It's a real first. It is also, for anyone who has been watching the traffic rather than the press releases, the second half of a story that started in early July.

What makes this one historic

This is the first hybrid-electric aircraft to fly an announced milestone under the eIPP. BETA’s July flight — more on that below — was battery-electric.

The distinction matters because of the route. Our track for the sortie has N337EE off Salt Lake City at 13:16Z on August 6 and into Cedar City at 15:32Z — 357 km over two hours fifteen, cruising in the neighbourhood of 8,000 feet. That is not a demonstration hop. It is a real regional segment down the I-15 corridor, the kind of thin route that lost scheduled service as the regional airline industry consolidated, and it sits at or beyond the practical limit for today’s battery-electric aircraft. A hybrid flies it with reserves.

Ampaire’s approach to this particular hybrid is also unusual, and worth being precise about. The airframe is a Cessna 337G Skymaster — the Electric EEL — carrying an electric motor in the nose and a Continental IO-550 in the rear. The two powerplants operate independently rather than one feeding the other, which is a different architecture from the series-hybrid turbogenerator arrangements elsewhere in the eIPP fleet. It is a genuinely different bet about how to electrify a regional airframe.

What it is not, yet, is the certification product. Ampaire’s route to market is the Eco Caravan — an STC on an already-certified Caravan airframe, running alongside a Part 33 project for the AMP Drive powerplant. The EEL is where the operational learning happens; the Caravan is where it’s meant to land. That two-step is easy to miss in coverage that treats every eIPP flight as a product launch.

And a note on scale: Ampaire is the smallest-capitalized participant in the program by a wide margin. It put a hybrid on a 350km / 220-mile regional route in the eIPP’s opening months, on a fraction of what the powered-lift OEMs are burning. In a three-year program, capital efficiency is a competitive position, not a consolation.

Getting there was most of the story

N337EE has been working toward this for a month. In our Week 28 log we noted the aircraft operating across Utah in early July and filed it under eIPP foreshadowing — Utah had named Ampaire as a partner back in March, but no press release from the FAA, US DOT, Utah DOT, or Ampaire had confirmed the program itself had formally begun. That looked like a practice run, and in hindsight that reading holds up.

The aircraft then went home. On August 3 it made the long climb back north, departing Long Beach at 20:34Z and landing at Salt Lake City at 00:49Z the following morning — four hours fifteen minutes, most of it above 8,000 feet, in a piston-and-electric twin. Three days later it flew the corridor sortie the FAA chose to announce.

There is something worth sitting with in that sequence. The ferry legs are longer, harder, and less photogenic than the demonstration, and they are the flights that actually prove a hybrid can be operated as transportation rather than exhibited as a technology. The institutional milestone is the 357 km down I-15. The engineering milestone, at 950 km was getting the aircraft to the start line under its own power, twice, with no cameras.

The first step: BETA, organs, and a relay in LIFR

The FAA’s Utah announcement describes it as the second major step in the program. The first came on July 14, when the agency announced that BETA Technologies and United Therapeutics, partnered with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, had flight-tested organ medical-transport capability.

We covered that mission the day before the FAA’s release, from ADS-B, and the detail in the traffic is worth more than the summary. N336MR flew the first leg from Virginia Tech Montgomery Executive in Blacksburg to Charlottesville Albemarle — 210 km in 54 minutes, departing into a 200-foot ceiling and 1.75 statute miles of visibility. That is LIFR. Ampaire, by contrast, flew Utah in unlimited-ceiling VFR at both ends. An electric aircraft launching a time-critical medical mission into low IFR is a materially harder data point than a clear-day demonstration, and it is nowhere in the press release.

At Charlottesville the containment system transferred to N916LF, which flew on to Frederick Municipal and then to Martin State outside Baltimore. The Frederick stop lasted 28 minutes on the tarmac. There is a Charge Cube on site rated at 320 kW, so even a short plug-in could have returned meaningful state of charge — and, if that happened that makes this a relay with a win for the Charge Cube embedded in it, not just a two-aircraft handoff.

Worth noting against the FAA’s framing: this is a Pennsylvania DOT partnership, but the flying happened in Virginia and Maryland, under a multistate collaborative that Pennsylvania leads. Readers tracking the eIPP by state map will find that map misleading more than once over the next three years.

