Hello, this is Craig Brelsford with RedChip Companies. Thank you for joining today's event with New Horizon Aircraft, which trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker HOVR. With us today, we have Brandon Robinson, the Chief Executive and Founder, and Brian Merker, the Chief Financial Officer. We will begin with a brief presentation in a moment, and then we'll open this event to your questions. Welcome to everyone joining us today on X, YouTube, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms. To submit your question, we invite you to join us on Zoom. Use the posted event link. Once in Zoom, click the Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom window and type your question into the text box. Before we begin, please allow me to read the safe harbor statement. This call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.
All statements pertaining to future financial and/or operating results, along with other statements about the future expectations, beliefs, goals, plans, or prospects expressed by management, constitute forward-looking statements. Any statements that are not historical fact should also be considered forward-looking statements. Of course, forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties. Brandon and Brian, please go ahead.
Okay. Thanks very much, Craig, and thanks everybody for joining us today. Really appreciate your time. It is a really exciting time here at Horizon Aircraft. If you take nothing more from this presentation is that we are building the machine that you see in front of you right now. That is an aircraft that can take off and land vertically, just like a traditional helicopter. Take off from any helipad, any parking lot, any roadside, just like a helicopter can. It can fly the duration of its mission just like a normal aircraft. We'll get into some really cool technologies and how those are proven out on our prototype aircraft that are flown already. Then it can land again just like a normal helicopter. Essentially, we have a helicopter capability that can take off and land vertically.
It can fly about twice as fast as a traditional helicopter, is between 50%-75% cheaper per unit mile, and is much safer and much quieter. If you think the world could use a helicopter that is faster, cheaper, safer, and quieter, that's the 10-second elevator pitch. Currently we have built and flown a large-scale prototype and in a really exciting set of circumstances, we're about to roll out a full-scale aircraft in the next 9-12 months from our hangar and begin full-scale flight testing. Really interesting. We'll get into some of the details here shortly. A couple of forward-looking statements from the lawyers. What is a Horizon aircraft? I spent about two decades in the Air Force flying F/A-18 fighter aircraft. A really exciting career.
At the peak of my career, I was planning on leading NATO coalition strike missions, practicing personnel recovery, special forces infiltration, exfiltration, that sort of thing. He had an aerospace company that was doing a lot of really interesting stuff in the general aviation space. He was taking general aviation aircraft, taking out old leaky hydraulic actuators and putting in new electrified sort of components, actuators. We were working on a hybrid-electric power plant. My father's been building, fixing, and flying airplanes since he was about 14 years old for the last six decades.
A group of investors approached us and said, "Listen, this is a really exciting space, this advanced air mobility space." Essentially these new machines that can take off and land just like a helicopter, but offer a lot more safety, a lot more economic efficiency, and can change the way people and critical stuff moves around the planet. Could you please investigate whether this makes sense? The Joby Aviation and the Archer Aviation and the Beta Technologies of the world were doing some excellent work in designing these prototypes that were all-electric.
When we did our research for these investors, we looked into the market using our very deep operational experience. Again, I've been flying since I was literally three years old and obviously flying in the Air Force. We saw an opportunity where a lot of the companies were going to do some great work, but over much shorter distances.
Intra-city flying 30- 50 mi, a high-frequency, low-margin type of routes in good weather with all-electric machines. We saw an ability to design a machine in this really exciting new advanced air mobility space that could go five times further, about twice as fast as some of these other machines, and wouldn't require any charging infrastructure whatsoever. The key to that was realizing that a hybrid-electric architecture would make a lot of sense, and then developing some really cool technology that would allow the airplane to fly just like a normal aircraft for about 98% of the mission. We'll get into that. Anyone building out a portfolio in this space, it was very much a complementary service.
Instead of point to point within the city, we can go between cities in a 3- 500-mi range at speeds up to 250 mph and fly in bad weather and cold weather. We'll get into why that is the case. I slid sideways from the Air Force, and we founded Horizon Aircraft around what is really a unique concept in this space. We built prototypes, we've flown them, and now we're building a full-scale aircraft right now, which is a pretty exciting time to start to look into our company. What is it? This is the aircraft right here, and we'll get into how it works. Essentially, you have a distributed electric propulsion system. What does that mean? It means those circular holes in the wing are fans.
