SkyZero Podcast on Electric and Hybrid Electric Aviation

Bri O'Neill spends her days making sure the sky stays boring in the best possible way. She's an ASTM F-38 standards author and founder of Altimitus, helping UAS, the industry, turn P108 from a proposed rule into safe everyday operations. If you didn't know what all of those words meant, don't worry, we're gonna talk about it. Bri is also our guest today on the skyzero.io podcast. Bri, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you so much for having me, Kyle. It's great to be here. how did you get into the role? Like how did you start doing what you're doing? And what is that? Tell us more about you. so I'm a UAS systems engineer. this is how I've spent my career. started in the defense space working in battlefield radar, doing digital signal processing to detect drones, trying to retrofit really old radars that were used in the battlefield for large, fast, high altitude things to now Mm. find what we call low, slow, small or drones. so that was when I figured out what the radar signature of a drone looks like. and from there Mm. I went on to start developing drone platforms both in defense and commercial spaces. And as I moved from the defense to commercial space, the biggest challenge that I saw was integration into the NAS and the standards required in order to do that. So almost a decade ago, I was putting kind of the first tiny little Fordham radar onto the front of a scanny goal, seeing if we could do detect and avoid forward-facing. pretty beautifully but also the technology has come a long ways. And then on the standard side, trying to map that to like the C and Avoid advisory circular. How are we actually going to say that a radar counts as C and avoid when you don't have a pilot up there? Right, right, right, right. There's no one to see. Yeah. right, exactly. So I went from you know working on transitioning defense platforms to commercial platforms by enhancing those safety critical technologies like DAA or Detect and avoid Command and Control or C2 links, really to be able to fly beyond the visual line of sight of the operator. I also spent some time kind of diving deep into the technologies used for command and control, and hopefully eventually they will be used for things like electronic conspicuity that can be used for detect and avoid. And that was cellular, like terrestrial networks. So I worked with Verizon for a while on a program to test drones using the cellular network as the command and control link. Today, most drones that are flying Beyond Visual Line of Site are using cellular, and it's pretty reliable. robust, especially if you've got more than one carrier in there, more than one SIM card, or if you're using an electronic SIM. But at the time we were really just trying to figure out how does the existing terrestrial network perform at altitude. the results were actually really promising and that's why so many drones fly over cellular today. Cool. so since then been working on presenting to the FAA on means of compliance for uncrewed aircraft. so similarly the sea and avoid requirement, what are we gonna do about that in the standards world? getting all the way into things like cybersecurity and how do we secure the systems that don't have a pilot on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. That's such a big s I I feel like uncovered part of it that people don't spend enough time on. the the more computers we put in these things, the more possible that becomes. Okay. when I I think about radar systems, they they normally sort of exclude the you know, the runways that they serve. And that's on purpose so that operators can like see what's coming at them. But what else is different when you're trying to reconfigure a radar to see low small and slow? I was on the digital signal processing side. So I was actually trying to figure out in our algorithms what tracks are really tracks that we're interested in and what aren't. And the hardware for the and software for these types of systems was developed based on intercontinental ballistic missiles. so I was really looking for an ICBM type signature, which is high in the higher in the sky, you know, not not gonna be within the trees or anything. it's gonna be moving really quickly because we're expecting to have to react to it really quickly. and then it's gonna move, yeah, really fast. because again, you wanna get there really quickly. and then they're large. That that's the other thing, is that you know, ICBMs or even Aircraft that you don't want to be in your space, then they're pretty large. and so as I wrote those filters, what I was looking for was exclude everything that's low down, because what's low down are helicopters. I wasn't really looking for helicopters. radar signature-wise, like a wind blowing through the trees or a like a big cloud formation, you know, those are the types of things that I want to be able to exclude so that I don't think that those are, you know, fast moving targets. But when you try to put slow moving targets that are low to the ground and small, they end up looking a lot like birds. Or moving leaves. And so getting more granular in how we analyze those radar signatures, it came down to things like studying how birds fly on thermals and seeing if we wow. could come up with ways to say that pattern looks a lot like a thermal. And I know that drones do not have that type of sensing to be able to fly on thermals. And so if we could see flocks of birds or even individual birds that were flying in a pattern that looked like a thermal, it would look really different than a drone's pattern. wow, wow, wow, wow. Okay, right. I hadn't I hadn't thought of that. But yeah, you're gonna have to filter out leaves too while you're at it. Like it's it's gonna be Right. all of the things, not to mention birds. Okay, cool. and this eventually brings you the other one that you okay, so UAS, which is uncrewed aviation systems and the NAS, right? So that is the national aviation system, airspace system, something? Go ahead. Yeah, yeah, yep, absolutely. Yep, I think of it as the Okay, cool. you know, in in my background it's really been in the US, but really any civil aviation authority, what your national airspace is, is the space that is regulated where you have to follow rules. I think they might call it like ATM air traffic management and other parts of the world. But yeah, that same concept. Okay, cool. And that brings us to Altimetis So tell me about that. Like what does Altimetis do? what's your role there? tell us more about how that be you becoming like an entrepreneur and a business leader, in in and amongst all the other hats that you're wearing. Tell us about that transition. Absolutely, Kyle. So as I mentioned, I've been spending time thinking about what drones flying beyond line of sight of the operator looks like in the commercial space for over a decade. So it's been about a decade since Part 107 came out, which allows commercial operators to operate in the national airspace in the US, but it does require waivers in order to fly beyond visual line of sight, over people at night, moving vehicles, that kind of thing. And so what really inspired me to start Altimidus was the release of the Proposed rulemaking for part 108 of BV LOS rule. I had been part of BVLOS ARC years prior, been part of remote ID. So been thinking about how to scale these technologies for a while. And then to see that validation from the regulator that the regulatory pathway is here, I knew there'd be a need. That's the thing, the technologies that have been developed for part 107, where there has been commercial viability for drones in the US, a lot of those technologies aren't going to scale. going require hardware changes, network changes, software changes, and some of those changes are deep in the architecture. So for example, a lot of folks who are using these systems, they're using open source software for flight controllers and for ground control stations, which are really great ways to design and test a new drone. they're not built for one to many. They're not built for beyond visual line of sight. And when I Mm. say that, I can get kind of granular about how how how deeply I mean that in that, for example, traditional RF links, right, they're line of sight. And so really what you're depending on is you know over-the-air waves. But now beyond visual line of sight, you're worrying about not just over-the-air waves, but then also you know wide area network. concerns. Right. Right. And and the reason that that matters is that even under the Part 108 requirement, you do still have to be able to communicate with the ground. We can't just throw your aircraft up there and say have a nice life and then I'll see you when you land. You have to maintain that connectivity and that connectivity requires software and hardware. Got I got I got it. Okay. So Altimetis is helping clients make these shifts. But also, so what's 107 versus 108? Like, help me understand in in the short version, but like I guess 108 is the new one or something, like help help. readers and I understand that better. Absolutely, absolutely. So as I mentioned, Part 108 is really written for line of sight, one-to-one commercial