The e350
Most cargo aircraft solve the flight and hand the ground to somebody else. The e350 was designed the other way round: the landing was the middle of the journey, not the end of it.
We designed it in 2024, flew its scale proof of concept in September 2025, and closed the chapter in 2026. This is what was interesting about it, and what stopped it.
What made it different
An aircraft that only flies needs someone waiting at the other end. Somebody drives to the landing site, unloads by hand, and drives away again, which is most of the cost and all of the delay the flight just saved.
So the e350 was built to keep going after it landed. It folded its 8.4 metre wingspan down to three metres and drove, on its own wheels, straight through a normal industrial door.
The dock
The Charging and Loading Station was the other half of the idea. The aircraft drove into it, the pod came off, a fresh pod went on, and the charge came with it. No forklift, no loading crew, no waiting for either.
Put one station inside a warehouse and that warehouse is on the network. Put one helipad in an industrial zone and every business in the zone can reach it, because the last mile is driven rather than flown. Nothing new had to be built at the customer's end beyond the dock itself.
Designed figures for the concept. The full-scale aircraft was never built, so none of these are measured performance.
It flew
The full-scale aircraft was never built. What we built and flew was its scale proof of concept, and it answered the questions a drawing cannot: whether the geometry worked, whether the fold survived contact with a real hinge, whether any of it held together in wind.
The reaction was the part we did not model. People who watched it fly and drive were amazed, and started naming things they would put in it.
Why it stopped
This is the part most companies leave out, so here it is plainly. Nothing about the e350 failed in the air. What it could not do was close the gap between what it cost to build and what a logistics operator would save by using it.
Clients liked it. That was never the problem. The problem is that liking it is not a business case, and we would rather say so than pretend the chapter closed for a more flattering reason.
Certification and development ran to a five-year horizon, which put the first real revenue three to four years out. That is a long gap to finance for a hardware programme, and it asks an investor to underwrite a market that does not exist yet against a regulator that had not finished writing the rules.
Fourteen to eighteen small ducted fans is what buys you low noise, and each one is a precision unit. Together they became a substantial share of the bill of materials, enough that the aircraft cost more than a helicopter of similar lift and had to win the difference back on operating cost alone.
The drive system is what made the concept work on the ground, and it is mass the aircraft carries on every metre it flies. We believed full end-to-end integration justified it, because removing people from both ends is worth more than the energy the wheels cost. It is still a trade that has to be made deliberately.
B2B logistics does not compare a cargo drone to another cargo drone. It compares it to a lorry that already runs the route, is already paid for, and already works. A high list price only survives that if the cost per shipment falls a long way, and with five years in front of us we could not yet show it would.
The record
The chapter ran from the decision to leave passenger transport behind to the morning the proof of concept left the ground.
What we are building now
In 2026 we closed the e350 chapter and began a second aircraft, designed around a different problem in the same industry. The new aircraft answers a bigger problem with a simpler solution.
If you are a logistics provider or an investor interested in working with us on the next version, we would like to hear from you.