If it works, it could define the design of commercial and military aircraft. Pioneering startup JetZero has tapped Siemens’ Xcelerator platform to help design its revolutionary blended-wing aircraft—a design that all by itself provides 50 percent greater fuel efficiency and quieter operations, according to JetZero. The full-scale design is scheduled to pass FAA certification by 2030 and achieve near-zero carbon emissions by 2035.
Siemens’ open digital-business ecosystem will underpin not just the aircraft’s design and production but also power a $4.7 billion “Factory of the Future” in North Carolina, where automation, combined with a comprehensive digital twins, comes together to simulate product and manufacturing processes long before physical production begins.
“Siemens is giving us the confidence to take a leap, not just a step, in revolutionizing air travel,” said JetZero CEO Tom O’Leary. “Their digital twin and industrial metaverse technologies will be instrumental in helping us design, build and operate the world’s first fully digital aircraft, delivering a better experience for passengers and airlines.”
When Tim Barry, head of manufacturing, quality and integration at JetZero, talks about airplanes, his voice carries both the confidence of a veteran engineer and the impatience of a startup executive. “We’re not here to take steps,” he said. “We’re here to make leaps.”
With the help of Siemens Industrial Software applications, JetZero will be able to simulate wind tunnels and actual flight with subscale models in its goal to enter commercial flight by 2030 in a way that may be even more efficient than the Skunk Works. “We like to say we’re reshaping aviation, quite literally,” Barry told hosts of Siemens’ StartUp podcast as he cleared up what exactly a blended wing is. “This is not a flying wing like a B-2 bomber. It’s not a delta wing. It’s something in between.”
Rethinking the Airframe
Commercial aviation has been stuck in a rut, Barry argues. “From the Wright Flyer to the first Boeing 737, there was immense innovation,” he said. “Since the 1960s, most of the advances have come from engine technology. The shape of the airplane hasn’t really changed.”
And so we have arrived at the present, with commercial passenger aircraft that pretty much all look the same, for the most part bland and uninteresting,
JetZero’s design, by comparison, is radical. Instead of the wings providing all the lift, JetZero has the fuselage helping. So much does the blended wing design contribute to the lift that the engines can be a lot smaller, which further adds to fuel savings.
With a tube-and-wing, the tube only produces drag and no lift. The lift is all due to the wings, explains Barry.
For airlines, less fuel means lower operating costs and a smaller carbon footprint.
The biggest plus may be for the passengers, however. The narrow tubes, in universal use in commercial aircraft, have been a bane to passengers. Let’s face it: a tube just doesn’t lend itself to comfortable air travel. For the entire history of commercial flight, we have been squeezed into round tubes. This never happens in all other forms of transportation, not with automobiles, buses or rail. They are all rectangular.
And rectangular is what the BWB design allows.
“We have an airline working group with most of the world’s largest carriers,” Barry said. “Our cabin team has decades of experience. For the first time in their careers, they’re not fighting for inches—they’re painting on a new canvas.
Filling the Mid-Market Gap
JetZero is targeting what Barry calls the “mid-market gap,” which encompasses 200- to 250-seat aircraft, some of which have been phased out, some of which have been stretched to bigger capacity by extending the fuselage length. They are still narrow-body, though, with the same or less comfort per passenger.
JetZero’s design, however, creates a wider rectangular cross-section space, and should, in theory, allow airlines to open things up, go beyond cramped small-diameter tube construction, and afford more of the luxury of space.
Scaling Down and Up
JetZero is building a demonstrator aircraft that is “subscale.” Its first flight is scheduled for 2027.
Again, blended wings are nothing new. NASA spent more than a billion dollars over decades studying the concept, even flying subscale X-48B and X-48C prototypes. But commercial adoption faltered structural and manufacturing challenges.
“The core issue is pressurization,” Barry explained. “A tube is an ideal pressure vessel. A blended wing isn’t cylindrical. That creates bi-directional loading stresses in the center body.”
