He spent seventeen years inside the world's largest aerospace company. Then he went looking for the edge.
// The lawyer-turned-strategist now selling a plane that takes off in half a football field.
The aircraft Marc Allen is selling lifts off the ground at about 35 miles per hour and lands on a strip of pavement the length of half a football field. Eight electric propellers run along the leading edge of the wing, pushing air over big flaps to manufacture a "blown lift" effect strong enough to make a nine-seat airplane behave like a helicopter that hates noise. It is, by Allen's own description, not fast. "It won't move you at turbo speeds," he has said, "but it's not slow either." That sentence is the whole pitch: a machine engineered around patience instead of speed.
Allen runs Electra.aero, a roughly 96-person startup in Manassas, Virginia, building the EL9 - an ultra-short takeoff and landing aircraft with hybrid-electric propulsion. The company calls the idea "Direct Aviation": air travel that lands where people actually are, on short fields and small strips, without the airport, the emissions, or the roar. By early 2025 Electra had collected something close to 2,200 pre-orders worth nearly $9 billion, one of the largest order books in the entire Advanced Air Mobility business. In April 2025 it closed a $115 million Series B.
"Electra is bringing air travel closer to where we live, work and play - without airports, emissions, or noise."
What makes the story interesting is not the airplane. It is the man who agreed to fly it. Allen did not come up through the garages of a hardware startup. He came from the top floor of Boeing, where for nearly a decade he sat on the Executive Council, ran Boeing International, chaired Wisk Aero, and oversaw a $5 billion customer finance business. He had the corner office at the company that defines American aerospace. In August 2024 he left it for a firm that, at the time, most travelers had never heard of.
He has a phrase for why. He wanted to "be on the edge." Not the edge of a quarterly earnings call - the edge of what an airplane can be. The founder he replaced as CEO, John Langford, called him "the ideal choice to guide Electra into its next phase of growth." Allen framed it more plainly: his passion, he says, "has always been about building, coaching, and inspiring high-performing teams."
For a man who clerked at the Supreme Court and litigated commercial cases in Washington before he ever touched an aircraft program, the move reads less like a career swerve and more like a continuation. Allen has spent his life moving toward whatever room had the highest concentration of hard problems. Right now that room is a hangar in Manassas where engineers are trying to certify a plane that can take off from a parking lot.
If you want to be a continuous learner, you have to be a continuous listener. Curiosity is always rewarded by growth.
Electra's Ultra Short is the unlock for a new era of air travel - what we call Direct Aviation - that is as transformative as it's practical.
My passion has always been about building, coaching, and inspiring high-performing teams.
We don't want to be a community that has only hub and spokes.
It won't move you at turbo speeds but it's not slow either.