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.