To solve this problem, JetZero draws upon NASA’s Perseus program and its “stitched resin-infused composites.” Instead of drilling thousands of fasteners through composite skins—“treating it like black aluminum,” Barry said—JetZero stitches dry carbon fiber layers together before infusing them with resin. The process produces lighter, damage-tolerant structures with fewer joints and better load distribution.
The company is also leveraging lessons from SpaceX and other new-space firms where Barry once worked. Rapid prototyping and iteration are core to JetZero’s culture. “We run a subscale program where we produce different sizes of vehicles,” he said. “We test new configurations, new flight controls, learn fast while the stakes are low.”
Digitally Born
If composites are JetZero’s structural breakthrough, Siemens software is its digital one. Last year, the companies signed a memorandum of understanding making Siemens Xcelerator the backbone of JetZero’s design and manufacturing environment.
“It’s not really a digital transformation for us—we are digitally born,” Barry said. “From advanced CFD simulations to model-based systems engineering, to full digital twins of every aircraft we build, Siemens tools let us move faster and collaborate better.”
Design teams scattered across Long Beach and remote sites share a common data environment through Siemens’ product lifecycle management (PLM) system. Manufacturing engineers use Plant Simulation and NX Line Designer to model entire factories virtually before breaking ground.
Barry calls the vision a “digital hive mind factory.” Every aircraft will have a living digital twin tied into the production system, maintenance logs, and even smart building controls. “It’s the digital thread that connects design, manufacturing, sustainment, and infrastructure,” he said. “We’re building in a year that starts with a 20, not a 19.”
Navigating Certification
For regulators, JetZero emphasizes continuity as much as novelty. “This is a Part 25 aircraft,” Barry said, referring to the Federal Aviation Administration’s airworthiness standards for transport planes. “It uses today’s gates, today’s speeds, today’s altitudes. The only thing new is the shape.”
To bolster its certification campaign, JetZero recently added former FAA Administrator Steve Dickson to its advisory board. “We feel confident we can meet Part 25 as written,” Barry said.
A Southern California Home
JetZero’s headquarters at Long Beach Airport is steeped in aviation history. The ghosts of McDonnell Douglas still linger in nearby hangars. The buzz of departing flights punctuates Barry’s sentences.
“It’s inspirational,” he said. “We could throw a rock and hit the old McDonnell Douglas plant. There’s immense talent here. And the city of Long Beach has been a great partner, even letting us use closed taxiways for testing.”
The company has yet to announce a final production site but touts its plan for a U.S. “factory of the future.” Siemens’ automation and electrification technologies will be deeply embedded. “We want a truly 21st-century smart factory,” Barry said. “Better, faster, cheaper, more reliable.”
NASA a Partner
NASA, once the lonely champion of the BWB, is now a hands-on partner. The agency sits in on JetZero’s design reviews and shares expertise from decades of structural research.
“We’re not just reading papers,” Barry said. “We’re working with the people who developed the technology. The tribal knowledge they bring is invaluable.”
Culture and Talent
Barry knows firsthand how hard it is to marry startup agility with aerospace rigor. He spent years leading manufacturing teams at SpaceX, then at Vast, a space-station startup. At JetZero, he preaches urgency and accountability.
“Some people call it a maniacal sense of urgency,” he said. “You think in seconds, minutes, hours—not days. And if you know about a problem, it’s your problem.”
For new engineers, JetZero prizes first-principles thinking and resilience over credentials alone. “We want people who boil problems down to basics, who take ownership, who aren’t afraid to ask simple questions,” Barry said. “And a sense of humor helps when you work at a startup.”
About JetZero
JetZero is an aviation startup headquartered in Long Beach. It draws inspiration from established giants in the nation’s aviation hub in Southern California, home of Lockheed’s Skunk Works, which to this day represents aviation innovation at its most daring, producing marvels such as the SR-71 Blackbird.
JetZero aims for a similar transformation, convinced that the blended-wing body, or BWB, is the way forward. It is not alone. The BWB concept has been studied by NASA and offers large flat areas to produce more lift than “tube-and-wing” aircraft of the same size.