Okay, great. Thanks, folks. I really appreciate your time today. This is an exciting time for Horizon Aircraft, HOVR. If you don't take anything else from this video, is that we are building that airplane that is on that front screen there. That is an aircraft that can take off and land vertically. Just like a normal helicopter, you can take off from any helipad, any parking lot, any cleared area. It can take off and land vertically. Then it transitions using some really cool technology that we'll show you to just fly like a normal airplane for 98% of the mission. Then it can land vertically again in any confined space, any helipad. A really versatile, really interesting machine. For about half of the helicopters around the world, they simply go from one place to another.
If you think that there's a thesis whereby the world could use a much cheaper, faster, safer helicopter to do about half of the helicopter missions around the world, then I really don't have to say much more. We are building this aircraft. It will be ready in the next nine- 12 months for flight testing. If you look at any of our comparables in the market, Joby, Archer, BETA, it's in a pretty exciting time for us right now to be rolling out a full-scale aircraft very shortly. We'll go into some of the technology right now, and looking forward to some questions later as well. Thank you. Standard lawyer stuff, two slides. I'm an ex-Air Force guy, so they made me put at least two slides in here, because I tend to shoot a little straighter than most folks.
What is a Horizon Aircraft? Our company was founded in 2013 surrounding a prototype design in a bit of a different area. My father, near the end of my Air Force career. I flew jets in the Air Force for about 20 years. Near the end of my career, it was either go up or kind of step sideways. I had a mechanical engineering degree and a business degree. I was always interested in mobility, finding better ways to move things around the planet. My father was the same. We come from a long history of aviators and operators. My grandfather was a World War II bomber pilot. I was in the Air Force and flying jets for 22 years. My father's been flying airplanes since he was about 14 years old. My father had an aerospace business.
We were really interested in this new advanced air mobility space. Specifically aircraft using brand-new technologies that could change the way people moved around the planet in a much more efficient way. When we looked into this very carefully, again, using our operational background, we realized that a lot of these new companies, the Jobys, the Archers, and the BETAs of the world, they were designing these incredible machines to do some very useful work. There was a growing gap for a machine that could go about five times further, fly about twice as faster. Instead of moving things within a city, maybe it's a skyscraper to a skyscraper, or maybe it's transporting somebody from the roadside to a hospital within the city. We could move things between cities in a much more efficient, quicker, and safer manner.
Much more economic, and we'll get to that in a second. We went about designing a prototype machine that was very much grounded in the real world. There are several distinct features of our aircraft. Yeah, the history is there. We came up with a valid concept. We have built several subscale prototypes and successfully tested those. The technology works, and we're working on building and producing a full-scale aircraft right now that should be ready to go in the next nine-12 months. We're pretty excited about that, and it's a very exciting particular time for Horizon Aircraft and its trajectory towards the future. That's what we're building. That aircraft, again, can take off and land vertically just like a normal aircraft.
When it flies forward, it has a special technology that allows the wings and the canards, the small wings at the front, to close and to fly 98% of the normal mission just like an aircraft with very, very low drag. The capabilities of a helicopter to take off and land in a very versatile way, but the efficiency and safety of an aircraft. 250 mph , that's about twice as fast as a typical helicopter. 500 mi, that's about five times further than the typical VTOL companies in this space. Flying in all weather, we'll go over that a little bit more in the future.
It is hybrid electric, so it has a gas turbine engine, one of the safest, most efficient engines on the planet that's kind of the beating heart of the system that allows it to charge itself while it's airborne. It doesn't need any sort of charging infrastructure. For those of you folks that have looked into this a little bit, this space requires typically those all-electric machines. They have to go from a vertiport it's called, so a place that has charging and the ability to take off and land, to go to another place that then they land, and they have to plug in an extension cord and charge it up for several hours before it goes flying again.
