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, Chief Executive and Founder. We will begin with a brief presentation in a moment, and then we will open the 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. Of course, forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties. Brandon, please go ahead.
Okay. Thanks, Craig. Really appreciate it. And thanks, folks. Really appreciate your time today. If you take nothing more away from this presentation, it is that we are building this aircraft that is on the primary screen right now. For those uninitiated, this aircraft can take off and land vertically just like a normal helicopter. When it moves forward, it can transition with some really cool technology to change into that of just a typical aircraft, which is a lot faster than a typical helicopter, and a lot safer in many different ways. Essentially, helicopter capability, so VTOL capability, but about twice as fast, about five times the range of the all-electric eVTOLs in this space, and very much a complementary service.
Anyone who is building out a portfolio in this space, some of the major players, Joby, Archer, BETA, they are going to do some great work over shorter ranges. This machine is built for bad weather, cold weather, longer distances, and has a lot more fuel reserves on board, and we can touch on that. Instead of just within cities, this is very much a between cities, tough machine built by a company led by an ex-fighter pilot that is pretty excited about it.
So been through a flight test program on a large-scale prototype. We are building the full-scale aircraft right now, and it is going to, I think, catch the markets by surprise when in several months we roll this full-scale aircraft out of the hangar and start flying. Okay, for those who do not know and have not done as much research, that is totally cool. What is New Horizon Aircraft?
I was a fighter pilot in the Air Force for the better part of two decades. At the peak of my career, I was planning and leading NATO coalition missions, in training, recovering downed pilots from beyond enemy lines, that sort of thing. We always were limited in some of those more complex missions to the slowest vertical takeoff and landing aircraft in the fleet. A lot of these helicopters, amazing Black Hawks, Bell helicopters are fantastic, but they are slow, and they break a lot. Near the end of my career, my father and I, my father was running a high-tech aerospace company that was doing a lot of really cool stuff in the general aviation space, a lot of electrification of older systems, modernizing some of the more antiquated general aviation aircraft.
We got very interested in this advanced air mobility space that Joby and Archer and BETA were designing concepts for. When we looked into it, we saw a little bit of a gap forming whereby a lot of these architectures were all electric, carrying a few thousand pounds of batteries on board, and sort of in a place where their range and their operational utility would be confined to good weather. We could very much build a complementary prototype that, like I said, instead of within cities, this can go between cities twice as fast, 5x the range. It has an internal combustion engine on board, which we are pretty proud about. We will talk about that in a bit. Like I said, without much competition in this space, the way the architecture came together.
Founded the company, produced the concept, and we made some incredible progress that is going to culminate in a really, really interesting next six months for us when, again, we roll out a full-scale aircraft from the hangar and begin testing, joining an elite group of companies in this space. Instead of an all-electric architecture, again, that was a little bit of a crowded space, we came up with a hybrid electric architecture. This aircraft has a Pratt & Whitney turbine engine at the heart of it, with a generator on board that produces electricity, and is seven person. So six people in the back, one person up front with a jump seat for training also. Can go up to 250 mi an hour, 500 mi range at mid loads with enough fuel reserves when you get there to your destination to give you a lot of options.
It is planned to be all-weather, so it can fly in clouds. Very few helicopters in the world are certified and very few operations for flying helicopters in clouds, so that is quite unique. As a hybrid electric machine, it can charge itself after a takeoff, when it vertically takes off. It transitions to forward flight. The generator on board recharges the batteries. Again, instead of having thousands of pounds of batteries, we have hundreds of pounds of batteries on board. When it gets to its destination, it starts its landing with full battery power.
When you land in the middle of nowhere to do a lot of really cool missions that we will talk about, it is able to recharge itself as long as there is fuel on board, which I will remind everyone who is technically oriented, fuel, jet fuel in this case, still has 30, 3 0x amount of energy in it than the same mass of batteries would. So 12,000 Wh/kg instead of 200 Wh/kg . Once you account for efficiencies, it is about 30x- 40x , which is pretty incredible. That gives us superior range, speed, and a lot more operational flexibility to go those longer distance at higher speed. How does the technology work and why does it work? So you see in the main wings and in the small wings at the front, called the canards, those are electrically powered lift fans.
