Hybrid-electric propulsion specialist VerdeGo Aero has spent the last seven years building its team, perfecting its products and making a name for itself in niche circles. This summer, the Daytona Beach, Florida-based company broke out and took its offering to the world stage.

VerdeGo exhibited for the first time at the Farnborough Airshow in July, bringing its 185kW VH-3 powerplant to the runway – a unit it markets as “a hyper-efficient technology that allows electric aircraft to have autonomy and endurance necessary for safe and practical flight. operations”.

“This wasn’t our first show in Europe, but we’re at the point now where we’re showcasing hardware on a large scale,” says co-founder and managing director Eric Bartsch, with a burst of pride.

The company is on a mission to prove that advanced hybrid power plants can be a game changer in the increasingly crowded field of advanced air mobility. Bartsch, its chief evangelist, says purely battery-powered solutions won’t suffice for some of the most complex uses of these planes, but hybrid solutions will.

VerdeGo began life in 2017 as a designer of urban air mobility aircraft. Bartsch teamed up with experts from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU) as well as Erik Lindbergh, a pilot whose grandfather was none other than Charles, the first to cross the Atlantic in 1927 But about a year later, the team moved away from building a vehicle to benefit from its deep expertise in hybrid-electric powertrains.

Although the civilian applications of the propulsion units are quite obvious, VerdeGo has also found an interested and appreciative partner in the US Air Force, and increasingly the US Army, both of which have supported the company in the development of the VH-3 and the more powerful VH-3. 4T. The latter is a high-performance 400 kW stand-alone system comprising a motor, generator, inverter and thermal management.

“The VH-3 is an ideal engine for reconnaissance drones or objects that need to loiter for a long period of time,” says Bartsch. “Efficiency, which is great from a commercial point of view – because it reduces emissions and operating costs – is also great from a military point of view, because it allows you to carry out missions a lot longer, wherever you want to go. »

The VH-4T, meanwhile, could be ideal for transporting people or cargo – anywhere from 226 kg (500 lb) to several thousand pounds – depending on the application.

Electric aircraft manufacturers have done significant preparatory work in this area, he says. “You can use the convertible flight modes – vertical takeoff and horizontal cruise – much more easily at high speeds and efficiently. »

MILITARY INTEREST

“The military was an early adopter and recognized the great potential of electric flight,” he says, but a purely battery-powered electric aircraft would be impossible to use for compelling military missions.

“The range trade-offs are too great for the military, which typically cares about high-performance missions. There is no charging, refueling or any other infrastructure in most places they want to go.

“These powertrains allow the military to try electric flight in different ways and really think about what the next generation aircraft will be that could replace some of the helicopters, tiltrotors or other devices available for vertical lift.”

A collaboration with the US space agency NASA, as part of the latter’s SBIR Ignite program, announced in June, is finalizing design studies for four types of electric aircraft with the VH-3. SBIR Ignite funds U.S. small businesses in early-stage, high-risk technology development, and so far the results have been promising.

“What we were able to show was that a VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft with two VH-3s, a battery and a hybrid-electric powertrain and, most importantly, wings, compared to a helicopter with similar capabilities, we get about a 60% reduction in fuel consumption,” Bartsch says. This is a commercial application or perhaps a military drone application.

“We’re using this industry-neutral design to really illustrate how all these things come together. The big story is this: electric motors, wings and electric hybrid allow you to get something very different from the performance we are used to seeing in a helicopter.

The company is currently ground testing full-scale engines at its Daytona Beach test center, with some already installed and preparing for an imminent maiden release. Bartsch doesn’t name names, but he says he expects the first VerdeGo hardware to fly in early 2025.

“Some powerplants are already installed on our customers’ aircraft, so I expect to see these test aircraft flying very soon,” he says. “They’ve been tested quite a bit, and now it’s the aircraft manufacturer’s schedule, and when they’re able to make their first flight, that’s the ride when they take off.”

FLORIDA BASE

All of the company’s engineering and testing work currently takes place at its own facilities near the ERAU campus, but with a growing order book and mass production in the medium term, it will need to look for new premises.

Bartsch says VerdeGo has MoUs for “thousands of hybrid power plants, from quite a number of aircraft manufacturers (and) these aircraft range from military drones to civilian aircraft with passengers on board.”

So far, the company has raised about $16 million in seed funding, plus “a substantial amount of non-dilutive financing through commercial programs and partnerships with the military.” Most recently, it added more than $4 million to its coffers in July.

Bartsch and his team are preparing for the company’s next investment round, scheduled for mid-2025, when the company will target $40 million to support construction of its future production facilities. The location is to be announced, but Bartsch believes it would make sense for VerdeGo to stay in Florida.

“We’re being approached aggressively by economic development organizations in other parts of the country, and we’re going to have to look at what those incentives are and really find the right final business model for where we locate this facility. But personally, I’d like to see it happen in Florida, right near where our research and development and headquarters are, just because it makes collaboration between those two parts of the company a lot easier .

As VerdeGo’s engines attract broader global attention and investors, Bartsch is focused on selling what he calls “the right tool for the right job.”

“I don’t think this next generation of aircraft is going to kill the helicopter, in any case, there is a market and a mission for helicopters. But there are many missions, existing and new, for which this new generation of vertical lift aircraft is also ideally suited.