‘This needs to be built’: JetZero founder on taking on the middle of the market with a revolutionary design
July 1, 2025
At the Paris Air Show, with the sound of fighter jets roaring overhead, Tom O’Leary, founder and CEO of JetZero, barely had time to grab a sip of water before he was pulled away to another meeting.
The energetic entrepreneur, formerly of Beta Technologies and Tesla, was well in demand, as excited stakeholders flocked to see what JetZero’s Z4 was all about. The appetite for something other than tube-and-wing aircraft was clear to see.
While aerospace companies from NASA to Airbus have touted the blended wing body design over the years, few companies have really progressed, and JetZero is by far the furthest ahead. Being an early mover comes with its advantages, but it takes a special kind of CEO to rally entire companies around innovative ideas.
“I was willing to go all in on something I believed in,” O’Leary explained. “That’s what the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship is. I saw something that I thought the market needed, and if you want to build an all wing, you have to go all in.”
JetZero’s Z4 ‘needs to happen’
Taking on a completely different sort of aircraft is a high risk venture, but the CEO is unshakable in his commitment to the project.
“The only person I had to convince was myself,” O’Leary smiled, “but then I had to convince a lot of other people along the way. Eventually, people say to me ‘you said this needed to be built, and I think you’re right. I think it does need to happen’.”
JetZero’s vision of a different way to fly is appealing. The combination of private, spacious cabins for passengers, more efficient operations for airlines and the plugging of a genuine gap in the market sounds almost too good to be true.
But with a Critical Design Review under its belt, a production site identified, and a full scale prototype already being built, JetZero’s Z4 is no longer a paper plane.
Filling in for the never-built Boeing ‘797’ NMA
JetZero’s Z4 intends to fill a specific gap in the market where narrowbodies end and before widebodies begin. This ‘middle of the market’ (MoM) niche doesn’t have an aircraft to fill it, and with airlines keen to right-size their routes for efficiency, JetZero sees strong demand for its proposition.
The MoM has had an aircraft-shaped gap in it for years. The Boeing 767 and 757 combination effectively filled this role before MoM was even coined as a term, but no new aircraft with the right mid-range, mid-capacity credentials has emerged since.
Boeing explored a New Midsize Aircraft (NMA), coined the 797, a decade ago. As the 757s and 767s began to retire, Boeing sought a solution to their replacement and, in 2017, it formally defined the project as a family of small, twin aisle jets positioned between the MAX and 787.
Despite strong support from the airline industry, Boeing stumbled in 2019 when the MAX was grounded, and in 2020, CEO Dave Calhoun declared the NMA to be ‘off the table.’
But the airline appetite hasn’t been sated. Airlines need aircraft that can serve long, thin routes, transatlantic connections with moderate demand, or even domestic routes where a widebody would be overkill.
“People want this plane in the market,” Tom says. “We’ve had more than one airline tell us if it were available today, we would put it into our network right away.”
The beauty of the Z4 is that, despite its very unusual appearance, it fits all the existing infrastructure – and crucially the certification process – of a conventional tube-and-wing aircraft.
“It’s just a plane,” O’Leary asserts. “It performs very differently from an efficiency perspective, but ultimately it’s just a plane.”
Setting up shop for blended wing body aircraft in North Carolina
The development of the Z4 is progressing at pace. Selected is a production site, for which O’Leary and his team picked the rising star of future aviation, Greensboro in North Carolina.
Where, over a century ago, the Wright Brothers first took off, now emerges a fast-growing complex of aerospace innovation.The Piedmont Triad Aerospace Center (PTAC) houses 1,000 acres of present-day aerospace excellence, from Textron Aviation to HAECO Americas. Now, North Carolina is going after the future of aviation too.
“They want to go from ‘first flight’ to ‘future flight’,” O’Leary says. “They’ve invested a lot of time and resources to be at the forefront of growth in aviation.”
Boom Supersonic began building its Superfactory in Greensboro in 2022. JetZero’s factory will sit right next door to the home of the first supersonic airliner since Concorde. In the search for sites, O’Leary sought Boom’s opinion on the location.
“When I talked to Blake, the CEO of Boom, I let him know that Greensboro was one of the places that we were looking at,” Tom recalls. “And he said, ‘Well, I can’t speak more highly of them; the only problem they have is that they move too fast’; that’s not a problem for me.”
JetZero: On time and under budget
JetZero completed its Critical Design Review on 29 May, an important milestone in the development of the Z4. It means the full-scale demonstrator is fully defined and ready to transition into manufacturing.
But the team didn’t wait for that piece of paper to press ahead. Even before the CDR was finalised, manufacturing of the demonstrator was already underway at the Scaled Composites facility in Mojave, California. O’Leary noted that “a lot of work has already been completed” to progress this full scale prototype.
“On time and under budget is where we are,” Tom says. “Our CDR was delivered exactly when we aimed to deliver it.”
When the prototype does fly, estimated to happen in late 2027, JetZero will be on the final approach to certifying this futuristic aircraft.
Underpinning the pathway towards certification is JetZero’s strategic use of off-the-shelf components and parts for around 80% of the aircraft’s systems and equipment. This smooths the certification process, and is similar to the tactic being employed by the developers of the huge Windrunner outside cargo aircraft.
For the prototype, the engines will be Pratt & Whitney PW2000s which O’Leary says have the required thrust for this size of aircraft. The selection of the final engines hasn’t been revealed, but JetZero is working with the USAF to evaluate the options.
If everything progresses to plan, which Tom O’Leary is laser focussed on ensuring, certification could happen as early as 2029, with the Z4 entering service in the early 2030s.