At the time, BETA’s own LinkedIn claimed it had become the first manufacturer to conduct operational flights under the eIPP, and Aerospace America reported the collaborative had signed its agreement with DOT the day before the first flight. No agency confirmed any of it for another day. That gap — between what the aircraft are doing and what the government has said about it — is the whole reason we track the traffic.

What the first two sorties tell us

Both milestones are cargo and medical. Neither is passenger. Neither, on the FAA’s own description, is revenue: Utah is explicitly framed as a demonstration to test future cargo service, and BETA’s flight carried an animal organ for evaluation.

That is exactly the sequence the program’s structure predicts. Cargo and medical logistics sit at the low-friction end — no paying passenger aboard an uncertificated aircraft, a cleaner liability picture, an easier safety case. Passenger service sits higher up the curve, and while the FAA’s revised guidance has put limited commercial passenger operations on the table ahead of type certification, nothing announced so far tests that end of the envelope.

The honest read: the eIPP is delivering on its most conservative promises first, and doing it roughly on schedule. Two announced milestones in three weeks, both in the mission categories where the regulatory surface area is smallest.

What to watch is whether the announcements start moving up the friction gradient — a flight carrying cargo for compensation rather than for evaluation, or a passenger sortie in the New York or Texas projects. The FAA notes Utah and the other participants are planning additional test flights through the rest of the year. The interesting question is not whether more flights happen. It’s when one of them stops being a demonstration.

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Sources: FAA, “FAA Marks Major Milestone with Hybrid-Electric Flight Test in Utah,” August 6, 2026; FAA, “FAA Announces Major Milestone in eVTOL Technology Use,” July 14, 2026; SkyZero EVTOL Weekly, Week 28. Flight data from SkyZero ADS-B.

The FAA named eight projects — air taxis in Florida, New York, and Texas; cargo; emergency medical; offshore energy runs — across 26 states. The first of them is slated to be operational within months of selection. Which means this summer, ordinary people are going to watch aircraft fly commercial-looking missions before those aircraft are type-certified, and a lot of them are going to ask the same question: how is that allowed?

That question has a real answer. It involves exemptions, special airworthiness, and three distinct integration pathways that treat cargo and passengers very differently. It’s the kind of thing that sounds like hand-waving until someone walks you through the actual mechanism — at which point it’s genuinely elegant, and a little surprising.

That walk-through is what our four-part eIPP series was. I’ve now assembled and updated all four parts into a single field guide:

Flying Before Certified: Inside the FAA’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program.

It’s the document I’d want in hand the next time someone asks me how a not-yet-certified aircraft is legally carrying cargo over a US city.

If you’ve been reading SkyZero for the analysis, there’s now a tier built for you. eVTOL Analyst is $29/month — locked at that rate for life if you join as one of the first 100 founders (it’s $49 after). Founders get the field guide as their unlock, plus the things I actually use to write these posts: twelve months of history across every OEM we track, the market-intelligence dashboards built on ADS-B data rather than press releases, and a weekly digest.

The newsletter you’re reading is bundled in. Nothing you have today goes away — this just opens the data behind it.

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The eIPP was always going to be the moment eVTOL stopped being a render and started being a schedule. That moment is now. Good time to have the field guide.

— Kyle

Updated May 30, 2026: New FAA guidance and Joby's stated plans have since clarified the eIPP's commercial cargo and passenger provisions. See the full update at the end of this piece.

Now to the eight projects themselves, the certification pathways underneath them, and what to watch for over the program’s three-year run.

Eight Projects, Three Pathways

On March 9, 2026, the DOT and FAA announced the eight projects selected from more than thirty proposals. The selections are led by six states (Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Utah) plus the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the City of Albuquerque with partner state participation covering 26 total states in the USA. The Federal Register notice published in September 2025 had laid out evaluation criteria that emphasized geographic diversity, operational concept diversity, state, local, tribal and territorial government (SLTT) readiness, and aircraft-maturity considerations. The eight selections appear to balance all four.

