On April 26, in Gongqingcheng, Jiangxi Province, a white aircraft lifted steadily from the test flight field, circled the lake three times, and landed smoothly back on the ground.
No runway, no control tower, no crowd of spectators. The "big guy," with a wingspan of 12 meters and an overall length of 6.5 meters, quietly completed its first flight, thereby setting a record: L400, an 800-kilogram-class distributed electric propulsion fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), independently developed by Nanjing Aerospace Exploration Technology Co., Ltd., is currently the largest electric fixed-wing UAV model in China that has completed its first flight.
Less than six months after the first flight, the company established its headquarters in Nanjing Jiangbei New Area. A startup that had just learned to make planes fly now faced challenges not in the sky—it needed to make planes fly legally, cheaply, and continuously with steady workloads.
01 A Flat Piece of Land Is an Airport
The L400 is Aerospace Exploration's first product, positioned as an electric Short Takeoff and Landing (eSTOL) UAV, with a maximum takeoff weight of 850 kilograms and a range of 300 kilometers for the pure electric cargo version.
Over the past two years, attention in the low-altitude economy has been almost entirely absorbed by manned eVTOLs: vertical takeoff and landing, urban air mobility, flying cars—the stories are compelling enough. But when it comes to delivering goods to fields, islands, or mountains, what hinders the industry has never been "whether it can take off vertically," but a more fundamental issue—there is no runway there.
No matter how efficient traditional fixed-wing aircraft are, they require ground infrastructure support; multi-rotor drones are not picky about locations but cannot carry heavy loads or fly long distances. What L400 targets is precisely this underserved middle ground: an order of magnitude larger than small UAVs, significantly cheaper than general aviation aircraft, and lowering the takeoff/landing threshold to "relatively flat ground": grasslands, dirt roads, all acceptable.
The Aerospace Exploration team chose a "taildragger" configuration, which has few precedents in China. They had to tackle slipstream control laws, flight control systems, structural lightweighting, and high-voltage tri-electric integration themselves, while the supply chain was also incomplete. What they gained was not just impressive lines on a spec sheet, but returning the "right to takeoff and land" from airports to users: The thinner the infrastructure, the greater the value of this machine.
The electric propulsion system is also a self-developed "oil-to-electric" conversion. It eliminates expensive aviation engines, saving not only BOM costs but also addressing the most sensitive operational economics in agricultural aviation—requiring only one pilot on the ground, with algorithms autonomously planning operation routes. In forestry and agricultural protection scenarios, operational efficiency is 6–8 times that of similar small UAV models, and operating costs are reduced by approximately 40% compared to traditional fuel-powered aircraft. Extending further to island and mountain logistics, forest fire prevention, and emergency rescue, these scenarios share common traits: inconvenient ground transportation and weak support conditions, which are not compromises for L400 but rather its home turf.
In other words, it sells not an aircraft, but "unit workload." This is the confidence behind the startup's ability to discuss orders immediately after its first flight.
02 A Question Held for Two Years, and a Dozen People
To understand why this company shaped its product this way, one must look at founder Si Jiapei.
A graduate in aerospace engineering, holding a master's degree from the Chinese Aviation Research Institute, he joined the Chengdu Aircraft Design Research Institute after graduation, later becoming an engineer at DJI, participating in the development of multiple products, and organizing a complete multi-rotor overall design process from scratch. By conventional logic, this was a stable path for an aviation professional. The turning point came from a question posed by a pilot—what should be done in places without runways that most need transport capacity?
He did not resign immediately. For nearly two years afterward, he conducted research while working, gradually converging his solution onto electric propulsion fixed-wing aircraft, and hand-built a small prototype from scratch during his spare time. In 2024, the prototype took off. He felt "the time had come," resigned from his job, gathered several colleagues and friends to form a team, and registered the company in August of the same year.
This is not a story of a track accelerated by capital, but rather a person holding onto a question for two years until he could provide the answer himself. So those three laps around the lake in Gongqingcheng were less of a performance and more of a verification: Can it take off from a piece of ground that isn't particularly well-prepared, and can it land steadily?
Immediately after the first flight was completed, domestic and international clients reached out! Beidahuang General Aviation sent an invitation, and clients from Australia and Brazil flew specifically for inspections. To date, Aerospace Exploration has signed 12 letters of intent, with a team of over a dozen people busy every day.
But here we must hit the brakes: Letters of intent are votes of confidence cast by the market, but the aviation industry recognizes only certificates of airworthiness, not votes of confidence. The first flight proves physical feasibility; delivery requires proving compliance, continuity, and economic viability. Between these two things lies a long, difficult taxiing phase.
03 Site Selection Is Not Renting an Office, But Buying Time
As the enterprise progressed, Si Jiapei began considering another question: Where to set up the main base?
For large companies, site selection is a spatial choice; for whole-aircraft startups, site selection is a comprehensive bet on industrial ecology, factor supply, and development rhythm: the most expensive costs are often not written in the BOM table, but in transportation fees for test flights, scheduling, and coordination. Previously, dragging a plane with a 12-meter wingspan to remote locations meant flying for one day but spending possibly three days on the road.
They ultimately settled in Jiangbei New Area. "This area is already a cluster zone for the low-altitude economy, with a complete industrial chain, making it very suitable for our whole-aircraft enterprise development," said Si Jiapei.
Within less than a month of settling down, this judgment turned into specific lists: the structural shell was entrusted to Julong Technology, a local enterprise in the new area; subsequent airworthiness certification was handed over to their "neighbor" Aokun Technology; and locally available test flight bases. "From now on, we will never have to drag planes to remote locations again," he remarked. Combined with low-altitude industry funds and dense university and research institute resources, a company of just over a dozen people compressed the verification radius of "test flight—certification—supporting facilities—capital" into a few kilometers.
This is actually a more noteworthy achievement of Jiangbei in the low-altitude economy: not merely attracting another enterprise, but enabling a whole-aircraft enterprise to find upstream and downstream partners simply by opening its door. From "providing policies" to "supplementing chains," the quality of industrial clustering has always been measured by the hidden costs saved by startups.
Of course, no matter how convenient the ecosystem, it cannot replace the enterprise's own effort to obtain certifications. What it can do is return the time spent on commuting to R&D.
04 The Big Test Is Next Year
The current schedule is packed: The V2 revision of the L400 has entered production testing, airworthiness certification documents are being prepared simultaneously, aiming to complete the "qualified to operate" process. According to plans, next summer, the team will head to Beidahuang to complete commercial pilot flights, officially launching large-scale commercial use.
The first half of the low-altitude economy competition was about who could fly first; the second half is about who can fly longer, in compliance, and at scale. What ton-class electric fixed-wing UAVs currently lack is not technical imagination—the first flight has proven this—but a commercial operating model acceptable to regulators, customers, insurance, and maintenance systems. The 12 letters of intent are the starting whistle, not the endgame; the land of Beidahuang is where the real scoring begins, by acre, by sortie, and by ledger.
The most reassuring moment for a startup may not be the second the plane leaves the ground, but perhaps after settling down, realizing that tomorrow does not require dragging the plane far away.
From a flat grassland in Gongqingcheng to a certificate of airworthiness, there is still a long taxiing distance in between. But the nose has already lifted.