Last week, California startup, Jump Aero, unveiled a new eVTOL, a launch customer, and a potentially new emergency medical response model.
The eVTOL is called the JA1 “Pulse” – an eight-rotor, tail-sitting, vaguely Star Wars-esque single-person air vehicle in which the pilot flies Superman-style (prone) in forward flight.
Its aim is to rapidly deliver a pilot-paramedic to the scene of a medical emergency in rural areas within eight to ten minutes – the window of time before oxygen loss to the brain from a heart attack, stroke or injury can cause debilitating damage or death.
Pulse is the brainchild of a team led by former Terrafugia flying car startup CEO, Carl Dietrich. I spoke with Dietrich, who debuted Jump Aero’s new concept at a conference in San Francisco on Friday, about the vehicle and what led him down the path to its eyebrow-raising design.
Jump Aero has quietly been fleshing out its Pulse concept for three-plus years with funding support from the Air Force’s Agility Prime program as well as venture capital and angel investor funding. The Agility Prime imprimatur lends some visibility to a concept and a yet-to-be-built aircraft that may or may not pan out as envisioned.
The concept for Pulse is illustrated in a company animation; In simple terms, a medical emergency arises and a mobile app is used to summon Jump’s first responder. A Pulse aircraft with a pilot-medic (and an aircraft support person) stationed in a commercially-owned facility or at a Fire/Ambulance Station is scrambled.
By virtue of its electric motors and batteries, the aircraft can immediately spin-up and launch without waiting to warm-up like a helicopter, cutting response time. The pilot -medic climbs into the tail-sitting Pulse in a standing position with broad visibility. The aircraft makes a vertical takeoff-climb to a prescribed altitude before tilting forward to transition to forward-flight. The pilot tilts along with it, flying in a prone position.
The JA1 then transits to the scene at relatively low altitudes and at speeds up to 250 knots, arriving within the golden eight to ten minutes noted above. It tilts back up to the vertical (the pilot again in a standing position) and makes a VTOL descent to landing at the scene. The pilot-medic emerges and stabilizes the patient, bringing along a defibrillator, a mechanical CPR device or other equipment.
As he/she does so, a traditional ground ambulance has been dispatched and arrives within the 15-20 minute window typical in rural areas. While the ambulance is enroute, a Pulse retrieval truck with the support individual has left the station for the scene. It arrives at some time near or after the ambulance to retrieve the pilot-medic and the (generally one-way) aircraft. The ambulance transports the stabilized patient to a hospital. The Pulse-carrying truck returns to the station.
“Our business is that we’re not transporting patients at all,” Dietrich says. “We’re only getting a paramedic to the scene of the emergency to stabilize a patient. It’s a new type of mission that nobody does right now which is a challenge…”
Indeed, the video and the above description raise a slew of questions for anyone remotely familiar with emergency response. The concept breaks both the emergency transport operation and two-person emergency medical response paradigms long codified within the first-responder industry.
But it has already won limited market support. Jump Aero announced Danish emergency services firm, Falck, as putative launch customer at the San Francisco conference.
Falck says it does business in 14 countries and conducts eight million medical response operations per year. These include ground ambulance operations in California, Colorado, and Oregon. However, the company’s emergency medical and patient transportation services do not appear to include air-ambulance operations in the U.S. or elsewhere.
Falck’s lack of experience with such operations may have made it more receptive to Jump’s conceptual departure from the norm. While Falck has not taken a financial position in Jump, it has purchased four Pulse airframe options (there is no physical airframe yet to purchase) according to Dietrich.
A second international emergency services operator has purchased a further ten options Dietrich adds, pointing out that all are non-refundable, underlining some confidence in Jump and its concept.
While the per unit cost of Pulse aircraft was not disclosed, it can reasonably be expected to be significantly less than a helicopter air ambulance given its size and limited scope. Its real-world operational costs and operating economics are far less certain at this point.
“Falck and other first-response organizations get it,” Dietrich says. Their receptiveness he asserts is part of a broader movement within the emergency medical services sector to “try to do more actual treatment on site.” That idea dovetails with the limited performance envelopes and limited experience of current eVTOLs.
By foregoing a patient transport role, Pulse can be relatively small. Its biplane configuration is expected to come with a 19-foot wingspan and 3,150-pound gross takeoff weight. Its eight unshrouded rotors will be approximately nine-and-a-half feet above the ground when sitting. They’ll spin using eight motors and eight independent and cross-linkable 11 kWh batteries.
Jump says the package will carry a 330-pound (150 kg) payload including the pilot-medic. Given that the average American adult weighs 185 pounds according to the CDC, Pulse would have about 145 pounds available for devices/medical supplies. Packing efficiently for a specific call or a limited range of scenarios will be paramount.
According to Dietrich, the rurally-oriented JA1 will have an approximate 50 nautical-mile range at its maximum energy conservation cruise speed of 123 knots. Real-world range will naturally hinge upon how much time a Pulse spends in hover, the sort of terrain it’s over-flying, low altitude winds, weather and reserve requirements constraints.
The JA1’s headline 250 knot dash capability would obviously cut its range in half and likely more. For now, the numbers are purely theoretical but Dietrich says the most important baseline metric will be the eVTOL’s ability to travel 30 miles in eight minutes.
One-way ground ambulance trips in urban or suburban areas are typically ten miles or less but they lengthen in the rural areas (where 57 million Americans live) that Jump hopes to serve. The difference in rural distances and response times is so dramatic some areas (over 25 minutes) that a recent study characterizes 4.5 million Americans as living in “Ambulance deserts” Dietrich says.
“We should cover nine to ten times the coverage area of a [ground] ambulance within that eight-minute window which is what changes the operating economics for the first-response service provider,” he predicts.