operations. So think like early days when this was used for like film and television or for like real estate photography. Those are the examples I can think of that go kind of far back. So how 107 started was, you know, there really wasn't a legal framework to fly your drone and make money while you do it. And Yeah. so that's what Part 107 was for. So it has a license approach. so you have to get a Part 107 license. there are requirements associated with that. Later on, the remote ID rules got rolled in as well. So now, you know, to make money with your drone, you not only have to have your Part 107 license, but you have to, you know, comply with some technical requirements. and then if you want to fly beyond visual line of sight, you need a waiver. And there's a bit of a maze to get through a waiver with Yeah. Right. the regulator because those are all you know reviewed and approved onesie twosie. and so if you need one of those for every BVLOS flight that you're gonna do versus wow, wow, wow, wow. Right. going like a route for a COA. You know, there have been waivers that are, location-independent waivers that have to do with the type of, for example, infrastructure inspection. Okay. but still it's a whole, it's a whole market today that just waivers. there's a lot of market today for accomplishing waivers, doing the content with the FAA to make sure that you're going to, you know, be allowed to fly in that space. The FAA staffs for that. And frankly, it's just not scalable at the scale that, Okay. you know, technology is gonna be able to keep up. So unlike something like general aviation where you, key up and talk to a controller and file a flight plan and maybe you did it in foreflight ahead of time, in in this world you're literally applying for waivers like before you take off. and it sounds like you're hinting at there's some concept of like, I'm I do pipeline inspections or I do you know transmission line inspections. So maybe I can get like a longer term waiver. I think you said location independent, but how like how and when we don't we got I don't want to dive too deep, but but help us understand these waivers a little bit. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So the waivers that I've seen, some of them are as small as location dependent. So if you're doing routine inspections of like a bridge, and when your aircraft is gonna go underneath the bridge and no humans can see it, you're no longer flying line of sight. And so you need a waiver Right. to do that under part 107. you don't necessarily and if you're gonna do you know, repeatedly, then the waiver application would be, you know, we're gonna do it this many times a year. At that Wow. point you probably have to talk about, you know, what kind of weather we are gonna fly in versus what weather we're not gonna fly in, if you're gonna do it year-round. so be as small as that and then the waivers that can apply for operations that are location independent they often have to do with the use case. So the example I'll I'll mention is the utility inspection. I've seen waivers there that are location independent that will focus really on, safety. How do you know that there's not gonna be air and ground risk in that area? And utility companies really have an advantage here because they can use what's called shielding. so they'll essentially say, I'm gonna fly within a couple hundred feet of my wires. No should be flying there anyways because that's pretty unsafe to be flying right Okay. Right. next to power lines. And then also I have right of way underneath the power lines. So no one should be having their picnic right underneath my power line. I'm not going to have a ground risk concern. Right. Right. So really the liability goes back onto the operator and the utility company of if I ruin anyone's day it's going to be my own. Got it. that gets nuanced though, because a lot of utility lines are also mixed with agriculture. And agriculture has not only drone use cases, but obviously crewed aircraft use cases. And so that's the one that scares me most about those types of waivers that I'm talking about, is that you know I a lot of those are not equipped. So they don't have ADSB out in, a crop duster, for example. That's Mm. Right, right, right, right. exactly the type of risk that is not holistically addressed by Part 107 waivers today. Got it. Okay. So one eight is the replacement then? And it sounds like it's like but by the context I'm picking up its proposed rule right now. Like we're not yet there, I guess. That's right, that's right. In the United States, part one eight is a notice of proposed rulemaking. and it was released mid-year last year, and the intent is to have the final rule really any day now. would have expected it last month, but yeah, hang hanging on for that. And and what that will allow are routine BVLOS fights and a route for becoming an operator. so you'll need Okay. to kind of declare that you're going to be a part part 108 operator and meet all the requirements required thereof. It really puts the responsibility on the organization as an operator as opposed to an individual pilot, which you know in in aviation philosophy that's a really big change because a lot I'll Yeah. I'll kind of contrast it with mosaic rules. so for light sport aircraft in the United States, recent rules can't out and one of their requirements is that in order to avoid damage to people or property on the ground, the operator is required to have visual sight of where they would land in case of emergency at all times. Mm. Mm-hmm. So if you're flying in a space where it's like I don't really have an out here, that's on the pilot, it's on a person. Right, right. That's a that's really different than putting that requirement on a system. Right. But I guess that makes sense though. Like when we talked to Bobby Healy of Mana in in the last episode, like we were talking about fleets of these things and and I don't think Bobby intends to have like for seventy five drones, seventy five pilots. I I think we intend to have the system fly them. So right, that okay, so that is a big change then that we're talking about, but it enables a lot at the same time, so worth it. Totally worth it because the technology, some of them enabling technology has been around for a while, some of it's still being developed, and a lot of it really needs to be tested at scale. Got it. Right. Right. And that brings us back to Altimetis, like testing that at scale. Nice. Okay. Cool. when we think about safety it sounds like that would have been a lot of what's in one eight, and thinking about what makes it safe. How do you do beyond visual line of sight, BVLOS, operations, especially in a fleet context like we're talking about where there's no individual pilot responsible. So what does it look like? How do you go about ensuring safety in a situation like that? How do you avoid the crop duster? How do you avoid a bird? How do you like how do you avoid yeah, what does safety look like? Absolutely. There's two sections of part 108 that I think I'll reference to give the flavor of what it describes. The first one is a concept called simplified user interactions. So this is a requirement in part 108 that essentially the operator shouldn't be able to crash the airplane. Okay. And so this has been interpreted in standards body as put simply no stick to servo. Okay. Okay. right, which means you know, if if you're if you're sitting in front in an operations center and you're commanding a drone, this would be the difference between using a literal hand controller and and pointing and clicking on a user interface, on a graphical user interface to say go here. so under part 108, that hand controller requirement, it doesn't explicitly say no hand controllers and it doesn't explicitly say no stick to servo. that interpretation is for the industry. Okay. Okay. Yep. to document and require to say this is what we think simplified user interaction means. Got it. Okay, so I see. So it doesn't necessarily say that you can't specifically control it. But I guess the assumption there is if you can let any one human control a BVLOS drone which is like maybe two kilometers away and so on, then you know, they and they try to start connecting it. they might be dealing with information which is, you know, a couple of seconds behind and they might, you know is that sort of the why behind it? that that taking control over a specific drone mid flight is a bad idea because of the the the ability to sense or what's the why behind it? I my my interpretation is the why behind it really has to do with one that it's beyond visual line of sight and you can't see it. Yeah, yeah. therefore doing stick-to-servo type stuff that you would do with an aircraft that you're actually looking at in the sky is pretty different. and the other one is one to many, is that this rule is really intended so that you're not just operating one aircraft at a time. You can operating be operating tens of aircraft, a hundred aircraft at a time. Right. Yep. And so if you have stick to servo capabilities with a hundred aircraft at a time, the amount of concentration that it takes the operator to do stick to servo, even with just one, Right. Right. it it doesn't Okay, so