The two little wings at the front called the canards, those are electrically powered lift fans. When they're spun up to full power, that allows the aircraft to lift off the ground vertically, just like a helicopter. At the back, there's this prop here at the back that can push the aircraft forward. With some proprietary technology, the wings and canards transform. It is hybrid electric, so we do not require any charging infrastructure whatsoever. We'll get into some of the really cool missions, but you can land essentially anywhere there's fuel. This aircraft can recharge itself airborne. It can recharge itself after it lands because it has a generator on board itself, which is pretty cool. Flies at speeds up to 250 mph , so again, about twice as fast as some of the modern eVTOL aircraft.
500-mi range is about five times further. All weather, we'll get into why that's very important for operations. Again, no charging infrastructure required whatsoever. Using its distributed electric propulsion system, this is proprietary technology. Those fans in the wings, in the small wings at the front allow the aircraft to lift off the ground. When it wants to move forward, the pusher prop at the back, you see between the two tails, pushes the aircraft forward at a very safe speed. The aircraft then transforms. This is our HOVR Wing technology. It's proprietary. It's patented across the world. It's the only aircraft to use this technology. Just like in a commercial aircraft where the flaps and the slats retract, ours is a very simple, very robust, very safe system. The result is for 98% of the mission, this is how the aircraft flies around.
In an extremely low drag configuration. It's very fast, it's very efficient, and it's very quiet. This is our technology, and it's been, again, proven out at a large-scale prototype. Again, we're building a full-scale aircraft right now and testing all of the full-scale components. Pretty exciting. Very unique in this space and very complementary. It is also capable, so you don't have to use it as a VTOL aircraft. You don't have to use that helicopter capability. It can take off and land from a normal airport and normal runway as what's called a conventional takeoff and landing CTOL variant, where you can just taxi out onto a normal runway, take off just like a normal commercial aircraft, fit into the normal commercial air traffic routes, and then land literally anywhere there's a flat spot or a helipad, which is pretty awesome.
That unique configuration, that unique technology combines to give it some extreme performance, some extreme versatility, and of course, the ability to carry much more useful load than much of the other all-electric machines. I want you to focus the pillar on the right. The motto of the company is, and I tell all the engineers this, "If you can't put your loved ones, your family, your kids in the back, and you don't feel comfortable about putting them in this aircraft and flying around in bad weather, in good weather and windy conditions, maybe it's colder out, then we're going to go back to the drawing board." We're really focused on the safety pillar and building the world's safest VTOL. I was in the Air Force. Again, I flew F/A-18s in the Canadian Air Force for 20 years almost.
The air environment can be unpredictable, it can be tricky when it comes to predicting weather and unforeseen circumstances. Having an airplane that can fly in bad weather, in cold weather, and in clouds is very unique. Not a lot of people on the call might understand that helicopters, for the most part, and any modern VTOL aircraft, will have a lot of difficulty flying in clouds. Most helicopters do not fly in clouds at all, and certainly not in clouds with any sort of icing conditions. Our aircraft, our VTOL aircraft, is set up to fly in clouds, fly using normal commercial routes, so fitting just fine into the normal commercial traffic sort of flow. Potentially, we are seeking flight into known icing, so flying in clouds that have known icing.
Because it flies like a normal aircraft and has a turbine engine on board, we can use all of the traditional anti-ice and de-ice systems. Essentially, just a safer version of the VTOL that can travel faster and further. Because a lot of helicopters cannot fly in icing conditions, that's where we have a lot of accidents. You can imagine people showing up to a helicopter operator. They want to go from point A to point B. They want to go sightseeing. They need to critically transport goods to somewhere that really is in need of them, but the clouds are too low, and it's a little cold out, and the helicopters are grounded because they can't fly.
Well, there's a lot of pressure from those operators to fly those aircraft under the clouds and fly way too low to the ground and potentially run into power lines and unfortunately run into the ground, as happens quite a bit. Again, to really emphasize this, our aircraft will not suffer from that same operational restriction. It'll be able to fly 24/7 in almost all conditions. The only time it wouldn't be able to fly is when all commercial aircraft are kind of grounded at the same time. This is a huge operational advantage. Again, focused on the operator delivering them a machine that's going to do a job much, much better and much more efficiently. Now, I would have loved to have had this machine in the military.