Those spin up, they produce enough lift to lift the aircraft off the ground. Then that pusher prop at the back will spin up. That prop is attached directly to the PT6. That pushes the aircraft forward, and at a safe speed, the wings and the canards will transform. Just like we are retracting the flaps and slats in any sort of commercial aircraft, this happens. In this configuration, the aircraft flies 98% of its mission. I would highly encourage anyone to go check our YouTube video on it and see a large-scale prototype flying and going through transition, which is the hardest phase of the flight for any modern VTOL company. Ours is very simple, very safe. We stressed about it, and it turned out to be the biggest non-event ever. It is by our proprietary technology, and it works like a charm.
This is, again, how the aircraft flies 98% of its mission as a single engine turboprop aircraft, carrying, again, six passengers with a pilot up front, and up to 1,500 lbs of useful load, which is pretty incredible statistics. So with superior performance and versatility and a lot of layers of technology on board, I want you to focus on the column on the right. A lot of helicopter operations and VTOL operations will be highly restricted and are highly restricted by weather conditions. Said plainly, helicopters and helicopter operations, like I said before, do not like to fly in clouds, and a lot of helicopters are not certified for flight into clouds. Specifically, there is only a handful of helicopters and VTOLs that are already flying that can fly into known icing conditions. It is called FIKI. This aircraft will be able to do so.
We are targeting it to be able to do so, which is a game changer from a modern VTOL type of machine, and that distills into an operational capability that is going to be very profitable and very safe for end users across a number of different missions. Like I mentioned in the Air Force, I would have loved to have one of these things. A typical helo will travel at half the speed. Some of the faster ones, the V-22 Osprey is an amazing piece of machinery, but they are complicated to work. They have had some problems with flight safety. They are very expensive, so CAD 80,000+ an hour just to operate. Our aircraft is a lot simpler. I would have loved to have had about 10 of these instead of one single V-22 flying around.
On the dual-use side, I love the fact that this will have an outstanding capability to support troops, allied nations around the world. Of course, we essentially built a helicopter capability that, again, can fly in bad weather, but it is twice as fast. Some of the really unique missions, besides the military utility, which is going to be off the charts, emergency medical services. Moving people, moving organs, moving any sort of time critical, maybe it is cancer in a radioactive isotope, drugs from hospital to hospital. This aircraft will get people to the hospital in almost half the time, or from twice the distance in that critical hour.
A really critical item to understand here, and we can go through the cost model a little bit in the questions, it will be up to 75% cheaper per unit mile to operate than a helicopter that can carry the same amount of stuff. Essentially, a helicopter that is twice as fast operating at 60%-75% less cost per mile is going to be pretty transformative for any emergency medical services. Of course, who would not want to travel in one of these things from point to point? NASA did a really interesting study. There are 5,000 underutilized regional airports across the U.S. alone. For me, I live north of the border in Canada. I have to travel two and a half hours to get to Toronto Pearson International Airport. I get there two and a half hours early.
I typically go through a very arduous process in an overcrowded, underwhelming airport sort of experience. Then just to go three or four hours away and then reverse that process. I recently discovered that I could fly to certain locations from Porter Airlines, which operates out of the island, the regional smaller airport just to the south of Pearson, along the north shore of Lake Ontario. It is what I can only describe as what flying in the 1970s would have been like. It is so frictionless. You would walk in there, whatever, like 40 minutes early. Some guy wands you down. Cool. You let them take a look at and make sure you have no sharp objects. They hand you a vodka soda, and then you get on your plane two minutes later. It is amazing. You fly directly where you want to go.
With our economics and our speed, and the lack of requirement for really long runways, you can land anywhere that there is a helipad or a safe spot to land. That opens up some really unique passenger travel options as well from a business case analysis perspective. Pretty excited about that. I would like to buy one of these things too eventually, if I can afford it, once they become available, which we are getting a lot of interest these days. As a hybrid electric aircraft, again, it has the minimum amount of batteries on board. It still uses the internal combustion engine. It has a generator on it. You can land this thing anywhere. A great scenario, weather goes through, maybe it is Louisiana or Florida, knocks out the power to a large geographical area. You can fly these aircraft in, rapidly deploy them.