this simplified user interaction on some level is about workload and about making sure that the the the device itself, the aircraft, ha UAS system has enough smarts on board to be able to control itself, I guess. Am I hitting it now? You said it so beautifully, Kyle, better than I could have said it, because your interpretation is exactly where we have kind of landed in the standards groups, is that Okay. what that requirement of simplified user action action simplified user interaction actually drives is the brain on the aircraft or the flight controller or autopilot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it kind of forces you to be able to do it. There's no it's probably good enough. no, it it really has to be good enough and and and not depend on the human. when we talk about these kinds of safety implications. Does this drive anything else? I mean, we've talked a little bit about how, you know, operators shouldn't be able to crash, no stick to servo. okay, so that kind of gets like to piloting and and that aspect. What about other aspects of sort of the business of flight? what else might change? Yeah, so that that's the other area of part 108 that I'm really interested in right now. and that's the that's requirements around no probable failures shall result in a hazard. Okay. So that's regulatory text. there's a decent amount of preamble text in the Part 108 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that describes the philosophy behind what what is considered probable and what is considered a hazard. but that's that's the requirement that is being kind of interpreted in industry standards bodies to say how do you determine what your hazards are? How do you determine whether they're probable, and then how Mm-hmm. do you show that you don't have a probable failure that's going to lead to a hazard? Right. Right. And that's pretty Part 108 specific, because that's how that language is written. There is an analogy here to Transport Canada. So Transport Canada, section 922 for remotely piloted aircraft systems, they talk about so not only no probable failure, but no single point of failure. Mm, okay. and I love that one because you know mixed common cause type failures can become probable if they're common, but you know, a single point might not necessarily drive it. not exactly how the the rules are written for part 108, but I think a really good safety philosophy to follow that single points of failure are exactly that. They're single points. that means you don't have a mitigation. Right. So this shapes the design of the aircraft, and the way that we have to think about power plant and steering abilities and and everything else. but also th that word hazard, you know, like wha how how might we predict what hazards we might be able to cause? Like, does that actually start to get into the context we're flying in, or is that mostly about the aircraft itself? It it's really both, Kyle. And actually there's even a third degree to it, which is that which regulation you're applying to. so I kind of Mm. think of three inputs when we're doing this type of analysis. One is the architecture of the aircraft. one is the concept of operations. Where are you flying? What kind of commission are you going to do? And then finally the regulatory approach. So what rule are you going to fly under? For example, Mm. it's not guaranteed that part 107 waivers won't be allowed after part 108 is out. So there could be operations that you still do BVLOS, but under Part 107 with a waiver. Those regulations are going to be really different than complying with Part 108. Got it. Okay. Interesting. when you and I talked before, you mentioned that there was an interesting connection between all of this and insurance. So help our help our audience understand that. Like what's what's the change there? Yeah, absolutely, Kyle. So I I came to this this topic because I've been helping, large enterprises who are using drones make procurement decisions. That's really the position that they're in right now. If you've seen US regulations around supplier management and foreign supplies, there are a lot of new rules to step around. I won't go in depth on those today because they're they're quite complex. But the idea is that your supply chain really matters, especially if you're going to be Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. spending taxpayer dollars. So for example, federal funding, you can't buy your drone from certain countries or your drone equipment from certain countries. And so that's really got kind of the spotlight in the supplier management and procurement activities. At these organizations who frankly are spending tens of millions of dollars on this type of equipment right now. And I think that's only going to continue to increase as these rules, these rules come out. And so as they're making these massive purchasing decisions, one of the areas that I'm that I am focusing on is how they're going to ensure their operations and their equipment. Hm. specifically from the liability perspective. so today the way that underwriters look at insuring Part 107 operations It's a lot like traditional aviation in that it has to do with your pilot certificate. Do you have your pilot Right. certificate? Have you had it revoked? Have you gotten into trouble flying? do you have experience flying the aircraft that we're going to ensure? It's not asking questions about how many incidents has that aircraft had and how autonomous really is that aircraft. But those are going to be the questions we need to answer under Part 108. And that pilot license question, because of the simplified user interaction requirement, it will be much less relevant in how we ensure. Interesting. Yeah. Because if there are failures in these, it's not going to be an individual with a license that's held accountable, it's going to be the organization. Right, right. That's a huge change. my gosh, wow, right. So it's not about ensuring pilots anymore. Right, how do you even begin to sort of gain enough information to be able to do underwriting? Like it it seems like there'd be a lot of like statistical analysis you'd want to do and it would be really helpful to have thousands of hours of flight time and these systems are new. It's it. Like how how's this gonna work? Exactly, exactly, Kyle. So I would say there doesn't really exist a good precedent for this yet. And so one of the goals at Altimetis and but I've seen some other new market entrants look after is how do we help underwriters really understand the risk without having to do it in retrospect? So today, for example, when shopped around for my own drone insurance and then I've asked them, like, you know, you cover a hundred different airframes. How do I know Yeah. if I select between one or the other? How Going to change my premium costs, for example, or my coverage. and right now the answer is well, it's all dependent on the cost of the system, which is a really interesting question because number one, okay, yeah, that makes sense. If I'm gonna file a claim for a hundred thousand dollar product, you I should have that much coverage. but the organizations, the OEMs who are developing these are trying to figure out how to price their systems right now. right. Right. So there's sort of a chicken and egg problem going on. Exactly, exactly. We we get we get a bit of a chicken and egg problem. and then yeah, what that doesn't take into consideration and that I've asked underwriters that do this today for part one seven is well what happens if that's an aircraft that is fresh off the production line and it doesn't have any service history? Are you gonna charge a little more for that? Because now your customer is probably the test fed for for that aircraft and Right. Right. they're gonna find out how many times it crashes. And I have gotten responses of, well, you know, once we start receiving claims for a certain airframe, then we will raise rates on that airframe. Until we, you know, Mm. find out that they've done, you know, we work with the OEM, I guess, to find out if they've been able to reduce the amount of incidences or the frequency of incidences or or even the severity of their incidents. but that's really that's got some lead time in it, the lag there. my my pitch here really is I would like to see some leading indicators for what the insurance cost is going to be for UAS, especially under Part 108, that are based on their system safety assessment, which is exactly written to describe the likelihood of incidents. Right. Okay. So in a way, I wonder like when you think about like what is it, NHTSA, the the national highway safety folks in the States, I I I don't understand this world as well as I should, but I think that they're sort of the ones doing the crash test dummy situation, you know, so that they're literally the ones testing the cars. So and and that obviously that the insurance companies I think are funding all of this so that they can understand better like how how it all works, when it does go wrong. so there could be a role for insurance to be more kind of active. I guess you would need sort of a technical nongovernmental group that or government group really that sits in between them that that ha that brings the know how. But insurance s could have more of a role, I guess, is is kind of what I'm hearing. And and maybe they're not doing much of it yet. And and I like tying it back to those that are making the procurement decisions because they are, you know, requesting larger and larger budgets each year for procuring this equipment or paying for services for someone to do this work. And so yeah, right now that it's kind of like flying blind. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So far it seems like the the risk is being measured in terms of replacement value, right? So it's it's it's about ensuring the vehicle. Is there not a liability question too? Like or or maybe that's different? There there is absolutely a liability question. yeah, yeah, exactly. what I what I would like to see is that liability calculation and how that is determined by underwriters. And I have not been able to get a lot of transparency into that. I would imagine, Got it. for example, yeah, if you're flying your own substation, then you probably need a policy that's going to cover your liability for busting your substation if your aircraft, you know, if there's a gust of wind and your aircraft takes down a substation. Right. Right. so that that's one example, but those are examples of, you know, kind of like the shielded example. I gave where we already know what we're flying over. And so there's so it's it's a little easier to quantify. That's not necessarily going to be true for all drone operations. I think about you know delivery operations in urban environments. they, you know, they might have to, for example, in insurance, they might be required to only fly over certain types of areas, and the second you go fly over a school, Then what happens? Yeah. and you're you're operating outside of the scope of what the insurance covers, and now we're not gonna cover it. That's one way to go about it. the other one I can think of is emergency use cases. so if you've got, you know, a drone operation that is bringing, you know, AEDs, Narcan, EpiPens to, Sure, yeah. Yep. you know, emergencies where they're needed, is you know, how how do you ensure that? And also like it's you know, God. God. if it's responding to an emergency, I would hope it's not gonna make the emergency worse. Right, right, right, right, right, right, for sure. Okay. Well and like the software developer in me kinda wants to listeners may know that my my day job is actually software development and that's that's most of my background. Kind of wants to build like a digital twin system of the operating system, right? Of the system which is controlling the fleet. UTMs, we call this, is that the right phrase? No. You know, I I I would think of that as command and control, Kyle. so Got it. Okay. yeah, yeah, the the centralized system that actually commands the aircraft. UTM or uncrewed traffic management or universal traffic management, depending on who you ask, it is really it it primarily has a strategic deconfliction focus right now. so it's more about planning. right, right, right. That's the one that you run in between the systems. Right. Okay. Yep. Yep. Right, exactly. Yep. Bobby talked a little bit about this in his man mano talk and using I've mixed up my acronyms. Yep. UTM and no worries. Okay. So if I'm if I'm mana, I participate in the UTM, but I have my own system, command and control system, I guess. and that's what participates in the UTM. Okay, fine. so yeah, to me, that system itself, command and control, would be something that definitely I would want that system under test. I would want to know what it does. I would want evals wrapped around it and you know, to be sort of hill climbing it with, you know, new LLM techniques towards you know, better and better capabilities to deal with like wind to deal with like a sudden obstruction, to deal with a p imminent collision and so on. So yeah, there's a lot of interesting sort of digital aspect there, I think. that's actually exactly the type of example I'm gonna be leading when I share the a system safety assessment approach with ASTM F-38 industry leaders next week. we're gonna talk through what a system safety assessment would look like for a top-level event of loss of separation. so loss of separation as in you've breached a well-clear volume of another aircraft. what are the cause what are the potential causes of that? And I do split it into, you know, strategic and where the failure points are in the strategic mitigations, the mostly things like route planning. And then also on the tactical. So if you have onboard detect and avoid capabilities or if you have some type of communication capability between your fleet such that they avoid each other that way, there's all sorts of failure points that could cause those to fail. And then the one that's even a little scarier is the common cause one. So if your strategic deconfliction of planning your route is based on a data source that is same the same as the data source that your tactical de-confliction is using for detect Mm. and avoid, then if you have a failure. In both, you can't really mitigate failures in the other one with failures Mm. Mm. Mm. on one. So this is an area that you know the industry is going to have to face around like strategic deconfliction is great if it works all the time, but the second you have a non-cooperative participant in the airspace, Mm. Yeah. as in someone who is not broadcasting ADSB or doesn't have remote ID out on, you know, you're not going to be able to see them. And so you are really forced to use, you know, sensors to be able to see what else is in the air. Interesting. Okay. Cool. Wow. Okay. So another another set of acronyms, F thirty eight and ASTM. Can you unwind those for us? Absolutely, absolutely. So ASTM is the industry standards body that is really tackling Part 108 right now. The other one that is most commonly used in the US is RTCA. the cool thing about what the F38 group in ASTM is doing, which is the UAS standards group body. So there's F-38 is UAS standards, F-37 is light sport aircraft. We work really closely together since we're developing industry standards together. But F-38 is all things uncrewed. And in particular, we're writing a specific standard that we're calling the Meta standard. And is a and the reason it is called the Meta Standard is because we want a standard that we can comply with for part one. oh eight on Mm-hmm. day one when the rule comes out. And there is so much in the proposed rulemaking to do from a standards development perspective that we want to kind of get, you know, as broad of a sweep as we can to make sure that we're covering the requirements. Of the regulation while making sure that we have industry feedback on it, because the whole point of working with an organization like ASTM and using those standards is that you can use a means of compliance with the FAA that has already been vetted by other by industry. So other folks have Okay. Yep. voted on it, they've given their input, you've gone through ballots, and something going through ASTM is much more likely to be an accepted means of compliance by the regulator than, you know, companies absolutely are allowed by the law. to come up with their own means of compliance if they want Right. R Right. to do it themselves. It will require a lot more review through the FAA and Right. probably a lot more scrutiny than if I say I'm going to comply with this standard that the industry already agreed on. Got it. So what kinds of companies would be or organizations would be members of of F thirty eight, of of all and that paying attention to all this? Yeah, I mean anyone who's flying today that wants to fly under part 108 should be involved. And a lot of them are. so I'm I'm not familiar with mana participants, but I'm sure Bobby's got some folks in there. the other delivery giants that he named, like Zipline, Google, Amazon, DoorDash, they're absolutely involved in these conversations. Interesting. and then there's a whole, whole boatload of work that's going on the UTM side. So I know ANRA is involved as well because they've got a you large taken. UTM market here in the US. And so yeah, anyone who's developing technology to comply with Part 108 should be involved here. And one of the reasons why it is such a good use of my time and really anyone else who wants to operate under Part 108 to be involved in these standards bodies. This part 108 is only a proposed rule, right? It's not finalized. And so it's very common today when I'm talking to current drone operators or current folks who make products for drone operators, for them to say, Well, I'm just gonna wait until the rule's out and then I'll decide how I'm gonna, you know, update my technology. The the way that the rule will probably change is not likely to impact the standards level. you know, they're not they're like unlikely to change the rule about no probable failure should can result in a hazard. And the amount of standards content related to that one little part of the rule is massive and unlikely to change. Mm. the other the other examples I would give are rule changes around the systems and equipment that are used for Part 108 and the reliability of those systems, that's unlikely to become