The Future Aero Festival, hosted by the Sustainable Aero Lab in Amsterdam on December 1-2, 2025, brought together innovators and investors from both sides of the Atlantic for two days of discussions about the future of aviation technology.
The event also provided AeroTime with the chance to speak with Daniel Moczydlower, President and CEO of Embraer-X, the innovation division of the Brazilian aircraft manufacturer to better understand its role within the group.
Embraer-X enjoys, in fact, a significant degree of autonomy within Embraer. It hands directly from the group’s parent company structure and is not part of any of the group’s four main units (Commercial Aircraft, Executive Aviation, Defense and Services), although its projects constantly seek to leverage synergies with all of them.
On this point, Moczydlower commended the group’s comprehensive performance, observing that in 2024 all four business units achieved exceptional results simultaneously.
The commercial division secured substantial orders for the E2 family, the executive jets division outpaced market growth, and the defense segment made significant inroads into international markets, in great part driven by the success of aircraft such as the C-390 multi-role transport. Demand for the services division also expanded, in tune with the growth of the other business units.
Moczydlower explained how Embraer-X aims to be not too close to the parent company, in order to be able to develop new ideas out of the box and remain agile without the constraints which are typical in large organizations. At the same time, Embraer-X is never too far away from the group’s other units, so that the most promising ideas can benefit from their resources.
The separation between Embraer-X and the rest of the group is, to a large degree, also physical.
Embraer-X is not headquartered in Brazil or in Florida, the US state where Embraer has a very significant footprint, but in San Francisco. The Bay Area location allows Embraer-X to be closer to the world’s prime focus of innovation and it is complemented by other centers in Boston, a city known as well for its top-rate universities and research centers, and in The Netherlands, to be close to the European innovation scene.
The best known and most high-profile project to have so far come out of the Embraer-X foundry is EVE Air Mobility, an eVTOL developer, which was spun off and listed in the New York Stock Exchange in 2022, with Embraer remaining to this date its largest shareholder.
The eVTOL market still presents quite a few incognita in, both, the commercial and operational fronts, with a number of major OEMs such as Airbus and Hyundai, having paused their respective advanced air mobility programs in 2025. EVE, however, and despite some delays in its development schedule, remains committed to launching its eVTOL flight testing program in 2026.
While Moczydlower expressed his pride in the key role Embraer-X played in the launch of EVE Air Mobility, he remarked this is now an independent business which is no longer under his umbrella. Embraer-X, however, keeps funneling a stream of new ideas into the group’s core divisions.
Embraer-X is currently focusing its efforts on six main fields of research.
The first one of these to be enumerated by Moczydlower is sustainability, with “Energia” as its flagship project. Energia is a family aircraft concepts, unveiled in 2021, which would be powered by novel propulsion technologies, ranging from fully electric to hydrogen fuel cell to hybrid, as its flagship project.
Embraer-X is also active in five other areas: autonomous systems, advanced manufacturing, passenger experience, aviation-applied artificial intelligence (AI) and airframe competitiveness, which is basically research related to enhanced aerodynamics.
Some of the work done in these areas is only disclosed ex-post or when it is at a considerable stage of development. For example, earlier in 2025, Embraer revealed a research program called New Technologies Demonstrator Platform (NTDP) through which it had been testing a new composites wing.
Other projects, such as those relating to additive manufacturing, avionics or air traffic management systems, may not be as eye-catching as the EVE eVTOL or the Energia family, but play an important role in sustainaing Embraer’s technological edge.
In this regard, it is worth highlighting that despite being much smaller than the two dominant commercial aircraft manufacturers, the Brazilian manufacturer is often praised by industry insiders, on account of its technical expertise and track record in delivering competitive products to the market.
A passionate of the Star Wars movie series, Moczydlower likes to quote the Yoda, one of the saga’s key characters when describing his role atop Embraer-X.
“You must unlearn part of what you have learned and let go of some of your beliefs to be able to move forward!” he told the audience at the Future Aero Festival.