Again, they are cheaper and faster and in many ways safer than a helicopter that would do the same. You can land them, you can start saving lives right away, or identifying places for extraction. You could, with its generator on board, power a remote medical station, for example. A lot of really interesting missions that could be accomplished on the disaster relief side. In Canada, connecting our remote communities is a big deal. Reaching out and touching some of those northern communities, people die on a yearly basis because they cannot get medical supplies that have run out, or maybe it is a doctor to a remote community, or an extraction from those remote communities. Reaching out and connecting the north, helping our northern communities here in Canada is a construct that works in a number of different geographies around the world.
Again, just a pretty exciting mission set for a very unique aircraft, and again, a complementary aircraft in this space. On the economic side, I get questions about this. How is this possible? I am like, "Are you really 75% cheaper per mile than a typical helo?" The answer is yes. The numbers vary a little bit depending on payload range equations. But essentially we are about 20%-30% cheaper per hour, and during that hour we travel 1.8x further, and those two things stack up, and you are not only cheaper per hour, but you are going almost twice the distance, and that is where you truly get your savings. Why the per- hour savings in the first place? Well, it is much simpler than a helicopter. It looks complicated with a bunch of fans in the wings, but those are electric motors.
Instead of internal combustion engine timing out at 2,000 hours, these motors could go 20,000 hours. They are just electromagnetic waves turning them. It is amazing. A helicopter has one main rotor system to keep it airborne. That requires a lot of precision manufacturing. The blades are very expensive. There are extremely high maintenance requirements for all of that main rotor system and the gearbox associated with it. Tail rotor, if anything happens to that thing, the typical helicopter will not stay straight. Anything breaks on any one of our main rotors, we can fly in a vertical condition with, we calculate up to 30% of rotor loss. Each one of them is protected from the other one, so there should not be any cascading failures. That is why. So cheaper per unit hour. During that hour, it travels almost twice as far.
That is some pretty compelling economics for about half of the helicopter fleet that simply travels from one place to another. We have had these cost models verified by third-party auditors, and built by people who have ran helicopter operations and fixed- wing operations in companies for many, many years. We are pretty proud of that. This is all publicly available information, of course. You can see we are pretty strong on the finances. Last reported, CAD +28 million in cash. We are burning between, and you can look this up, CAD 3 million-CAD 5 million a quarter. The folks can do the math on that. Easily 24+ months of runway to get through not only production of a full-scale prototype, but well into the testing and validation and technical risk reduction. We do have an active ATM facility that we are very careful about using.
Our last raises were in the $ 2.25-$ 2.40 sort of mark. We have been responsible with our very clean sort of any S-1 type of, or S-3 type raises as well. We really take care of our retail investors. Every single one of my employees is a retail investor, and we are fortunate to have pretty strong strategic finance partners that, again, you guys can do the research on and look up. So, very strong financial position, and in a really good spot from a technical development perspective. I always get asked about the developmental trajectory. This slide speaks for itself. You can pull it off the website.
Bottom line, we have been through technical validation through the testing of a large-scale prototype, and we are building a full-scale aircraft right now with a lot of really strong partnerships, like I said, and hitting a bit of an inflection point. We built the company, this time last year we were under 50 folks, now we are close to 100 folks in terms of an equivalent basis. We are continuing to grow very rapidly in this space.
I just love this slide in terms of we are making sure that this aircraft is built tough. As an ex-fighter pilot, I have been in some pretty sticky scenarios where you would fly in and there is unexpected snowstorms or weather in place. This is a tough machine that I would be happy to put my kids in and go flying in. This is a rendering, of course, of a remote landing.
