When Kevin Noertker bought a home in the Los Altos neighborhood in January, he and his wife took a gamble — not just on the nearby preschool but on the chance that Long Beach could be the city that makes air travel go electric.
With the cut of a ceremonial ribbon Tuesday, Noertker formalized the move of his company Ampaire, a hybrid-electric airplane startup, from Hawthorne to Long Beach Airport.
City officials stood by to welcome the airport’s newest, and arguably its quietest, tenant.
“We welcome Ampaire to our campus,” said Airport Director Cynthia Guidry. “This cutting-edge California start-up represents the very future of aviation, a future we are proud to be part of here at Long Beach Airport.”
From a small hangar and office space, the company will design and test propulsion systems that run off electricity. These systems, Noertker said, can be retrofitted onto most fossil-fuel-driven planes.
They’re also testing their own planes; they began testing their first model in 2019, along regional routes over Hawaii. By last December, a craft completed a 1,400-mile loop to and from the company’s test site in Camarillo over the course of 12 hours.
When asked, Noertker said he is in talks with the Federal Aviation Administration to see if “it makes sense” to launch test flights from Long Beach.
Ampaire’s fleet has since traveled more than 25,000 miles to date, including flights across Hawaii, Ireland, Canada, Alaska, Arizona, and California, the company said.
It joins a cast of high-tech companies-turned-neighbors in Long Beach where rockets are 3D printed, powered by electrons or splashed down in the nearby waters.
It signals another reminder that by land, air and sea, modes of transport in California are continuing to electrify. And Long Beach wants to be in the fold.
Chastened by downturning oil valuations, city leaders like Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson have taken part in rebranding the city as a “Space Beach” — a hub for aerospace research and development. An industry survey conducted earlier this year found that Long Beach competes most with markets in Phoenix, Austin and Denver.
“It’s about grabbing these startups that are really showing promise and putting them in a place for a position of growth,” Richardson said. “That’s what Ampaire is.”
Richardson, who first announced Ampaire’s coming in late June, said discussions began in the spring after JetZero, another Long Beach aerospace company, moved to a larger hangar nearby.
A deal was reached in April. “It moved pretty quickly,” Richardson said.
It’s one of several new aerospace companies set to come to Long Beach in the coming years, Richardson said, as the city hopes to bring more than a thousand “high-paying” jobs within the tech, manufacturing and engineering fields over the next two years.
The trend is propelled in part by history, as the city hosted the building of B-17 bomber planes in World War II and a naval shipyard up until 1997. At their respective heights, either required hundreds of thousands of workers.
“When you think about it, this technology is as transformative as the jet age was 70 years ago,” Noertker said. “So, I imagine there are going to be tens of thousands of jobs created over time.”
Like JetZero, the former Douglas plant and shipyard, Ampaire will be designing aircraft for the government. It currently holds contracts with NASA, the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Air Force, the latter of which wants an electric “VTOL” aircraft, which are planes that lift and land like helicopters.
It also comes at a time when regulators and businesses globally are under increased scrutiny to reduce the emissions from airplanes, automobiles and ships that emit a chunk of the world’s excess carbon. Airline fuel prices are also continuing to rise, surpassing pre-pandemic levels.
This is what makes hybrid and fully electric airplanes a palatable option, as they are expected to use less fuel and require fewer parts, lowering operating and maintenance costs than traditional aircraft.
“Sustainability is the race, now,” Richardson said. “That’s the race forward.”