How Fashion Houses and Jewelers Are Giving Swiss Watchmakers a Run for Their Money
By snapping up some of Switzerland’s best manufacturers and watchmakers, brands including Chanel and Louis Vuitton are stunning even the most seasoned collectors.
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Perched on a couch last April in a private room inside Chanel’s sprawling space at Watches & Wonders, Frédéric Grangié and Arnaud Chastaingt appear positively serene. Outside, the world’s largest watch fair buzzes with energy as press, retailers, and VIP clients gather for a first-hand glimpse of the latest from a wide swath of brands, including the industry’s biggest hitters. Unlike at Paris Fashion Week, where Chanel is perpetually one of the hottest invites in town, here in Switzerland the maison’s iconic logo might actually be a disadvantage. The fashion house must vie for attention with horological heavyweights such as Patek Philippe and Rolex, which dominate the landscape and have catalogs of coveted models dating back hundreds of years. But Grangié, Chanel’s president of watches and fine jewelry, and Chastaingt, director of its Watchmaking Creation Studio, are unfazed. They insist that Chanel’s fresh perspective, combined with an incomparable fashion history and laser focus on savoir faire, actually gives the house an advantage in the world of haute horology.
“When we look at competition—and we are very respectful of them—some of the houses have been there for two centuries, some claim even more, but we are still in that phase where everything that we are creating is actually part of a living patrimony,” Grangié says. “We see the difference in what we are presenting because, of course. The biggest mistake that we could have made is to be a fashion company making watches, as opposed to a watchmaker whose manufacture and craftsmanship is at the service of creation.”
Chanel didn’t enter the watch domain until 1987, but in the short time since, it has become a trailblazer in terms of both innovation and creativity. Its J12 X-Ray, which debuted in 2020, was the first timepiece to feature a case and bracelet made from clear sapphire crystal; typically used to cover watch dials, the material is so hard it can only be machined with diamond-tipped tools. It’s also extremely expensive and difficult for companies to produce. Cutting-edge watch brands such as Hublot, Richard Mille, and Bell & Ross (in which Chanel has a minority stake) had produced the material for some of their special high-end cases, but the J12 marked the first time a sapphire-crystal bracelet had appeared on the market. “We had a competitor, a very important one, come to us here, and when they saw it they said, ‘We tried to do it and it was a nightmare,’” Grangié recalls, chuckling and adding, “I can confirm it is a nightmare.”
Nevertheless, Chanel followed up this year with a version in pink sapphire crystal, even more difficult thanks to the formidable challenge of maintaining colour consistency across the limited edition of 12. It’s just one example of how Chanel—alongside other fashion and jewelry houses from Bulgari and Van Cleef & Arpels to Hermès and Louis Vuitton—is elevating its watchmaking game, giving brands with centuries-old horological history a run for their money in the process.
Watches used to be an afterthought for luxury brands looking to expand their lifestyle portfolios. At jewelry houses, timepieces offered male clients a reason to treat themselves while buying baubles for their significant others, or they were seen as a mass-marketing tool, a means of enticing clients who might not be able to afford a million-dollar high-jewelry necklace or five-figure handbag.
But as social media began luring an entire new generation of watch enthusiasts—a trend that accelerated hugely during the pandemic—luxury houses began taking the category more seriously, seeing the long-term potential of upping the ante on both design and technical movements and increasing their investments accordingly. The result has been some of the most creative and challenging watchmaking happening anywhere in Switzerland—even if collectors have been slow to recognise it.
The race to compete for headline-grabbing horological feats has become fierce, and some of the creations defy belief. Take the ongoing tug-of-war between two houses with jewelry roots, Bulgari and Piaget, over laying claim to the most complicated timepieces in the thinnest possible cases.
Piaget took ultrathin engineering to a new level in 2018 when it created the Altiplano Ultimate Concept, the thinnest mechanical watch in the world at the time, measuring an incredible 2 mm thick; the previous record holder, the Master Ultra Thin Squelette from longtime traditional watchmaker Jaeger-LeCoultre, suddenly seemed hefty at 3.6 mm. Just four years later, Bulgari one-upped Piaget with its Octo Finissimo Ultra, which slimmed down to a mere 1.8 mm thick—a literal hair thicker than a quarter, despite packing 170 components and 50 hours of power reserve. It marked Bulgari’s eighth world record for thinness in the Octo Finissimo line. Some consider it a gimmick, but the race to reduce gave the company bragging rights over elite watchmakers in an industry where it’s hard to stand out.
