Canadian airline Nolinor Aviation has secured several production slots to acquire Kona blended-wing-body (BWB) aircraft from the Californian startup Natilus.
The Kona is a clean-sheet cargo aircraft concept being developed by San Diego-based Natilus, the brainchild of aerospace entrepreneur Alexey Matyushev.
Thanks, in great part to its blended-wing-body design, the Natilus Kona is expected to be able to carry up to 3.8 metric tons of cargo over distances of 900 nautical miles, offering an operating cost reduction of 50% and fuel consumption savings of 30%.
Another structural element which has been key in the decision of Nolinor Aviation to opt for the Kona is the high position of its engines on the top rear side of the fuselage.
This element, Nolinor’s Chairman Marco Prud’homme confirmed to AeroTime, makes the Kona particularly suitable for operations in unpaved, gravel runways like the ones Nolinor regularly uses in the Canadian far north.
In fact, a large part of Nolinor’s operations consist in supply flights to and from remote outposts in the northernmost territories of Canada, mostly for mining and energy companies with which it has long-term contracts. For this purpose, Nolior operates a fleet of Boeing 737-200s which are specially equipped to land on gravel or ice runways.
“It’s a very interesting design for us” said Prud’homme on a phone conversation with AeroTime, “since most of the maintenance challenges of unpaved runway operations derive from the potential gravel ingestion by the engines.”
The Kona is still under development and needs to go through its certification process first, but Prud’homme was confident it could potentially enter service by the end of this decade.
“We are not a public company, so we can afford to think longer term than others”, he stated to AeroTime.
The exact number of orders has not been disclosed yet.
“We’ll get less Konas than we would like!” exclaimed Prud’homme when asked about this particular point.
The Canadian executive also pointed out that he doesn’t see the Kona as a like-for-like replacement for the airline’s Boeing 737-200s, but as a complementary asset. In this regard, he expressed his intention to use the Kona to expand operations to new locations, taking advantage of the Kona’s ability to land and take-off from relatively shorter runways.
In 2023, Natilus successfully tested a sub-scale model of the Kona and in October 2024, it announced that it is also working on a blended-wing-body (BWB) airliner, which it calls “Horizon”, with capacity to carry some 200 passengers on long haul routes.
