Tom O'Leary admits that most suppliers are skeptical a few years ago when his startup Jetzero approached them with a business plan that challenged Airbus and Boeing with bold new commercial aircraft designs.
This concept requires a Blend Wing Body (BWB) aircraft, also known as a “full wing” aircraft, large enough to carry between 200 and 250 passengers.
Building decades of research into the flight characteristics of BWB aircraft, Jetzero's “Z4” features a not-so-distant fuselage that blends into a wide wingspan and fuses two turbofans mounted on a relatively short body.
Jetzero will build an aircraft with already used materials, parts, components and engines and lean against an aerospace manufacturer with an established supply chain.
However, O'Leary, the company's founding chief executive, told reporters this month at the Jetzero facility at Long Beach Airport.
“Of course, their answer was 'altogether',” he says. “We were looking at our vision and they were looking back at us and saying, “What kind of people do you guys like, eight people? You realize there's a two-layer global one, right?” ”
O'Leary said it is “not daunting, but not impossible” to build a large-scale aircraft with a radically different appearance to compete with one of the world's leading aerospace manufacturers.
The cost of developing the sky, which could reach $10 billion by some estimates, is one of many considerations that comes with building the world's first BWB passenger aircraft.
However, Jetzero believes that demand for the Z4 will increase. The future is maintained, everything is wings.
The fast-growing Los Angeles-area startup has signed a $235 million contract with the US Air Force (USAF) with the goal of achieving its first flight in 2027 since landing in August 2023.
More recently, United Airlines has become the latest US carrier to throw support behind the development of BWB aircraft in a conditional order of up to 200 jets, subject to the Z4 crashing into a specific development milestone. United invested in Jetzero, but the dollar amount has not been disclosed.
The startup has also partnered with Delta Air Lines to investigate effective cabin layouts with BWB aircraft and received financial support from Alaska Airlines in the Series A funding round that was closed in 2023.
Founder and Chief Technology Officer Mark Page tells FlightGllobal that Jetzero is engaged in deep consultations with Delta, including a route plan with the Z4, but the Atlanta-based airline has previously balked its financial support for Jetzero.
However, I am confident that Jetzero and Delta's relationship will move forward.
It is still unclear how Jetzero will raise the billions it needs to bring the Z4 to the market, but it suggests it will pursue public-private partnerships and private equity financing, which can provide cash injections, in addition to securing pre-orders from the airline.
Jetzero's product head Scott Savian told Flight Global that the company is in continuous discussions with potential airline customers. In addition to major US carriers, freight carriers, lenders and low-cost passenger airlines are among those interested in the Z4, he says.
Apart from carrying passengers and cargo, all-wing aircraft have potential military transport and air refueling applications.
“Every time we lay the interior and exterior of the plane, we look at multiple functions of the aircraft,” says Savian.
O'Leary emphasizes that USAF demonstrators support Jetzero's commercial aircraft program and that there is a “zero military requirement” besides demonstrating the viability of the aircraft.
“When that happened, the Air Force and other military operations could actually deploy it as a derivative,” he says. He points to examples such as the aerial refuel tanker of the Boeing KC-46, a derivative of the 767.
Jetzero summons the concept of tanker KC-Z4.
According to O'Leary, the company says it is focused on lasers in the commercial market, but when it landed the USAF contract, it marked a turning point when suppliers began taking the program more seriously. “Everyone on the military side started working with our team and introduced us to the commercial side across the fence.”
Geometry “limits”
In-house, we believe that the efficiency of traditional tube and wing passenger aircraft designs is more or less at its maximum, with almost all potential aerodynamic gains already being achieved.
“We are at the limits of today's geometry,” says Savan. “Changing geometry is much easier than changing physics.”
O'Leary adds that the flying public has only known designs for one aircraft to date, and that alternatives have been delayed for a long time.
“We've got this tube and wing configuration that serves us since the 50s and 60s, so well, for our lifetimes, we're flying in the same aircraft configuration,” says O'Leary. “We were able to expand our global air travel. In fact, the modern world is not what we are today, and without this form of air travel, it would be totally different.”
However, O'Leary claims that the tube and wing “were past a point that reduces returns for a long time,” allowing the Z4's excellent lift and aerodynamics to rise beyond the traditional fuselage.
“The whole wing design effectively lifts the entire wing, leveraging the four forces of flight (lift, weight, drag, thrust), and means lower drag and reduction with the lifting body through carbon composites, meaning less engine, less weight and less drag,” he says.
Jetzero estimates that this “noble cycle” will reduce the fuel burning of the Z4 by up to 50% over today's passenger aircraft, representing an efficiency leap in which the global aviation industry needs to significantly reduce its increasingly distant targets of “net zero” emissions by 2050.
