Learning to fly: Eleven years after being founded Elixir Aircraft is breaking into US market

A fishing port and centre for sailing that served as a 17th century departure point for French settlers to the New World and Second World War U-Boat base, La Rochelle has long been a city of the sea rather than the air.

However, just over a decade after establishing their business at the local airport and four years after delivering their first certificated aircraft, the three founders of Elixir Aircraft are well on their way to putting La Rochelle on the general aviation map.

The company will today at the show provide an update on recent European orders and unveil a rebranded version of their two-seat trainer, called the Elixir+. Elixir Aircraft will also outline progress towards the certification of instrument flight rules (IFR) and 140hp turbo variants.

With close to 60 examples of its 100hp Rotax 912is-powered training/recreational aircraft in service with European customers, the start-up is also set to break into the world’s biggest GA market after securing US Federal Aviation Administration Part 23 certification during the EAA AirVenture show in Oshkosh last July.

The USA represents about two-thirds of all GA deliveries and dominates the ab initio flying school market, so cracking it has been a major goal. Elixir claims to have around 250 “pre-orders” there, but in January it announced its first firm order, with Sarasota, Florida-based flight school Cirrus Aviation committing to 10.

Two of these – together with an aircraft for another training college, Sierra Charlie Aviation in Scottsdale, Arizona – will be delivered in June, establishing Elixir’s transatlantic presence. Other shipments will follow towards the end of the year.

Elixir plans to partner with its initial customer there to establish a parts support centre in Sarasota, explains Cyril Champenois, head of sales and marketing and one of the trio of founders.

That will be followed by a second hangar housing a reassembly facility by the end of the year, with aircraft kits shipped, two per 40ft container, to Florida and the Rotax engine transported separately directly from Austria.

“The USA is a hugely significant market for us,” says Champenois, who says the company will begin hiring up to 50 staff in Sarasota this summer. “The average size of any order there is 10 aircraft. In Europe it is just four.”

Its home continent, however, remains a buoyant market for Elixir, with flying schools in recent years replacing flying clubs and private owners as the company’s main customers.

One of its first significant orders, shortly after the aircraft received European approval in 2020, was from Airbus Flight Academy Europe, based in Angouleme, southwest France. It received its first four of eight aircraft in December 2023.

A breakthrough came at the 2025 Paris air show when French national civil aviation school ENAC announced it was buying 30 Elixir aircraft to replace its ageing fleet of Socata trainers. The aircraft will be delivered to the Toulouse-based organisation this year and next.

Recent customers include Omni Aviation Training Centre in Cascais, Portugal, which has committed to seven Elixir aircraft, and Egnatia Aviation, based at Kavala-Amygdaleon airport in Greece, which placed an order for 12 units at last year’s Aero Friedrichshafen, with deliveries completing this year.

To meet its backlog of orders, Elixir is ramping up production at its La Rochelle factory. After producing 13 aircraft in the last financial year to June 2025, Champenois expects that to double in the current financial year, with 16 shipped in the first six months. “We want to go to three, four, maybe five per month,” he says.

Although none of Elixir’s founders are from La Rochelle, the business’s back story combines maritime and aviation. Arthur Leopold Leger, who came up with the idea of designing a “fourth generation” Part 23 aircraft in France, had grown up in Brittany, where he was a keen sailor, taking part in races.

However, his father was a flight instructor and Leger also grew up with light aircraft; he achieved his pilot’s licence shortly after his 16^th birthday. He decided that the GA industry was not developing as quickly as the racing yacht business, where investment in areas such as advanced composites was driving innovation.

Although he and Champenois met while studying aerospace engineering at Kingston University near London, their careers took different paths: Leger working for kit plane manufacturer Dyn’Aero in Dijon and Champenois as a sales manager for design software specialist Dassault Systemes.

After Dyn’Aero collapsed in the financial crisis, and an attempt to establish own yacht racing team that ended when he nearly drowned in an incident during a competition in 2013, Leger got in touch with Champenois and another former colleague, Nicolas Mahuet, to see if they would join him in establishing Elixir.

Existing on homemade pasta and not paying themselves salaries, the three pooled their savings – about €50,000 ($59,000) – and raised a further €300,000 from local investors to build a prototype, which they flew in August 2017.

Using their contacts in flying clubs around France, they generated around 40 deposits from potential customers which, although they were in escrow accounts, gave the banks faith to lend more money, recalls Champenois.

Able to recruit three or four staff, they developed flight test examples and secured European Union Safety Agency certification just as the pandemic was shutting down aviation – and much of the rest of the economy – in March 2020. They delivered their first aircraft – to a local aero club – in February 2022.

From working in a shed with a handful of staff in the pre-Covid years, Elixir now employs 225 at two facilities in La Rochelle. With an 18-month production backlog of around 60 aircraft, and a more than €40 million in new subsidies and development funding, the business is on a sound financial footing, says Champenois.

Elixir uses a technology derived from competition sailing called carbon oneshot to create composite panels and has its own composite production facility in La Rochelle, opened in late 2021. The airframe is built from just nine parts, which the company says enhances safety by reducing failures and simplifies maintenance.

The next priorities are certificating the IFR variant and a more powerful version with a 915iS engine, as well as looking at establishing a larger, 10,000sq m (108,000sq ft) factory at the airport, bringing the current rather space-constrained production operation under one roof.

Getting the timing right – creating space for growth without tying up capital that could be spent on the product – is crucial. “Industrialisation is the hardest bit,” admits Champenois. “We have to make sure we are 100% full here first so the question is when we do it.”

The company plans to pitch the Elixir+ as an aircraft for flying clubs, with a simpler sibling, the Elixir Initial, with single-screen avionics, for flying clubs.  It hopes to achieve IFR certification and approval for the 140hp version next year.

Also on the gameplan is expansion eastwards, with demand for airline pilots in India and Southeast Asia driving the opening of flying schools. Champenois admits that as a young company setting up sales and marketing organisations in these markets will be tricky, but events such as Aero, with its international audience, help.

As an emerging French GA champion, Champenois also hopes the country’s powerful diplomatic influence might also aid those efforts. “Airbus and Dassault are strong in many of these countries,” he says. “We hope it can open some doors.”