The diversity of operational concepts isn’t only a function of FAA preferences. It also reflects the application structure: SLTT governments and their industry partners chose what to propose, based on what they thought they could execute and what the local political economy could support. Louisiana proposing offshore-energy-adjacent logistics with BETA makes sense given the Gulf’s existing helicopter infrastructure. North Carolina proposing medical and regional operations with Joby and BETA reflects the state’s existing rural healthcare logistics challenges and its established medical aviation footprint. Florida’s comprehensive medical-and-cargo-plus-air-taxi proposal reflects the state’s existing emergency response infrastructure and tourism-driven appetite for premium transport. New York’s air taxi focus reflects the political will to make Manhattan-area heliport operations work for AAM.

The map of where eIPP operations will happen in 2026 tracks the geography of winning applications, which itself reflects SLTT governments invested in proposal development.

Where the OEMs are in the certification process

Before walking through the eight projects, it’s worth going over where the leading manufacturers sit in the FAA’s certification process. Headline coverage tends to talk about “the eVTOL companies” as a single group, but the certification dynamics are different across the eight aircraft in play. These distinctions determine timeline, scope of FAA review, what evidence the applicant has to generate, and which other regulations come along for the ride. Lumping all eight together as ‘eVTOL companies’ obscures more than it explains.

We’ll group the OEMs together as “eVTOL” projects, which rely on §21.17(b), and others that rely on “Part 23”, an older regulation for small aircraft.

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Part 2 - legal mechanism

Part 1 and part 2 covered the history and the legal mechanism. Now to the structural question that gets the least airtime in the existing coverage: who’s putting what into the program, and why.

Who pays?

As of program launch, no federal money flows to eIPP participants. The FAA has noted that funding could become available and be appropriated to OTAs in the future, but the program is operating today on the basis that participants fund their own vertiports, their own chargers, their own ground handling, their own operational integration.

So, cash is going to matter — the projects most likely to hit operational milestones on time are the ones whose lead partners already have balance-sheet capacity or deep, patient, private capital backing. So, who has it? We’ll start with the three that have the heaviest lift and longest road to travel: Joby, Archer, and BETA are all three working towards, and have order books that depend on, the brand new powered lift certification.

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This piece was published on May 6, 2026. On May 29, The Air Current reported that the FAA has opened a limited pathway to commercial passenger and cargo operations under the eIPP, potentially ahead of type certification, for operators already inside the formal certification process.

That revises the most specific claims below. Where this article states that “commercial passenger service in uncertified aircraft is not permitted,” that passengers are “not included” in the revenue carve-out, and that the air taxi projects are “an infrastructure-building and crew-training phase, not a revenue passenger phase,” those reflected the program as scoped by the Screening Information Request at the time of writing. Under the revised guidance, limited commercial passenger operations ahead of certification are now on the table, with the specifics set by each project’s still-unpublished OTA. What does not change is the rest of the argument: the eIPP still does not bypass or accelerate certification, every participating aircraft must still be in an active type-certification project, and the OTA remains a permissions-and-contracting instrument, not an airworthiness standard. Part 4 covers the change in full.

Part 1 covered the history of the program. We’re now into the legal mechanism — what an OTA is, the layered contracting architecture both the IPP and the eIPP rest on, what the OTAs actually permit, and what they don’t.

While this article holds up on its own, you can start from part 1 if you prefer.

So, what’s an OTA?

Most of the reporting describes the eIPP as “allowing” pre-certified aircraft to fly commercial operations, which is directionally correct but collapses a lot of nuance. The actual instrument — the Other Transaction Agreement — is worth understanding, because the specific shape of what each project’s OTA permits will do more to determine the program’s outcomes than the project selections themselves.

Most of the reporting describes the eIPP as “allowing” pre-certified aircraft to fly commercial operations, which is directionally correct but collapses a lot of nuance. The actual instrument — the Other Transaction Agreement — is worth understanding, because the specific shape of what each project’s OTA permits will do more to determine the program’s outcomes than the project selections themselves.

An OTA is a federal contracting authority that lets agencies enter into research, prototype, and demonstration partnerships with private entities outside the standard federal procurement rules (the Federal Acquisition Regulation, which runs to thousands of pages and dictates how most government contracting works). The point of the OTA is flexibility:

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Update — May 30, 2026

This piece was published on April 29, 2026, before the program’s terms were clarified. On May 29, The Air Current reported that the FAA has opened a limited pathway to commercial passenger and cargo operations under the eIPP — potentially ahead of type certification — for operators already inside the formal certification process.