Testing bad weather, cold weather, full instrument meteorological conditions. Of course, on the certification side, we are a Canadian company. Put plainly, we are a big fish in a small pond. Transport Canada has the highest of standards alongside the FAA for certification. We can have their attention, right? In the U.S., it is a little bit of a busier space. FAA is doing some amazing work, but of course, they are inundated with a bunch of companies trying to do the same thing with, quite frankly, a lot of aircraft that look and feel the same. Our aircraft flies 98% of the mission just like a normal airplane, and so the certification folks really, really do love that. We are trying to have this thing type certified early in 2030. Some amazing partners. I want to call out a few of them.
Pratt & Whitney Canada, we have the world's most reliable turbine engine as the beating heart of this airplane. The Pratt & Whitney PT6 series is incredible. We have a PT6A that is, again, forms sort of the core forward propulsion system. BETA Technologies, Kyle Clark and BETA have done an amazing job building a very practical company with some incredible technologies that they are willing to share, and they are kind enough to share with us. They have a very similar architecture. You can look this up. They have an aircraft that lifts off the ground vertically, and then a pusher prop configuration that drives it forward. Their transition is when their blades stop rotating on the top in a very elegant way, and they fly 98% efficient, almost just like a normal aircraft.
That flight control system that they have developed, they are willing to help us out and take what is a very complicated development process, for those of you who do not know, and one of the blockers for early certification, and start in an incredible place. They have already flown 200,000+ mi on their ALIA aircraft. I could not be prouder to partner with a company that has that type of technology that can turn something that is a technical risk into a technical strength. MHI RJ, RAMPF, NORDAM, Marshall Aerospace.
Number one, Canada has a surprising ecosystem from an aerospace development perspective. We are one of the only countries that can design, build, produce, test, and certify clean- sheet aircraft designs. We have world-class partners to help us do so. That is a pretty exciting thing. You probably looked up my profile. I do not like to go over too much.
Flew jets in the Air Force, mech. eng. degree, got a license to be dangerous in business. I have a valid ATPL, airline transport pilot's license, so I flew commercially as well. Although in an amazing company called Top Aces, and not foreign airlines. I understand all the civilian rules. I know the military sort of rigor associated with test flying, and have a pretty good network of folks that can help us along the way and have helped us, which is amazing. My father is the Chief Aircraft Architect and Co-Founder. He has been building and flying and fixing and cursing at airplanes since he was 14 years old. Pretty special individual, a lot of innovative ideas. On the CTO side, someone that has been there and done that from a technical development perspective. On the financial side, we are extremely strong with Brian leading the way.
Has been in the financial leadership of publicly traded companies before. We never file our stuff late. We are very solid on the deals that we do and how we execute on the financial side. Of course, Jason has got incredible sort of experience in startups and scale-ups and helps us coordinate. There are a lot more folks that are critical now. We should probably update this slide, but I would spend all of it talking about the amazing team that we are building. Comes together pretty well. Like I said, we put safety first in everything. We are building an aircraft that is much more further along towards certification than anyone might think from a developmental perspective. It has got the performance, and critically it has the economics to really be attractive from an operational perspective. That is it. So really appreciate your time.
We can move into some questions pretty much exactly on time. Like I said, for anyone building out a portfolio in this space, it is really unique what we have been able to do in terms of a complementary type of machine as this advanced air mobility piece gets built out. So with that, we will turn it back over to the RedChip folks. Thanks, Craig. Appreciate the opportunity and happy to answer any and all questions like we always do.
Thank you, Brandon. To speak to the New Horizon Aircraft team, please click the raise hand button and wait for the prompt to unmute your line. To submit a question by text, please click the Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom window and type your question into the text box. Many people already have typed a question into the text box, Brandon. Will we see images of the prototype before full assembly? Will the company be releasing any updates prior to reveal?
Yeah. I think we do a decent job communicating. We don't over-communicate. There's a lot of people that, a lot of I'd say releases in the space that want to talk about every single little thing. We like to put out major milestones. We like to talk about where we're going to go and give presentations, et cetera. As we build it out towards the great reveal, if that makes any sense, there will be technical updates, where you'll see maybe it's the Iron Bird that's been testing core critical flight control systems and all of the electrical components for electromagnetic interference. Maybe it's this simulator one where we show the sophistication of the incredible simulator that we're building to prove out some of the aerodynamics and flight controls in the beginning. Yeah, and more, of course, potential releases on major strategic partnerships as well.
