Whisper Aero is proud to announce the grand opening of its first 8,000 sqft flight test center at Crossville Memorial Airport. The new facility, funded by a $1.2 million direct appropriation from the Tennessee General Assembly to support economic development, marks a significant milestone in Whisper Aero’s mission to deliver cleaner, quieter, more efficient propulsion from Tennessee. After a year of construction, the flight test center is ready for Whisper’s engineers to begin work on the company’s next wave of products.

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Since its earliest days, Whisper Aero has had a strong presence at Crossville Memorial Airport. Conveniently located minutes away from the 20-acre campus where the team grew out of, the airport served as the ground school location for company engineers seeking private pilot lessons. As Whisper grew, the company found compelling reasons to ground test its initial propulsor and 55 lbm demonstrator drone on the flight line before moving to actual flight tests. In those early days, the scrappy but nimble Whisper team worked opportunistically from the corner of a hangar that was available at the airport.

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Over two years later, the team’s new flight test hangar features six times the size, access to an aerospace-grade electric charger, and plenty of high-bay space to scale its testing operations significantly from its humble beginnings. Initially, the team expects to use the space to extend its ground testing and life cycle testing operations as it prepares to sell its first products later this year. The company took time during the ribbon-cutting ceremony to provide live demonstrations of its high-efficiency, ultra-quiet propulsors from five pounds of thrust all the way up to over seventy pounds as examples of its future testing plans.  

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Ultimately, the team intends to use hangar space to install newly-built propulsors from its 40,000 sqft Crossville headquarters onto customer airframes at multiple sizes. At the flight test center opening, the team showcased its Whisper Jet cabin mockup alongside a new Whisper Swift Glider featuring its largest thruster to date. These aircraft concepts showcased how Whisper’s propulsion systems can be installed in innovative ways to unlock a low-noise future of flight that’s as considerate as it is compelling.  

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Whisper invited many of its academic, government, and industry partners to the event who will also benefit from the business Whisper’s flight test hangar will generate. As its flight test operations scale, the company sees numerous ways for its flight test hangar to catalyze new high-paying, high-tech jobs in Tennessee from test engineering internships to design and manufacturing jobs a few miles away. Whisper’s partners in attendance, many from its ReConnecTN coalition focused on enabling Regional Air Mobility, similarly shared in this vision for economic growth. TNECD Stuart McWhorter said: “Tennessee is fortunate to have a vast network of research institutions statewide that provide immense support to our industry partners. Today, Whisper Aero is opening its third location in the state since 2021, which is nothing short of a testament to our business-friendly climate, skilled workforce and research and development assets. We are proud to have this cutting-edge brand in Tennessee and believe their continued investment will further strengthen and build out our innovation ecosystem in the years to come.”

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Others who were in attendance to celebrate this win for Tennessean innovation included:

• Tennessee Speaker of the House, Cameron Sexton

• City of Crossville Mayor, RJ Crawford

• Cumberland County Mayor, Allen Foster

• Crossville City Manager, Valerie Hale

• Tennessee Senator, Paul Bailey

• Representatives from the offices of Senator Marsha Blackburn, Senator Bill Hagerty, and Governor Bill Lee

• Tennessee Higher Education Commission Chief Academic Officer, Julie A. Roberts

• Tennessee Tech, JW Bruce

• Crossville Memorial Airport Manager, Greg Livingston

• Plug and Play VC, Steve Goetz  

• Launch Tennessee, Ashlin Smith