Agility Prime ‘Air Race to Certification’ Moves
Ahead, Air Force Examines eVTOL Supply Chains
Air Force leaders working to support the
development of electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft in the United
States acknowledge that this new segment of aerospace will require a robust
supply chain to rapidly develop prototypes and achieve expected production
rates.
Officials from Agility Prime, the service’s effort
to procure eVTOL aircraft and ensure their commercial success, discussed supply
chain challenges and the government’s role in creating solutions during a
webinar on June 3.
The main goal of the effort is to work with
aircraft manufacturers directly to test and evaluate eVTOLs, providing flight
hours and data to the Federal Aviation Administration to speed up the
commercial certification process.
Agility Prime recently announced two eVTOL manufacturers
— Joby Aviation and Beta Technologies — had advanced to the third phase of its
“air race to certification,” which will enable the companies to apply for
access to Air Force assets and expertise, moving closer to achieving military
airworthiness and potentially a procurement contract.
But looking ahead to a world where thousands of
eVTOL aircraft are flown in skies above cities by commercial and military, NASA
and the Air Force are considering taking action to support the rapid creation
of a tiered supply chain system like what exists today in aerospace.
Parimal Kopardekar, director of NASA’s Aeronautics
Research Institute (NARI) and a key creator of unmanned traffic management
concepts, said he is working on a project to assess the industrial capacity of
the United States to fulfill expected production needs.
“We are now in the requirements analysis phase for
an electronic exchange platform … [that] would reduce friction to interact with
would-be suppliers, understand who has a production certificate and who does
not, and allow new suppliers to join in an authenticated fashion so anyone who
is one that platform has some kind of a quality benchmark,” Kopardekar said.
Such a system would be prototyped by NASA and then
handed off to industry for an associated or other private player to manage,
Kopardekar added.
Dana Jensen, senior industrial policy analyst with
the Air Force’s Office of Commercial and Economic Analysis, shared a
crowd-sourced slide with about 80 companies that had identified themselves as
current or planned members of the eVTOL supply chain, spanning propulsion
systems, aerostructures, energy storage, avionics, sensors and more.
“There are industries that produce aerostructures
and actuators, but to some degree they’re a little too burly for these
applications, so they need to be scaled down,” Jensen said. “There are
automotive solutions for energy solutions, but they’re not exactly optimized
for weight the way they should be for eVTOL. The fact that these vehicles live
in this liminal space between helicopter and airplane and automobile makes it
tough to build out a supply chain.”
Jensen’s team is closely tracking fundraising
activities of those 80 self-identified member companies of the eVTOL supply
chain, concerned about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. About half are
private firms that have raised capital in the past 12-18 months.
“If we want the supply chain as it exists now to
get through the COVID crisis, we need to keep a very close eye on firms that
may need to raise money soon,” Jensen said. “As far as we know, liquidity in
the private equity sector has been maintained, but venture money is starting to
pull back, circling the wagons around its existing portfolio as opposed to
reaching out to new firms. We’re keeping a close eye on the capital markets
because these guys need enough runway to get them through the crisis.”
Jensen and other Air Force officials mentioned
there may be funding available to assist eVTOL suppliers through Agility Prime
or Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contracts, though the program is
focused on aircraft manufacturers at this point due to limited bandwidth.
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