The Redmond spokesman., April 26, 2022, Page 14, Image 14

Stratos ready to sell a
plane designed and
built in Redmond
FLYING HIGH
Cliff Ng
ABOVE: Later this summer, Redmond-based Stratos Aircraft plans to go public with its finished product:
the 716X. LEFT: A look inside the aircraft.
BY TIM TRAINOR
Redmond Spokesman
Commercial airlines have had a difficult few
years. Travel restrictions, mask mandates and
soaring fuel prices all reduced demand for their
services — and made the flying experience pretty
miserable for their customers.
But over that same stretch, a group of aeronau-
tics engineers in Redmond had a pretty productive
time by keeping their nose to the grindstone, while
testing and tinkering on a jet of their own design.
Later this summer, Redmond-based Stratos Air-
craft plans to go public with their finished product:
the 716X. The single-engine, six-passenger plane
will be marketed as a less expensive, more efficient
private aircraft.
Carsten Sundin, the chief technology officer for
Stratos, said the pandemic restrictions were not
much of a problem for the company. They had
their funding in place before the first economic
rattles hit — and they weren’t yet ready to go out to
pound the pavement and entice buyers.
8 | REDMOND PROFILES | APRIL 2022
“We’ve been hunkered down,” said Sundin. “We
have continued to do what we needed to do on the
development side. It would have been far harder if
we were at the stage when we needed to have cus-
tomers traveling to the area to make sales.”
That time, however, is soon approaching. The
company expects to start selling their jets in July
or August, according to Sundin, who said the final
product would be roughly “95 percent engineered
and built in Central Oregon.”
Stratos operates out of a facility on Franklin
Street in southeast Redmond. It currently has 18
employees, most of whom are longtime veterans
of the Central Oregon aeronautics companies, in-
cluding Lancair and Epic. Their Redmond oper-
ation includes both a composite shop and metal
shop.
There were issues in the supply chain, of course.
Machine parts — especially carbon fiber — be-
came more difficult to find. Raw materials became
more difficult to locate and were more expensive.
They started to order specialized parts months in