Lockheed Martin’s Venture Capital Arm Is Dabbling in Island-Hopping Seagliders

Lockheed Martin Ventures (LMV) recently put money into a Rhode Island-based startup which aims to sell a sea-skimming wing-in-ground-effect craft called “seaglider” to passenger transport and cargo companies by 2025. The logic goes that LMV has invested to “expedite the development of seagliders for defense missions” but the reality is less clear.

LMV vice president, Chris Moran, says the venture capital arm of the defense behemoth has general interest in wing-in-ground-effect (WIG) concepts based on current discussions with U.S. military officials about future conflicts and based on the historical past.

“As we look at the [Indo-Pacific] and remember WWII history, it was an island-hopping fight. One of the bigger issues was how you keep the warfighter supplied with materiel and the things they need to survive in that space. This type of [WIG] craft, along with helicopters, provides a sort of infrastructure-free way of moving materiel around, shoreline to shoreline.”

The seaglider is a proposed coastal transportation vehicle currently under development by REGENT Craft Inc. (REGENT is an acronym for Regional Electric Ground Effect Nautical Transport), a small firm that has attracted significant investment attention. LMV joins other VCs including Thiel, Mark Cuban Companies, Hawaiian Airlines and most recently, Yamato Holdings, Japan’s largest parcel delivery and logistics company.

The all-electric seaglider prototype is propelled by 12 approximately 100 horsepower motors and propellers on the leading edge of its wing. REGENT claims a full-size seaglider it calls “Viceroy” will have a 160 nautical-mile (300 km) range at its 160 knot (180 mph, 300 kph) cruise speed with a 3,500-pound (1,600 kg) payload.

Figures for the investments made by LMV and the others above have not been made public but REGENT claims it has sold over 400 seagliders to global aviation and ferry customers including Mokulele Airlines, Southern Airways Express, FRS (Germany), and Ocean Flyer (New Zealand).

“With more than $7.9 billion in orders from commercial operating partners around the world, REGENT expects its flagship seaglider, Viceroy, to enter service by mid-decade,” the company proclaims.

If it is to make that date, it’ll have to hustle. REGENT successfully completed its first flight in August, 2022 but that flight was done with a subscale model. Its size and sophistication are hard to discern from the photos and videos promoted by various transport providers that REGENT says have ordered seagliders. Scaling the prototype up to a piloted (or conned) 12-passenger Viceroy transport craft that can undertake scheduled service by 2025 would (like so many of its eVTOL counterparts) appear to be a longshot.

But REGENT says full-scale prototypes will begin sea trials this year. And because its vehicles will supposedly be classified as boats, they potentially have far a less complex, lengthy and costly path to certification. Enter Lockheed Martin
LMT
Ventures.

“The certifying authority is the Coast Guard and the pilot has to have a captain’s license, not a pilot’s license,” Moran says. “Every investment that we do has to have a strong commercial pull, otherwise we probably won’t get the scale we need to bring what we hope are low-cost solutions to the DoD.”

The immediate application for seagliders Moran concedes is augmenting ferry service, a sector that LMV learned includes “literally tens-of-thousands of ferry lines operating throughout the world” that could be potential customers for REGENT.

“When you think of ferry service from the west coast of England to Ireland, it’s a 12-hour slog on a slow boat. This could turn it into a couple hour journey – at a higher price with fewer people.”

Islands from the Caribbean to the South Pacific could benefit from such service, providing a commercial foothold for a technology that Lockheed Martin and others see as tactically and strategically valuable.

Those others include the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) which launched its own “Liberty Lifter” WIG seaplane full-scale demonstrator program in 2022. The planned Liberty Lifter demonstrator will be a large flying boat similar in size and capacity to the C-17 Globemaster but it will rely on the same WIG concept that seagliders seek to exploit.

In simplified terms, a WIG craft accelerates in-water to a speed at which its wings gain support from the reactions of the air against the surface of the water (ground effect) to produce lift sufficient to raise the craft above it, skimming the surface. The resulting absence of hydrodynamic drag yields an efficient vehicle with amphibious capability but one which does not necessarily have to have sufficient power to climb away and fly out of ground effect.

In February, DARPA selected two teams (General Atomics working with Maritime Applied Physics Corporation and Aurora Flight Sciences working with Gibbs & Cox/ReconCraft) to develop designs for a full-scale Liberty Lifter X-plane and build demonstrators. Lockheed Martin may have submitted its own design for the project though it was not mentioned by DARPA.

Regardless, LMV is clearly interested in other designs and other WIG craft aimed at smaller scale commercial-military applications. However, Chris Moran admits that putting resources into REGENT was not a slam-dunk decision.

“When we select a company [to invest in] we do a lot of due diligence and rely on the elite technical people inside Lockheed to help us do that. We did have to warm up to this one because we obviously make helicopters which have a broad overlap with what [REGENT] does. We think there are for this [WIG craft] opportunities to work alongside the helicopters we make but there are some things that need to be addressed.”

Chief among them is REGENT’s emphasis on battery-electric power for its seagliders. In stating its case for its EV approach, REGENT covers all the usual zero-emissions/environmental bases that UAM eVTOL makers cite despite there being highly serious negative environmental impact, performance and strategic questions/downsides to electrification that are rarely acknowledged.

Moreover, a militarized battery-electric seaglider is unlikely to be able to perform with sufficient range, speed and payload to meet U.S. forces’ requirements any time soon if at all. The performance issues are compounded by the lack of portability and disrupt-ability of electrical power, a problem the military has begun to refer to as “Battlefield Circulation of Electricity” (BCoE).

As such, Moran says LMV has raised the prospect of hybrid power with REGENT.

“An important part of this, the part we’re still talking to them about and a part that [REGENT CEO, Billy Thalheimer] is coming around to is hybrid power… Just the way that the automotive industry developed the Toyota Prius, the same thing is going to happen here.”

LMV sees hybrid powertrains as essential for other electric aircraft companies it has invested in including autonomous cargo aircraft developer Elroy Air and eSTOL developer Electra Aero. Moran says work on hybrid turbogenerator propulsion is still in its early phases but Lockheed (through its Sikorsky subsidiary) and General Electric
GE
are working on a hybrid propulsion system as are European engine OEMs Safran and Turbotec.

“The utility of this [seaglider] craft will be so much better with more range and payload if you can bring jet fuel or diesel along and run your [WIG] vehicle that way.”

Whether Lockheed Martin Ventures’ seeding of REGENT pays off or not, Moran says investments like this (LMV has deployed $300 million into 80 different companies since its establishment) aren’t merely capital-hopping. They help the parent company see paths ahead irrespective of the latest aerospace investment fads.

“When you look in from the outside, you may go, ‘What in the world is Lockheed doing with this [investment]? We’re trying to shape the technology with [REGENT]. We’re not pressing them, we’re just
just
saying, look, for this thing to be military useable, we’ve got to have these features.”