By Chris Sloan

Sept. 17, 2025, © Leeham News: At the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Global Aerospace Summit, Tom O’Leary, CEO and Co-Founder of JetZero, made clear that his company is bringing something different to commercial aviation: a Silicon Valley ethos. JetZero, founded in Long Beach (CA) in 2021, is applying the speed and risk tolerance of the tech world to one of the most conservative corners of industry — airliner design.

O’Leary, who cut his teeth as Director of Sales and Marketing at Tesla and later served as COO at eVTOL startup BETA Technologies, is no stranger to disruption. “I was used to people saying that’ll never happen,” he said. “But it’s just about the belief in a disruptive technology and what a small group of committed individuals can do to move that technology forward.”

A Bold Design with a Big Payoff

JetZero’s Z4 aircraft is a blended-wing-body (BWB) design, in which the wings merge seamlessly with the fuselage. The company claims up to 50% lower fuel burn per passenger mile, thanks to lower drag, with capacity for more than 250 passengers and 5,000 miles of range. With engines mounted on top of the airframe, noise is reduced significantly — a key benefit for airport neighbors — and the Z4 is designed to fit existing airport infrastructure for faster turnarounds.

“The more you dig into the design, you find that’s the most compelling part of the plane,” O’Leary said. “There’s a 30% dynamic efficiency, the ability to hit the mid-market where there is no plane.”

Customer-First Design and the Midmarket Gap

O’Leary says the customer was “really the key to the founding.” He explained, “We’ve heard a lot about supersonics and eVTOLs, and I love those projects. I just was left with the sense that there was no innovation from an airframe perspective that was speaking to the core need of the customer in the market, which is to lower fuel burn and emissions.” The competition between speed and efficiency recalls Boeing’s early-2000s debate between the high-speed Sonic Cruiser and the efficiency-focused 7E7, which ultimately became the 787. Efficiency, not speed, carried the day then, and O’Leary is betting it will again.

For O’Leary, changing the shape of the aircraft opened up an opportunity to rethink everything about engineering and manufacturing. “Once we change the shape, we have the ability to reevaluate everything about how we engineer the airframe,” he said. “We get to use largely existing equipment from the supply chain, which is a benefit. We get to hit the middle market, which is another benefit, so it was really by taking this customer set first approach.”

That midmarket opportunity — the space between today’s narrowbodies and widebodies — has been a long-recognized gap. Boeing’s long-discussed “New Midmarket Airplane” never materialized, leaving room for a new entrant.

Why Now?

When asked why BWB hasn’t been tried before, O’Leary was candid: “That’s the most common question that we get. Airbus has 8,700 aircraft in the order bank — 10 years of production. That’s a disincentive to change configuration and heap risk upon what looks like a juggernaut.”

Even so, Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury, speaking earlier at the summit, acknowledged that BWBs are promising for widebodies. “We came to the conclusion that the blended wing is for bigger, wide-body planes,” he said. “But for the narrow-bodies, the thickness of the blended wing is too high, so you lose on drag. So we’ve come to the conclusion that the better architecture for narrow bodies is longer wings, which are better for efficiency.”

This validation reinforces JetZero’s midmarket focus — though it also raises the possibility that Airbus or Boeing, with their deep financial resources and global support networks, might eventually step in and acquire JetZero rather than let it grow into a third OEM competitor.

Airlines Join the Effort

JetZero has invited airlines into its hangar to help shape the aircraft. “This week will be our fourth airline working group,” O’Leary said. “We have more than 20 airlines that we’ve done a deep dive with, and we’ll have 15 airlines in our hangar for two days for the fourth time. We’re there to listen.”

In March 2025, Delta Air Lines announced a partnership, donating equipment for the full-scale demonstrator and investing in cabin development. United Airlines followed in April with both an investment and an option to purchase up to 200 aircraft, contingent on milestones such as first flight in 2027. “This is real! I don’t know how long it will take, but it’s transformative,” affirmed United CEO Scott Kirby onstage at the Summit.

Alaska Airlines was the first carrier investor, participating in JetZero’s Series A in 2024 through its Alaska Star Ventures fund, securing future purchase options as part of its broader push toward net-zero carbon emissions.

Passenger Experience

JetZero is also investing heavily in the passenger experience, building a full-scale cabin mockup to solicit airline feedback early in the design process. O’Leary said that the company’s upcoming working group session will host 15 airlines in the hangar for two days, focusing entirely on cabin experience. “This isn’t a two-day pitch from JetZero,” he explained. “We’re there to listen and we’re there to understand as much about what the right questions are to be asking in the design process as we are to solve the problem.” For O’Leary, the cabin is a central part of the value proposition. “Ultimately, as an airline, you’re delivering for a ticket price, a destination between two points. You’re delivering an experience, and that cabin is such a huge part of that. So we could hardly be more excited to put them in a full-scale mock of the aircraft to get their feedback. And what better way to understand your customer’s needs?”

Scaled Composites, Air Force Support, and De-Risking

The Z4 demonstrator is being built with Scaled Composites (Northrop Grumman), and in August 2023, JetZero was awarded a $235m, four-year contract from the US Air Force to build and fly it. “There’s a need for a tanker, a transport. A transport can be a cargo. It unlocks three markets: passenger, military, and freight,” O’Leary said.

JetZero is de-risking the program by using Pratt & Whitney PW2040 engines — the same engines deployed on the 757 and C-17 — for its demonstrator, before switching to next-generation propulsion on the production model. “What makes us confident is that we have the technology right now,” O’Leary said, pointing out that NASA has already invested more than a billion dollars in enabling technologies such as flight control structures and the BWB’s fundamental shape.

He emphasized that the company is “on time and under budget,” noting that completing a critical design review with both the Air Force and NASA ahead of schedule is no small feat. “How many program managers are walking around the Pentagon, waving their head yes to, Are you on time and under budget? It’s not common,” he said.

Building in Greensboro

In June 2025, JetZero announced Greensboro (NC) as the site of its first advanced manufacturing and final assembly facility. Located at Piedmont Triad International Airport, the state-of-the-art factory is projected to create over 14,500 jobs and eventually produce 20 Z4 aircraft per month by the late 2030s.

North Carolina’s incentive package is worth nearly $2.35bn, including $1.57bn in job development grants and $450m in infrastructure support. O’Leary called it “the biggest, most massive win,” emphasizing that the project is about more than tax abatements. “It’s the job growth. It’s the commitment of the community and to the upfront. All the universities, the airport, the infrastructure, and they really want this project. Look to a history of North Carolina being first in flight, and they want to make that now the present and the future of North Carolina.”

Toward Zero

Looking ahead, O’Leary said, “SAF is great, but we’ve come to realize it’s further down the road. What’s today is use efficiency to lower the energy input, and therefore the cost input. It’s going to make future propulsion more attainable. It’s the best first step towards zero emissions, which is part of our name.”

For O’Leary, execution is about mindset as much as technology. “Any team that is successful, they don’t start a game thinking about, is it possible for me to win the championship? They just say, that’s what we’re here to do. And we do that by winning one game at a time,” he said.

JetZero’s name, he explained, reflects not just its sustainability mission but its ambition to create something entirely new. “We’re not just building a plane, we’re building a company. So zero also refers to the fact that this is a zero-to-one enterprise,” he said. “Really, all that was lacking was people with the conviction that this future is not impossible. It’s inevitable.”