Of course, as we continue to prove and develop, there's more and more serious players very curious about what we're doing. Yes, the answer's yes. We're going to talk about it. We're going to keep folks updated at the right cadence.
For military applications, how will the Horizon Aircraft compare in performance specs with the Archer Anduril tiltrotor design?
Well, any tiltrotor design is a difficult thing to make work. That Anduril design is a little bit smaller. Tiltrotor mechanisms are heavy, the blades are heavy, and they are not built for speed for the most part. The V-22 was a very special, big military aircraft that is still in the 230- knots sort of range, maybe a bit quicker I might have to recheck the specs on that. Ours will have much superior straight-line speed, as just simply a much slicker airplane that has been purpose-built for speed and range over something that has been converted. But again, we would be very much complementary to that type of Anduril type of machine that we have seen. On the military side, yeah, we are pretty happy with the spot that we are in.
Relative to takeoff and landing noise generation, how does the Horizon compare with the all-electric Joby and Archer eVTOLs?
We compare ourselves primarily to helicopters. We will be 3 dB-5 dB decibels, so call it 5x quieter than a helicopter during hover. And of course, we are cheaters in overflight. For 98% of the mission, we have the wings covered up, and you are just a single engine turboprop that has noise shielded by the deck at the back of the airplane. And so we are up to 20 dB, so 100x quieter than a helicopter in overflight. I am not sure that we have accurate data in terms of comparing apples to apples from all the major OEMs, so I do not really want to comment on that. We will have higher disk loading, so that lends to a bit more noise, but the noise is shielded in the ducts.
It reduces tip vortices, and noise is generated from a number of different areas in an aircraft. Anyway, I will not comment on that in terms of direct comparison to some of the all-electric VTOLs, but certainly much quieter, especially in overflight, than a typical helicopter.
Matan Assulin, please go ahead.
Hi, Brandon. Hi, everyone. I have a question regarding the fan and wing technology. I have always wondered, you cannot add any flaps or ailerons to them, and because we always compare the efficiency of a plane, typically planes have ailerons and flaps. Obviously, that is a trade-off we, due to the fan and wing technology, cannot add. Is there any negatives to not having that? Is there any other trade-offs maybe you can point to?
First of all, we do have ailerons and flaps. We do. We have a really clever light and robust mechanism. It is fly-by-wire, so the actuators are back there. We have a set of flaps and a set of ailerons. We are looking at just a longer one called a flaperon. It is a combination of the two. If you could not open up the wings for whatever reason, and fire up your vertical propulsion system, and you still needed to land, this aircraft can land and operate just like a normal airplane, so it has all the traditional flight controls. It has two rudders, it has an elevator, it has ailerons, so we really get the best of both worlds from that perspective.
What the realistic trade-off is with this design, because we want it to be as efficient en route as possible, is that we have higher disk loading, and that is why we put them inside the wings in ducts. When you put a fan inside of a duct, ours are 32 in in diameter, you dramatically reduce the drag, and therefore you alter the disk loading calculation, and that really benefits our configuration. Helicopters essentially spend most of the time paying for the fact that they can take off and land vertically. Half of the helicopters in the world go from one place to another, and they are very aerodynamically inefficient.
We reversed that equation and said, "Listen, we have plenty of takeoff and landing capability with the hybrid system, and the amount of hover time that we've calculated makes sense." For 98% of the trip, you're much faster and much more efficient, up to 3x-4x more efficient aerodynamically than a helicopter that spends a lot of time trying to beat the air into submission when it's traveling a sightseeing trip or taking a passenger to the hospital, et cetera. So, great question, but yeah, we're very much like a traditional aircraft for 98% of the time with all of the traditional aircraft stuff on it, including the landing gear, and the flaps, and all the traditional flight controls.
Amazing. Thank you. I didn't know that.
Craig, you're on mute if you're going to read out another question.
