Instead of trying to make the aircraft long and mostly cylindrical like most commercial and business jets, the 500L comes in an unusual teardrop form. With a fairly fat and blunt nose and a pointy tail, the fuselage comes out to a nearly perfect aerodynamic shape. With sharp wings and tail, landing gear that folds away cleanly inside the plane’s shape, and even the engine tucked neatly away, the plane cuts through the sky a lot more easily than other planes.

While not mentioned on Otto’s website, it appears that even the propeller is helping minimize drag. By pulling air from where the teardrop shape comes together in the rear, the propeller may even be sucking on the boundary layer like an experimental NASA design I’ve written about before, helping further reduce drag.

The air intakes for the engine, on the other hand, are spaced out from the skin of the teardrop a bit, likely because boundary layers are very unpredictable sources of air for a combustion engine, whether it’s a turbine or a piston engine. //

To take better advantage of this aerodynamically clean design, Otto Aviation chose to use RED Aircraft GmbH’s AO3 engine. Like a jet engine, it runs on Jet-A fuel (basically kerosene), but it’s a turbocharged 12-cylinder piston engine. This helps reduce operation costs, as Jet-A’s economics of scale makes it cheaper to purchase and it’s more widely available. Like a jet, it’s also capable of operating at up to Flight Level 500, or 50,000 feet above sea level. But, despite similar performance, it’s designed to use only 50% of the fuel of a comparable jet engine.