“That's really the beauty and this one technology brings a lot,” says O'Leary.
Jet passed the preliminary design review milestone in 2024, with a critical design review expected to be completed this year, followed by the expected system integration review in 2026.
Jetzero claims that skipping a full-fledged demonstrator in 2027 is on track.
“Large market”
The Z4 is intended to be a 200-250-seat aircraft that is what Jetzero is an unserved segment of the Air Ruiler market.
While Airbus is currently increasing production of its newly certified A321XLR, Boeing has yet to clarify the highly delayed certification of the 737 Max 10.
Savian says Jetzero is moving to “a large market that desperately needs new technology.”
“This is where the airlines say they need planes,” says O'Leary. “We believe that the demand by 2050 will be a lot more planes than we can ever build.”
Some people in the company hope that Airbus and Boeing will focus on filling thousands of current generations of narrow body jet orders, not bringing new airliner designs to the market.
Members of the Jetzero team also suggest that major aircraft carriers will pursue their own BWB concept after the concept has proven to be a winner.
“I think it's a good thing for the industry,” Savant says. “When we succeed, I believe it forces others to follow.”
The startup plans to produce hundreds of jets each year by the mid-2030s.
O'Leary acknowledges that production rates have historically been low on all multi-aircraft, and accelerating the production rates of large multi-aircraft units is a “factory goal of the future.”
So, Jetslo plans to build a manufacturing facility somewhere in the United States with a footprint of the “Sophie Stadium Complex, Magic Kingdom” size, O'Leary says. “This is a huge type of operation, 1,000 acres.”
Jetzero will primarily handle composite manufacturing and fuselage assemblies in-house, increasing the footprint needed for the company's expected production plants. The factory site has not yet been revealed.
“The Giant's Shoulder”
Jetzero envisions O'Leary to introduce disruptive technology into a deeply entrenched aerospace manufacturing industry compared to startups such as SpaceX, Palantir and Waymo.
“These companies are entering the space and saying, 'There's a better way.' And what's usually involved is putting aside preconceptions (and sometimes misconceptions) about what's needed to bring new technology to the market,” he says. “Everything we do here at Jetzero is designed to lower the entry barrier.”
O'Leary himself previously worked for Tesla, but Jetzero attracted talent such as Airbus, Boeing, Embraer, Gulfstream and Electric Aircraft developer beta technology.
The Chief Executive of Dan da Silva, a former Boeing executive and son of Embraer's founder, says the common power to animate Jetzero employees is “interested in bringing something different to this market.”
The team is “very familiar with the art of confusion,” says O'Leary.
However, he notes that Jetzero is not pursuing a Tesla-type strategy for vertical integration and is choosing to work with established aerospace suppliers to reduce the risk of the project.
“The decision from the start was to build on the shoulders of the Giants,” O'Leary said, referring to flight test data collected from previous BWB designs.
“It would be incredible to be able to start a company with billions of dollars of research with experts around the world for decades,” he adds.
BWB technology has been researched for decades, with McDonnell Douglas developing the concept in the 1990s, NASA and Boeing later collaborating on the X-48 program, and two subscale prototypes were seen in assembly and test flights between 2007 and 2013.
Recently, trace elements from BWB designs have appeared in NASA, with Boeing's conceptual design of the transnic truss brace wing aircraft known as the X-66. The concept was recently abandoned by Boeing. Boeing is currently researching “thin wing” technology for its next commercial jet.
The BWB design establishes aerodynamic advantages, but its drawbacks are also known.
The main one is pitch stability. Because BWB aircraft do not have horizontal stabilizers, aggressive correction from the flight control surface is required to balance the load, introducing complexity.
The predecessor design also shows poor slow handling during takeoff and landing.
Da Silva says Jetzero is testing the aerodynamics of the aircraft using a subscale model mounted on the truck. “We are satisfied with controllability at every stage of flight,” and the prototype design is locked.
“If we achieve it… 15-20 flights at every attack angle, every slip angle… everything can be repeated in perfect condition, so you know there's a stable architecture,” he says.
Jetzero isn't just an ambition to bring BWB aircraft to the market and disrupt decades of tube and wing domination. San Diego-based Natilas is currently searching for US manufacturing sites to build self-driving Kona freight aircraft.
Canadian Business Jet maker Bombardier also researches BWB designs in the Ecojet program.
While knowing Natyrs and his equally big ambitions, Savant says that Jetslo is focusing on its own development path.
“We're looking at awards,” he says. This is to deliver the first full-wing aircraft and do it in the right place on the market with a complete product offering. ”