less stringent at the rule Mm. level. Therefore, the standards that we're writing today will will more than likely still apply, regardless of how the final rule comes out. Okay, so in so it sounds like you're saying that the the process so far, you've got a lot of different operators at the table, big named operators that people have heard of. help me understand that relationship and what why one would impact the other and what they are a little more? Absolutely, Kyle. Absolutely. So I there is a part of the, you know, industry that looks at Part 108 and says all it is is proposed. It's not a final rule. There were thousands of comments submitted to the FAA after the notice for proposed rulemaking for 108 came out. And some of those comments might have said, you know, to the effect of, I actually think it's okay for the aircraft to fall out of the sky without a parachute or a mitigation. Right. Those comments are unlikely to be found persuasive and to make their way Into the rule changes. But Got it. Right. there are a host of you know comments that probably will drive rule changes, especially around electronic conspicuity and right of way between crewed and uncrewed aircraft. I don't want to dive too deep into that because it's a kind of a can of worms. But so there are probably going to be some changes. That said, those changes are very unlikely to impact the technical requirements of the products and the systems. And that technology roadmap that I'm writing today based on the NPRM, I see very little opportunity to change it once the final rule comes out. But what I do see is that once the final rule comes out, if you can start operating under that rule soon, you only have so much time then to update your technology to be able to operate under that new rule. And the testing Mm, mm-hmm. to prove that your system is safe, that's what takes time. So I can make a fancy user interface for a GCS pretty quickly, a ground control station for operating drones. I can make that really quickly. The amount of time that it takes me to test and prove that it is safe once integrated with hardware and once I'm using the scaled network designs, that's what takes time and resources. And that's what I'm trying to get started on now so that when Once the rule comes out, the technology and evidence that it's safe is ready. Got it. Nice. You another acronym check there. one which you walked us through. Thank you. But N P R notice for proposed rulemaking. this is the method of rulemaking that the FA uses. Got it, got it, got it, got it. Okay, got it. Okay, so this is the whole the the whole process. Nice. This is fantastic. So there's a lot going on in terms of rulemaking and in terms of new regulation coming out. And while it doesn't sound exciting, it enables really exciting things because the current regulations don't. But yeah, it sounds like command and control has got a lot of changes coming to it is is one of the the net impacts of all of this. Like we've gone from a piloted system to a not at all piloted system, right? So like and if I've got a fleet already out there, it seems like they might Be doing all sorts of different things. Like help help me understand what it's going to look like to migrate. are people gonna end up with mixed fleets? Like, how is this how's this gonna work? Yeah, absolutely, Kyle. So there's there's one problem here that I am really excited about solving, and that is the use of heterogeneous fleets. Okay. so when I when I say heterogeneous fleet, what I'm thinking of are airframes in particular that are different. Right. Right. Right. So not just operating under different rules, so I'm I'm thinking like multicopter. but like literally different architectures. Right. Okay. Yep. Exactly, exactly. Because these are these are robots with jobs. And so they Yeah. have different skills to do their jobs. And that can come in the form of performance differences, as in like aircraft that can fly at different altitudes based on their propulsion systems, versus you know, the kind of basic like size weight power, endurance, you know, how long they can be out there, how fast they can get to the emergency. and that all drives other other physics related disparities like fixed wing versus Multicopter versus electric VTOL. These types of airborne robots can work together to accomplish jobs that one type of airframe couldn't accomplish as well by itself, is more costly right. to accomplish by itself. And so even if you keep adding, you know, the same exact airframe over and over, you might not actually be getting more value in your use case as opposed to adding different types of airframes. Right. So wow. So okay, so when I think about like you mentioned ground control stations earlier, so probably there's like kinds of ground control stations that generally deal with fixed wing and another one that probably generally deals with something that shaped like a quadcopter. and and so you're gonna be able to have to run them like in the same software. But is that happening today? Is anybody doing that today? There are some instances of this happening today, but it's rare. And Yeah. this just has to do with the where the industry is in its maturity to on the commercial side. So I'm going to speak commercial very specifically because some of these concepts are really well proven in defense. But that's where safety requirements don't apply quite quite the way that they Okay. huh. Yep. do in commercial. So on the commercial side, and a UAS OEM who's been around for the last, you know, five to ten years, they've spent a lot of their effort, likely on the air. Dynamics of their aircraft because this is a really new space. And so while there are some really great reference designs, there's also brand new ones coming out. If you've seen the DARPA lifts challenge winners, you know, they're coming out Yeah. Crazy looking things. Yep. with some really interesting airframes and propulsion systems. Crazy looking things. And so, really, what they've been focusing on are those kind of my aircraft, you know, it needs to meet these performance requirements, and therefore I need to design the aerodynamics in this way and the propulsion in this way, and the payload capacity. In this way, that's really what they've been focusing on. And in order to not just develop but test that, usually what they use is a test ground control station. Okay. So that would be like those open source ones that you can just find available online because your flight controller is likely an open source flight controller like R2Pilot or PX4. And so they've been using what I would call test software. That test software is very engineer focused, right? It's like I'm trying to test this aircraft so that I can figure Mm. Yeah. out if I'm getting the aerodynamic performance that I was expecting. That's a very different use for ground control station software than operating Right. to go and inspect a utility line or to respond to an emergency in a police department. And so what I'm talking about there really starts with yeah, like the user interaction. So what the actual graphical user interface looks like for operating. Right. It's probably not gonna look like multi-UAS operation, like one-to-many type operation. And it's also probably not going to look like a mixed fleet because that's not the point at which you test different airframes through the GCS. You know, they kind of use their own their own GCSs to be tested. Mm-hmm. Getting those in getting those into an operational ground control station is going to be the next challenge that we face. So from you know, the police officer who's using this mixed fleet, they're not going to be switching between the test platforms of each of their hardware pieces. They want No. No. to be using the operational software. Right. Right. So okay, so we might have bought software from one OEM for our quadcopter and another piece of operational software for our conventional I I don't know, maybe the conventional is monitoring wildfire smoke and the quadcopter is is trying to pinpoint people inside of the fire zone or something. And these softwares don't necessarily work together. They weren't they they were purchased separately, right? So on some level you kind of need to start building systems for the operators themselves, which are somewhat distinct from the fleets that they're actually flying. So it's almost like a change of like who the customer is or but maybe I'm overreacting or underreacting to that. Yeah. I I think it's a huge change to who the customer is and and their concept of operations and how they work. Because so we're talking about, you know, a pretty challenging problem of having heterogeneous sleep from commanded from the same ground control station. But even today, I know some operators who, you know, they have their Part 107 waiver to do one to four. So they're applying four aircraft. But that aircraft that they chose is one of the less expensive ones. And it does not have a one-to-mini ground control station. And so that is the type of operator that's sitting here with four laptops. I'm no no Wow not kidding, Kyle. And that's how they're monitoring four, because not one of those GCSs is built to to be able to command more than one aircraft at