Burying the Engines in the Wing Compressed Air Thrusters That Add Lift While They Push

This application covers an aircraft whose main wings have a row of recesses cut into their upper surface, each one housing an ejector, a nozzle-like thruster fed with compressed air through conduits running inside the wing. The applicant is Jetoptera, a Seattle-area aviation startup building vertical and short takeoff aircraft around what it calls a Fluidic Propulsive System, and the design turns the wing itself into part of the engine.

The Problem

The background section starts with the basic bargain of wing design. Lift depends on airflow and geometry, and designers want to maximise it with wings that stay compact and light. In practice, the specification notes, wings keep growing larger for efficiency and lean on composite construction just to keep the weight in check.

The deeper waste, as the document tells it, is what happens behind the engines. In most aircraft the jet efflux, the fast-moving stream a propulsion system leaves behind, still carries energy that nobody uses. You cannot simply point it at an airfoil to harvest lift. A turbojet’s exhaust runs around 1000 degrees Celsius, hot enough to rule out placing a wing surface in it. A turbofan leaves a swirling, rotating mixture with a hot core that would take miles, not inches, to mix and settle. Large turboprops churn out propeller-sized cylinders of rotating downwash that are equally hard to exploit. In every case, part of the kinetic energy simply spills into the sky.

What This Invention Does

Claim 1 describes an aircraft with a fuselage and at least one primary wing whose upper surface has multiple recesses spaced along its span. A source of compressed fluid on the fuselage feeds those recesses through at least one conduit, and each recess holds an ejector that receives the compressed air. Critically, each recess is shaped so that the wing surface fore and aft of its ejector still works as an aerodynamic surface, so the thrusters sit flush in the wing rather than hanging off it.

The ejector is the key component. Like the classic injector or ejector pump, it uses a small flow of pressurised air to entrain a much larger flow of ambient air, and the specification cites a thrust augmentation of around 2.0, roughly double the thrust the compressed air would give on its own. Because an ejector can be made non-round, it can be shaped like the upper surface of an airfoil and embedded into the wing.

Embedding it there pays twice. The ejector inlets swallow the sluggish boundary layer forming on the wing’s upper surface, and the fast sheet of air they blow across the trailing edge behaves like a blown flap, energising the flow so the wing can fly at aggressive angles of attack without stalling. The specification claims at least 1.5 times the lift of the bare wing, gives worked examples where efflux moving 125 percent faster than the aircraft yields more than 50 percent extra lift on the blown portion, and says the combination enables STOL performance beyond what separate systems manage. In the illustrated embodiment a gas turbine and compressor distribute air through the wing interior, the aircraft carries forward canard wings and a tail fin, and the ejectors shrink progressively from wing root to tip.

Key Features

• Thrusters recessed into the wing’s upper surface. Multiple ejectors sit in spanwise recesses formed in the primary wing, with the recess surfaces continuing to work aerodynamically fore and aft of each unit.
• One air source, many ejectors. A gas turbine and compressor on the fuselage feed compressed air through conduits inside the wing to every ejector at once, a distributed propulsion layout with a single prime mover.
• Thrust roughly doubled by entrainment. Each ejector uses the pressurised flow to drag in ambient air, citing an augmentation ratio of about 2.0 over the bare thrust of the compressed air.
• Lift boosted by blowing the wing. The ejector efflux washes the trailing surface behind it, with the specification claiming at least 1.5 times the lift of an unblown wing of the same span.
• Boundary layer ingestion built in. Ejector inlets are placed along the span to swallow the boundary layer off the upper surface, cutting drag while feeding the thrusters.
• Graded ejector sizes. In the illustrated embodiment the ejectors get progressively smaller from the fuselage out to the wing tips, matching thrust distribution to the wing.

Who Is Behind It

Jetoptera, Inc. is a propulsion, drone and aerial mobility startup developing V/STOL aircraft around its trademarked Fluidic Propulsive System, bladeless-looking thruster pods that it promotes as faster, simpler, quieter and more compact than propellers or ducted fans. The sole named inventor, Andrei Evulet, is the company’s chief executive and chief technology officer, an aerospace engineer who spent years across GE Global Research, GE Oil and Gas and GE Aviation, where he was Technology Maturation Leader for the GE9X engine, the powerplant of the Boeing 777X.

The priority chain is a single clean line. This application is a divisional of Australian application 2020268690, the national phase of PCT/US2020/014459 filed on 21 January 2020, which claims priority from United States provisional application 62/794,464 filed on 18 January 2019.

Why It Matters

Distributed propulsion is one of the live questions in aviation right now, with electric VTOL developers scattering rotors across airframes to get vertical lift. Jetoptera’s answer is different: keep one engine, pipe its compressed air around the airframe, and let flush-mounted ejectors do the pushing. Blowing a wing for extra lift is an old and proven idea, but embedding the blower inside the wing so the recess itself is the nacelle is the arrangement this application claims.

The filing strategy suggests a family the company intends to keep working. A 2019 priority date carried through a PCT filing, an Australian national phase and now a divisional in 2026 keeps claim scope in play in Australia for the heart of the company’s technology, and for a startup whose value is largely its patent estate, a pending application it can still shape is a strategic asset in its own right.

Related Concepts

• VTOL – the vertical takeoff capability Jetoptera builds its aircraft concepts around.
• Coanda effect – the tendency of a jet to follow a curved surface, the physics behind blown lift surfaces.
• Blown flap – the established lift augmentation technique the embedded ejectors echo.
• Boundary layer suction – the drag reduction family that ingesting the wing’s boundary layer belongs to.
• Lift (force) – the aerodynamic force the ejector efflux is recruited to increase.
• AFWERX – the US Air Force innovation arm that has publicly backed high speed VTOL concept work of this kind.

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AU 2026202102 was published in the Australian Official Journal of Patents on 9 April 2026 and is open for public inspection. Patent applications represent inventions that are sought to be protected and do not necessarily reflect commercially available products.