When I was in the Air Force, again, planning and leading NATO coalition strike missions and training, we would often practice going with 100 aircraft airborne. We would have top cover. We would have air-to-air refuelers and AWACS providing the picture to everybody in terms of what's happening. All sorts of electronic warfare stuff going on. The most critical thing would be these aircraft that could go in, often they're helicopters, that could go in and land almost anywhere, pick up Special Forces troops. Maybe it's pick up downed pilots from beyond enemy lines who ejected, and we have to come and grab them. That we are always limited by the slowest airplane in the fleet. It was great when we got the V-22 Ospreys. They cost $85 million a copy. If you plan on eight of them taking off, maybe six or five might actually take off.
They're horrendously complicated, they cost CAD 40,000-CAD 80,000 an hour to run. This is an order of magnitude cheaper and just as fast. It would've been great. Essentially a helicopter that's about twice as fast as a typical helo, and could keep up with a V-22. This is a picture of one fitted in the back of a C-17 for rapid deployment. Again, I would've loved to have had this aircraft on board, we are talking to major defense prime contractors about this technology that is pretty exciting. On the medevac side, can you imagine getting someone to the hospital literally in half the time or from twice the distance in that golden hour? This aircraft will save lives, again, by the way, operating at up to 75% cheaper per unit mile than a traditional helicopter. Why is that?
Helicopters are expensive to operate per hour, ours is cheaper to operate per hour. In that hour, our aircraft can go almost twice as far. Those two economic things stack up. We're really excited about the EMS capability. Transporting people to the hospital, transporting organs from hospital to hospital or from roadside to the hospital, radioactive isotope transfer for cancer research. This is a fantastic use case for this airplane that's available immediately. I'll remind folks, if you're doing your research, Blade out of New York used to do about half of their revenue model just transporting organs in and around the city of New York, which is pretty fantastic. Business travel is an amazing future use case as well.
Imagine you're traveling somewhere, you pay a little extra for your business class ticket, you land, instead of going and waiting in line at the rental car place, getting your rental car, then driving three hours to some location, you can just take a slick black bus and head over to a different area on the tarmac, get out, hop in one of these, instead of three hours in the car, you can be at your destination in 15-20 minutes. That is a really cool thing. Being a hybrid-electric aircraft also, it does not require any ground infrastructure whatsoever. We don't have to wait till these vertiports with these high voltage charging systems are developed. We're not restricted from going from charging station to charging station when we land. We don't have to find the world's longest extension cord to plug the airplane in.
The airplane can recharge itself. It recharges itself airborne. When you land, as long as there's fuel available, it can recharge itself as well. You can imagine, say southern United States, Louisiana. A big storm goes through, knocks out all the power. There's a bunch of people that are in need. We can deploy these things with zero power grid. We can get them on station quickly, again, twice as fast as a helicopter, we can start saving lives right away. If you want to set up a mobile medical station, the aircraft is essentially a little generator.
120 kW of power is a lot. You can run an extension cord from the aircraft as long as there's fuel available, it can power a remote medical station, you start saving lives pretty much anywhere you can set up a remote medical station, which is just absolutely fantastic to think about. On the economics, we spent a lot of time laser-focused on the economics. Let's be honest, you can build a fancy thing in this world, but if it doesn't have an economic use, if the operators can't use it efficiently and make money with it'll never be adopted. Alongside its robustness and its ability to operate 24/7 in bad weather and cold weather, we've really focused on making it as efficient as possible compared to other traditional methods that require vertical takeoff and landing, like a helicopter.
Again, compared to a helicopter, about 75% cheaper per unit mile. I'll remind everyone, of the 70,000 helicopters that operate on a daily basis around the globe, about half of them simply go from one point to another place. Right. They're moving logistical stuff around. Maybe they're resupplying a forward operating base somewhere in the military. Maybe they're transporting high-value cargo, setting up a mining operation. I was at a mining conference the other day, and the lady that eventually founded her own mining company initially started by doing some exploration in the north looking for rare earth elements. Setting up her own company that actually eventually was a mining operation. She had a fleet of 20 helicopters, all they did was move things around.