Excuse me. How is Flight Into Known Icing, or FIKI, attained on this design? Are all fans heated?
I can speak conceptually to what would make sense for us to consider. I haven't released. That's a sensitive part of our technology. It is 100% a game changer. There's only a handful of helicopters in the world that can fly into known icing, and for the most part, they avoid it like the plague. That's why you get helicopters avoiding clouds and flying too low and running into the ground and doing all sorts of things on operations. Our aircraft will be able to fly, we anticipate it'll be able to fly using normal commercial routes in clouds, in IFR conditions, much like any single- engine turboprop that carries critical cargo and people around in the commercial air structure. How could we do it, theoretically? We have a lot of electricity on board.
It's easy to rectify that from the generator and send it different places, so electrothermal coatings would make a lot of sense. Maybe the fans spin up in the wings, even when the wings are closed. This is an easy thing to think about and conceptualize. That generates heat. Maybe we have, for those who don't know, this has been publicly released, we have two motors per fan. Maybe one could run opposite to the other and generates more heat and electricity. Of course, we have bleed air on board, so we have 800+ degree air on board from the turbine system that can heat the cabin, that can heat various surfaces if we so choose. We have all the traditional ways of providing de-icing, so getting rid of ice that's on the airplane, and anti-icing, preventing ice from accumulating in the first place.
Our prop is specially designed for that, of course. In addition to that, we have a lot of electricity on board where we can just, in a very efficient way and clever way, heat the various things that require heating for that, without getting into too much more of the technical detail.
Are you considering to talk to the armed forces to replace some of the Twin Otter in the Arctic from the armed forces' replacement programs?
I cannot speak to any specific programs that have not been released that we are talking to the Department of National Defence about. Of course, the Twin Otter have some advantages for their northern operations. Some of them can land in water. They put them on skis, and they can land on frozen lake beds, et cetera. Our aircraft, of course, is not amphibious, so landing in water, but it does not have to because it can really just land anywhere it wants to that is sort of flat.
It would make sense to consider a number of different northern operational missions, delivering things to remote communities, searching for people that are down, and we do not have the close runway infrastructure to take off and fly this massive mission. On the military side, there is a lot of military, Canadian military, a lot of Rangers in the north that need support as well.
It is a great mission for it under prescribed conditions. They are not going to just replace all of the Twin Otter overnight. Twin Otter payload is much different than ours, so we have to do the math on what makes sense economically, but there is definitely a place, especially for an airplane that is built for those harsher climates.
Do you already have a fully working prototype, or are these assumptions?
What we do have is a large-scale prototype, not a full-scale prototype, our X5. You can go take a look at YouTube of it flying. It is a beast of an aircraft, has a 22 ft wingspan. It is not a tiny little drone that we built as a flashy proof of concept that will not scale up. We built it at the scale that we can get useful info from it, and we are currently building the full-scale aircraft, kind of like a VTOL 2.0 company in this space, waiting a little bit, having the regulatory structure and some of the technology coalesced to make sense, and then roll out a full-scale prototype just like most of the big boys in this space very soon. Again, people can check out our YouTube channel for some videos from the flight test program that we did on the large-scale prototype.
Hello, Brandon. Thank you for your time, and highly interested in all you are doing. I came across your design about a year ago by looking up what is an autogyro from the 1982 movie "Annie." True story, ha ha. I started researching HOVR and thoroughly impressed. My question is recent dilution to raise funds. Will there be more of this in the future with the financial strength over the next 24 months? A lot of rhetoric that top leadership has been selling shares. Can you address that?
Yeah. I'll address both of them. Absolutely. So great question. One thing you'll realize with all my interviews is I never shy away from tough questions. I'll address the dilution problem first. If you look what we have done and where our market cap is right now compared to how much money other folks have spent getting to where we are, I think you'll find a company that is extremely responsible from a dilution perspective. Look at our last two raises that happened concurrently. No warrants, equity only, two struck at CAD 2.51 and CAD 2.19. That should tell a lot of folks. That's a one in 100 deal these days for a microcap company. But we can be picky, because like I said, we have a great team that's doing some cool things. Now, will there be more dilution? Yes.
