Ultralight aircraft are usually the simplest of flying machines, often just tube and fabric—no certification, no pilot’s license, no commercial use. 

But several advanced air mobility (AAM) startups see the FAA’s Part 103 rules for ultralight vehicles as a way to bring electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) technology to market without the cost and time involved in certifying an aircraft.

Putting unproven technology into the hands of recreational pilots would seem a risky step for the nascent eVTOL industry. But one of the first companies to enter this personal air vehicle market has already spent more than a decade working to ensure its aircraft is as safe and easy to use as possible.

Canadian engineer Marcus Leng made the first manned flight of a fixed-wing eVTOL in October 2011. More than a decade later the Californian startup he founded, Opener, is in the final stages of validation testing of its fly-by-wire Blackfly ultralight eVTOL and looking to begin deliveries in 2023.

This contrasts with the fast-paced plans of some of the more recent startups that have entered the Part 103 ultralight eVTOL market promising to begin deliveries just months after starting flight tests.

“There remain a number of unknowns as we go through our final validation testing that make it difficult to put a date on the calendar and say: ‘This is when you get your production Blackfly’,” says Ken Karklin, who took over as CEO at Opener in May after 13 years in senior management at AeroVironment.

“It’s for that reason that we are not engaging in these games of deposits and wait-lists. To me, all that is kind of dishonest,” he tells Aviation Week. “Our goal is to offer the safest personal air vehicle economically feasible … We’re feeling pretty good about 2023, but we’re not committing to a day.”

Opener has completed more than 4,300 test flights, mostly uncrewed. “We have a robust history of remotely piloted testing and design and control updates,” Karklin says. “For the last year, there has been a lot of work on corner cases, failure modes, parachute testing and expanding the flight envelope. We recently transitioned to human-piloted flight as the dominant mode of test.”

The startup has multiple Blackfly v3 vehicles in testing and multiple pilots—called operators—“and we’re in the process of training even more,” he says. All Opener’s operators have either completed FAA ground school or are Part 107 drone operators. Blackfly display flights at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s AirVenture Oshkosh show in July were flown by one experienced operator and two employees who were freshly trained, he says.

An ultralight aircraft does not require type certification. Instead FAA field officers, guided by an advisory circular, evaluate whether the aircraft complies with Part 103. The Blackfly will be ready for production, Karklin says, when it has accumulated sufficient human-piloted test hours to ensure safe flight and undergone an independent non-advocate design review and test flight.

“We are in the process of confirming the full flight envelope. Later this summer we are going to be flying hot and high,” Karklin said. “We’re also looking to expand the payload envelope a bit. Now it’s been specified at 200 lb., and we’ve got room to grow that.”

A Blackfly is undergoing electromagnetic compatibility testing in an anechoic chamber. “We are running pieces of DO-160G [environmental testing standard]. This is not something we are obligated to comply with, but it’s a computer-controlled aircraft. We need to know the operator is going to have a good experience, even if they bring an unlawful transmitter onboard,” he says.

Endurance and reliability testing, at the subsystem and system level, “has been nothing short of exhaustive,” Karklin says. “The Blackfly has been flown for thousands of miles without incident, except when performing deliberately risky testing at the edge of the envelope in an unmanned fashion.”

The boundaries for remotely piloted testing are wider than for crewed flight. “They are much closer to the edge of the performance envelope and are walked in a bit for human-piloted flight,” Karklin says, adding that Part 103 rules have created an unusual situation in testing.

“The FAA comes in and does an airworthiness inspection on each of our aircraft because we fly them remotely piloted under a COA [certificate of authorization]. We get an airworthiness certification for it as an unmanned vehicle and it’s FAA-registered,” Karklin explains. “Then when we’re done putting it through its paces as a UAV, we deregister it, put the airworthiness certification in a file, and when the human operator gets in it’s a Part 103 aircraft.”

Opener has produced fuselages, wings, batteries and electronics for “dozens” of aircraft, but fewer than a dozen have been assembled and human-flown. “We’ve [got] our arms around the cost to manufacture, and the supply chain is stable and vetted. We’ve not announced pricing, but we’re in a position where, if we satisfy all the final validation testing, we’ll be capable of ramping up production,” Karklin says.

Sales will be face-to-face and selective. “If someone doesn’t want to get trained on how to fly a Blackfly, they’re not going to be able to take delivery,” he says. Operators will not have to be pilots but will need to be able to read aeronautical charts, find Class G airspace, read the weather and understand Part 103 regulations and how to interact with the FAA. 

Transported on a trailer, the Blackfly takes two people 20 min. to assemble and check out. Preflight checks are performed using a tablet that serves as a supplemental screen in the cockpit. “You take the tablet, walk around the aircraft, and it walks you through every step,” he says. Opener is developing online computer-based training to help customers maintain currency.

Technologically, the Blackfly appears diametrically opposed to the traditional notion of an ultralight aircraft as a simple machine. But, Karklin says, the FAA seems “reassured by our approach to airworthiness and by our obsessive dedication to reliability achieved through redundancy.” Flight control computers are triple redundant, radar altimeters quadruple-redundant, 16 independent battery packs in the tandem wings power the eight propellers, and all elevon control surfaces are split.

“We’ve taken an incredibly conservative approach to managing power and energy storage,” he says. Motor thrust is overspecified, batteries have a 20% reserve and the system runs at a low “sub-100” voltage. The ballistic recovery parachute is “100% manually triggered” and the only system on the aircraft not controlled by electronics. 

“Who buys these things is still TBD,” Karklin says. “We feel there is a huge community. Any enthusiast out there who ultimately never crossed the threshold and became a certified pilot for whatever reason. Or maybe they’re later in life and wouldn’t mind spending a bit of money to have something they can take out on their ranch or farm and fly, especially if it can be done safely and efficiently and it’s green.”

Graham leads Aviation Week's coverage of technology, focusing on engineering and technology across the aerospace industry, with a special focus on identifying technologies of strategic importance to aviation, aerospace and defense.

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