Triumph Group’s Red Oak and Arlington facilities will be working on state-of-the-art electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft for Jaunt Air Mobility. 

Triumph’s Aerospace Structures unit will design, develop, certify, and build a full-scale demonstration aircraft for urban air operations. The contract extends beyond prototypes and could extend to the large-scale manufacturing stage. 

“We couldn’t have a better partner than Triumph that has the experience in building large airframe structures for some of the largest aircraft manufacturers in the world,” Jaunt CEO Kaydon Stanzione told Avionics International. He said Triumph has the “future vision” Jaunt was looking for.

Pennsylvania-based Triumph Group, Inc. is an international aerospace services, structures, systems, and support supplier. In Arlington, Triumph has its Aerospace Structures Technology and Engineering center, which has capabilities for full life cycle design, engineering, and testing. It’s also the headquarters for Triumph’s Aerospace Structures and Precision Components divisions.

Red Oak, just south of Dallas, houses Triumph’s around 850,000-square-foot facility specializing in “the manufacturing and assembly of large major composite and metal integrated airframe systems for military and commercial aircraft programs.” It has the large amount of scale needed for Jaunt to evolve the program into production, according to Peter Wick, executive vice president for Triumph Aerospace Structures. He also said the company has been establishing an R&D lab in the Red Oak facility.

Triumph also has a presence in Grand Prairie and Fort Worth.

Jaunt Air Mobility is a New Jersey-based transformative aerospace company that develops advanced air vehicles like autonomous air taxis. Jaunt is currently working on a proprietary technology that slows the speed of the main rotor during cruising flight so the aircraft will be quieter than a traditional helicopter. 

Triumph’s Technology and Engineering Center in Arlington will handle engineering services, while the manufacturing center in Red Oak handles the final assembly of Jaunt’s demonstrator vehicle. 

The agreement was signed at the Business Aviation Conference and Exhibition 2019, and announced at Uber Elevate.

Jaunt is one of six companies Uber Elevate, the rideshare giant’s air mobility arm, has partnered with to build what could become a commercial aerial ridesharing fleet, Avionics International reported. The company expects to have the service up and going by 2023 with initial flights from Frisco to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport to downtown Dallas, and to more destinations in the future. 

Uber Elevate announced its plans in 2017 to launch an aerial shared transportation service called Uber Air. The goal is that air taxis will be transporting riders through commercial flight operations in three launch markets: Dallas-Fort Worth, L.A., and Melbourne, Australia.

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“Triumph has some really innovative technologies that are going to allow us to increase the production rate as we start increasing the up-tempo as we’re building airframes,” Stanzione said. “That becomes very important to meet the demand of the urban air mobility needs, not just here for our Uber partner, but on a global scale.”

The first aircraft could be ready for certification by 2022. Jaunt plans to build 150 aircrafts in the first year and later scale to 350 to 600 in the following years.