She said, "Listen, if I could have a machine that could move something at twice the speed of a traditional helicopter and was, by the way, much cheaper and, by the way, safer and quieter, I would replace my fleet overnight with one of these machines." It just makes economic sense. There you go. That laser focus on the operator and with third-party audited financial models that underpin this analysis that we're willing to share under NDA with folks. We have. Yeah, it's pretty impressive. On the finance side, those of you have looked into us a little bit realize we just raised another $45 million under very favorable circumstances, commons only. We have $75 million-plus of cash in the bank right now.
That's a solid two years, and then some, of runway, with an active ATM facility to raise responsibly when we can as well. We're definitely capitalized to complete the full-scale aircraft and begin flight testing, again, happening very quickly, which I think is going to be an inflection point in the market when we surprise folks with, well, that's the machine right there. It's going to look exactly like that. Very strong cash position, as I mentioned. We can take questions at the end of this if you want to ask Brian some hard questions, I'll deflect over to him. For the most part, you can see our trajectory. We are fundamentally focused on respecting our retail investors. All of the employees in the company are shareholders. We're on an employee stock purchase plan.
Every single one of my employees is a shareholder, and I am, and Brian is, and everyone is laser-focused on making sure that we raise in the utmost responsible manner possible, minimize dilution, and we have done so, and we're, like I said, set with some decent 24+ months in the bank right now. Where are we right now in terms of our trajectory? We started testing in August 2022, that large-scale prototype. For anyone unfamiliar with that, please go to our YouTube channel, Horizon Aircraft. It's easy to look up, and you can see a number of really cool videos. I'm pretty proud of Meet the Team. You can get a feel for the type of exceptional individuals that we exclusively hire.
You can also see a lot of really interesting video of the aircraft flying, of some of the testing that we're doing, some explanatory videos on how the aircraft actually works if you want to dig deeper. And please go take a look at that. We obviously went public in January 2024, and are on a pretty significant trajectory up to this point. Again, just to emphasize it, we will have a full-scale prototype that is rolling out of the hangar in the next 9-12 months. I just love that shot of the aircraft landing in what is a pretty austere operating environment. Like I said, we're building this machine to be tough. I always get asked about certification, and that's a great question. The takeaways here are we are certifying in Canada under Transport Canada Civil Aviation. What does that mean?
Transport Canada Civil Aviation, TCCA for short, is essentially just like the FAA is down in the United States. It is responsible for the certification for all aircraft that are going to carry passengers. A gentleman by the name of Dr. John Maris is on our board. He founded a company called Certification Center Canada, essentially cherry-picked all of the best public certification folks, brought them into a private company, and they specialize in certification of new aircraft types, of modifications to existing aircraft, and are one of the best organizations in North America to understand and to complete certification. Having him on our board is fantastic. We're working close with literally one of the world's best companies in figuring this out on how to create and execute a very lean certification effort. Thankfully, north of the border, TCCA has a few advantages.
It specializes in powered-lift, so helicopter certification, which is fantastic, which we'll need. Very efficient to certify up here. We have a lot of, let's just say, I wouldn't say empty space. We have a lot of available spaces to go to do testing. Most of Canada lives within 100 mi of the border. It leaves us a lot of exceptional testing airspace. We're, frankly, a big fish in a small pond up here. It's not like the FAA where they're inundated with 600 different companies with various sort of bizarre prototypes looking to talk about certification. We're a professional organization. We have certification in our DNA. We've built a solid program, and like I said, we have their attention.
When we certify in Canada, to head off some of the other questions, Transport Canada Civil Aviation and the FAA have what's called bilateral agreements. When we certify in Canada near the midpoint of the process, the FAA will bring up delegates. They'll take a look and say, "Yes, Transport Canada, you are doing things in accordance with our bilateral agreements." Once we attain our Transport Canada certification for the aircraft, the FAA certification should follow shortly thereafter. You don't have to restart the whole process in the U.S. in order to get a U.S. certification. The same thing is the case with Europe under EASA rules. We have bilateral agreements with the European Regulatory Agency as well. Certifying in Canada, efficient, they're good at it, and we have a solid plan. Like I said, FAA certification for the U.S. shortly thereafter.
