JetZero’s plans for an innovative “blended wing” airline makes it the third planemaker to choose Piedmont Triad International Airport as a manufacturing base, after HondaJet and Boom Supersonic.
The company is headquartered at California’s Long Beach Airport, which has a rich history as an aircraft manufacturing hub, with C-17 transports being built there for the U.S. Air Force as late as 2015.
Why pick North Carolina, out of the 17 states the company looked at?
“What it required was a spirit of partnership around the mechanics of how to put a factory project together,” says JetZero CEO and co-founder Tom O’Leary. “An incredible workforce already exists right here.”
With three aircraft manufacturers based at PTI, “I think it’ll also be a magnet,” says O’Leary, a Furman University grad. “Whenever you do something of this nature, you’re going to draw other people to the state who are coming here for the opportunity. And I think that’s a good-news message for North Carolina that we’re happy to be a part of.”
If everything plays out as the company envisions, the project will be the largest economic development deal in North Carolina history in terms of jobs. To receive state and local incentives, JetZero is pledging to invest $4.7 billion by 2036 and create at least 14,564 jobs.
In return, the state has offered a $1.6 billion incentive package, highlighted by a $1.0 billion, 37-year Job Development Investment Grant.
The Golden Leaf Foundation is putting in $60 million, alongside $32 million in N.C. Community Colleges’ workforce training assistance and $10.8 million in recruiting help from the state Department of Commerce.
The remainder of the state’s end of the deal is an as-yet unveiled state appropriation of “as much as $450 million,” Gov. Josh Stein’s aides say. The money will pay for site prep, “road, water and wastewater improvements,” and part of the factory’s construction cost.
Senate leader Phil Berger, whose district includes much of Guilford County, says legislators can expect to see “a bill that we’ll have to move through the General Assembly” for the project.
“We’ve already pre-vetted that bill between House and Senate leadership and with the governor,” Berger says, adding that a possible source of the money is the state’s Economic Development Project Reserve.
As of April 30, that fund held $676.6 million, according to the Office of the State Controller.
The package also includes local incentives. Greensboro is putting in $14.6 million, and the Guilford County Commissioners on Thursday approved a $75.9 million grant for the project.
O’Leary said JetZero’s Long Beach facilities will serve as “a design hub” for the new aircraft, called the Z4. But the Greensboro factory will need plenty of engineers to go with the many technicians that work there.
“What some folks have famously said, it’s just as difficult or more difficult to build the machine that builds the machine than it is to build the machine,” he says. “So that’s the engineering component of that, right? You have to engineer the factory.”
As part of that, JetZero is working with Siemens to simulate the factory’s operations, an effort Siemens has said should help “de-risk the manufacturing process, validate the approach and scale processes long before any ground is broken or jets take to the skies.”
At full production, the factory will be capable of building 20 airplanes a month. O’Leary is anticipating a long ramp-up that will take “a number of years.”
But given certification timelines and an early 2030s target date for delivering planes to airlines, “we have to put shovels in the ground next year” and ramp up construction “in a meaningful way” through 2027 and 2028, he says.
Along with the community colleges, JetZero is counting on help from the UNC System, specifically its engineering schools, NC State, N.C. A&T State and UNC Charlotte.
Greensboro Chamber of Commerce President Brent Christensen says JetZero figures to need “a lot of materials science [specialists] and that sort of thing,” given the plane’s planned use of composites.
Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina head Chris Chung says recruiters made sure JetZero’s leaders understand the state’s investing more in its engineering schools. Chung anticipates further talks between JetZero and the universities about the company’s needs. “That may lead to some organic conversations around tweaking degrees or adding degree specializations.”
Officials are making e sure that “the public dollars that go into [a deal] are retrievable,” with incentive payouts only following a company’s performance and any infrastructure investments reverting to state or local control if a project falls through, Berger says.
“What we do when we make decisions about who to partner with is we have a mixed portfolio,” Stein said. “This is new technology, but we’re confident that it’s going to succeed, and when it does, it’s going to transform aviation. We want North Carolina to not only be where aviation started, but where it goes into the future.”