Our aircraft is hybrid electric, think gas turbine engine on board with a generator that recharges the small battery array that it has on board that enables its technology. Very versatile. It can go anywhere. A lot of cool missions that we can discuss in the future. How does it work? We saw a lot of very complicated architectures emerging from this space. We wanted to keep things as simple as possible. I've flown, again, 20+ years in the Air Force. I've been in a lot of sticky situations. Machines that are simple and bulletproof just seem to work from an aerospace perspective. We wanted to design a machine that we would all happily put our kids in the back of and transport them from Point A to Point B. We came up with a very unique design.
This is a patented design that has several technologies on board that make it very unique. I mentioned the hybrid electric architecture. This is itself in its vertical flight mode. Okay. Those fans in the wings, the main wings, the five ducted fans, they're called, in the main wings, and the 2 fans in the canards are electrically powered, and they have unique technology that allows the aircraft to take off vertically. When the aircraft wants to move forward, this pusher prop at the back that you see accelerates the aircraft forward. At a safe speed, the wings and the canards close, just like flaps retracting and slats retracting in any normal commercial aircraft, thereby returning the aircraft to a very, very low drag configuration.
Instead of a helicopter, which is going from Point A to Point B, it's not a very efficient way to travel from Point A to Point B. This is a much lower drag, faster, and safer way to travel. That's our patented technology. It works. We're going to be, like I said, flight testing a full-scale prototype here in the next nine-12 months. We talked about the speed, the range, and a little bit about the payload advantages. On the very right side, I really want to highlight this. This type of unique design allows the aircraft, we are almost certain it will allow the aircraft to fly in all sorts of bad weather, cold weather, and is designed completely around safety. If the engine fails in a traditional helicopter, you typically have a 45-degree cone. You're coming down, basically, out of the sky.
They do not glide very well. That's tricky for commercial operations. Helicopters also do not fly in bad weather for the most part. All right? There's only a few helicopter types in the world that can actually fly in clouds. This aircraft will be able to fly in bad weather, cold weather, and in what's called instrument flight rules conditions. Using the standard highway in the sky that already exists. We don't have to reinvent any sort of travel architecture in the sky to make this thing work. It fits right into the commercial transportation framework, if that makes any sense. We're pretty proud about that, and I think that's going to be a really powerful thing.
It's a little frustrating for a lot of folks when they show up to a helicopter operation and there's some clouds or some low weather, and they're told that they can't go do the thing that they want to do. They can't go to the place they want to go. They can't go on their sightseeing tour. This aircraft will fit into the commercial, like I said, aerospace structure and will be able to fly in those bad weather conditions and will get people and critical goods to where they need to go more efficiently, faster, and safer. There's also very significant potential for this in the military world.
At the peak of my career, I was planning on leading NATO coalition strike and recovery missions in training where we'd go and practice recovering a pilot from beyond enemy lines, or maybe it's inserting Special Forces troops beyond enemy lines to do a special task and then extracting them thereafter. I would have loved to have had one of these aircraft in the military mix. We have a lot of really cool tech at our disposal these days, V-22 Osprey, Black Hawk helicopters. They're all really expensive. They're all relatively slow. The V-22 is a pretty quick airplane, but it also costs CAD 80,000 an hour to run. Having a machine that was smaller, quicker, and much more efficient would've been extremely useful for going to drop off Special Forces people, and I said recovering maybe downed pilots from beyond enemy lines. Extremely significant military uses.
The U.S. Department of Defense now is talking a lot about runway independence. Any machine that can be quickly deployed to a remote location, it doesn't need a prepared strip, it just needs a flat place to land and take off, makes it extremely useful for, like I said, any number of missions. Incredible dual-use potential. We made sure two of them fit inside a C-17 for rapid deployment. Pretty proud of this. With foldable wings that go forward, you can fit two of them, like you see there, which is pretty fantastic and definitely has the attention of a number of defense prime contractors, as well as the Special Forces and a few other different military groups. Essentially, we are building a helicopter that can travel twice as fast.
For transportation of any time-sensitive drugs or people or organs, for example, Blade out of New York does about half of its revenue just transporting organs from hospital to hospital or from a critical location to a hospital. Getting someone to the hospital in half the time or from twice the distance in that critical time, critical golden hour, as they call it, the first 60 minutes, is incredibly powerful for any sort of emergency medical services mission. It does so at 75% less cost per mile when compared to a typical helicopter. The reason we don't move things around with helicopters as much as we could is because quite frankly, they are very expensive. They have a lot of inspection costs associated with them. They break a lot. Any parts that do break are very critical, and so they're very expensive to make.
This is essentially a much faster, much cheaper and again, safer way to move things around than the typical helicopter would be. Again, I'll foot stomp that 75% less cost per unit mile. We're pretty excited about the EMS mission is all I can say about that. Of course, it'd be really cool to get off your airplane at the airport instead of going through the whole rigmarole of grabbing a Uber or renting a car and driving another four hours to your location. Maybe you take a bus over to one of these airplanes and they get you to where you want to go in the next 20 to 30 minutes versus a four-hour car ride. On the business travel side, I think that's also a pretty interesting thing to consider. Not to mention the fact that I think NASA did a great study.
There's about 5,000 underutilized regional airports in the United States alone. I travel a lot and so from Toronto in Canada, I would have to travel two hours to Pearson Airport, get there 2.5 Hours ahead of time, go through the whole crazy security thing, hop in an airplane, maybe it goes on time and most likely won't. I fly two hours away or three hours away, I have to undo that whole process. Until I figured out that I could go an hour south of Pearson to Billy Bishop Airport, where I'd hop in a regional airplane, get there half an hour ahead of time. They'd wand you down with a very sort of low friction security screening that's still very safe. You'd hop in a much smaller airplane and you'd fly exactly where you wanted to go.
I do that for trips to New York and a bunch of other places, and that is as I imagine traveling in the 1970s was before this whole thing got crazy and they forced us into these massive overcrowded hubs. For business travel, that's also going to be a really interesting, and I think disruptive way to travel around, which I'm pretty excited about as well. Of course, our aircraft is hybrid electric. I'll just foot stomp that again. It does not require any charging infrastructure whatsoever. Weather's getting pretty crazy these days. You imagine a storm goes through, wipes out the charging infrastructure or any sort of electrical infrastructure in a remote location or any major city in the U.S., call it the Southern U.S., and they don't have power and they need an emergency response. These airplanes can get there twice as fast.
They don't need any kind of supporting infrastructure. They can power remote medical stations because they're little generators themselves of electricity. A really exciting emergency medical and disaster relief mission that could be quite useful in the future. As for performance and economics, we talked about it. About 75% cheaper per unit mile than a comparable helicopter. You can see some of the comparisons on the screen. For those people that are skeptical, why is that the case? Well, one, it's about 70%-80% of the cost, so call it 20%-30% cheaper per unit hour to fly than a helicopter. 20%-30% cheaper per hour. In that hour it goes about twice as far. Those two things stack up, and you get some very serious per unit mile savings.
Again, half of the helicopters in the world just simply move things around. A great example, I was at an interesting mining conference and I met a wonderful lady who had started an exploration business. They were looking for rare earth minerals, turned that company into a mining company, actually. She had a fleet of about 20 helicopters that were just flying things around northern Canada setting up a mine. She said, "Listen, if we had one of your aircraft and these economics do play out even close to what you're saying, I would swap out the fleet right away. Or I would go to a lessor and I would lease a bunch of these airplanes instead. It would save me millions of dollars setting up a mine," for example.
There's a lot of other examples around the world where this would unquestionably be the case. Twice as fast, cheaper per unit hour, and carrying almost as much as a traditional helicopter, which is I think a pretty cool coalescence of different factors from a performance perspective. Where are we right now? We have designed, built and flown a large scale prototype. We've proven the technology, and we are building a full-scale aircraft right now. In the next, like I said, nine- 12 months, we will have a full-scale aircraft rolling out of the hangar, ready for a ground test. If you look at our comparables, again, Joby, Archer, BETA, there's a few others on the public markets. Any company that has a full-scale aircraft that is undergoing testing, that has technology that works. Well, you can do the math yourself.
