Blue Thunder - Yamaha's Airplane Engine

Along with a Japanese partner, Yamaha built a small plane concept to test the realities of utilizing the company’s small engines to power aviation initiatives. It isn’t specified as to what exactly the engine is but from the photo provided by the press release it does look a lot like the parallel twin the powers such popular bikes as the MT-07. The idea is to explore “possibilities for the commercialization of next-generation small aircraft”.

We believe this is what the marketing types call “vertical” integration. Yamaha is already in the “vertical” field as the company builds drone helicopters that can do things like spray crops and surveil stuff.