The autonomous aviation sphere has a potentially disruptive new entrant.
San Francisco Bay Area-based Grid Aero, which emerged from stealth on Monday, is taking a unique approach to self-flying aircraft. Developers of small drones and electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) air taxis have added or are looking to add autonomy to their designs. Some companies, such as Merlin Labs, Reliable Robotics, and Xwing, are retrofitting existing airframes, such as the Cessna 208 Caravan, with autonomous systems.
But Grid is building something different: a fully clean sheet, self-flying aircraft designed to carry thousands of pounds over thousands of miles.
The company’s Lifter-Lite, designed and built in just over half a year, is intended for contested military logistics and short-haul commercial cargo. Founder and CEO Arthur Dubois described it as a “flying pickup truck” and an “order of magnitude cheaper than anything else you’ll see on the market, pound for pound.”
“We basically had an empty hangar in mid-to-late January,” Dubois told FLYING, “and now we have a hangar with an aircraft in it.”
Dubois said Grid “immediately got traction” with the Department of Defense (DOD) when he created the company in 2024. By year’s end, it closed a $6 million seed round. On Monday, the firm announced it was awarded a Direct to Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract from AFWERX, the innovation unit of the U.S. Air Force.
Dubois believes the Lifter-Lite could afford the DOD the same capabilities as a Lockheed C130 Hercules at a fraction of the cost. Grid aims to get aircraft in the hands of the military by 2027.
The company’s advisory board includes Leo Kosinski, former director of logistics for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a pair of retired C130 pilots for the Pacific Air Forces (PACAF). According to Dubois, the Air Force operates a few hundred C130s in the Pacific. The model is the longest continuously produced military airframe.
“That is really not a lot,” Dubois said. “And their concern is that, well, if we lose our C130s, then there’s no more logistics in the Pacific.”
According to Grid, only a handful of Chinese designs match the Lifter-Lite’s range, payload, and price for autonomous aircraft. Dubois said it will be capable of flying from Guam to Japan, for example.
“If you go any direction from Guam, you need the minimum of 1,500 nm to reach the next land mass,” said Brandon Florian, chief commercial officer of Grid. “And currently, everyone else falls in the water somewhere along the way.”
On the Grid
Despite being a new company, Grid brings plenty of expertise to the table.
Florian, for example, has worked in the aerospace and defense industry for 20 years, including about a decade at Northrop Grumman. Dubois was one of the first employees of eVTOL air taxi developer Joby Aviation and later served as vice president of engineering for Xwing, which Joby acquired last year.
Dubois helped lead Xwing’s conversion of a Cessna 208 Caravan for autonomous operations and assisted with certification and contract opportunities. But he became disillusioned by the “sheer technical complexity and cost associated with these retrofit programs.”
“It’s a very suboptimal way to do it, as my experience has shown in the last several years,” Dubois said.
Dubois’ expectation is that a human pilot will never fly the Lifter-Lite. Building the aircraft from scratch is a “massive unlock” for safety, he said, because Grid doesn’t need to alter or strip down any existing systems.
“We don’t have to interface with 30-year-old systems,” Dubois said. “You don’t have to connect to all the cables and pulleys in a 30-year-old aircraft. You don’t have to connect with an old analog computer. You don’t have to figure out how to read instruments that may be from different brands.”
According to the Grid CEO, there is “nothing super innovative” about the Lifter-Lite’s hardware. The airframe is composed of thin sheet metal and simple rivets. Commercial off-the-shelf components are used to lower the cost of electronics. Due to the limitations of electric aircraft batteries, propulsion comprises a diesel powertrain and “single digit” moving parts.
Keeping the hardware uncomplicated and dedicating the bulk of resources to autonomy has allowed Grid to go from concept to full-scale aircraft in just a few months.
“Keep things super simple, make it cheap, make it attritable, and you can build these things really, really fast,” Dubois said.
The straightforward design comes with some tradeoffs. It lacks VTOL capability, for example, but can handle short takeoff and landing (STOL) on unprepared runways with about 1,000 feet. The aircraft will also be relatively low-speed—its greatest defense, Dubois said, is strength rather than nimbleness.
However, Grid can tailor the simplified design to the customer’s needs. If the military believes the aircraft will be shot down after 200 hours, for example, the company can build a version with lower durability—and cost. The Lifter-Lite’s autonomy also decreases downtime on the airstrip.
“It lands, you load it, fuel it, and off it goes,” Florian said.
Dubois said the Lifter-Lite was not designed with applications such as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), aerial refueling, and casualty evacuation in mind. But those missions are certainly feasible.
“It is really designed to carry anything, but we need to keep the price point low, otherwise it loses its attritable state,” he said. “And if we start really designing it to the same standards as an airliner, then we’re going to lose some of that low cost.”
Dual Use
Cost is also a complicating factor for short-haul commercial cargo, the other industry Grid is targeting for the Lifter-Lite. It will operate out of “middle of nowhere, untowered airports that don’t have a lot of traffic” and will not land at international airports “any time soon,” Dubois said.
“If you talk about smaller aircraft, you talk about smaller distances, and pilot cost becomes quite dominant,” he said. “In the smaller airlines, the turnover for pilots is super, super high, and then the margin is super slim. So the minute you have a pilot to pay, the minute you have a problem with maintenance, you start to go down to almost zero profit margin.”
Grid is targeting full-scale aircraft testing in the fall and first flight a few months later. But its initial commercial operations may be abroad due to the regulatory uncertainty around autonomy in the U.S. Dubois said the company has a few international partners. Still, it will pursue Part 23 certification from the FAA and could change its plans if the industry receives clarity.
“Part 23 is actually fairly well-suited, weirdly, for the certification of an aircraft like this,” Dubois said. “So one path is to use Part 23 for the aircraft certification and then operate internationally under different operational rules.”
The FAA has made some regulatory progress on autonomous flight for small drones with its proposed Part 108 rule. A pair of White House executive orders and the Defense Department’s request for billions of dollars in uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) are further tailwinds. But Dubois would like to see operational regulations for larger autonomous aircraft, such as performance standards for detect and avoid systems.
“China is going to have years and years and years of commercial experimentation to develop their aircraft,” he said. “And we need to be able to match that if we want to stay on pace with technology…But that can’t happen without sacrificing safety levels in the national airspace system. So we need the FAA to lead the way when it comes to setting up rules and standards for autonomous aircraft certification and operations.”
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