Bye Aerospace has begun building the first production prototype of its two-seat eFlyer 2 electric trainer airplane. More than three years since the Colorado-based aircraft developer announced that series production had commenced, it is “taking the composite molds and now fabricating the actual aircraft parts,” Bye Aerospace chief financial officer James Dunn told AIN.
Production work at Bye Aerospace slowed down due to “an extraordinarily challenging funding environment,” Dunn said, but the company believes it is on track for FAA Part 23 certification and service entry in the next 24 to 30 months. The company has launched another Series C fundraising round, and Dunn said he is “pleased with the interest” so far. He said he believes the latest funding round “can power our eFlyer type certification campaign through rate production.”
The FAA has approved all 16 of Bye Aerospace’s system-specific certification plans and its means of compliance, and in January 2023 the U.S. air safety regulator granted the company the G-2 issue paper. In September 2023, the company reported that the FAA approved its functional hazard analysis. The company intends to use the first eFlyer 2 production prototype, named “Serial Number 00001,” for FAA certification testing.
When it began laying the groundwork for series production in 2021, “Bye Aerospace had initiated the precursor steps to fabricating Serial Number 0001 by contracting with several firms for non-recurring engineering production of the composite master tools, molds and fixtures, and a few sample composite mock-up parts,” Dunn said.
While Bye Aerospace has faced some setbacks in launching series production, the company has already built and flown a technology demonstrator for the eFlyer 2. Formerly known as the Sun Flyer, the aircraft achieved its first flight in 2018. That proof-of-concept test aircraft “provided invaluable insight on our high-voltage electric power system design and performance,” Dunn said. “Over three years we flew the proof of concept over 100 times, gleaning important data and trends, which we dovetailed into our production design engineering.”
Despite the lack of apparent progress since 2021, Bye Aerospace has continued to secure more orders for the battery-powered eFlyer 2 and the subsequent four-seat eFlyer 4 model. Between the two eFlyer models, Bye’s order backlog amounts to 893 aircraft worth $570 million, according to Dunn, who said the backlog is about evenly split between nonrefundable, deposit-backed orders and commitments backed by letters of intent.
In January, Skyborne Airline Academy, a flight school with locations in Florida and the UK, upped its commitment to include a total of 40 eFlyer aircraft, including both the eFlyer 2 and 4 models. Then in May, charter operator Hopscotch Air signed a letter of intent to purchase one eFlyer 2 trainer and three eFlyer 4 aircraft, the latter of which it aims to operate for commercial on-demand air taxi flights.
According to Dunn, Bye Aerospace will begin delivering the aircraft to customers as soon as it’s certified, although the company has not yet selected a site for its scaled manufacturing facility and has not disclosed its targeted production rates. However, thanks to an innovative “design-by-manufacturing” approach, the company may be able to deliver its certification test aircraft to customers as production aircraft, he said.
“Through this approach, we will be developing and learning eFlyer manufacturing processes,” Dunn said. “In turn, we will leverage those production lessons into ramping up deliveries into the hundreds of aircraft in a few short years.”
Bye Aerospace claims the eFlyer series can cut operating costs by up to 80% compared with the Cessna 172. The battery-electric propulsion system produces zero emissions and emits less noise than traditional piston-engine trainer airplanes.
Equipped with Safran’s 100-kilowatt EngineUs electric motors, the eFlyer 2 is designed to fly for about three hours at 73 knots, delivering a range of about 250 miles. The larger eFlyer 4 model is expected to offer about twice that range. It will have Garmin’s G500 TXi avionics suite and Aviation Safety Resources’ Soteria whole-aircraft recovery parachute system.
In addition to the eFlyer 2 and 4 models, Bye Aerospace is also planning for yet another larger model called the eFlyer 800. It is billing the eFlyer800 as a multirole general aviation aircraft that will compete with twin turboprops such as the Textron King Air family.