having to then take a taxi or a train back from the airport when you get to your destination. So it really seems like that could make sense in this whole ecosystem here. And again, you keep mentioning this safety component, right? That I'm sure everyone is wondering about. The safety and regulatory approval is definitely essential here before the technology can truly scale. So tell us where you are in that certification process for the larger aircrafts that you have, what the biggest hurdles are left to clear. Absolutely. There are two pieces. There's the operating piece and there's the airplane piece. On the operating piece, the U.S. government. The White House has led an initiative called the EIPP, which is a demonstration initiative to Bye. get advanced air mobility air platforms out and about, get them into operations, let people see them, understand them, collect data to understand what safe operations look like. We were fortunate to be selected for that program, and so we've been flying all over the country. Across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia, South Carolina, Florida, New York. And that's been great because it really is helping collect the data necessary to advance safe operations and create novel apps. The second piece is the airplane itself. We are in the middle of the certification process with the FAA. We have filed our certification application, and that will be a process that we are in the middle of for the next several years as we work carefully with the FAA through all the requirements for the airplane to get it certified for commercial use. Those two pieces come together, certified airplane, certified operating context, and then we can deliver it to you. That'll be toward the end of this decade. Yeah, it's just incredible to think about where all of this is going. You already have so much interest already from commercial operators as well as other letters of intent. So talk to us about what you see in the next few years. Again, you said later in the decade, what you see in the next few years in terms of when people will actually be able to get in one of these and take a trip and also what that looks like for the business as you scale. People will see more and more of these just in the environment as the testing continues and as more and more vehicles are produced for the certification testing process. Just start to see them around. They will come into your neighborhoods once our operators start to launch service, which will be in the 2030 timeframe. We have about 63 operators, airline operators, who are regional airline operators who have signed up with letters of interest to buy this aircraft and to operate them on these regional mobility routes. They are the ones who will show up near you. So we build the airplane, they operate it, but obviously it's a partnership to get these into service. I love what we see because right now we've got partnerships that are emerging with a number of the operators of access points. We've signed up with the likes of Signature Aviation. We've signed up with real estate developers who are thinking about putting access points for ultra-short aircraft in their housing developments. So all of these parts of the ecosystem are coming together. Then you've got the airline operators that are coming together, the aircraft that are coming together, and you start to see the ecosystem taking shape. So over the next three years, there'll be slow, steady partnership building across those segments. So we're ready by 2030. Well, we really appreciate you walking through all of this with us today. So exciting to think about where all of this is headed. Thank you so much for your time, Mark Allen, CEO of Electra. We really appreciate you being here today. Thanks for having us on today. Really appreciate the chance to talk with you.