An electric aircraft that has to lift 550 lb of cargo on battery power alone has no tolerance for dead weight — which is exactly why AIR’s newest supplier deal goes after the cooling system. The eVTOL maker announced a strategic partnership with Elmo Motion Control on August 25, 2026: Elmo’s Gold HV servo drives will run the propulsion motors of AIR’s Heavy Lift UAS, and they will do it with air cooling alone, eliminating the liquid-cooling hardware such systems usually drag along.
The aircraft itself is a fixed-wing co-axial quadcopter with vertical takeoff and landing, built for cargo missions from constrained or improvised sites — no runway required. The headline numbers, per AIR’s own spec sheet:
- 550 lb useful load in a 70 cubic foot cargo bay
- up to 1 hour of endurance at an 85-knot cruise, with a 115-knot fast cruise
- 8 independent electric motors fed by 4 independent Li-Ion battery packs for redundancy
- Group 4 UAS classification under the U.S. Department of Defense system
Elmo’s contribution is one high-power-density drive per motor: the Gold and Platinum HV drives work in a master-slave configuration that can supply 210 amps at 805 volts to each of the eight motors. Because the drives are efficient enough to shed their heat into the airstream, AIR gets to delete the pumps, plumbing and coolant of a liquid loop — less weight, less complexity, and more of the aircraft’s lift budget left over for actual payload.
“For an electric aircraft, every gram matters, and the propulsion system needs to deliver high power while remaining compact, efficient, reliable, and thermally manageable,” said AIR CEO Rani Plaut, who added that the integration is already under way as part of the AIR 120D development program. Rami Chanan, VP of sales and marketing at Elmo, called the collaboration an example of “what’s possible when innovation meets engineering excellence.”
This is not a paper airplane, either. AIR says more than 25 units of the cargo aircraft have already been ordered and paid for, and the Elmo deal follows another recent supplier agreement that made Dynon Avionics the platform’s avionics provider. The company is pitching the Heavy Lift UAS at logistics, resupply and rapid-deployment missions — the kind of dull, dangerous delivery work where an uncrewed hauler that trades coolant for cargo makes obvious sense.
The partnership was announced in late August 2026; AIR lists the cargo aircraft as in production.
