10:45 AM PDT · September 26, 2025
A wider leadership shake-up at Hyundai’s electric air taxi startup Supernal is underway just a few weeks after it paused work on its vehicle program and its CEO and CTO left, TechCrunch has learned.
Supernal’s chief strategy officer, Jaeyong Song, and chief safety officer, Tracy Lamb, are no longer with the company, the startup confirmed Friday. Lina Yang, the chief of staff to Supernal’s recently departed CEO, Jaiwon Shin, is also out. (Yang had previously served as Supernal’s “Head of Intelligent Systems” until April 2025.)
“As we transition to new leadership, we have taken the opportunity to strategically review our program’s progress and next steps to ensure alignment with our long-term goals,” the startup said in a statement to TechCrunch.
Supernal said owner Hyundai Motor Group “remains strongly committed to its AAM [advanced air mobility] business.”
Song’s departure is particularly notable given that he spent three years serving as the vice president of Hyundai’s AAM group before taking over the chief strategy officer role at Supernal in 2023. (Supernal was spun out of AAM in 2021.) Song has been employed by the larger Hyundai-Kia group since 2014. Lamb, meanwhile, has a long history as a commercial pilot and safety executive in the aerospace industry. Song didn’t immediately responded to a request for comment. Lamb declined to comment.
It’s been a tough year for Supernal. That startup ended 2024 by abruptly winding down its new headquarters in Washington, D.C., asTechCrunch previously reported. While Supernal finally pulled off its first test flight in March, itlaid off dozensof employees just a few months later. By early September, the startup began an executive shake-up and paused the air taxi program.
This is happening at a crucial moment for the nascent electric vertical takeoff and landing industry. Some players are securing investment and new partnerships ahead of planned commercial launches (all while the regulatory scheme gets increasingly favorable in the U.S.), while others are going out of business.
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Aria Alamalhodaei covers the space and defense industries at TechCrunch. Previously, she covered the public utilities and the power grid for California Energy Markets. You can also find her work at MIT’s Undark Magazine, The Verge, and Discover Magazine. She received an MA in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Aria is based in Austin, Texas.
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Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing [email protected] or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal.