By: Dawn Zoldi
The Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) emerging Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing Integration Pilot Program (eIPP) has the potential to do for air taxis and autonomous cargo aircraft what the original UAS Integration Pilot Program (IPP) did for drones: turn high‑level concepts into real, repeatable operations at scale. In that race, the on-going collaboration between Martin Solutions and Elroy Air offers a powerful blend of regulatory mastery and middle‑mile autonomy, positioning both companies as ideal for this program.
What the FAA’s eIPP Is and Why It Matters
The FAA’s eVTOL and Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) Integration Pilot Program is a three‑year public‑private initiative designed to accelerate safe, lawful eVTOL and broader AAM operations in the National Airspace System (NAS). Modeled on the earlier uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) IPP and BEYOND programs, eIPP pairs state, local, tribal, and territorial governments with private‑sector AAM partners to generate operational data, lessons learned, and policy insights that will inform future regulations and guidance. Key elements include:
- A focus on real‑world demonstration of air taxi, cargo, and related AAM missions that deliver public benefit, not just flight tests.
- A selection of at least five pilot projects, with proposals submitted by late 2025 and FAA selections expected in early to mid‑2026, followed by a three‑year execution window after the first project becomes operational.
No locations or industry teams have been selected yet. The ability to prove both operational value and regulatory seriousness will be decisive in that process.
Martin Solutions: The Certification Bridge
Martin Solutions helps advanced aviation developers turn innovative technology into approved and operational certifications. Led by FAA DER Jose Martin, who has a Certification Management special delegation, the company specializes in bridging engineering and certification. It transforms early ideas into solid foundations for certification, safety cases, and verification plans. As an execution partner, Martin Solutions manages and implements approval strategies that reduce rework, shorten regulatory timelines, and increase the likelihood of first-time approval.
Martin Solutions offers comprehensive certification support from an eIPP standpoint, covering Part 23 fixed-wing, Part 27/29 rotorcraft, and special class 21.17(b) programs often used for eVTOLs and larger UAS. For UAS operations, the company assists with FAA Exemption 44807 pathways via CMD-based justification packages that link the CONOPS, operational limits, safety goals, and verification evidence into a clear approval narrative. This support includes critical autonomy subsystems like detect-and-avoid (DAA), along with compliance strategies for Remote ID, durability and reliability planning, and subsystem approval approaches for higher-risk AAM missions. Additionally, Martin Solutions specializes in certification strategies for new technologies where guidance is still developing, such as hybrid propulsion systems including hydrogen and traditional fuels- delivering regulator-ready requirements, safety arguments, and test plans that facilitate faster approval and mitigate certification risks.
Global Regulatory Translation: FAA, EASA, and Beyond
These eIPP projects will not operate in a vacuum. Successful teams must anticipate follow-on deployments in other regions that will require harmonizing their safety cases across authorities. That is where Martin Solutions’ global certification work becomes a strategic asset.
In its guidance on global drone and eVTOL certification, Martin Solutions highlights that civil aviation authorities differ not only in terminology but also in regulatory outlooks, risk appetites, and institutional goals. Agencies like the FAA, EASA, Transport Canada, and ANAC each operate within unique public-policy environments, where societal risk acceptance, political oversight, operational risk, and historical precedents influence safety assessments—especially when comparing unmanned and manned aircraft and when involving new, autonomy-enabled features. If manufacturers overlook these differences from the start, they risk multiple approval processes, leading to duplicated analyses, scattered evidence, and the need to revise certification arguments late in development.
The firm’s strategy begins by confirming safety intent alignment: identifying where safety objectives across authorities are equivalent, where they differ, and how those differences affect acceptable compliance methods and necessary evidence. Martin Solutions bases this process on a well-defined CONOPS and business case, because operational assumptions and market-entry goals determine the appropriate certification route, operational constraints, and the required evidence. From this, the firm develops a flexible safety case that can be adapted without a complete overhaul, using EASA’s SORA as a rigorous operational risk baseline for UAS when suitable. This assessment is then translated into authority-specific frameworks, like the FAA’s Safety Risk Management expectations under Order 8040.4. Practically, this involves explicitly mapping hazards, severities, mitigations, and evidence into each regulator’s structure, language, and decision criteria. This ensures a unified approval pathway that reduces rework, maintains multi-authority market-entry options, and avoids surprises caused by mismatched regulatory assumptions.(See prior AG coverage of Martin Solutions).