I get heated about this latest S-3 ATM facility that we reloaded. All I say is look at our history. With the ATM, we raised between, and this is all in the 10-K, between $2.25 and $2.40, and that was back when we didn't have. Well, we weren't, quite frankly, at the place where we are now with a lot more technical development under our belt. So we have a track record of being very responsible on our raises and not doing any death spiral deals. We're going to continue to do that. Like I said, we have enough money in the bank to get us at least 24 months from now. Reloading the ATM is simply good practice, and we're not selling shares. A lot of retail investors thought that when we filed that S-3 and it went effective, that's us selling shares, but it's absolutely not.
It's just the ability to, under very good conditions, should we so choose, and when it's not punitive to the stock, put a little more money in the bank, which everybody should love, especially at high valuations, that can help with the sort of set the floor, if that makes any sense. Management has sold exactly in one period of time. In Canada, it is very expensive to own a company that has gone public and has share valuations and shares issued for performance. Our taxes are crazy. I was in a 54% tax bracket, and so quite frankly, I've sold shares to cover taxes and not much else. And you can believe me or not. You can take a look at some of the other folks. Yeah. And so that's the honest truth. That's how it's going to be going forward. We're going to be very responsible.
Management's not dumping out of this company anytime soon. I still own a decent chunk. That's it. That's the short answer to a couple of good questions. Happy to answer.
We have many questions remaining here, Brandon. Lots of people want to know more. Why not be a U.S. company?
We have a U.S. subsidiary that's also able to be looked up. It's based in Delaware. In Canada, it's just where we started, right? I was in the Royal Canadian Air Force. The company nucleated in Canada. In many ways, Canada's a pretty friendly environment to develop a machine of this nature in. We got great airspace access. We have an ecosystem that is much cheaper to put together and to build a machine in a very, very cost-effective manner. Governmentally, the way things have worked recently, geopolitically, there's a lot of foreign companies looking to directly invest in Canada right now that were maybe previously looking south of the border. The Canadian government is fully committed to supporting any sort of defense-type technology, and they're leading with aerospace and defense.
It's really a number of different tailwinds that sometimes better be lucky than good, but again, that's how it distilled. We're not going to forever just stay narrowly here. We're looking at it as a responsible management team, moving to where, or at least expanding into areas that make a lot of sense from the production capacity perspective, maintenance repair and overhaul partnerships, geographies around the world that are going to be conducive to this machine operating. It's where we started. It's not where we're going to end. A lot of options for us right now.
Are there any management concerns about the current tariffs and/or political climate between the U.S. and Canada?
Great question. The answer is no. Most of our costs are just people right now. We do not buy a lot of fancy stuff. If we were in high volume manufacturing with 200- 300 aircraft coming off a line with supply chains that cross the border, and all of a sudden, the titanium that we need was 4x as expensive, these would be very big problems. Right now, quite frankly, we buy carbon fiber and steel and some parts from different places. Pratt & Whitney Canada, that is a big expenditure to buy a Pratt & Whitney PT6 for the main engine, but we are building one prototype right now, not a lot. So right now, the tariffs not only do not hurt us, they have actually helped us quite a bit.
There is a bit of a Canadian sort of national pride thing, and like I said, the government really is getting behind aerospace and defense, and rightly so after underspending for a little bit. So it has actually counterintuitively been produced, at least, for better or for worse, in an environment that is very conducive to developing this type of airplane north of the border.
Are you currently able to find the engineering talent you need locally? Are you planning to open offices elsewhere or offer remote engineering positions?
The answer is we always want the best people, and there is never enough of them. This is true in any geographical location. I do not care where you are. You could be in Wichita, Kansas or Montréal, Québec, Canada, where we are kind of an aerospace hub. We are definitely looking at expanding into various locations. We do have a remote work policy, and quite frankly, some of these talented folks can be a bit picky and choosy, right? But most of them are very goal-oriented. We hire only sort of doers and builders, if that makes sense. They come to the hangar when they need to. We are just building it out in a federated way that makes sense. We already have, this is on the record, we have an Ottawa office. We have a place here just northeast of Toronto.