This slide for partners could be about 50 slides long. We're partnered with Pratt & Whitney Canada. The PT6 is the beating heart of the aircraft. It is the world's most robust turbine engine that has ever been built. One failure in 600,000 cycles type of thing. They're fantastic partners. We have a lot of partners on the finance side as well. We're talking to some of the best folks on the electric motor side. We've also, if anyone's done some looking into our past, we won a prestigious U.S. DOD grant as well. It was the AFWERX grant for high-speed vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. That put us on the radar for a lot of defense prime contractors with whom we're speaking, of course.
If you're building a helicopter that's twice as fast and is a lot stealthier, the defense primes, of course, are going to be quite interested in that technology. The U.S. Air Force and the defense primes. I'm pretty proud of the team that we're building. We're up to about 55 people now. We'll be double that by this time next year. You know my background. Flew jets in the Air Force, took mechanical engineering and business, and all that sort of good stuff. Essentially, you can read as well as I can on the screen. My father has been in aviation for the past six decades, building, fixing, flying airplanes. When I was a kid, I would go into the shop, and there would always be a new airplane under construction, a new Piper Cub or our family's Republic Seabee. It's an old flying boat aircraft.
If you know what it is, high wing with pontoons, pusher prop. My father and my grandfather built that essentially from scrap metal. Put an old Franklin 215 engine in it that was not that reliable, if I'm being honest. Anyway, it's in our DNA. We brought in Tom as our CTO from a prominent VTOL company. Been there, done that, knows exactly what we're doing and the challenges we're up against. We have Brian, obviously, as our CFO with tons of experience. Been in aviation for a couple of decades and a ton of experience in the finance world. Haven't filed a single late quarterly filing or any filing yet, we're definitely on a good trajectory. Jason, tons of startup experience that helps us build the team as well.
The combination of safety, performance, and economics of this machine that is proven right now, and we're proving out on the full scale very shortly, is pretty exceptional. We're pretty excited right now to be, like I said, hitting kind of an inflection point for the company. If anyone does the research and looks into some of these companies that have a full-scale aircraft that is actually in flight testing, they can see definitely an upside to taking a look at our company from a portfolio perspective, and really just working towards building a better future for all of our kids. With that, I'll turn it over for some questions, and shoot it. I'm happy to answer all the hard questions. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Brandon. To speak to the New Horizon Aircraft team, please click the raise hand button and wait for the prompt to unmute your line. You also may submit a question by text by pressing the Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom window and typing your question into the text box. We already have several questions for you, Brandon. With Horizon's strength in hybrid-electric technology, its patented HOVR fan-in-wing design, and continued growing interest in the Cavorite X7, do you view the remaining development period, including full-scale prototype work, testing, certification, and manufacturing preparation, as an opportunity to educate a broader range of operators, infrastructure partners, regulators, and future passengers around the world about the aircraft's capabilities and use cases?
In other words, do you expect the period leading up to commercialization will help create a more prepared and informed ecosystem, enabling more efficient market adoption once production deliveries begin?
That's a lot of words. Okay. Great question, whoever came up with it. Articulate, well said. I think there's two pieces, education and authenticity. The authenticity underpins education. The first thing is there's a lot of hype in this space, let's be honest. We try not to get involved with that. We put our engineering first. Education is a key piece. Initially, again, we're past the hype cycle. Initially, I'm generally met with a little bit of skepticism. "What are you guys doing, and how does this technology really work?" Give me an hour. If you know anything about engineering and aerospace engineering and operational flying, in especially commercial sense, we're going to be able to convince you. From an educational perspective, it is showing people that we have a real machine that is actually going to perform correctly.
In a few months, we'll again be rolling out a full-scale aircraft that is going to be undergoing flight testing, and it's continuing that narrative of showing people, telling people what we're going to do, executing the game plan, and reaching as many folks as we can. That education piece extends to operators. Again, those folks that on a daily basis have to jump in this machine and do hard things and make a profit doing so, and putting their pilots at risk on a daily basis. Generally speaking, that has been very positive.