“I remember very well when I said, ‘Why does a client today have to buy a Bulgari watch?’ ” says the company’s product creation executive director, Fabrizio Buonamassa Stigliani, recalling the early days when the Octo Finissimo was just an idea. “We are not linked with any path. We don’t follow the sport model. We are not in golf or in polo. We are not in aviation,” he notes. The label did have the Bulgari Bulgari timepiece, a successful branded fashion watch from the ’70s that was revived this year, but he says he began challenging the executive team to green-light more complicated pieces. No one had expected them to be able to create a movement at that level, and yet “we have this manufacture inside, and we are able to create the most ultrathin watches,” so why not use it to their advantage? “We started to use the story of [setting] the record to switch the lights on [in] the watches business,” Buonamassa Stigliani says.
The drive to bring something exciting and original to market is fueling a rush of new ideas, many from overlooked sources. Van Cleef & Arpels, for instance, infuses its 118 years of jewelry expertise into wildly complicated automaton wristwatches and clocks behind intricate facades. Unlike many traditional watchmaking houses, Van Cleef often leads with design and storytelling, with technical development serving as the means to turn its fanciful imaginings into reality.
The company has been creating complex automaton timepieces since 2006; its most recent example, Brise d’Été, boasts a field of grass and violets that appear to waft gently in the wind. A pair of butterflies crossing above indicate time on a retrograde time scale. “What’s interesting there for us—besides the idea of the poetry of time, which is why we call these watches Poetic Complications—is that when we started to work on these projects, we found out that they were technically very, very complex,” says Nicolas Bos, the former global president and CEO of Van Cleef & Arpels who is now the CEO of its parent company, Richemont. Van Cleef spent seven years developing table clocks that presented the same concepts on a much grander scale. The first example, Automate Fée Ondine, came to life in a whimsical scene set with a jewelled fairy resting atop a lily pad. “It required the expertise and inventiveness of around 20 workshops in France and Switzerland to devise this extraordinary objet,” says Bos.
Courtesy of Chanel
Masterminding creations at this level also requires in-house wizards, and many brands have strengthened their teams in order to construct even more advanced timepieces. When Van Cleef & Arpels director of research and development Rainer Bernard joined the company from Piaget in 2011, he was one of just four people hired to accelerate the watchmaking vision. Now, team headcount is at 20. Bernard says the fantastical ideas dreamed up by the house foster new mechanical achievements. “It actually gets us to places, technical places, where nobody has been,” he says. “This is why, for a while, we created between three to five patents every year.” These achievements are not for bragging rights on technicality but rather milestones leading to the creation of museum-worthy pieces. Take for instance the brand’s magnum-opus table clock, the Planétarium—a wonderland of rotating jeweled planets in a piece measuring nearly 20 inches high by 26 inches in diameter—where each sphere moves at its genuine speed of rotation set to a melody created with Michel Tirabosco, a Swiss musician and concert artist. It reportedly had a price tag of almost $10 million. “Since I’ve been here, with all the elements we put into place, we have more tools and more possibilities to really create and be crazy about our stories,” Bernard says. “So, we can do things we only dreamed of a couple of years ago.”
Courtesy of Louis Vuitton
The competition to wow collectors has become so stiff that, for some, hiring internally no longer suffices. Instead, luxury labels are snapping up revered Swiss manufactures whole or investing in smaller independent brands with elite expertise. Bulgari was an early pioneer of the practice, purchasing Gérald Genta and Daniel Roth in 2000. Buonamassa Stigliani joined the company just a few months later and says the acquisitions were key to Bulgari’s watchmaking growth. “It’s true that we found an amazing savoir faire, but it’s also true that we spent a huge, huge effort to achieve these results, because the idea was to have new movements,” he says. “The idea was to buy high-horology manufactures to find our path and to be the owner of our destiny.”
Having to source movements from outside manufactures poses several problems, including a lack of exclusivity and the potential for supply delays. But most importantly, bragging rights are typically reserved for companies that create their own. In-house production is a play for a rarefied, well-versed clientele. “You have to use a different language,” Buonamassa Stigliani says of appealing to serious connoisseurs. “You have to talk about the movement. You have to talk about technical constraints. The collector doesn’t talk with you if you’re talking just about shapes.”