a time. my god. And you can see how that would turn into a human factors nightmare. And so in some of those waivers, they not only have to say, yeah, I'm gonna have four computers in front of me, but if one of my aircraft, you know, has an alert on it or says that I need to go inspect something more closely, I have to come and do land, land, land, observe. So I have to go land yeah. all my other aircraft before I go and observe with the other one. One example my gosh. of the way these waivers are written today. But yeah, that's that's an example of someone who I know wants to go one to eight next. I don't think they want to hire any more pilots. They want to keep with No. one pilot, but I don't have a desk big enough for my eight laptops. No, I was just thinking, I could maybe imagine four laptops here, but there's no way like maybe the other four over here or something like no, this is not happening. and even virtual machines, that's a very large monitor. It's just it's just not happening. Okay. Wow. Okay, so so really the state of the art in terms of these like software systems, I'm sure they're very well tested and I'm sure they're very stable, but they're not necessarily purpose built for what we're doing with them on some level, maybe. Yep, yep, that that's exactly right, Kyle. when I think about, you know, robots that do jobs, you know, that's the other part of the coordination aspect that I don't want you know, a a typical end user to have to worry about. You know, if we're using the drones as first responders example, you know, they know that they need eyes in a certain area where there's an emergency. They shouldn't have to think about things like how far away the aircraft are stationed, because they're probably in docks, what altitude they're going to fly at, because if it is hetero heterogeneous fleet, it's going to be different altitudes. Aircraft to aircraft, what the performance characteristics are of each of those aircraft. So if one can get there faster, but one is getting there slower simply because it takes longer for its dock to open and for its autopilot to spin up, gosh, yeah. those are all things that influence how quickly you can respond to an emergency, not things that we should ever ask the operator to keep in their head. This No. is a ground, this is requires a ground control station that is performance aware of your robotic fleet. Right. Well, when I think about an operator here, I mean they're probably an expert in the thing that they are doing with the drone. They but we don't want them to also have to have a PhD in electronics engineering and everything else so that they can understand like all of these complexities. Okay, right. So the level of abstraction needs to come up. Okay, quite a bit. Did you mention like I wrote down swarms question mark? Like did you mention like operating multiple robots to do a job? Like should I imagine like passing things between them or like or or hold on, or am I d going too sci-fi there? Like when we're talking about multiple aircraft that could do something together that they couldn't have done alone, how did you mean that? I mean, I I so actually I love that example of passing things between each other. I don't really see like aircraft fuelers between drones these days. But what I can see, for example, in the delivery space, there's already a kind of change in the concept of operations in the delivery space, going from launching and recovering out of my pod, and other that I'm always in the air, to launching from your pod, landing at the restaurant, hanging out on the roof of the restaurant, waiting for so now you're actually not flying anymore. Is that the end of the mission? Right. right, right, right, Is that the beginning of the mission? right. I don't know. So then it's waiting for food. That example of how drones could work together could be I've waited too long for my food here. I want to s my battery's gonna die. Send out the backup aircraft to get the food and I'm gonna go back and charge up. That's that's one way that they could work together. the other example though that I think of for simultaneous operations is aircraft that have different jobs. so for example, in the first responder use case, if you know you have an aircraft with a highly performant payload, but then probably higher swap, it's probably going have to fly at higher altitude anyways, but it can get really good pictures because it's got the really nice heavy imager on it. If that air if that aircraft is spending all of its swap budget on carrying that imager, it has no more swap budget for detect and avoid. So it's not going to have a radar on it. So all it needs right. to do is call its buddy that does have a radar, an upward-facing radar on it to follow to fly below it and monitor its wow. airspace for it. wow. These are ways that I could see drones working together, but they have to have not just that performance awareness, but also the regulatory context of I need a I need to detect an avoidance system that is performant in this operational space. Yeah. Okay, so when I start to think about how that works, right? Like in in aviation today, we we talked about things like ADSB out and of course like mode C and mode S can be detected by ground stations, which gets fed into ADSB, but that's not happening in drones. Like the transponders are too heavy. So instead we have remote ID. And as I understand it, this is basically Bluetooth and Wi Fi. So the distances are less, right? And I guess that's because you have lower energy radios. just something like LoraWan? get involved or or or is it like no, we've got like Bluetooth Wi Fi and then we've got cellular, or are there middle ground players, or is that kind of the field? You know. one one thing that I do talk to Altimatous clients about that are trying to prepare for part 108 is part 89, which is the remote ID rules for UAS. And there will need to be updates to those rules. Mm. I the the one the one that I can think of that's really simple and obvious is the current kind of ICD for what you broadcast over remote ID. It includes the operators lat long. That's not going to be as interesting when you have an operator, Hm. right. Yeah. you know, a couple states over, you know, that's sitting in a what looks like a call center, you know, so you know something like an address on a floor level might be a little more interesting. So they're gonna have to update that rule in that regard. But what you're describing as far as how UAS see each other with what I would what I would call just electronic conspicuity, the the technology has far outpaced the limitations that the current Part 89 rules have put on it. Okay. so I see the future not just in having more performant radios than you know the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth solutions that we've come up with, but also having things like network capabilities as well as even like terrestrial and satellite networks, being able to provide that electronic conspicuity based on, you know, RF readings. Okay. So sort of networks of ground stations which are RF radio Okay, got it. And conspicuity, that's not an acronym and yet I almost feel like okay, I so that is the the property of being conspicuous? Is that where we're going? Got it. Exactly, exactly, yes. So you're not Okay. you're not stealth in the national airspace and no one should be. No, right, right, right. For safety. Okay. okay, so wait a minute. So right now today, like they're supposed to carry small Wi-Fi or Bluetooth beacons which can just sort of say I'm here, I'm here, I'm here. to your point, like you could imagine more like networks of ground stations then, I guess, which are being using radio signals to see, you know, that there are multiple aircraft in the area? Or or am I maybe I jumped too far with something you said? No, you no, you're you're absolutely on the right track there, Kyle. So I have Yeah. seen this worked in a so I see it a lot in the what would be called the counter UAS space. So in the counter UAS space, ground based systems that can determine where thing where things are in the air. and those are often a mix of radar, vision systems, acoustic systems, and then having the remote ID. Yeah. Yeah. capabilities. So you know between those mostly can see what's in their airspace. Those don't have great range usually because if you want really great range, you're gonna have a really expensive radar. And so those, you know, you'd have to kind of put those all over the place. I do think that there's a market for that. Where I'm really curious about the technology is, you know, my background is improving that a a network that was built for cell phones on the ground. could also be used for drones in the air. Similarly, I think that same network that is used for cell phones on the ground could be used for electronic conspicuity in the air. The FAA Department of Transportation has spent resources in the past couple of years investigating this capability with cellular network providers as well as with satellite providers. And that's more about, you know, things like triangulation. I can figure out Right. where that phone is on the ground using cell networks. Why couldn't I do the same thing with something at low