Mikaël Cardinal

Canada

 

From Leadership Profile: Vertiflite, September/October 2026
MIKAËL CARDINAL: ART IN MOTION

Growing up in Quebec City, Canada, Mikaël Cardinal remembers being fascinated by the shapes and possibilities of aircraft. The AV-8B Harrier particularly captured his imagination. So did the SR-71 Blackbird, the Blue Angels and the Thunderbirds. By about age 10, he was drawing aircraft and trying to understand how they worked, particularly how an aircraft like the Harrier could take off and land vertically.

“I was really into learning about vertical lift propulsion,” Cardinal recalled. However, aviation was only half of the picture. Cardinal grew up in a household steeped in education, music and the arts. Homeschooled through primary and secondary school by his parents, both professional teachers, he developed a degree of independence at an early age. He studied classical piano for 15 years while simultaneously developing interests in computers, physics and science.

Music runs throughout the Cardinal family. The oldest of five children, Cardinal has siblings who pursued professional careers in classical music, including a brother who became a professional cellist with L’Orchestre symphonique de Québec and a sister who is a violinist and conductor. Cardinal ultimately chose engineering, but he never really left the artistic side behind.

“I like as much art as tech,” he said. “And for me, tech is art in some way. So, I like to bring the creative component into my daily job.”

That combination, the discipline to master something technically demanding and the creativity to imagine something that does not yet exist, would eventually become a defining feature of his career.

Finding Aviation
Cardinal’s fascination with flight was encouraged by his father, who brought him to airshows as a child. One particularly memorable experience came during Quebec City’s 400thanniversary celebration, when the Blue Angels performed at the city’s airport. Meeting the pilots afterward and hearing them speak to children about their profession left a lasting impression.

Cardinal initially gravitated toward computer science. The decisive moment came during a college industry tour that included a visit to Bombardier. He chose the Université de Sherbrooke, entering its mechanical engineering program in 2007 and specializing in aeronautics. A major attraction was Sherbrooke’s extensive cooperative education program. Rather than spending years studying engineering before encountering the profession, students alternated academic terms with placements in industry.

Within his first year, he was already exposed to working engineers, mentors and real engineering problems. It is an experience he believes more young people need today: an opportunity to discover not simply what engineering students study, but what engineers actually do.

Cardinal remained at Sherbrooke for graduate study, earning a master’s degree in mechanical engineering with an aeronautics focus. His research brought together several interests that would reappear later in his career: flight testing, modeling, control systems and uncrewed aircraft. Working from actual flight-test data, including flights in the cockpit alongside a test pilot, he developed a high-fidelity dynamic model of a fixed-wing aircraft to support development of flight-control laws for an unmanned version. He presented that work at the 2014 AIAA SciTech Forum at National Harbor, Maryland.

From Engineer to Entrepreneur
After university, Cardinal worked in Canada’s aerospace industry, including structural engineering and certification work and projects involving space and satellite systems. However, he increasingly found himself drawn toward something more entrepreneurial.

As cofounder and CEO of Zenith Altitude, Inc., based in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, Cardinal led multidisciplinary aerospace work involving aircraft design, systems integration and certification for specialized aerial operations.

Cardinal met Martine Rothblatt through their connection to the Eastern Townships and learned about her vision for combining aviation with the challenge of transporting organs for transplantation. He was immediately struck by both the ambition of the mission and Rothblatt’s way of thinking.

The attorney, entrepreneur and founder of United Therapeutics is also a musician. Cardinal recalls recognizing in Rothblatt a similar balance between artistic thinking and technical rigor. “That balance, I think, is very important when it comes to leading innovative projects,” he said.

Cardinal to another community that would become important to his career: the Vertical Flight Society. Around 2018, he attended one of the Society’s early symposia in San Francisco on electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. Cardinal remembers encountering figures including then-VFS Executive Director Mike Hirschberg, Mark Moore, John Piasecki and others working at the forefront of the emerging eVTOL movement. “All the pioneers were there,” he recalled.