We are looking at several other locations to build out in southern Ontario and across to Québec as well. We just went down to Springfield, Ohio and checked out the National Advanced Air Mobility Center of Excellence down there. Again, no commitments, no announcements, no promises to do anything, but there is a lot of great stuff happening south of the border as well with the administration that is supporting through real structures like eIPP, the ability to really accelerate some of this tech. The macro environment is very good at this point.
Given the compelling defense applications for the Horizon Aircraft, could the Horizon Aircraft be certified for military applications before receiving commercial certification?
The answer is absolutely yes. For those folks who do not know, in the military, you have a separate governance body that accepts, quite frankly, more risk than a commercial program might accept, right? The military wants things that can do a job, and they are willing to accept a bit more risk in some of their certification frameworks in order to get an awesome piece of aircraft that can, the balance is that it can save lives a lot sooner. That is absolutely fantastic, and the answer is absolutely yes. That process is typically more streamlined, and they want to get the piece of kit to the military operators, which is important. Yes.
What can you do that drones can't do?
That's a big question. The size of the drone, the type of drone. This has a fly-by-wire flight control system. We could make this an autonomous aircraft. The truth of the matter is we've been flying an aircraft that had been capable of fully autonomous flight for quite some time. The Boeing 777 you used to fly overseas, at the right airport can flare, land, stop on the runway all by itself, and the pilots touch the controls for about 1% of that mission. The F/A-18 I flew in late 1970s technology, it can automatically turn at waypoints. It can automatically hold its airspeed and get into a condition and land, fly a precision approach itself. Even so, for three decades or more, we still haven't done it, or more than three decades. Why are there still pilots up front? There's a number of reasons.
One, pilots are there for a contingency perspective. Anytime you have precious cargo, humans, or anything that is critical, you want a pilot on board for contingency operations. The airspace structure is surprisingly antiquated. No kidding, in 2026, I'm a commercial airline transport pilot. I have flown in busy commercial airspace. I'm still talking on the radio like it's 1951 or whatever, to some air traffic controller through radio waves that he can misunderstand, I can misunderstand. The environment in which you fly, unless you're avoiding all the commercial airspace and you're only doing sort of remote operations that have been in a prescribed area, it's still a system that requires pilots on board. Now, that's changing. It's getting better. When it gets to the point where it makes sense operationally, maybe it starts with cargo. This aircraft is set up for it.
This is not a complicated thing to do. It would be complicated if it was an all- mechanical system that was in a different configuration, but three redundant flight control computers, all of the necessary sort of backbone architecture to support the communication structure. We got Starlink to help us out these days. This is an easily solvable thing for us when the time is right.
And final question, Brandon, to the extent the Cavorite needs to be recharged, will it use the BETA charging system?
As a hybrid electric aircraft, you don't need any infrastructure whatsoever. You don't need any charging infrastructure. However, if you have access to it, maybe you land at a vertiport and there is a high- voltage charging station there, yes. I mean, the BETA's coming up with one of the best systems to support all of the all-electric fleet. The answer is yes, we could. The answer is no, we don't need it, and we can go literally anywhere where there's fuel, or if you still have fuel on board, you can go to the middle of nowhere, pick something up and go back. You don't need to recharge because the aircraft can recharge itself without any sort of charging infrastructure at all, like I said, in a sort of very complimentary sort of way to the all-electric machines.
Thank you very much, Brandon. For more information about New Horizon Aircraft, reach us at 1-800-RED-CHIP or email us at hovr@redchip.com. Please visit RedChip's investor information page for New Horizon Aircraft. It's 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 on Bloomberg U.S.A every Saturday night at 7:00 P.M. and on CNBC every Sunday at 11:00 A.M. Finally, join RedChip's next webinar with Clinch Resources tomorrow, Thursday, September 24th at 4:15 P.M. U.S. Eastern. Register for all RedChip webinars at redchip.com/events. Thank you to our many participants today and thank you, Brandon.
Thanks, Craig, and thanks to everyone who took the time to tune in.