Date: Thursday, December 7, 2023
Time: 5 p.m. ET 
Hybrid event: Room 33-206 & on Zoom

The Aerospace Innovation Seminar Series will feature speakers from some of the biggest names in entrepreneurial aerospace — many of whom started as students in AeroAstro!

The Talk

The April 23, 1988 flight of the MIT human-powered aircraft Daedalus set performance records that still stand today.  But before Daedalus there was Monarch, winner of the Kremer World Speed Prize in 1984.  Monarch was in fact a hybrid-electric plane, coupling human energy with batteries to achieve a top speed of 23 miles per hour (Mach .03).  Almost 40 years later, key members of the Monarch team are developing the Electra eSTOL, a hybrid-electric, blown lift aircraft design.  Electra recently made the first flight series on its manned technology demonstrator (the EL-2 Goldfinch) and is working on a 9 passenger design to operate out of spaces the size of a football field. 

The 40-year journey between Monarch and Goldfinch is a story of aerospace entrepreneurship.  It starts at a time when aerospace startups were almost unheard of and the Institute’s focus was almost exclusively on academic excellence.  The Daedalus Project (1985-88), Aurora Flight Sciences (1989-2019), Athena Technologies (1998-2008), and Electra.aero (2020-present) feature prominently in the story.  In this talk John Langford will review some of his experiences and how they tie directly to Course XVI and Course XVII, what some of his lessons learned have been, and provide some thoughts for future aerospace innovators.

The Speaker

John Langford  (MIT ’79, ’83, ’84, ’87) is an aerospace entrepreneur who has spent his career developing a wide range of aircraft, many of them robotic and many of them electrically-powered.  After leading the MIT Daedalus Project in the 1980s, he founded Aurora Flight Sciences and led the company for 30 years before selling it to Boeing.  In 2020 he launched a new company, Electra.aero, specifically to pursue green aviation technologies and products.

This seminar series is part of the Certificate in Aerospace Innovation offered by the MIT Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics in collaboration with the Martin Trust MIT Center for Entrepreneurship. Learn more about the certificate program on our Certificate in Aerospace Innovation website!

Contact Email: aa-innovation@mit.edu