Noelle Harff
The San Diego Union-Tribune
(TNS)

San Diego’s Natilus recently won a $3.5 million Air Force contract to test how its futuristic cargo plane could support military missions in the Pacific.

The aviation innovator released designs of its sleek, blended-wing-body plane, which looks a bit like a manta ray. The first such plane is still being built.

The startup is creating commercial and military planes, but for this contract, the Air Force is specifically interested in Natilus’s Kona cargo craft.

The Kona offers superior fuel efficiency and cargo capacity compared to traditional tube-and-wing planes, which is a priority if the U.S. were to fight in the Pacific, said Nolan Giblin, chief operating officer of Natilus.

“It’s going to be a lot of island hopping and the distances are pretty vast compared to the Middle East,” Giblin said in a phone interview shortly after a meeting at the Pentagon. “The Pacific is going to be highly contested, just given who the likely adversaries might be.”

The Kona’s diamond design gives the cargo bay 60% more volumetric capacity than a traditional tube-and-wing aircraft of similar weight. The Kona will be able to carry 3.8 metric tons (approximately 8,300 to 9,000 pounds), according to the company.

The aerodynamic design purports to use 30% less fuel, cutting operating costs in half.

“The Air Force is looking at fuel in two ways,” Giblin said, first by reducing fuel intake in general, but also by finding new ways to move fuel throughout the Indonesian archipelago. “That’s where we come in.”

The startup, founded a decade ago, is still assembling the Kona in a hangar 1.5 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. It is in the process of picking a site for a factory.

In February, the company discussed a 250,000-square-foot Kona factory and a 3.5 million-square-foot second phase that could bring 11,000 jobs.

The specific grant awarded to Natilus this week is for research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E). That type of funding is what the Pentagon uses to test whether a technology is worth pursuing; it can be a first step toward bigger contracts.

It’s a drop in the bucket compared with the billions of dollars it takes to actually build airplanes.

“We know you can’t go raise $10 billion right away. We had to start small,” said Aleksey Matyushev, CEO and co-founder of Natilus, in February after raising a $28 million funding round.

Natilus isn’t the only company in the blended-wing-body aircraft space.

Competitor JetZero is also developing a prototype, backed by a $235 million Air Force contract award. The two aircraft differ greatly in size: JetZero’s Z4 blended-wing-body plane is roughly 2.3 times larger than Natilus’s twin-prop Kona.

The Kona is designed primarily for flights under 900 nautical miles, while the Z4 is intended, in theory, for transcontinental missions.

Both companies are planning to fly their first planes in 2027.

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