Chanel has followed a similar path, making acquisitions that are both prestigious and technically adept. In 1993 it purchased G&F Châtelain, known for producing high-quality cases and movements, and in 2019 it acquired a minority interest in Swiss movement manufacturer Kenissi, an important supplier of sapphire-crystal glass to the industry. (Rolex is the main shareholder through its subsidiary, Tudor.) Chanel also owns stakes in Bell & Ross, Romain Gauthier—which helped Chanel develop its first complication, a jumping hour, in the Monsieur watch from 2016—and F. P. Journe. In August of this year, the Parisian house announced a surprise investment in avant-garde darling MB&F.
“Obviously, we are making our own watches, but we are also a supplier to many, many other houses, and that’s always been very Chanel,” says Grangié. “It’s the same thing with couture. The house owns many, many métiers—more than 35 at this point. We work for all the great names.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a luxury showdown without LVMH at the table. In 2011, the conglomerate purchased La Fabrique du Temps, a manufacture founded by watchmakers Enrico Barbasini and Michel Navas, who cut their teeth making ultra-high-end movements for Patek Philippe, among others. Based in Meyrin, Switzerland, the atelier is staffed with designers, engineers, and craftsmen who create timepieces for Louis Vuitton, Gérald Genta, and Daniel Roth. It has enabled Louis Vuitton to make some of its wildest and most inventive watches, such as the recent Tambour Opera Automata—a $871,813 automaton watch, nominated for a Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève prize—that pays tribute to the Sichuan Opera’s Bian Lian tradition with a retrograde-minutes and jumping-hours function. Such over-the-top pieces aren’t for wallflowers, or even the typical watch enthusiast, but there’s no denying the sophistication of their calibers.
Courtesy of Hermès
Meanwhile, Jean Arnault, the 26-year-old son of LVMH honcho Bernard, has been hard at work overseeing the creation of beautifully crafted, if slightly more practical timepieces for Louis Vuitton, where he is the director of watches. Drew Coblitz, a Philadelphia-based alternative-asset-fund manager and seasoned watch collector, says he was interested in the Tambour Automatic when it came out, but talking to Arnault was what convinced him to purchase the timepiece. “You just get the impression that he’s supersmart and detail-oriented and thoughtful product-design-wise—the whole nine yards,” Coblitz says. “And the thing that he’s trying to do, branding-wise, is just really hard. It’s got to be one of the hardest things to do in watchmaking.”
He’s referring to the attempt to shift perception of Louis Vuitton from a fashion house to a maker of bona fide collector watches—and, with prices running from roughly $34,571 to $133,056, clients should expect the kind of top-notch watchmaking the house is delivering. While some of the high- horology pieces are for a flashier clientele, the Tambour and Escale lines are attracting collectors who, like Coblitz, care about finesse and nuance but want a more traditional look. “The amount of little-detail nerd stuff in the Tambour is killer,” Coblitz says. “And that’s before you turn it around, because the movement finishing is very nice.”
Creating this level of finishing on a series-production piece versus a limited edition such as the Tambour Opera Automata, though, is a stretch on resources, which means luxury houses are sizing up more manufactures to add to their rosters. Like Louis Vuitton, Hermès is not content to remain on the sidelines. This year, for example, it debuted the Arceau Duc Attelé, a feat of mechanical engineering that combines a triple-axis tourbillon with a minute repeater—the crème de la crème of complications—with hammers charmingly crafted as horse heads. The latest industry buzz circulating around longtime rivals Vuitton and Hermès, both famed predominantly for their premium leather goods and handbags, is their rumored competition to buy Vaucher, an elite Swiss manufacture known for its high-quality watch movements and components.
This summer, it was announced that niche watchmaker Parmigiani Fleurier and its network of subsidiary suppliers of watch parts, including Vaucher, are collectively up for sale by their parent company, the Sandoz Family Foundation. Hermès, which has owned a 25 percent stake in Vaucher since 2006, may seem like the logical suitor. But the house is now reportedly vying with LVMH for full ownership of the manufacture, which also supplies parts to other high-end watchmakers, including Chopard and Richard Mille; LVMH-owned TAG Heuer also outsources its higher-end movements through Vaucher. Hermès, Vuitton, and Parmigiani declined to comment for this article, but whoever gains control of the prized facility will have leverage over many of its competitors, and could even become their primary supplier.
