OC’s role in the emerging eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) aircraft industry has seen its share of setbacks of late.
Santa Ana’s Overair quietly wound down its operations over the past year, and competitor Archer Aviation announced the acquisition of its technology and the hiring of some key Overair employees in August. Last week saw another flying taxi upstart based in OC, Irvine’s Supernal, pause its operations amid an executive shake-up; see Kevin Costelloe’s report in the next print edition for more details.
There are signs of progress in the nascent sector. Last week came reports of Palo Alto-based Jetson, a maker of an ultralight, one-person eVTOL aircraft, delivering its first product, the Jetson One, which costs $128,000.
The buyer: Anduril Industries’ Palmer Luckey, who was filmed taking the vehicle for a solo flight after getting 50 minutes of familiarization with the vehicle.
Anduril’s no stranger to eVTOLs. It’s working with Archer Aviation for military-quality applications of the technology; San Jose-based Archer now has a local base in Surf City.
And Luckey’s no stranger to piloting, as he owns several helicopters.
The Jetson One is said to have a flight time of up to 20 minutes, and a top speed of just over 60 mph, which would be enough to get Luckey from his home on Lido Isle to Anduril’s Costa Mesa HQ if traffic’s bad.
Autonomous drones, fighter jets, submarines and other AI-powered technologies have propelled Anduril Industries into the big leagues, reports military trade publication Defense News.
For the first time, it cracked the publication’s annual listing of the World’s Top 100 Defense Firms by revenue, coming in at No. 93 with an estimated $950 million in total defense revenue last year.
The publication this month noted that Anduril’s been roughly doubling revenue each of the past five years. Getting to $2 billion in annual defense revenue would’ve placed the firm at No. 63 in this year’s list.
The latest big win for Anduril, announced last week, is a $159 million prototype contract with the U.S. Army for development of a night vision and mixed reality system for soldiers.
Anduril Industries is grabbing more local real estate to handle additional work; see the Sept. 1 edition for its latest big lease, pushing its area footprint over 1.25 million square feet.
TTM Technologies, by contrast, counts just 14,500 square feet of local space, for its Santa Ana HQ. Yet the maker of printed circuit boards, mission systems and radio frequency components was the highest-ranking OC firm on the World’s Top 100 Defense Firms list, placing No. 86 with $1.1 billion in defense revenue last year, according to Defense News.
The nearly $5 billion-valued firm (Nasdaq: TTMI) this month got a new CEO, Edwin Roks, who previously led Teledyne Technologies (NYSE: TDY). He replaces the retiring Thomas Edman.
TTM’s shares are up 180% in the past year. Its real estate portfolio spans 5.5 million square feet, with most of its space outside the U.S.
