Arlington-based startup Eviation, which flew the first flight of its sleek all-electric airplane at Moses Lake in fall 2022, laid off most of its staff last week after failing to attract new funding, according to two employees who were among those cut.
“The company is pausing operations indefinitely,” said an engineer. “Most of the engineering team is gone.”
“We were all invested in the program. We hoped until the last moment that it would succeed,” said the other employee. “Very few folks are left.”
Both asked not to be named to protect future job prospects.
The Eviation workforce was mostly in Arlington but with a small team in Israel, where the company was founded in 2015 before the move to Washington state.
The company shrank gradually through attrition from about 120 employees at first flight in 2022, down to about 70 people a year ago and then to about 30 before the layoffs.
The main shareholder of Eviation is Clermont Group, a collection of investment companies funded by New Zealand-born, Singapore-based billionaire Richard Chandler.
Clermont also owns Everett-based electric motor and battery-maker MagniX, which provided the motors that powered that battery-powered first flight in 2022.
After that achievement, Eviation decided to redesign the nine-passenger, two-crew commuter airplane — named Alice, after Alice in Wonderland — and pushed out entry into service until no earlier than 2027.
Since then, it has worked on updating the technology, including selecting new electric motors and bringing in suppliers ready to invest.
But one employee said the ownership structure, which includes ties to an Israeli company, made it difficult to attract electric aviation systems suppliers outside the Clermont Group.
An article in Hebrew in an Israeli tech journal this week quoted Aviv Tsidon, one of Eviation’s co-founders, criticizing the decision to wind down operations without prior notice. The Feb. 10 article goes on to state that some of the Israeli shareholders holding special minority rights may try to block the move.
The journal, citing unnamed sources, said the Clermont Group had been in talks with investors in the United Arab Emirates and speculated that the goal may be to shutter the U.S. operation and move the company there.
Eviation has made no public announcement about its halt to operations and CEO Andre Stein did not return messages. The news of the layoffs was first reported in the U.S. Friday by specialist aviation news site The Air Current and confirmed independently by The Seattle Times.
Eviation first showed off a nonflying prototype of what became Alice at the 2019 Paris Air Show.
By 2022, the first CEO of Eviation, Omer Bar-Yohay, predicted at a conference in Lynnwood that the company would be building “many hundreds, if not a thousand airplanes per year in a reasonable time.”
What looks now like the end of this innovative airplane concept follows the failure of a series of zero-emissions aviation technology projects to reach fruition.
Universal Hydrogen, the pioneering startup that in 2023 flew a partially hydrogen-powered flight, also out of Moses Lake, went bust last June.
In Europe, short-range air taxi startups Lilium and Volocopter have failed, and Tecnam of Italy postponed its P-Volt electric commuter plane.
And Airbus, prioritizing the production ramp-up of its conventional jets, has abruptly halted its electric and hydrogen aviation projects.
Last month, it halted its CityAirbus electric air taxi project and then this week scrapped its much-hyped plan to develop a hydrogen-powered plane by 2035.
Lee Human, CEO of Seattle-based aerospace engineering firm AeroTEC, which did certification work for both Eviation and Universal Hydrogen, said “the days of frivolous investment are over.”
Following first flight of an all-new airplane design, he said getting to production takes years of component development, “requiring heavy investment and working with major aerospace suppliers.”
Former Eviation CEO Greg Davis, who left in the spring of last year, said little venture capital is now going into zero-emissions aviation.
He expects a shakeout among the various proposed new air vehicles over the next few years and that financial survival may favor those with military applications.