As luxury brands continue to develop their watchmaking prowess by absorbing and investing in smaller specialised businesses, they pose a potentially significant challenge to the industry. Chanel, for its part, sees the business strategy as an opportunity to push boundaries. “Your competitors, who are also clients, will push you to develop things that you will not do for yourself,” says Grangié. “Then you become better at what you do, and you manage to have a model that will make your business sustainable over the long term, because you have those clients as well. To us, it’s a win-win proposition.” But for more-established watchmaking houses, the creativity inherent to fashion- and jewelry-first houses, backed by Switzerland’s finest horological specialists, could present a major threat.
Some are wise enough to move beyond their comfort zones: Just last month, Patek Philippe launched its first new collection in 25 years, aimed at a younger clientele. But Chanel, for one, is already barreling full steam ahead. “Next year, you will see something extraordinary that took a long time in the making,” hints Grangié. “We are creating an ecosystem to support our business and our future ambitions that relies on either the highest level of expertise or incredible names that we have become associated with first.” With historic houses seeking to attract fresh attention just as the fashion-forward upstarts hit their stride with never-before-seen innovations, we just might be on the brink of a remarkable new era in luxury watchmaking.
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The new 192-key hotel is the brand’s 60th location.
The St. Regis is celebrating a massive milestone halfway around the world from where the hotel brand first began.
The company just recently debuted its 60th property—the St. Regis on the Bund, Shanghai. The 192-key hotel is the St. Regis’s second opening in the city, and it combines the brand’s New York glamour with touches that honor Shanghai’s history.
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Just consider the increasing velocity of technological innovation and change and how it has shaped our lives in the last 20 years, says noted astrophysicist, futurist, and author Neil deGrasse Tyson in kicking off the 2024 NBAABusiness Aviation Convention & Exhibition (NBAA-BACE) in Las Vegas.
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Tyson told the packed hall that history reminds us that innovations come from places you don’t often expect. Take the iPhone, he said. Apple didn’t invent GPS, music, or cellular communications, but the company assembled the technologies to create one of the most transformative devices in the history of inventions, the astrophysicist explained.
Aviation is entering a similar innovative period with advanced air mobility, efficiency, and sustainability, added NBAA president and CEO Ed Bolen, who also addressed the audience during the keynote. Bolen discussed the pace of aviation advancement with FAA’s administrator Michael Whitaker, who was on hand to sign a Special Federal Aviation Regulation (SFAR) establishing the final rule for a regulatory framework for the new category of eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft.
“It is an extraordinary moment in history,” Whitaker said, noting that AAM represents an entirely new aircraft category, typically involving a combination of rotor and fixed-wing aircraft.
The FAA also recognizes that you can’t certify an aircraft and do not have a way to operate it as intended, Whitaker added. This final rule creates the blueprint for integrating this technology and modeling an ecosystem for operations. “I don’t know the last time we went from an idea to a final rule in 16 months,” said Whitaker, who has had a long history working with both the FAA and aviation, including a stint at eVTOL maker Supernal. “That is light speed for rulemaking.”
The final rule, he explained, creates a flexible climate for companies to train pilots, operate these aircraft, and safely integrate new technology.
AAM represents a “seminal moment” in aviation to help achieve net zero by 2050, Bolen says. “Over the last 40 years, the industry has been able to shrink its environmental footprint by 40 percent,” he added. “Every aircraft is 25 to 30 percent more efficient than its replacement aircraft. The industry has invested significantly in developing sustainable aviation fuels and advancements with electric, hydrogen, and hybrid propulsion systems.
One of the regulatory challenges, Whitaker added, is that the FAA doesn’t yet know how the business model will evolve. “Will this require departures every three minutes to the airport or primarily serve rural communities?” he asked, citing two possible futures for electric aircraft. “We need the regulatory flexibility to allow AAM businesses to succeed and do so safely.”
The topic was explored during a seminar on how advanced air mobility infrastructure will develop yesterday. Beta CEO Kyle Clarke, which makes eVTOLs, said his firm had built charging stations in airports across different states, with the goal of creating 150 charging facilities across the country.
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Since its beginnings in rural Quebec making snowmobiles, Bombardier has grown into an $8 billion global leader in business aviation. In 1966, Laurent became company president and took the the brand public in 1969. He diversified beyond snowmobiles by purchasing a train manufacturer in 1970, and purchased Canadair in 1986, which was the leading manufacturer of Challenger wide-body business jets, to become part of the aviation industry.
