Kea Aerospace opened its new facility in Christchurch last week. The 3,000sqm space is designed to house a new unmanned aircraft called the Atmos Mk 2, which has a 35m wingspan. That is bigger than an Airbus A320. It will also be mission control for any launches.

Kea Aerospace's first plane, the Mk I, had a 12.5m wingspan and weighed just 40kg. That project kicked off in 2021 and CEO Mark Rocket says it was designed to fly from dawn till dusk in the stratosphere.

The Mk II is all about flying continuously, for weeks or months at a time, he says, and that's down to a combination of solar, very light materials, energy efficiency and new battery technology.

CTO Philipp Sueltrop says it uses about as much energy as a hairdryer when it's flying and, unlike some other space-focused companies, even the launches are electric, with an Audi e-Tron helping the planes to take off.

Kea Aerospace is in the aerial photography and surveillance game and New Zealand has a lot of space to monitor. Sueltrop says Australia and New Zealand are responsible for 21% of the world's water surface. There's illegal fishing, smuggling and real defence issues to deal with.

Satellites can't do it all to the fullest, and neither can manned planes, he says. That's the gap it's aiming to fill and, as solar efficiency and battery technology improves, there's an opportunity to fly further.  

While aviation is one of the sectors where electric options don't yet exist or are uneconomic (unlike 84% of New Zealand's ten million fossil machines), Rocket says there is a lot of potential with short-haul electric flights and US company BETA recently tested one of its electric planes for Air New Zealand.

"There are use cases where this works, and there will be more use cases where you can integrate fully electric, maybe solar-powered aviation," says Sueltrop.

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