Aerospace & Advanced Air Mobility

Advanced air mobility is the aerospace industry's mobility frontier — piloted and autonomous electric vertical-takeoff platforms, hybrid-electric short-takeoff aircraft, and the drone base that carries cargo, inspects infrastructure, defends airspace, and increasingly delivers to the doorstep. Silvia Flores leads executive search for the advanced air mobility sub-practice of Alder Koten's mobility practice, working across the OEM base, the Tier and MRO ecosystem, and the venture-backed AAM startup layer.

What we search for

• eVTOL platforms — vehicle engineering, certification, and production
• Hybrid-electric fixed-wing aircraft (eSTOL and short-haul regional)
• Autonomous unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) — cargo, inspection, utility
• Cargo and last-mile delivery drones
• Defense-adjacent drones and collaborative combat aircraft (CCA)
• Counter-drone (C-UAS) systems — sensor fusion, EW, kinetic interceptors
• Vertiport infrastructure and mobility operations
• Air-traffic integration, unmanned aircraft system traffic management (UTM)
• Type certification (FAA Part 23, EASA CS-23, SC-VTOL) and airworthiness
• AS9100 / NADCAP quality systems for the AAM production base

The roles

Chief Technology Officers and VPs of Engineering; VPs of Manufacturing and Directors of Production for AAM factories under Part 23 / CS-23 / SC-VTOL certification pressure; Type Certification Directors and Chief Airworthiness Engineers; Directors of Flight Test; Directors of Autonomy for uncrewed platforms; Directors of Sensor Engineering and Fusion for both AAM and drone platforms; VPs of Vertiport Operations and Directors of Airspace Integration (UTM / U-space); Directors of Counter-UAS Engineering; Directors of Quality under AS9100 and NADCAP; Program Directors for defense-adjacent CCA and collaborative-autonomy programs.

The ecosystem we cover

The AAM OEM layer — Joby Aviation, Archer Aviation, Beta Technologies, Vertical Aerospace, Wisk Aero, Overair, Electra, Eve Air Mobility, EHang, AutoFlight, and the successor programs to Lilium. The Tier-1 aerospace base building AAM subsystems — Honeywell, Safran, Collins Aerospace, GE Aerospace, Rolls-Royce Electrical, Magnix, H55, Verdego Aero. The drone OEM layer — Skydio, Zipline, Wing, Matternet, TEKEVER, Volansi, Elroy Air, Kittyhawk. The defense-adjacent autonomy base — Anduril, Shield AI, AeroVironment, Kratos, General Atomics, Northrop Grumman's autonomy portfolio, BAE Systems (Bronte Max), Boeing (MQ-28 Ghost Bat). The counter-drone segment — Dedrone, Fortem Technologies, Epirus, DroneShield, Anduril's Lattice, and the sensor-fusion + AI-decision layer around them. The infrastructure and vertiport layer — Ferrovial, Skyports, UrbanV, Volatus, Groupe ADP's Advanced Air Mobility unit, Signature Aviation's mobility arm.

The Mexican corridor exposure

Querétaro is North America's third aerospace cluster and the natural corridor for AAM production integration; Chihuahua, Baja California, and Sonora carry the balance of the aerospace footprint. Border cities like Ciudad Juárez, Reynosa, Tijuana, and Mexicali are the natural location for dual-use drone and defense-adjacent production as ITAR-cleared programs move into the corridor. The AAM sub-practice runs across all of them and connects directly to the aerospace and defense pillar.

How the search runs

Through The Dynamic Fit Method™, evaluating Ability, Capability, and Capacity for the rate of change the role will carry. AAM mandates require candidates who can carry aerospace certification maturity, automotive-like production velocity, and (for the startup layer) capital-market fluency simultaneously. Contact the practice to open a search.

Advanced air mobility search — questions

Is advanced air mobility a real market or still a promise?

It is now a real, capitalized market with binding orders and production sites under construction. Farnborough 2026 closed with Vertical Aerospace's Valo eVTOL completing a piloted transition flight, Electra announcing an $850 million EL9 hybrid-electric factory in Springfield, Ohio for 400 aircraft per year at initial capacity, BETA Technologies introducing the autonomous ALIA MV250 utility platform, Joby and Archer advancing toward FAA type certification, and Boeing marketing the MQ-28 Ghost Bat to European air forces via a Rheinmetall partnership. The leadership market is where the ecosystem's stress point sits today.

How does an eVTOL production ramp differ from a traditional aerospace ramp?

The certification framework (Part 23, CS-23, SC-VTOL) is aerospace, and the AS9100 / NADCAP quality discipline is unchanged. What is different is the manufacturing model: high-mix, small-batch, robotics-heavy, digital-twin-driven, engineered for a workforce that manages autonomous production cells rather than manual assembly lines. The leadership profile therefore has to hold aerospace certification maturity, automotive-like production velocity, and startup-scale organizational fluency at once — a profile the traditional aerospace search market has not yet built enough of.

Do you place drone and counter-drone leadership?

Yes. The commercial drone OEMs (Skydio, Zipline, Wing, Matternet, Volansi, Elroy Air, Kittyhawk, TEKEVER on the utility side), the defense-adjacent drone base (Anduril, Shield AI, AeroVironment, Kratos, General Atomics, Northrop Grumman's autonomy portfolio), and the counter-drone segment (Dedrone, Fortem Technologies, Epirus, Anduril's Lattice, DroneShield, and the sensor-fusion + AI-decision layer around them) are all inside the sub-practice. Real-time AI drone-vs-bird discrimination, on-vehicle LLM inference like Smith Myers ARTEMIS, and the EW + kinetic layer are all leadership demand centers.

How does this sub-practice connect to the aerospace pillar?

The aerospace and defense pillar covers the traditional airframe, aero-engine, MRO, and Tier base under AS9100 / NADCAP / ITAR discipline. Advanced air mobility is the pillar's forward edge — the same certification discipline, applied to platforms that are electric, autonomous, and manufactured under a new plant model. The two are searched together whenever a client has both traditional aerospace and AAM programs; they diverge only on the leadership-market side (the AAM candidate pool sits partly outside traditional aerospace).