Drone firm Elroy Air has appointed Alex Blake as chief of staff and Zach Lovering as vice president of engineering.
Most recently, Blake served as vice president of engineering at Kittyhawk where she played a central role in driving the development of an electric autonomous air taxi, backed by Google/Alphabet founder Larry Page.
She was a member of the team at Google X that developed drone delivery and UTM systems, eventually splitting off as Wing, a subsidiary of Alphabet with operations on three continents. At Wing, Blake led aerodynamics, propulsion, reliability, and flight test, aiding in the 1st FAA operational approval for a commercial drone service in the US.
Blake also served as a launch lead for Amazon Prime Air’s next generation drone delivery system, quality manager for Google’s high altitude solar drone Titan, manufacturing engineer for Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser space flight vehicle, and materials development engineer at Raytheon.
“Alex’s many years of experience in moving new aerospace concepts from idea to proof-of-concept to operational reality brings an incredible set of strengths to our organization. We are extremely excited to have Alex join our leadership team!” said Elroy Air co-founder Clint Cope.
Blake is working with Elroy Air’s founders to shape how the company will mature and scale, including where to focus energy and resources as it builds its middle mile aerial delivery system’s products and services.
In his role, Lovering is focused on growing the engineering function at Elroy Air with a focus on its powertrain, autonomy, integration, and flight testing teams. The expansion of these critical groups is expected to accelerate the company on its path to producing early vehicles.
As vice president for Urban Mobility Systems at Airbus, Zach oversaw Urban Mobility operations in the US and was responsible for the end-to-end system integration of next generation aircraft into airspace and cities.
He led the company’s flagship eVTOL demonstrator programme, Vahana, originally as its founding chief engineer then as project executive at Airbus's Silicon Valley innovation centre, A³ by Airbus.
Lovering also led rotor blade programmes at Helicopter Technology Company, and worked on the structures, propulsion, and aero-performance teams at Zee.Aero (now Wisk).
“We recently welcomed Zach Lovering as VP Engineering. Zach led the team at A³ by Airbus as they built and flew the Vahana eVTOL aircraft all the way through transition over more than 138 flights - a pioneering program in our industry which is highly-relevant experience for the trajectory ahead for Elroy Air,” said Elroy Air co-founder and chief executive David Merrill.
Elroy Air aims to develop the first end-to-end autonomous vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aerial cargo system.
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