I'm not going to talk about market caps, but you can take a look at the upside potential. Again, as a very complementary service, not as a competitor to these folks who are doing some amazing work, but as a complementary service in this really cool new advanced air mobility space. I always get asked about certification. We have several advantages. North of the border, we're certifying under Transport Canada Civil Aviation. We have a gentleman on the board, his name is Dr. John Maris. He is the Founder of Cert Center Canada, essentially the elite from the public sector coalesced into a private company that are world leaders in certification of new aircraft and modifications to current commercial aircraft. These folks are awesome. They're helping us out.
North of the border, I'll say it, we're kind of a bigger fish in a smaller pond, if that makes sense. We get Transport Canada's, I'd say, increased attention, if that makes any sense. Whereas in the U.S., the FAA is inundated with hundreds of companies that are trying to enter this market space, and it's very busy. We're very fortunate. We can do it much more efficiently north of the border. Of course, we are simply certifying to build these aircraft. For the short to medium term, we're not going to be an air taxi service. We're just laser-focused on building very efficiently an elite aircraft that's going to have global off-the-charts demand. We think that that matters quite a bit. We'll be into flight testing in 2027, and then we seek to certify prior to 2030. This is a bit outdated.
We recently raised a significant amount. We have about CAD 45 million in the bank right now. That is good for 24+ months of development. Again, in a much leaner kind of eVTOL or advanced air mobility 2.0 company that started a lot later, when all of the rules were coalesced, and we could be laser-focused on capital efficiency and developing in a very lean manner. We think that that is excellent. We're very cognizant of our shareholders. I value every single one of our retail shareholders. Each one of my employees is a shareholder. We have an employee stock purchase plan. Yeah, we pay very much attention to making sure we do high-quality financings. Nothing overly dilutive to the retail folks. Like I said, each one of them is an employee. We value that significantly. Lots of partners.
I won't go through all of them. You guys can do your own research. Pratt & Whitney Canada, Bell. In our history, we've been partnered with the United States Air Force through AFWERX, where we won a significant grant for development of a large-scale prototype. In this slide, honestly, there could be another 30 folks on there. The team, you've probably done your own research, but essentially a world-class team that is rooted very much in operational realities. They've been there, they've done that. A lot of them are pilots, and we have a program whereby any employee who wants to be a pilot can get trained as such, supported by the company. I think that makes us a little bit unique in this space, which is great. I will jump to the end because we only got another six minutes for questions, but essentially this, right?
It's great technology. This is a real company that's building a full-scale prototype right now, that's about to hit an inflection point when we roll that thing out of the hangar and start doing flight testing in a really cool new space that's opening up, the advanced air mobility space with vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. Proprietary patented technology, very much a complementary aircraft and technology to some of the more common companies in this space. Thanks very much. Really appreciate everyone's time, and happy to answer a bunch of questions.
Thank you so much, Brandon, for doing the presentation. I request everybody at this time, if you have any questions, please submit them at the Q&A section at the bottom of your screen. Brandon, I will start with a few of my questions. What industries or customer verticals are showing the strongest early interest right now?
That is a difficult one to answer because everybody at the same time is interested. About half of the global helicopter fleet simply moves things around, right? They don't need to hover in one space for a long time, in which case you wouldn't buy our airplane. For any other helicopter operation, where you're just moving things from Point A to Point B in a time-critical manner, you're instantly interested in our airplane. The easiest ones to begin with are the Emergency Medical Services, so moving people to hospitals, moving life-saving organs to hospitals, moving time-sensitive cancer drugs around the country, moving critical goods to remote locations. A good example is there's a lot of places in the Canadian North that are isolated communities.
You need to get something there, you have to load it on a barge and float it up there, wait for the ice to part. It's a very complicated logistical scenario. That's why you get a dozen eggs costing CAD 25 or whatever it is in some of these remote locations. Our airplane will immediately be very economically potent for some of those missions. That builds out into sort of cargo delivery, like I mentioned, and then a lot of military. On the dual use side, a lot of military missions that it's just tailor-made for. Like I said, basically a helicopter that goes twice as fast. You just name your mission in the military. That's a pretty significant thing to be able to offer.