When we go and we sign NDAs and we show them exactly what's going on, and we show them the design, and we show them the performance specifications, and we're honest with these folks, what starts as skeptical, they run maybe 30 or 40 different helicopters on a daily basis, invariably ends in a, "Holy crap, tell me when this thing is available. If and when it does what you say it's going to do, it looks like it will, we're very interested in this." When we talk to lessors and educate them about what's going on, the people with the money that buy the fleets, and we show them our detailed financial models that Brian has built that shows profit for the lessors, that shows profit when they lease it to the operators who then operate it in a profitable manner, it is quite a compelling story.
Education extends to insurance folks so that we can keep our insurance costs low. Education extends to folks that are going to help us globally maintain the fleet, so MRO folks. Yeah. Really great question. Education is an excellent piece, and it's underpinned by authenticity, solid engineering, and a very operationally savvy company that's not afraid to show you exactly what it's doing. We're not, like I said, a flashy marketing company as much as other folks might be. That's our strength, I think. Hopefully that answered it. Happy to follow up if I missed anything. Brian, do you have anything to add there that I might have missed?
No. I think that was well said, Brandon. As you alluded to, the numbers look promising. It's a function of the operating costs, which, as Brandon mentioned, are significantly beneficial relative to the traditional helicopter field, as well as other players in the advanced air mobility space. As a result, the margins look very appealing for both lessors and operators.
One thing I didn't mention is, and it fits under education a little bit, we really try to let people know that we are laser-focused on being an OEM. We're building an awesome machine, and we're going to deliver it to lessors and operators. We're going to do some amazing work with it. We are not going to operate this machine initially, right? Some companies are trying to build this machine and then set up a whole other operational arm. We are laser-focused on being an OEM and delivering just an awesome machine that's going to be very sought-after, and it'll be very profitable for folks who get their hands on it early.
Maybe one just quick add on there. In respect to our finances, as a result of us being a pure play OEM and not operating the machine ourself, that results in significantly less cost to get to market, to get the certification. You saw some of our peers, what they're spending on facilities, in some cases buying airports. We're not doing any of that. As a result, our path to certification is much more cost-efficient.
Well said.
Thank you very much, gentlemen, for that. We have a lot of questions flying in. We appreciate that. Thank you to all the attendees for your great questions. Let's try, gentlemen, to reach as many of these people as possible. Here's a good one. As an investor, I appreciate the clear and constant communication you maintain with us. Could we have any hint on what type of manufacturer partnership are you looking into, if any?
Of course, I'm limited to what I can say that's been released publicly. What I will say is this. People might not understand, Canada has a very robust aerospace ecosystem. We're one of the only countries, alongside the U.S., that can design, build, produce, test, and certify clean sheet commercial aircraft designs. Right? The Bombardiers of the world, the Bombardier Global series, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries with the 200 series. There's a lot of pride and a lot of talent in the Canadian ecosystem. It would be silly if we weren't talking to the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries of the world, the Bombardiers and Bombardier Defense that have this type of capability, alongside CAE on the training side.
It is a really excellent ecosystem to give birth to an aircraft like this in Canada. There's a lot of partnerships that we'd be silly not to be pursuing at this stage, if that makes any sense.
Thanks, Brandon.
Just to make sure we hit the whole picture here. Of course, again, on the military side, there are companies that do this for a living on the military side as well. Right? The defense prime contractors. Like I said, if you build and prove that you can build and fly an aircraft that essentially has a helicopter capability but is twice as fast, stealthier, and a lot safer in a lot of ways, of course, there's some defense primes that would be more than happy to talk to you about said technology. On both sides of the fence, commercial and military.
When you get to the point of flight testing, will you build multiple aircraft to do that?
The answer is yes. Yep. I've talked about in the past almost certainly we're going to build a CTOL variant, a VTOL variant to start, then go from there. I haven't announced anything else, but you've seen what the other OEMs have done. There's a way to do this that makes a lot of efficiency sense, it's not just have one aircraft doing one thing only. It's building a couple of different aircraft. The answer is simply yes.