“Canadair was a big entrée into aviation, but we were fortunate to have the engineering staff in place,” Laurent told Robb Report. “The only thing they lacked was an entrepreneurial spirit and we were able to introduce that into the company.” Through his career, he also focused heavily on product design. “That’s always been important to me,” Laurent says. “Beyond it functioning, why shouldn’t it look attractive? Our aircraft look fast, even when they are sitting on a runway, they look like they want to go.”
In 2020, Bombardier sold off its railway business, becoming solely a business jet manufacturer, with multiple aircraft types across different categories, including its new flagship aircraft, the ultra-long-range Global 8000. “We still see a lot of upside for our company in this industry,” said Pierre. “The service business is one—there are a lot of aging aircraft out there, and we are also moving into military applications with our business jets. We see a very bright future there.”
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Paul Allen and Larry Ellison were the Cain and Abel of the silicon set. They had a storied rivalry that sailed past the boardroom and into yachting. The Microsoft and Oracle Corporation cofounders’ race to build boats—Allen’s Lürssen-built Octopus in 2003 and Ellison’s Bannenberg-designed Rising Sun in 2004—kicked off a crazy billionaire boys club that saw other tech titans, such as Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Sergey Brin (whose Dragonfly was for sale at the Monaco Yacht Show in September) also build custom yachts.
But the latest generation of tech billionaires, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates, have upped the ownership ante by creating new style parameters and technologies that have pushed superyacht design forward. Bezos and Zuckerberg also have two of the coolest shadow vessels on the water.
Of course, superyacht ownership might not be all it’s cracked up to be for some of these owners. Besides being spotted everywhere they go, there could be safety concerns. Last weekend, a Florida man jumped on board the tender for Zuckerberg’s support vessel, Wingman, at a marina in San Diego. It’s not clear what his intent was, but he may have been headed for Wingman, or even Zuckerberg’s main vessel, Launchpad, before he was arrested at gunpoint.
In terms of owning a shadow vessel, video mogul Gabe Newell was one of the first to see the benefits, referring to it as an “external hard drive” of the main yacht to house extra staff, crew and a wonderland of toys.
Newell sold his 220-foot Damen support yacht, Dapple, last year to none other than Zuckerberg in preparation for his next big delivery, Project Y722. Newell’s Oceanco new build will go a long way to furthering his investment into ocean exploration. His 2022 purchase of the deep-sea Hadal Exploration System included a Triton 36000/2—the world’s first and only manned-submersible certified for dives to 36,000 feet.
Project Y722 will be Oceanco’s third-largest yacht to date following Jeff Bezos’s $7.5 million sailing yacht Koru. The 417-foot vessel is both the largest and tallest sailing yacht in the world (Sailing Yacht A is only sail-assisted). Bezos took delivery of his behemoth in April 2023, though it turns out a three-masted schooner is the one thing Amazon can’t deliver without a hitch.
Bezos came under fire for plans to partially demolish the famous De Hef bridge in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, to allow the yacht’s three 230-foot-tall masts to pass underneath. Crisis and controversy were averted when the yacht was instead shipped out of Oceanco’s Alblasserdam facilities in two pieces, before final assembly. Taking delivery of the largest Dutch-built yacht in the world whet Bezos’s appetite, and he twinned the purchase with Abeona, the largest support vessel built by Damen that same year.
Abeona’s $112 million build cost and 246-foot length are nothing compared to Koru, yet it’s still a serious asset. It sleeps 45 guests and 20 crew, including medical personnel. The large aft deck has a helipad and hangar for a D14 value helicopter, as well as marine gear, tenders, and toys.
Zuckerberg’s Wingman is also packed with amenities, though it’s not the only secondhand yacht that came from his 2023 shopping spree. The centi-billionaire scooped up the 387-foot Launchpad (formerly Project 1010), an Espen Øino–designed Feadship originally commissioned by (now sanctioned) Russian oligarch Vladimir Potanin. Zuckerberg is estimated to have paid a whopping $496 million for both yachts combined.
But that’s just over half of the $900 million that Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates is thought to have spent on his custom Feadship Project 821—the world’s first hydrogen-powered superyacht, which began tests recently. It’s no surprise that Gates, whose Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund has put more than $3 billion into companies that help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, should be the one to break ground on hydrogen-fuel-cell technology within yachting.