That revises one specific thread below. Where this article says the eIPP does not let companies fly paying passengers in aircraft without type certificates — including the “no, no, and no” in the opening — read that as the program was understood at publication. Under the revised guidance, limited commercial passenger service ahead of certification is now on the table, bounded by each project’s still-unpublished Other Transaction Agreement. What has not changed is the heart of the piece: the eIPP still does not bypass or accelerate certification, and participating aircraft must still be moving through the FAA’s formal type-certification process. Part 4 covers the change in full.

On April 27, 2026, a Joby Aviation eVTOL took off from John F. Kennedy International Airport and flew to a heliport in Manhattan. It was the first time an electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft had departed one of New York City’s three major airports under its own power on a point-to-point route. The flight was a demonstration — no passengers, no commercial revenue, no FAA type certificate. But it happened in some of the most heavily regulated airspace in the United States, with the explicit blessing of the Federal Aviation Administration, on a route the company intends to fly commercially as soon as possible.

So how does something like that happen? Has the FAA thrown the rulebook away? Has the certification process changed? Are paying passengers about to climb aboard uncertified aircraft? The short answers are no, no, and no — and the longer answers are what this series is about.

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update: Under the revised guidance, limited commercial passenger service ahead of certification is now on the table, bounded by each project’s still-unpublished Other Transaction Agreement.

While this flight was authorized via direct FAA coordination, future flights like this could be authorized much more easily under the FAA’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, the program announced in March 2026 with eight selected projects spanning twenty-six states. If you’ve read about the eIPP in the last six weeks, you’ve probably encountered a version of the story that emphasizes air taxis: Joby in New York, Archer in Texas, Beta in Louisiana, the future of urban transportation, the certification finish line in sight. The names and places are right, but we wanted to go deeper — into the legal mechanism, the economic structure, and the operational reality that determine what 2026 will look like.

While the eIPP does give the OEMs, their partners, and their customers genuine operational experience in real airspace, it does not let any of these companies fly paying passengers in aircraft that don’t have type certificates or accelerate any of their certification processes. It does not, in the FAA’s own framing, “bypass” certification at all. What it does is something narrower, more interesting, and arguably more consequential.

One more thing worth understanding before we go further. While the federal government decided to do the eIPP, and gets to pick the winners, the applicants are the cities, states, ports, and tribes themselves. State, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) governments are basically requesting permission from the FAA to allow these experimental aircraft to fly in their territory. These programs only exist because eight specific jurisdictions wanted them and built the proposals to make them happen.

This is the first of a four-part series, each article covering a different lens:

• In this first piece, we’ll start with the history. The eIPP is the third generation of a programmatic concept the FAA has been refining since 2017. The 2017 Drone Integration Pilot Program and its 2020 successor BEYOND established the pattern — public-private partnerships, geographic diversity, a three-year clock — and produced both the operational evidence base and the institutional lessons that the eIPP is built on top of. Understanding what the FAA learned from the drone programs is the cleanest way to understand what’s different about this one.

• Second, the legal mechanism. The eIPP is not running on the same paperwork as the drone IPP. The FAA has reached for a more flexible legal tool — the Other Transaction Agreement — and is using it to define the operational envelope for each project directly, rather than relying on stacks of waivers from existing rules. (We’ll release part two next week.)

• Third, the rules of the game. While the eIPP only permits revenue cargo case-by-case, training and demonstration flights, and explicitly not commercial passengers in uncertified aircraft, the commitments are substantial. Participants are putting in serious capital. The FAA is putting in serious institutional capacity. Understanding both halves is what makes the projects’ likely 2026 trajectories legible. (That’s Part 3.)

• Fourth, the eight projects themselves, and what each one is set up to deliver. There’s a real story here, but it’s not just the air taxi story. It’s also a story about offshore energy logistics in Louisiana, hybrid-electric aircraft carrying cargo in Utah, autonomous cargo in New Mexico, and regional revitalization across thirteen states. (Part four will bethe final, and one of the bigger pieces in the series.)

There’s also a structural pattern hiding inside the eight selections. Beta Technologies appears in seven of them. That’s not an accident, and we’ll talk about why.

The eIPP is one of the most interesting things happening in aviation right now - it deserves a careful reading. Here’s the one we’d offer.