Are you currently building two aircraft, one dedicated to VTOL testing and another dedicated to CTOL testing?
The answer is yes, we are. That's the plan. Now they're not going to be done at the exact same time. I haven't said what's coming first, but it kind of makes a lot of sense. You can probably intuit what's going to happen there. From a flight test perspective, Beta's done this. We love Beta. They're an amazing company, very practical. They've already flown over 100,000 mi with their ALIA CTOL. It makes sense. You start with, or you explore from the CTOL variant, the conventional takeoff and landing variants. Okay? It may or may not have vertical takeoff capability, but you fly it like a normal airplane. You explore the high-speed flight envelope, you dial in your flight controls a little bit more. You slowly work on envelope expansion, you slow down to the speeds where you transition.
At the same time, you might fly a VTOL variant, then you test all the VTOL equipment, then you start doing higher and higher speeds forward, then you meet in the middle with your two aircraft at that transition point. It's just a really slick way to do it. Yes is the answer. Most likely. I always got to caveat it. The lawyers will kill me if I don't. Yeah.
What is your current estimate for when the X7 will complete its first transition flight? Do you expect that milestone to be achieved by the end of 2027?
It certainly would be fantastic if that were the case, is what I'll say. Unlike a lot of these companies that put all these stakes in the sand then just move the stakes later, we are looking for certification in around the 2030 timeframe. Okay? That means that we need to transition the aircraft relatively quickly. The advantage that we have is our transition is a no-brainer. You have to know a little bit about aerodynamics and aerospace engineering to understand how complicated it is to take a tiltrotor and with the rotors beating down on the main wings and the main aerostructure, and these tiltrotors are along these main booms. Yeah. Joby and Archer and Beta and those folks have done a fantastic job designing amazing airplanes.
They're very safe, that is a complicated thing to do, to transition from, in that scenario, from vertical flight to forward flight. It's complicated. It takes a lot of testing. Ours is extremely simple from a transition flight perspective, we can't promise, but we expect that to be very efficient from a flight testing perspective, getting through the transition, the typically very difficult transition phase, just due to the nature of the design. It's much simpler, it's much easier on the airframe, there's a lot more redundancy built into it. We don't expect it to be a big deal. In the funny story in the half-scale prototype, again, this is a big airplane, 22-ft wingspan, thing weighs, like, 600 lbs .
We were really worried about it, of course. We built up to it. There's multiple flight tests. Then finally, the wings slowly snapped closed. Literally nothing happened at all. Everyone just kind of went, "Okay, well that wasn't a thing." The only thing that did happen is the thing took off like crazy, because it's really a slick airplane when the wings and the canards get closed back up again. Anyway, that was a little bit of an anecdotal story. Yeah, hopefully that answered the question.
Gentlemen, if we're sitting here in three years, what does success look like for New Horizon Aircraft? Is it a completed certification, the first commercial delivery, or perhaps an acquisition by a major defense or aerospace firm?
Well, listen, if I had a crystal ball, I wouldn't even need to build airplanes. I would just invest, right? I can tell you we have an amazing team. Everything that we're doing right now is exceeding expectations. There's going to be some interesting development decisions because everything's going fairly well. I'm not saying we're not going to eventually come up against a setback. It's a challenging thing to develop a new type of aircraft, especially one like this. Yeah, it's going very well. In three to four years, ideally, again, we've talked about the 2030 timeframe, where we have a commercial type certification. We are starting to deliver our first low-volume production aircraft. That would be ideal. Call that four years from now. That would be fantastic. We have a plan to do it. We're executing very well.
For anyone who's been paying attention, we are on a lean program with some elite folks that are doing some great work. Yeah, can't make any promises. That would constitute some exceptional success. Obviously, our technology, when it's proven out at a large scale, is going to be very attractive to a number of different folks. Again, as a complementary aircraft for someone that's setting up an operational company as well. Again, now you have maybe your all-electric eVTOL aircraft goes from point to point within cities and does a lot of really great work there. Then for all of these other missions around the world that require just a little more range, maybe bad weather operations. Instead of going 50 mi, go 500 mi. Of course you'd be looking at us and our technology from an acquisition perspective.
