Sun Flyer designer Bye Aerospace Expands Headquarters

Bye Aerospace has relocated its headquarters to a larger facility at the Centennial Airport, located in the Denver, Colorado, suburb Englewood. The new facility will house the engineering and operations departments for the eFlyer family of airplanes (renamed from Sun Flyer), and will make space for recently added employees. The company has more than doubled its staff in the past year.

The eFlyer proof-of-concept is a two-seat all-electric airplane for which flight testing begun nearly one year ago. Bye Aerospace aims to become the first company to certify an all-electric airplane to Part 23 standards. Pipistrel has successfully developed an electric LSA – the $140,000 Alpha Electro.

“The prototype eFlyer 2 that flew for the first time with the new Siemens electric propulsion motor on February 8 will be completing the initial phase of Siemens flight tests soon,” said George Bye, CEO and founder of Bye Aerospace. “Then, the airplane will be upgraded to the final production version of the motor that will also go on the future FAA-certified production-conforming versions of the eFlyer 2.”

In addition to the eFlyer, the company is building what it calls StratoAirNet, a family of advanced, high-altitude, long endurance solar-electric unmanned aerial vehicles. This project is also in the prototype flight-test phase.

Much of the funding that helped enable the Bye Aerospace expansion came from Subaru-SBI Innovation Fund in November.