altitude? right. Right, right, right, of course. Right. Okay. Okay. So on some level, 5G could give you some basic capabilities of just data transfer and being able to to make to say things. But to your point, like it also could give you can trilateralization. What's the there's a right word for this one, but triangulation, being able to try to figure out like where this thing is based on how many signals it's talking to and how far away it is. Okay, right. So not just sort of communication, but literal sort of detection and Placement in space. Got it. Okay. That definitely is is there is this like we have to wait for cell phone standards? I I just said it and now it's dropping out of my brain. Not LTE, but the something thank you. five G. Yes. Yes. Okay. Is is 5G enough, or do we need to wait for like 6G for all this? Or am I kind of overindexing on cell phone technologies and it's it's actually something else? Like how does that part work? So I'm a big true crime fan, Kyle. So I watch, you know, all the true crime documentaries on Netflix. I it is clear, you know, when you need to solve crime that you're gonna look at cellular records and you can determine where someone was located. it is often the exact same modem, the the small like modem that is used in an aircraft, similar to what would be on a phone. so all that to say, I don't think similar to how when you know Young Bri software engineer was trying to figure figure out if telemestrial networks could be used for command and control. And we find out, yeah, of course they can. I think it's a similar story for electronic conspicuity. We already know because police departments Yeah, yeah. have used it to find criminals, that they can figure out where someone was based on their cell records. Hundred percent. All the aircraft that are flying over BVLOS are gonna have to use cellular or SAT. And that's why working with cellular network providers and satellite network providers with the government or with whatever entity is going to have those come about, I think that's really the path there. And the technology, I don't think, is the barrier. I follow you. I thought you were trying to say, like, well, you know, if as long as we add a five G modem to all these aircraft, that will be fine. You're saying, no, no, they're going to have one. And so thereby that okay, right. So that now it's dawning on me what you're getting across. Okay, great. Okay, wow. So we yeah, that that obvious that seems very obvious on on a lot of levels then. So yeah, okay, that's how that's gonna work. Cool. Cool. hmm. There's a lot, there's a lot of precedent here too, which I'm sure you'll you'll know more about even than I do, in electric electric vehicles. Mm. So the technologies that are used right now to for V2V communication, it's very similar to the requirements for like airborne vehicle to vehicle type communication. And Yeah. I've found that even some of the hardware solutions that are used in ground vehicles Mm. for autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles, Yeah. it can have a lot of use in the low. Yeah. Constitute economy, especially what they do around, you know, around safety and assurance. So that type of equipment is already developed as though, you know, it's highly critical and therefore they're not, you know, just vibe coding or open sourcing everything. but then the other side is security, is that like, you know, I'm I'm sure you can find some interesting, well, I'll share with you some interesting stories that I've seen recently of Smart vehicles being hacked across the world. Mm-hmm. Yep. And the efforts that are being made to make that less available, I think, will translate really well to the low-altitude economy for the use of things Hm. like hardware security modules, trusted platform modules. Those are the types of things that don't even show up in drones today. right. Right. But that's really what you would need in order to secure your system. Right. Okay. So when I think about like TPM trusted platform modules, this is sort of cryptographic capabilities on motherboards that are able to sort of say, like, you know, this is who I am and and and thereby kind of validate which software is running on them as well and the other way around. So it makes it a little bit harder to take them over at a at a basic level. you can still sort of attack the higher level, but it's it's higher to get harder to get like down to the hardware level in terms of an attack. right, so right so right, and none of this stuff there's so much low hanging fruit. There's so much good stuff that we can apply. Okay. And to your point about the hardware side of things too, like what I think part of why I was fixating on 5G earlier is that it's it's my understanding that it's a lot lower latency and it's a lot lower energy somehow. maybe that means the masks have to be closer together. Probably does. but but yeah, that the capability to do collect, you know, detect and avoid in automobiles, an automotive on on some levels predicated on the fact that it's so low latency that you can go fast. Whereas you could get like high download speeds with four G, but the latency wasn't very good. So in five G, yeah, it's like much higher download speeds, but the latency's starting to get really, really useful for stuff like this. So I think that's that's part of what's so there's a lot of exciting stuff coming in the future. Okay. when we think about the defense side of things too, right? Like when I'm thinking about talking to people in Europe, working with an an operator or sorry, working with a company in the Netherlands called Blue Mark, that makes drone radios and things like that. Like I I get the sense that some of what they're working on is helping airports secure themselves against sort of drone harassment, right? And th this is bordering on warfare at times. You know, if if you're able to shut down a major airport by just harassing it with drones, like you've inflicted economic damage remotely. and so it seems like and even in North America, I think where we might I think I've yeah, something about like waterborne drones on Lake one of the Great Lakes. and I'm thinking that's probably you could detect that with AIS and I'm nerding out too much, so I'll probably edit this out. But it seems like the the sort of defense and side of this is do you think that's gonna start to impact us sort of onshore in North America, like where we don't have Yeah, I there's there's literally war has come to Europe, right? So I can totally see that technology being involved at every level. But do you think we're gonna see that like where we need to protect our own airports here? Help me help our listeners think through what might be coming soon there. yeah, absolutely, Kyle. You know, this is a huge this is a huge space, at least in the United States and where funding is being spent at state and local levels as well as certainly the federal level is on counter UAS, Yeah. is on being able to equip especially, you know, popular events. I'm thinking, Mm. you know, like FIFA and World Cup, Olympics, Yep. Twenty twenty eight Olympics, those types of events, being able yep. to yeah, being able to make sure that we can not only detect Protect and classify what's in the air, but then also to be able to mitigate if we need to. Huge amount of resources being put into this in the US right now. So that's kind of the you know, those sporting event examples are kind of the bigger picture. Smaller picture-wise, you know, prisons are buying these types of systems, right. churches are buying these types of systems. Anyone who wants to protect themselves against drones, the first step is Right. just to know that the drone is there. Right. And so that's these types of systems are incredibly they're becoming more popular, they're getting a lot of resources poured into them, and trying to find ones that are you know low cost enough that we can actually implement them in the commercial market. interesting. The the prisons use case that I'd heard was you don't want drones flying overhead and dropping contraband into the yard. those kind of things. So I can churches are s is somewhat more surprising, but but yes, I any organization that wants to have like perimeter of security, I I get it. Yeah. That's that's really what it is, is it's it's wild. I've been I've recently been reading some of the proposals for next year's exponential conference in Miami, kind of helping out the organization with triaging those proposals. And every time I hear one about security, I have to do a double take to understand, are we considering the cybersecurity of the platform or are we using the drone for physical security? Because Yeah. both of those things are really popular right now. using drones for physical security, it's a really, really valuable use case. Got it. Okay, so w how much of software dependability is a is a part of all of this? Because we we talk about all these wonderful technologies and how great they might be, but you know, I had to reboot my Windows laptop and and and or my Mac laptop yeah, more times than I care to admit this month. and I'm sure most people in the audience can can relate to that. But you know, you and I, it's it's often our job to make