Of course, again, from a defense prime contractor, same thing. We already have a lot of outreach right now, a lot of folks interested. It's hard to control all the outreach, we're just heads down, making sure we build an awesome machine.
What is your current cash runway? How much more capital will you need to reach type certification and initial production?
Yeah, that's where I get to deflect over to Brian on this one.
Yep. Thank you. We are currently burning approximately CAD 3 million-CAD 4 million per quarter. We do expect that to scale up as we add more people, buy more tools and materials for the full-scale aircraft, and as we get into flight testing. We think about that in terms of CAD 4 million going to CAD 8 million, and then, CAD 10 million-CAD 15 million. Having said that, it's difficult to quantify exactly how much it's going to take to get the certification, and that's a function of two things. One, back to the earlier question on manufacturing partners, that could have a significant impact on the answer to that question. We see some of our peers in the advanced air mobility space doing good things with manufacturing partners, whether it's in the automotive or aerospace industries, and that comes with investment dollars in many cases.
We see that as a material impact to certification costs, as well as the timing of the regulators. It's difficult to predict right now. We're expecting sometime prior to 2030 as our certification timeline. However, it's difficult to predict the timeline that the regulators will work towards. All that being said, we don't expect it to be billions of dollars like some of our peers, but more like in the hundreds of millions of dollars. As Brandon said earlier, we have about CAD 75 million in cash on hand today. That's certainly enough for the next two years. Then as we get into 2028, 2029, some of those factors that I described will have a big impact.
Our final question today, which is also financial in nature. Where do you see the first real revenue coming from? For example, you've mentioned that the X7 will fly 98% of its missions like a traditional aircraft. Does this mean that your primary market would be B2B, like medevac or cargo, rather than urban air taxis?
I'll turn this over to Brian to put a finer point on it. Initially, it's pretty easy to make the call, right? Cargo and EMS, this aircraft could immediately start flying EMS missions and just be an absolute rock star if it was certified tomorrow. Can you imagine, like I said, getting someone to the hospital in half the time? Expectation of positive outcomes goes up exponentially when you start chopping times in half from a medevac perspective. Same thing when you're transporting critical isotope drugs or transporting organs for that matter. Again, a very profitable business to be in, especially if you have an aircraft that operates 75% cheaper than a traditional helicopter. The economics start going through the roof. That extends to any kind of critical cargo as well. Anytime, especially in Canada, there's a lot of disconnected remote northern communities.
The way we get stuff up there is we pile a bunch of it onto a barge and float it around. It takes weeks and often months, we wait till the ice flows are a certain way. We land this thing on the side of a beach and then transport the stuff to a logistics hub that eventually makes it to these communities. That's why eggs cost CAD 30 a dozen up there. A lot of them need critical stuff right away. There's a lot of stories where people just simply can't get the medical attention they need in time. Helicopters are expensive, they're too slow, that's a really tough thing for those remote northern communities and cargo.
Delivering things right to where they need to go in an efficient and effective manner. Those will be the initial missions, then it will build out into everything else. Disaster relief is also an interesting one. We are talking to some firefighting folks, aerial firefighting folks, to see if this aircraft is going to fit into a firefighting fleet, which it very well could, for a number of different reasons. Whoever asked that question was bang on, it alludes to the fact that we are going to start with some of those missions where the aircraft could enter service tomorrow if it was certified.
Thank you very much, Brandon and Brian. For more information about New Horizon Aircraft, reach us at 1-800-REDCHIP or email us at hovr@redchip.com. Please visit RedChip's Investor Information page for New Horizon Aircraft. It is hovrinfo.com. There you can view and download the investor presentation and fact sheet and sign up for news alerts on New Horizon Aircraft. Please watch Small Stocks, Big Money, RedChip's program featuring exciting small cap companies every Saturday night at 7:00 P.M. on Bloomberg USA. Join RedChip's next webinar with ASP Isotopes on Wednesday, June 17, at 4:15 P.M. U.S. Eastern. Register for all RedChip webinars at redchip.com/events. Thanks to our many participants today. Thank you, Brandon and Brian.
Thank you very much, Craig. Thank you.