Right. What is the feedback that you guys have got from demonstrations, like from potential commercial or government customers?
Yeah. Initially, I'm met with skepticism, right? "How can your airplane cost 75% less than a helicopter per unit mile? How can this technology actually work?" The more people understand about it, and the more people dig into the tech, the more they go, "Oh, wow. That has really come together as more than the sum of its parts." The feedback has been universally positive. Once this technology is tested at the full scale, which we're doing right now, we're already seeing demand go through the roof on people contacting us, defense prime contractors on the military side, lessors on the civilian side who want to get in on getting a fleet of these so they can lease them out. We have a really well-done third-party audited financial model that shows profitability for lessors, profitability for operators who then lease those aircraft.
Like I said, and any person who's just using helicopters, any organization that's using helicopters to transport things around, this is going to be something that's quite disruptive in the field. It would take me a while to go through the list of all the different folks, but those are the ones that are showing the most interest right now.
Right. Moving a little bit to your financial and capital structure, given the intensive nature, how are you trying to balance the dilution risk work and the need to grow fund?
Well, I mentioned our capital efficiency. Anyone who does their own research on this space should look into how much it has costed us to get to where we are right now and then map that into the future. We are, number one, very focused on just building an awesome machine in the most efficient way possible. We recognize it is not a cheap endeavor to build and certify a new aircraft. I will say we are absolutely 100% committed to our retail shareholders and keeping dilution to a minimum. We'd be lying if we said there's not going to be dilution in the future.
If you take a look at the combination of our market cap, how many shares are out there, and some of the valuations in this space for companies that are profitable, again, I think people will be pleasantly surprised once they dig into the numbers and how much it's going to cost us versus, again, our current market cap and dilution.
Okay. Have you guys thought about once you guys are into the long-term manufacturing, what does the strategy look like? Is it always going to be in-house production versus outsourcing? Does that change the margins for you guys?
Yeah. A lot of companies in this space have had to vertically integrate quite a bit. That is extremely expensive. Rightly so. Like I said, I'm not disparaging any of them. They're going to do some amazing work. They're also going to sell thousands of these units per year. They're going to operate at higher frequency, lower margin, sort of good weather days. Our machine is a bit more ubiquitous in terms of use. It can fly between cities, it can fly further distances. We're not so critical on all of the technologies where we don't have thousands of pounds of lithium batteries. We're not critically dependent upon the battery supplier. We can use, let's say, tougher technologies that have higher power densities. As such, we don't have to vertically integrate everything.
As we move to the future, we can then slowly absorb some of these additional costs, so we can be more capital efficient upfront, prove the technology, and then slowly move to improve efficiency as we go forward with manufacturing. For anyone following us, they know that we've partnered with a number of different folks, the latest of which, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. They have full design, produce, test, certified aircraft abilities. We're partnering with folks around the world that have production capabilities. maintenance, repair, and overhaul is another significant piece of the business where we produce parts that can help support the fleet, the global fleet, when we start rolling these aircraft out. A lot of different pieces, not the least of which is also the technology itself.
Again, highly patented, very useful technology that could be used in a number of different ways across the industry.
Right. It is certainly an exciting time for the market and your company, definitely. I would just like to end by asking if you can sum up the value proposition for investors who might be looking across this sector right now.
The value proposition is, rewind five years. This advanced air mobility space had a lot of question marks, right? Are these machines going to work? Can they be certified? Fast-forward to 2026, these machines will be certified. That's almost certain right now. The technology does work, we're at a very unique inflection point in our current company whereby, like I said, in the next nine - 12 months, we'll have an actual full-scale aircraft rolling out of the hangar ready for flight test. That's an incredibly interesting point in space time to be in for our company. It's going to be exciting six- 12 months.
Great. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your time today, Brandon. I would like to thank everybody in the audience for joining us today. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Really appreciate the opportunity.