Not Just A Playground For Dreamers
It is tempting to look at this market and assume it is entirely populated by cash burning startups run by billionaires with a messiah complex. But you would be missing the clever part of the trade. The real muscle belongs to the old guard of aerospace. Boeing, for instance, has been quietly sinking capital into autonomous and electric platforms for years. If the regulatory hurdles do eventually fall, they already have the deep manufacturing scale required to capitalise.
Then you have Textron, a sprawling incumbent that represents a far less volatile entry point. Through their aviation arm, they are building genuine electrification credentials. You also have to consider the nuts and bolts of it all. TransDigm Group makes the highly engineered, downright boring components that these futuristic machines simply cannot fly without. As production volumes might scale, their order books could look rather healthy.