The National Advanced Air Mobility Center of Excellence will host its fifth annual industry forum on October 15 at Springfield-Beckley Municipal Airport in Ohio, and the keynote goes to Marc Allen, chief executive of Electra. The stated subject of the day is what it takes to move advanced air mobility programs out of flight test and into production and routine operation.

Registration runs $295 for general attendees, $25 for federal government and military employees, and $100 for students. The forum opens a three-day run at the airport, followed by a STEM day for grades 6 through 12 on October 16 and a free public electric aircraft race on October 17.

DroneXL covered the EL9 in August 2025, when Electra laid out the blown-lift design that gets a nine-passenger aircraft off the ground in 150 feet (46 meters). Thirteen months later the aircraft has not flown. That distance between the pitch and the airframe is the forum’s entire subject matter.

Electra’s Keynote Comes From the Company Building Next Door

Electra announced on July 21 that it will spend $850 million on a 96-acre plant at AirPark Ohio, adjacent to Springfield-Beckley Municipal Airport. The site will employ 1,975 people and, at full capacity, build up to 800 EL9 Ultra Short aircraft a year.

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine made the announcement alongside Allen at the Farnborough International Airshow, according to JobsOhio. Electra picked the site after a year-long search that looked at more than 140 locations. Design work started immediately, construction begins in 2027, and the first phase supports 400 aircraft a year before a second phase doubles it.

Allen called the agreement “the moment that our vision moves from demonstration into reality.” Electra’s EL-2 technology demonstrator flies today. The aircraft behind that sentence, the EL9, is in front of the Federal Aviation Administration for Part 23 type certification, with a first flight Electra expects in late 2027 or early 2028.

On August 24 the Ohio Tax Credit Authority approved a 2.227% Job Creation Tax Credit for the project, running 30 years against new Ohio payroll that Electra projects at $181.5 million a year by the end of 2035.

The Real Asset in Springfield Is 225 Square Miles of Airspace

Springfield’s draw is a Certificate of Authorization the FAA granted in 2019, covering 225 square miles (583 square kilometers) of airspace around the airport. NAAMCE says operators can fly beyond visual line of sight there up to 18,000 feet (5,486 meters), with no aircraft size restrictions and no chase planes.

That waiver rests on SkyVision, a ground-based detect-and-avoid radar developed jointly by the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Ohio Department of Transportation for $5 million and operated by the Ohio UAS Center out of a converted bus on the airfield. Chase planes and visual observer chains are the largest schedule and cost line in most flight test programs, and removing them is the whole product NAAMCE sells.

Ohio solved locally, in 2019, what the FAA still has not solved nationally. The Part 108 rule that would make routine BVLOS operations legal for everyone else blew past its February 1 deadline and has not landed.

NAAMCE says it is the only site in the country offering build, test and fly capability through a single coordinated partner network. The center runs 30,000 square feet of laboratory and collaboration space next to 25,000 square feet of hangar.

The Agenda Favors Working Sessions Over Podium Time

NAAMCE says the one-day agenda leans on working sessions rather than speeches. Three workshop topics each run in three separate sessions, and every session closes by reporting its findings back to the full forum. A fireside chat on defense applications sits alongside them.

The workshops are Beyond the Prototype, on the infrastructure behind scaling an aircraft that already works; The Digital Enterprise, on digital engineering and certification practice; and From Novelty to Normal, on community acceptance. The defense session puts Blain Newton of BETA Technologies, Donn Yates of Electra and Sergio Cecutta of SMG Consulting on the same stage.

NAAMCE executive director Ted Angel framed the scaling problem as “certification, supply chain, infrastructure and public acceptance.” Expected participants include Joby Aviation, Eve Air Mobility, the FAA and the Civil Air Patrol.

The $115 Billion Case for AAM Dates to January 2021

The forum’s economic argument rests on a study the Aerospace Industries Association and Deloitte published in January 2021, which put the US advanced air mobility market at $115 billion a year by 2035 and more than 280,000 jobs. Those figures are five and a half years old.

The same report expected eVTOL aircraft deployed in rural and urban environments in the United States and abroad starting in 2025. That has not happened. Joby, whose S4 is furthest along and expected to be the first eVTOL type certificated in this country, began flight testing its first FAA-conforming aircraft on March 11 and still expects FAA pilots to take the controls for credit before the end of this year.

The rest of the federal apparatus is moving at its own pace. The FAA named its eVTOL Integration Pilot Program projects in March, and the agency is still writing vertiport design standards that early operators will build to.

DroneXL’s Take

The FAA is spending $8.3 million on a vertiport research range in Oklahoma that opens in summer 2027. Ohio has been flying beyond visual line of sight over 225 square miles since 2019, for $5 million and a radar in a bus. Springfield is the counterexample to almost everything I write about federal pace: buy the airspace access first, then let the companies show up. Every state with an airport and an ambition should be studying how Ohio did it.

What I want less of on October 15 is the $115 billion. That number was written before any of these aircraft had a certification basis, by a report that also expected eVTOLs carrying people in American cities starting last year. Quoting it in 2026 tells a room full of engineers that the sales deck has not been updated since the engineering started. The honest number is a certification percentage, and the honest sentence is that the first US type certificate has not been issued to anybody.

Springfield earned its optimism. The $850 million and the 1,975 jobs are commitments with signatures on them, and the range has been producing real flight data for seven years while the rest of the country waited on a rule. The forum can hold both the achievement and a harder question about the timeline, and a working-session agenda is the right format for it.

One number is still missing. JobsOhio has not published the terms of its own assistance to Electra, which the July announcement said would become public after a final agreement is executed. The state credit is public: 2.227% of new payroll for 30 years, roughly $4 million a year once payroll reaches $181.5 million. What Ohio is paying on top of that, through JobsOhio, is not. Anyone in that room on October 15 with a microphone should ask.

My read is that the production conversation is about 18 months early for the keynote company and roughly on time for the host. Watch whether FAA pilots are flying Joby’s conforming aircraft for credit before December 31, a date Joby set for itself and has repeated since November. If it holds, the first American type certificate stops being a slide. If it slips again, Springfield will be building a factory for an aircraft whose regulatory path is still theoretical, which is a fine bet for Electra and a longer one for Clark County.

I watched Joby fly JFK to Manhattan in April. The aircraft are real. The paperwork is the industry.

Sources: NAAMCE, National Advanced Air Mobility Industry Forum, JobsOhio, Electra, Aerospace Industries Association, Joby Aviation.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.