Project 821 can’t perform entire crossings on hydrogen, but it can cruise at 10 knots or run hotel functions at anchor for a full week on hydrogen. It also has a nifty sensor-packed smart A/C system and advanced heat recovery system, alongside more luxurious features, such as multiple pools, a wellness area, and a hospital.
What is surprising is the fact that Gates listed the yacht for sale prior to its delivery this year. He also sold his smaller 224-foot Incat Crowther-designed Shadowcat called Wayfinder in February, which after three years of private use recently entered the charter market. It’s characterized by a blue certified helipad that doubles as a pickleball court.
With most tech moguls already sorted on the yachting front, only Elon Musk remains in the market to take a custom hydrogen gigayacht off Gates’s hands. Judging by his vocal condemnation of the renewable fuel, referring to hydrogen as “the stupidest way” he could imagine for energy storage, it’s an unlikely match. Instead, the world awaits the arrival of the Tesla boss’s $1 billion self-sustaining electric concept Model Y yacht, which he unveiled in 2021.
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Once the purview of military design, blended-wing-body aircraft may be the industry’s unconventional solution to carbon neutrality.
The first century of aviation design didn’t give trendspotters much to get excited about, with most production aircraft remaining little more than tubes with wings attached. Later, boomerang-shaped outliers known as “flying wings”, such the Northrop YB-49 and Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit, captured the aeronautical industry’s imagination with their futuristically stealthy looks, while military jets with blended-wing-body (BWB) configurations—notably the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird—likewise built cult followings for breaking design barriers as well as sonic ones.
A resurgence of BWB concepts, now addressing prior control and stability issues, promises more efficient operation for defence, cargo and even commercial-passenger applications, with some specifically designed as business jets. The streamlined BWB shape reduces drag, thereby increasing fuel efficiency, and lowers carbon output—the last being the main impetus for aircraft manufacturers trying to meet the industry’s widespread pledge to be carbon neutral by 2050.
EcoJet, Bombardier’s BWB concept, passed its first scaled-demonstrator flight tests in 2017 and is now starting the second generation with a larger prototype. “Our original idea was to create a more sustainable aircraft without compromising what our customers expect in a business jet,” says Stephen McCullough, Bombardier’s senior VP of engineering and product development. That includes hitting benchmarks for speed, altitude and interior volume that offer at least the same experience as its existing fleet. “The blended-wing-body ticks the majority of those boxes,” he says, while potentially reducing emissions by 20 percent. One challenge with the form is maintaining the plane’s airport-friendly footprint, though McCullough focuses on the positive, noting that the aircraft’s taller, wider cabin “opens up a lot of exciting opportunities” for Bombardier’s interior designers.
Airbus has also spent years developing a twin-engine BWB model it calls Maveric, but real progress came when the manufacturer added the aircraft to its hydrogen-powered ZEROe concepts program, as its larger inherent capacity makes it better for carrying hydrogen than a standard design. A spokesperson for Airbus noted, though, that Maveric remains a construct “not for our first generation of hydrogen aircraft, but for the following ones”.
By contrast, JetZero is fast-tracking a demonstrator to be ready for flight tests in 2027 and market entry in 2030. CEO and cofounder Tom O’Leary is no stranger to disruptive ventures, having worked at Tesla and eVTOL maker Beta Technologies, and the entrepreneur in him was inspired by NASA’s billion-dollar investment in BWB research.
“This design jumped out at me as addressing the biggest challenges aviation has: lowering cost and fuel burn, lowering emissions, improving the passenger experience and enhancing operational efficiency,” he says. The aircraft is being funded by a US$235 million (around $357 million) grant from the US Air Force, where it will initially be conscripted before entering the public sector. O’Leary insists that the tight timeline for JetZero’s efforts is realistic. “This airframe technology has been worked on for 30-plus years,” he says, “and we can use commercially available products for the rest of the plane, including engines, avionics and actuation systems.”
The BWB’s increased useable volume makes it especially suited to utility transport, as evidenced by California air freight specialist Natilus. According to its cofounder, Aleksey Matyushev, Natilus has US$8.6 billion (around $13 billion) in orders for its nascent fleet of autonomous cargo planes, the first of which should see initial flight testing in approximately two years.
