Paragon Aerospace expects to unveil the second iteration of a design for its hydrogen-powered VTOL aircraft and roll out a “half-dozen to a dozen” quarter-scaled models of the nine-seat machine by the first quarter of 2022. Company founder Dwight Smith told FutureFlight that he is also refining plans to build a factory on 730 acres in the Texas border town of Brownsville, where he envisions the establishment of a VTOL hub to serve a network of vertiports in cities as far afield as Los Angeles.
The new plan marks a change of course for the start-up, which began working on an earlier design called the T21 Raptor in 2018, with ambitions to get the vehicle certified by the end of 2021. In 2020, when the company based its operations in California, it had been preparing for a first flight by the end of that year, but the Paragon team subsequently resolved to take a different approach.
