Aircraft startup Electra plans to invest around $850 million to build a factory in Ohio, giving the maker of hybrid-electric ultra-short takeoff and landing aircraft its first dedicated production base.

It would place Electra in the same state as electric air taxi rival Joby, which is already building a scaled plant in Dayton.

Ohio has courted advanced air mobility firms hard as regulators keep clearing US airspace for air taxis, and Joby has said its Dayton site could eventually employ around 2,000 people.

Electra, based in Manassas, Virginia, has spent the past year expanding its engineering headcount rather than its factory floor, so a plant on this scale would mark a real shift. The company employed roughly 90 people at the last count, split between Virginia and a research site in Switzerland.

The aircraft it wants to build is the EL9, a nine-seat design Electra calls an “ultra short” aircraft, or eSTOL. Rather than lifting off vertically like an eVTOL, it uses eight electric propellers along the wing to blow air over the surface and generate lift at very low speed.

That blown-lift trick lets the EL9 get airborne in roughly 150 feet and operate from fields as small as 300 by 100 feet, about a tenth of a conventional runway.

Electra quotes a cruise speed of 175 knots and a maximum ferry range of up to 1,100 nautical miles, falling to around 330 nautical miles when it is carrying nine passengers and their bags.

Power comes from a hybrid-electric system in which a small turbine-driven generator keeps four battery packs topped up in flight, sidestepping the heavy batteries that limit all-electric designs.

Safran agreed in July to develop and produce its TG600 turbogenerator for the aircraft, while Evolito is supplying the electric motors.

At roughly 55 decibels on the ground, Electra argues the EL9 is quiet enough to operate close to where people live and work.

The company has pitched hybrid-electric aircraft as a way to expand US regional air travel roughly tenfold, and reckons domestic demand could eventually reach some 16,000 such aircraft.

Electra has drawn an unusually broad set of backers, including Lockheed Martin Ventures, which led an early funding round, alongside Honeywell, Safran, Prysm Capital, and Norway's Statkraft Ventures. It raised $115 million in a Series B round in 2025.

Order interest has been strong on paper, if not yet binding. Electra says it holds around 2,200 letters of intent from more than 50 operators, a book it values at close to $9 billion, with named customers including Bristow Group, JSX, Blade India, and Surf Air, plus interest from NASA and the US Air Force, Army, and Navy.

That tally dwarfs the pipelines of many battery-only rivals, though converting flying-car order books into paying passengers has proved hard right across the sector.

Much of the demand rests on a pitch that the EL9 can serve small airfields the airlines abandoned decades ago, opening thousands of routes that jets cannot economically fly.

Letters of intent are not firm orders, and the EL9 still has to fly. Electra has flown a smaller two-seat demonstrator that logged takeoffs well under 200 feet, and it staged what it billed as the first urban flight of a hybrid-electric ultra-short aircraft in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, but the full-scale plane is not expected to take off until 2027.

FAA certification under Part 23 rules is expected toward the end of the decade, with service entry pencilled in for around 2029 or 2030.

An Ohio factory would give Electra the industrial base to turn its pipeline into deliveries, assuming the timeline holds and the reported $850 million, along with the jobs it implies, survives the usual gap between aviation ambition and a running production line.