From Drone IPP to eIPP: A Lineage

To understand what the FAA is actually trying to do with the eIPP, it helps to look at what the agency learned from running this play before.

The eIPP is the third iteration of a programmatic concept the FAA has been refining since 2017, and the lineage matters — both for what’s been carried forward and for what’s been deliberately changed.

The 2017 Drone Integration Pilot Program

The original program traces to a Presidential Memorandum signed October 25, 20171, directing the Department of Transportation to launch a pilot program to “accelerate the safe integration of drones into the national airspace.” The FAA published a Federal Register notice in November 2017 inviting applications from state, local, and tribal governments, paired with their industry partners. Over five months, the agency reviewed 149 applications.

Why “applications from state, local, and tribal governments”? The IPP was structured so that the SLTT government had to be the prime applicant. Industry partners — drone operators, manufacturers, technology companies — attached to those applications as named partners. The FAA did not pick which cities and states would host drone operations and inform the locals. Cities, states, and tribes had to want it badly enough to write proposals, line up industry partners, build community support, and compete against 148 other applicants for one of ten slots. Asking the host jurisdictions to opt in, repeatedly, on the front end is part of why the 2017 IPP produced the operational ecosystems it did.

Christiansburg, Virginia hosted Wing’s launch of the first commercial residential drone delivery service in the United States in October 2019, and that service has been running ever since. North Dakota allocated $77 million in capital and infrastructure investment toward UAS — anchored by Vantis, the first statewide BVLOS network in the country, operating from Grand Forks. The Choctaw Nation in southeastern Oklahoma went from IPP lead participant to BEYOND participant to opening a 44,600-acre Emerging Aviation Technology Center in 2025, and was named as one of the FAA’s nine national UAS test sites in early 20262. None of those outcomes would have happened if those jurisdictions hadn’t built proposals and competed for selection eight years ago.

On May 9, 2018, the DOT announced ten lead participants representing 36 different operating environments — a deliberately wide range covering package delivery, medical transport, pipeline inspection, public safety, airport perimeter monitoring, agriculture, and emergency response. Lee County Mosquito Control District in Florida withdrew in February 2019, leaving nine effective participants. Over the program’s three-year run, those nine participants and their industry partners conducted more than 21,000 flight operations3.

Each lead participant signed a Memorandum of Agreement with the FAA defining their partnership; the actual operating authority came from waivers under 14 CFR Part 107, exemptions under Section 333 of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, and Certificates of Waiver or Authorization issued on a case-by-case basis. Section 351 of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018 codified the program in statute. The IPP’s three-year clock ran out on October 25, 2020 — the date was statutorily mandated, so the program ended on schedule regardless of what was or wasn’t finished.

BEYOND: the second iteration

The day after the IPP ended, the FAA launched its successor program: BEYOND. Eight of the nine IPP lead participants signed new agreements to continue. The City of San Diego did not return; the others — North Dakota DOT, Reno, Kansas DOT, Memphis-Shelby County Airport Authority, Virginia (under the Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership), North Carolina DOT, Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks — all moved into BEYOND.

BEYOND was designed to address what the IPP didn’t finish. Where the IPP focused on demonstrating that complex drone operations were possible, BEYOND focused on three more specific objectives: advancing Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations under established rules rather than waivers, collecting performance data to support performance-based rulemaking, and addressing community engagement on noise and societal impact. The shift from “prove the operations can be done” to “build the rulemaking foundation under them” was deliberate — the IPP’s waiver-based framework had been provisional from the start, and by 2024 the operational evidence existed to write performance-based rules instead.

BEYOND Phase 1 ran from October 2020 through 2024 and produced 70,563 total flights, of which 48,383 were beyond visual line of sight — a meaningful operational baseline4. The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 established BEYOND Phase 2 and extended the program to 2029, which means it’s running concurrently with the eIPP today.

What the post-mortems found

By 2022, both the DOT Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office had published reviews of the IPP. A more recent OIG follow-up in June 2025 covered BEYOND and the broader BVLOS integration effort. Read together, they paint a consistent picture.