Jump estimates that one Pulse unit could potentially service a population of approximately 10,000 people in a rural area with a seven percent chance of overlapping calls – essentially a one-in-ten shot of not being able to respond to two incidents simultaneously.
The company is investigating “candidate business models for our customers” Dietrich says, including a subscription service type model. He is confident that a Pulse’s operating economics (one electric aircraft, staffed by a pilot-medic, aircraft support/retrieval truck driver and one ground ambulance driver-medic) can support for-profit medical response services in areas where existing models cannot.
“The bottom line is that to achieve the same type of rapid response in a traditional helicopter, you would need to keep the aircraft engine hot all the time— burning gas waiting for the call— this doesn’t make economic sense when call frequency is on the order of one flight per day. With an eVTOL, we can achieve the rapid response capability without constantly burning dinosaurs — fundamentally changing the economics of rapid air response.”
Real-world numbers may or may not support this and there are other considerations. I ran Jump’s concept by a couple sources within the medical services and air ambulance industry. Their skepticism was obvious.
Much of it hinged on the combining of roles in one highly trained, highly stressed individual in Jump’s proposed eVTOL.
“They always fly in pairs,” one medical professional in the Midwest said of airborne emergency medical services (EMS) teams. Helicopter-borne EMS units typically include a nurse/RN and a pilot with limited paramedic training. Ground ambulances are similarly staffed by pairs, often an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) and a paramedic or two EMTs.
There are many reasons for this including different responsibilities and different accreditations that legally allow individuals to perform different tasks. An EMS helicopter pilot whom I spoke with echoed this sentiment.
“I’m not exactly sure how this one-person ship can accommodate all that’s necessary for [triage],” said the pilot who flies medevac missions in rural Kansas and New Mexico.
He added that combining the skill sets to fly a multi-engine (motor) single-pilot IFR (instrument flight rules) low altitude aircraft in all sorts of weather and off-airport conditions with acumen in paramedic triage and life-saving procedures in one individual would be tremendously difficult, expensive and quickly lead to burnout.
“I’ve seen what these [medical] people do,” the pilot continued. “If they’re that smart and they have to devote that much time, they’d have no family or other pursuits.” EMS helicopter pilots typically have recurrent training and two FAA check-rides per year.
According to the medical professional and others I spoke with, paramedics and EMTs are nationally certified and, depending on the state they are located in, require some level of recurrent training every year.
It’s difficult to say what an individual with these combined skill sets – even if they might be at lower thresholds given the level of flight control automation Pulse may come with and better-defined requirements for simple triage, temporary life-sustainment certification – might cost in terms of salary requirements. Medevac pilots typically make six figures a year and flight medics make nearly as much.
Personnel requirements (include aircraft support personnel/retrieval drivers and possible ambulance staff if a private provider handles all three in a remote area) will impact the Jump concept economics. So too, will the current industry reimbursement structure.
Helicopter EMS companies like Air Methods or Global Medical Response are paid for medical transport, typically by the loaded-mile. Figuring out how to price and how to reimburse for emergency triage services as Jump envisions will be a “huge issue” Dietrich acknowledges.
The pilot I spoke with watched Jump’s video and came away with a question regarding the mobile app-based call illustrated within. “Who has launch authority?” he asked. “If you want to launch an EMS helicopter, it requires a state authority, a hospital, a highway patrol or regional fire department that calls the provider dispatch.”
He also opined that, “Right now we have two experts that are saving a life [in helicopter EMS]. With a single person you may be getting a Jack-of-all trades but a master of none. If someone is working on one of my kids, I want an expert in his or her field flying and a qualified medical expert trying to save their life.”
Jump’s video is obviously a thumbnail sketch of its concept but many details remain to be worked out aside from the eVTOL aircraft itself. The single-person paradigm is one Dietrich admits that his company wasn’t sure of to start with.
Jump initially presented two-person aircraft concepts to potential customers. “We had talked with other first response companies who said, ‘We always go with two people”.
But Falck saw potential in the idea of a single pilot-medic for a narrow response mission, counting cost as well as the potential for faster on-scene EMS. “Is it okay to send one instead of two?” we asked. “It makes a big difference in terms of the speed with which you can get a human being to the patient. You can land closer to the emergency,” Dietrich asserts. Falck agreed. “That was huge,” Dietrich maintains.
It may well prove to be. But so many questions remain about the aircraft and the concept that it’s hard to tell if they can be resolved by the time a prototype is completed in July 2025 followed by ground and flight tests at some point.
The Air Force will be watching these. AFWERX has given Jump $1.8 million in TACFI – (Tactical Funding Increase) funding to fund construction of the first full-scale proof of concept prototype.
It’s easy to imagine the USAF seeing more potential in Pulse for a special operations type role than for EMS but its pure-electric design would have to be altered. In fact, none of the eVTOL concepts that Agility Prime is investigating will likely mature as pure EVs for a host of obvious reasons.
Dietrich is glad to have limited Air Force support though he is a realist and a level-headed entrepreneur. The pitfalls of Jump’s concept – from many unshrouded rotors not far above head-height to limited one-way range and return via truck which cuts availability in half – are obstacles the company will need to work through.
Certification will be another challenge since, beyond most air-taxi type eVTOLs, Pulse will have to be a certified emergency response vehicle. How a small, electric light aircraft flying at bird-strike altitudes in rural areas with no charging infrastructure and questionable weather will survive and provide enough availability to justify its cost is a major question.
Dietrich told me that, “If the economic and political drivers are strong enough (which we believe they are), the challenges will be overcome.”
He may be right but Jump’s goal of saving over 100,000 lives each year with the JA1 Pulse represents a big jump and possibly a bigger ask.
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