FAA eIPP Risk and Evidence Management: Making Data Regulator-Usable
eIPP is an FAA program designed to generate credible operational evidence that can inform FAA policy, standards, and future regulatory pathways. It is not about one-off relief; it is about producing data the FAA can trust and reuse. That makes structured Safety Risk Management (SRM) and disciplined evidence management central to any team that intends to turn demonstrations into durable approval outcomes.
Martin Solutions’ approach aligns eIPP execution with FAA SRM expectations, including the framework outlined in FAA Order 8040.4, by ensuring every operational demonstration is traceable to defined safety objectives and decision-relevant questions. The strategy begins with a precise CONOPS and a clear business objective, because the FAA’s risk evaluation is inseparable from the operational context and intended scope. From there, hazards, severities, and mitigations are documented in FAA-native terms, with explicit linkage to operational limitations, procedures, training, and technical controls. Verification evidence is then planned and collected as an approval-grade chain, including predefined success criteria, standardized data capture, anomaly classification, root-cause disposition, and closure rationale.
For eIPP, this converts flight hours into regulatory capital. Each sortie, deviation, and mitigation effectiveness result becomes structured evidence that can support FAA decision-making across multiple pathways, including future certification bases and operational authorizations, and—when applicable—FAA exemption and CMD-style justification packages. The outcome is not just a successful demonstration, but a regulator-ready dataset and safety argument that can be reused, audited, and scaled as the FAA evolves permanent requirements.
Elroy Air: Autonomous Cargo Capacity
On the aircraft side of the equation, Elroy Air brings a mission-driven platform well aligned with the real-world operational learnings the eIPP is intended to generate. For this reason, the company has been included in eIPP applications for four different locations.
Elroy Air’s focus is cargo missions, where repeatable routes, predictable staging nodes, and measurable public-benefit missions create a structured operational environment that produces credible safety, performance, and integration data.
Elroy Air’s Chaparral is a hybrid-electric VTOL cargo aircraft designed to move palletized or containerized loads between distribution centers, forward operating bases, and commercial hubs. The company has publicly stated capability targets of more than 300 pounds of payload and roughly 300 miles of range, which place the aircraft in a different category than last-mile concepts optimized for single-package doorstep delivery. That middle-mile emphasis matters because it supports higher utilization, standardized procedures, and clearer operational metrics for reliability, turnaround, and route predictability.
The hybrid-electric architecture is a key operational enabler. Hybrid propulsion removes reliance on high-power charging infrastructure at every location and increases operational flexibility in remote or disrupted environments, but it still requires disciplined energy planning, reserve management, and validated contingency behavior to support safe, repeatable operations. This is especially relevant for logistics missions where schedule pressure and payload variability can drive tight margins; the aircraft and operation must demonstrate that performance claims translate into usable operational capability across realistic conditions.
Recent milestones serve as early indicators of progress toward pilot program operations. Elroy Air has been successfully and safely flying their full-scale aircraft for 2+ years. The company reported completing multiple 25-mile autonomous fights in September 2025. Then they reported an autonomous point-to-point A-to-B cargo flight in December 2025 in which the aircraft carried 213 pounds over 2.6 miles, performed vertical takeoff and landing, and reached approximately 60 mph in transit. These milestones can be cited as concrete demonstrations of VTOL cargo flight and automated flight capability. The next step for Elroy Air towards recognizing pilot program operations is repeatable performance testing, verified communications and surveillance behavior, and validated responses to off-nominal conditions.
Martin Solutions + Elroy Air: A High-Discipline eIPP Teaming Rationale
The FAA’s eVTOL and Advanced Air Mobility Integration Pilot Program (eIPP) aims to produce decision-quality evidence to inform FAA guidance, policy, and scalable integration, not just isolated demos. The best teams will combine a mission-relevant aircraft generating operational data with a partner who can turn that data into FAA-usable safety narratives and evidence packages aligned with FAA Safety Risk Management (SRM). Elroy Air’s Chaparral supports repetitive, structured middle-mile logistics missions with runway-independent cargo capabilities. Martin Solutions provides DER-led certification management and FAA-facing approval strategies, aligning SRM, defining concepts, establishing acceptance criteria, and packaging outcomes for approval-grade evidence. If selected, the partnership can credibly offer three advantages: a realistic use case with repeated flights, an FAA-centered safety and evidence plan treating operations as “regulatory capital,” and a disciplined progression from demo to broader deployment, capturing data quality and mitigation effectiveness for FAA reuse.