DETROIT—It’s a boat! It’s a plane! It’s an electric vehicle! It’s… all three? And it could be used in military missions.
Electric boat-plane maker REGENT Craft is setting its sights on aiding military operations from logistics to medical evacuations. The Rhode Island-based company recently launched its defense business, offering its electric-run Viceroy seaglider to reach speeds of up to 50 mph.
The seaglider has options for crewed, uncrewed, or autonomous, and three modes: float, like a standard boat; hydrofoil, when it hoists itself above the water using small underwater wings similar to an aircraft; and ground effect, in which it flies about 30 feet above the water’s surface.
The company has been testing the craft’s hydrofoil mode—in which the vessel can go between 17 and 50 mph—for two months. But the goal is to officially fly by the end of the summer, said Tom Huntley, REGENT’s head of defense business.
“We’re working with the Marine Corps Warfighting [Laboratory] right now to validate tactical mission sets,” Huntley told Defense One at the Reindustrialize Summit, a conference focused on marrying domestic manufacturing with tech companies and investors.
The Marine Corps had REGENT build a prototype for about $4.8 million in 2023 and extended the contract earlier this year with $10 million to explore the tactical applications. This includes contested logistics, such as ferrying supplies in the Indo-Pacific region, launched effects such as being a “mothership for small drones or sono buoys or torpedoes,” and water-based rescues, he said.
“We’re doing the final contract [modifications] right now, and we’ll be executing on that contract shortly,” Huntley said. “It’s a seven milestone contract. It’ll be one milestone every other month or so for the next about 16 months.”
The plan is to demonstrate the hydrofoil and ground effect modes with all mission sets and complete two wargaming scenarios, he said. The company is building a manufacturing facility in North Kingstown, R.I., to produce the seagliders, which is scheduled to open in 2026.
Reimagining manufacturing
This wasn’t a typical defense conference; more of a tech and finance event with defense elements. The only military hardware spotted belonged to Allen Control Systems, which featured an autonomous weapons station on the back of a pick-up truck—a robotic turret called the Bullfrog that serves as a platform for unmodified automatic weapons in counterdrone missions.
But there was a clear theme: building in America and using new, advanced technology to do it.
The event was teeming with high vibrations, images of old factory workers during the American Industrial Revolution set to energetic music that would feel just as apropos in a spin class.
It was clearly a place for companies to make an impression and new connections, full of bubbling enthusiasm that couldn’t be dampened by overcast skies, light rain, or a group of anti-war protesters outside the event.
AI-factory builder Hadrian tapped into that energetic slipstream with a $260 million funding round announcement, the vast majority of which will go towards building a new 278,000-square-foot facility in Arizona.
“I think those of us who are [on] the coasts forget that the sentiment about the American economy is hugely different from these manufacturing towns that got absolutely decimated for the last four decades,” Chris Power, the CEO and founder of Hadrian, which largely works in aerospace and defense, told Defense One. “One of the things I’m most excited about is bringing Hadrian factories as far inside the country as humanly possible. Because it used to be the No, 1 job. A great job. Your dad worked there. Your mom worked there. Your cousin worked there…that no longer exists. We can’t have 50 percent of the population in the country without good, high-paying jobs.”
Hadrian’s Factory 3 in Mesa, Ariz. is expected to be up and running by Christmas, Power said. In the meantime, the company launched a factory-as-a-service product that can help upstarts and legacy companies use automation to improve their manufacturing capabilities.
There are two factory-as-a-service categories: a brand new product that includes design “from scratch” and “parallel production” for existing facilities, Power said.
“Often what we see with customers is these factories have been from the 1950s. The [capital expenditure] is very aged, the layout is bad, and they’re over cost, and they’re one to three years behind schedule,” Power said. “What we are doing for these customers is looking at those factories, looking at everything inside of that, rebuilding it…and then operating for them.”
When they do that, floor space is reallocated and the existing skilled workforce can be directed to more critical tasks, he said.
Looking forward to next year, Power said Hadrian wants to expand into engine programs and munitions, and increase factory capacity to fit customer demand.
“We have a pretty enormous wait list in terms of manufacturing capabilities right now. Until Factory 3 is online, we’re turning away customers because we can’t serve them right now,” he said.
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