Engineering With a Mission
In June 2018, Cardinal joined United Therapeutics to lead its aviation efforts with a growing network of aerospace partners. Their objective, however, went beyond simple aircraft development.

United Therapeutics is pursuing aviation as part of a much larger effort to transform organ transplantation. Donated organs are extraordinarily time-sensitive cargo, and conventional transportation can introduce delays, logistical complications and dependence on ground transportation between airports and hospitals. The company’s vision is an integrated network in which new aviation technologies can move organs quickly, reliably and directly between where they are needed (see “Powered by Purpose: Unither’s Project Proticity,” page 18 ).

That lifesaving mission gave Cardinal and his team a broad set of notes to play. Their work has ranged across remotely pilotedaircraft systems, autonomous operations, electric vertical flight and partnerships with companies including BETA Technologies. In September 2021, the team achieved a historic milestone when donor lungs were transported by remotely piloted aerial systems for transplantation, demonstrating that autonomous aircraft could become part of a real-world organ transportation system.

Art in Execution
Today, Cardinal is the vice president of program management and organ delivery systems at Unither Bioélectronique, the Canadian subsidiary of United Therapeutics. From the company’s 23,000-ft2 (2,136-m2) facility in Bromont, Quebec, roughly an hour southeast of Montreal, he leads a multidisciplinary team integrating technologies intended for the next generation of organ-delivery aircraft.

Cardinal estimates that roughly 80% of his time is now devoted to maturing hydrogen-propulsion technology and developing it into a certifiable system. The remaining portion includes managing relationships with outside partners such as BETA Technologies.

The work moved dramatically from concept toward reality in March 2025, when Cardinal's team successfully flew a piloted hydrogen-powered helicopter, a world first and the subject of this issue’s feature and cover story.

The harder task is execution: transforming an experimental propulsion system into an aircraft system that can be certified, operated reliably and ultimately entrusted with missions in which time can literally mean life or death. Cardinal describes Unither’s role as both system integrator and applicant to the regulator, with the team now working closely on safety and certification.

That distinction says something important about Cardinal’s approach to innovation. Creativity may produce the idea, but engineering turns the idea into something useful.

His Bromont operation reflects that philosophy. A team of roughly a dozen people works primarily on systems integration, supported by capabilities spanning flight safety and airworthiness. Outside Cardinal’s office, with its view across the Eastern Townships toward the nearby airport, the physical infrastructure for the next phase of hydrogen flight is taking shape.

It is a long way from a boy in Quebec City sketching a Harrier. And yet, perhaps not as far as it first appears.

The Creative Engineer
Engineering is sometimes presented to young people as a world of equations, requirements and rigid analytical processes. Cardinal’s career offers a different picture. Technical rigor matters enormously, particularly when the objective is a certifiable aircraft carrying lifesaving cargo, but so does imagination.

The two are not in direct opposition. Cardinal believes his ability to move between them is one of his strengths. Whetherdeveloping an autonomous organ-delivery system, integrating an electric aircraft or attempting to make hydrogen propulsion practical for rotorcraft, his work begins with imagining a different way something might be done and then assembling the people, technology and processes required to make it real.

It is one reason he continues to value the role of organizations such as VFS and has expressed interest in becoming more involved with the Society’s Montreal-Ottawa Chapter. Professional communities, he believes, can connect students with the engineers actually doing the work and show them the range of careers available within aerospace.

In 2025, Cardinal was recognized among the National Business Aviation Association’s Top 40 Under 40 in Innovation and Technology, yet his career is still very much in motion. The aircraft he once drew have given way to aircraft he can help create. The young pianist who spent years learning that complicated works are built note by note now leads teams attempting something similarly difficult: taking technologies that exist at the edge of possibility and methodically turning them into systems that can fly.

For Cardinal, there has never been much separation between those worlds. Technology can be analytical. It can be disciplined. It can be certified and tested and reduced to requirements. But in the hands of someone willing to imagine what comes next, it can also be art.