The successes were real. The IPP produced the first BVLOS operation in domestic U.S. airspace using onboard and ground-based detection-and-avoid systems instead of human visual observers (UAF, on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System). It produced the first state agency waiver for operations over people. It generated the technical data that informed the 2021 Operations Over People rule and shaped the proposed Part 108 BVLOS rulemaking still working its way through the regulatory process. When Wing and Zipline began commercial drone deliveries to U.S. consumers, they did it on a regulatory foundation the IPP and BEYOND had laid down.

The limitations were also real, and they’re the ones that matter for understanding the eIPP. The waiver-and-exemption framework was always provisional — it worked exactly as designed, generating the operational evidence the FAA needed to write performance-based rules. By 2025, it was time to graduate from waiver-by-waiver approvals to a more capable instrument. Coordination across FAA lines of business was a persistent friction point, with six of eight BEYOND lead participants flagging it in the most recent OIG review5. Funding ambiguity was structural: the FAA’s own response to the OIG was unusually candid that “all IPP program participants were volunteers, and no funding was provided to conduct operations, provide data, or staff the IPP.”[5] And partner attrition was meaningful — during BEYOND, at least 13 lead participant operating partners left the program, citing limited returns on time invested or, in some cases, using their operational approvals primarily for media value rather than the program’s stated data-collection goals.[5] (Worth holding in mind: the same risk applies to eIPP participants. The OTA structure with performance milestones and termination clauses is partly designed to manage exactly that pattern.)

What the eIPP carries forward, and what it changes

The eIPP was launched by Presidential directive — President Trump’s June 2025 Executive Order6, building on a Presidential Determination from earlier that year. Like the IPP, it solicits proposals from state, local, and tribal governments paired with industry partners. Like the IPP, it selects a small number of geographically and operationally diverse projects from a larger applicant pool. Like the IPP, it’s nominally a three-year program. The structural pattern is identical.

What’s changed is everything underneath the structure. To address some of the findings from the post-mortems, the MOA was replaced by the OTA. The aircraft category has shifted from small unmanned drones to crewed and uncrewed electric aircraft, including powered-lift aircraft for which the underlying certification rules are still being written. The economic stakes are an order of magnitude higher: the IPP’s industry partners were companies like Wing and Zipline operating sub-55-pound aircraft; the eIPP’s are companies like Joby, Beta, and Archer with multi-billion-dollar valuations and aircraft that intend to carry passengers. The data-sharing architecture is more formalized. The performance and termination clauses are more contractual.

If the IPP asked “can drones do useful work in real airspace?” — and BEYOND asked “how might we generalize what the IPP demonstrated into rules?” — the eIPP tackles “how might we allow a new category of aircraft to enter commercial service before its regulatory framework is finished — safely, on a scale that produces meaningful data, and on a timeline that’s compatible with the certification process running in parallel?” That’s the question Part 2 starts to answer.

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And, now here’s the full email from earlier describing the eIPP program in case you missed it.

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About eIPP - What It Is

A 3-year FAA pilot program to accelerate the deployment of electric air taxis and advanced air mobility (AAM) aircraft in the U.S. through public-private partnerships.

The Basic Structure

Who Applies: State, Local, Tribal, or Territorial (SLTT) governments — not the aircraft companies directly. An SLTT must be the lead applicant.

Required Partnership: Each SLTT must partner with at least one U.S.-based private sector company (OEM) that has an active FAA type certification project.

Minimum Awards: At least 5 projects will be selected.

What the Program Does

Regulatory Sandbox: Allows pre-certification flight operations under FAA oversight with waivers/exemptions that wouldn’t normally be granted

Data Generation: Collects real-world operational data to inform future FAA regulations, guidance, and certification standards

Public Trust Building: Demonstrates safety and viability to communities through visible operations

Infrastructure Testing: Validates vertiports, charging stations, airspace integration, weather system

Scaling Playbook: Successful implementations become “standards of practice” for nationwide roll-out

What Participants Get

• Expedited FAA approvals for operational concepts

• Direct coordination with FAA on airspace, certification, and regulatory questions

• Visibility as a national demonstration site

• First-mover advantage in building local AAM ecosystems

What Participants DON’T Get

• No federal funding — SLTTs fund their own projects

• No commercial operations in uncertified aircraft — this is about OEMs early access to testing flights, crew training, media access etc outside of their current approved airspace; but still does not allow ticketed passenger service.

Below I’m providing a summary by OEM of the eIPP programs we can see - and we’ll be sharing a full Excel version for paid members.