The world is currently facing a pilot shortage, as training costs prove prohibitive for many pilot candidates.
As travel demands grow, airlines have struggled to keep up. According to a recent Reuters story, Boeing estimates a need for 790,000 new pilots in the commercial aviation, business aviation, and civil helicopter industries over the next two decades.
One Colorado company hopes its electric airplanes provide an effective and affordable solution to this global shortage.
When George Bye launched Bye Aerospace nearly 12 years ago, his primary focus was on electric and solar electric propulsion.
“We wanted to highlight the opportunity to apply electric and solar electric propulsion as optimally as we could,” he said in a recent interview with Colorado Inno.
After years of testing and prototyping, the Englewood-based company has its eyes on FAA certification for an electric plane that Bye hopes will address the pilot shortage.
The Sun Flyer 2 is a two seat all-electric aircraft designed for training flights, specifically aimed at reducing the cost and mirroring technology found in modern aircrafts.
Bye said the cost and time of pilot training often excludes prospective candidates, with fuel costing $45 per flight hour on a traditional Cessna. Training with the Sun Flyer 2 costs $3 per hour in electricity costs and pilots can fly for about three and half hours, according to Bye.
“Pilot training is our market focus, there’s a very great pilot need. The requirement is urgent and growing, as last year we only trained 1/10 of the pilots we needed,” he said. “It’s getting dicey and urgent, and the Sun flyer, with 1/6th the cost of a traditional trainer, answers the problem we have of the cost of pilot training.”
The Sun Flyer 2 is expected to retail at $349,000, though that price is subject to change.
Bye Aerospace is currently going through the FAA’s certification process for the Sun Flyer 2, aiming at late 2020 for certification. That approval would make it the first electric aircraft certified by the FAA. The company has already begun taking pre-orders from flight schools around the world and will continue to focus on that market.
A recent investment by the Subaru-SBI Innovation Fund will help get Bye Aerospace closer to launching these planes in the wild.
“The fund investment is very helpful in progressing us down the road and those monies are being applied to the engineering and production of the Sun Flyer 2,” Bye said.
In addition to the Sun Flyer 2, Bye Aerospace is also developing a four-person plane called the Sun Flyer 4.
Bye said the company will be doing a lot of flying in the coming months to continue testing the Sun Flyer aircrafts. They first tested the Sun Flyer 2 prototype in April 2018.