those systems more reliable. So like maybe that needs to be In the rules? Like help us think about that. Like what do you what would you suggest if you had the well, it sounds like you do have the ear of the regulator. Like what would you suggest? Yeah, absolutely, Kyle. So earl early in my career, the the thinking was that we'd have to put we'd have to apply traditional aviation practices to the UAS space. So for software Right. Right. dependability, that looks like DO178 from RTCA. Right. Right. this is the process for proving that essentially development assurance. so showing that the product does what you want it to do, it doesn't do things that you don't want it to do, and it doesn't have anything extra in there that wasn't specified. that's you know things like writing requirements and test cases, getting traceability, testing, you know, coverage of your code. Okay. So this is like a SOC two or and that's really PCI kind of audit being applied to it. I think I think you've heard stories about people being like called to explain lines of code in the software to to prove that it was all well understood. So I I can only imagine they've got their own sort of process here. Okay. So that's DO one Yes. seventy eight, right? Current aviation standards. Okay. Okay. Right. Precisely. So yeah, I'm glad that you actually mentioned SOC2 because this is where it gets really interesting. DO178, you know, was written for embedded software. It was written for software that's going to go on the aircraft and that's going to be isolated. So, you know, we're talking like air gapped solutions that we don't have to worry about what's going on in the cloud. that's not going to be the future for UAS. It's a totally different type of software that's being written, and the safety criticality and where it lives is not necessarily all going to be embedded code. No. and as a software developer, then you know what that means is that we're not just looking at you know the hardware that the code is running on, we're looking at the languages themselves and what they what they have for safety Yeah, yeah. Everything. Yep. Yep. and security. Well, and plus with the distributed system. So you're you I mean you can test your unit and you should, and you can test its integration capability inside of its application and you should, but th it's it's still like dealing with a network of things that they all have to be tested and they have to be tested from an integration standpoint. Yeah, okay. So there's there's a lot of change coming at them then. If they've been used to focusing on embedded, that's like the unit, the application. And now we're gonna have to get into a much broader world. The system might be distributed across multiple components now. Yeah. Right. It and it reminds me a little bit about if I think of like an AWS example, it reminds me of FedRAMP requirements, right? Like I'm not gonna Hm. start my program by using my AWS version that you know is more expensive and going to comply with FedRAMP. But if I have clients that are going to that are going to need f FedRAMP compliance, Yeah. Yeah. then I'm gonna, you know, go to this next tier of reliability from AWS. It's kind of similar for UAS in that, you know, where you choose to host this stuff is gonna have to follow these industry standards. for safety Mm. and you know most most cloud developers or folks who are gonna you know develop a solution in the cloud you know they're looking for cloud optimization cost optimization you know things that are not that need to take a backseat to safety and security in a UAS world Yeah, yeah. I I once had to to build a credit card processing system and and we had to take some PCI scope on because of decisions that, you know, w maybe you could have made differently, but but point being we had to figure out like how do you actually do PCI in the cloud, not just sort of sub it out to Stripe or something, but actually do it. And yeah, it's a it turns out to be a lot of work. The idea of handing it to a FedRAMP is a is a very Okay, wow. So there's a lot coming. There's a lot changing right now. Okay, nice. So the software stuff, Kyle, I'd like to talk about it more because if we think about all those different places that your software is running and then all the different you know languages and frameworks that you're using and then having to Mm-hmm. tie them all together to prove something safe, Yeah. this is where the the characteristic of the UAS industry of being one where It's so nascent and small that companies need to work together a lot to achieve what they want to achieve. I think that's gonna be particularly true in software. Yeah. Because if you're going to attest to the safety of the entire system, we can't be black boxing portions of our software without a lot of thought, you know, Yeah. especially as we go about designing it. So when I think about designing, you know, my high in the sky part 108 heterogeneous fleet compatibility. compatible GCS plus certified flight controllers. My trade space needs to extend not just the GCS UI. You know, my my trade space has to go into the cloud services that we're using. It has to go into the embedded code on board the aircraft that is actually Yeah. Yeah. commanding the aircraft. It has to go into any modules on board that are ensuring things like safety and security through things like route conformance monitoring, all the way down to the example that you used about TPMs. my GCS designs, they actually have a concept in them of Is this person who's commanding me allowed to command me? Right, right, right. Okay, wow. And that's really different when you can only command from your hand controller or from your laptop that has the local application running on it. Now it's an application in the cloud, and anyone can read it on the open internet. Mm-hmm. So, how do I know that the person who's in the open internet has been authenticated and also that their credential or their access controls exactly Right. And you sort of gotta pass all of that all the way through. Like I'm almost thinking like an OAuth bearer token style thing where you yes. can say, like, okay, I logged in at this system, like way over here, and then it sent a command here and took the token with it, and there and there and there and there and there and there all the way. And but then also on board on the device, they've gotta be able to authenticate that token very, very quickly and in a high security way, and hopefully in a way that doesn't use much battery, right? Like some of the original encryption algorithms, DES and triple des, for instance, The benefit of triple deads was that it was that it took three times longer, right? And so that way it made it harder to do the the computation, which meant it slowed down the attacker. But that means it's chewing through more battery, right? So like on so yeah, balancing all of this is going to get really interesting. And that kind of brings in the quantum space in terms of like quantum proof encryption capabilities suddenly become needed, right? Like, I mean, if you can attack a drone with a quantum computer and then thereby sort out its encryption much more quickly, God knows what you've just taken over. It it just gonna depend on the capabilities of that drone and where it is and how much energy is in the battery. Yeah, there's there's there's a lot of okay, I'm not turning I'm not doing a good job of turning this into questions. Like I feel like I'm following you, That's okay. but like did we get where you wanted to go or like what's another prompt I can hand you to get one more thing going? I mean just ask me about challenges in the space. Challenges with implementing anything that we've talked about, I can tell you about it. So yeah, I mean tell us about thank you. It's like host one one here. Thank you very much, Bri. I appreciate you. So Gotcha? so okay, but instead of me just making it up, like what what are some real challenges you've faced in the field? Like tell us about that. Real challenges that I've faced in the field. you know, the reason that the heterogeneous suite command and control problem interests me so much is because I have not seen an elegant solution from it. in fact, it's because I've seen a lot of solutions that are not elegant and have not stood to meet the requirements of the end user. Yeah. and often that's because companies are trying to go it alone. they're struggling like either to partner or to use, you know, companies that have a better subject matter expertise. What they're trying to solve, because a lot of companies that are drone companies today, 10 years ago, either they didn't exist or they were playing in a completely different technology space. So their background Right. Right. is in maybe traditional aviation, which for the reasons that we just talked about, things like cloud Doesn't fit. development doesn't fit, or it can be even the opposite if you like, you know, think about like a Google Amazon DoorDash, Right, right. right? They all started as web-based applications. But not aviation. Yeah. you know, right, but not aviation. And so trying to get into this aviation. Space where you're developing you know embedded code that is also safety critical, it can be a pretty big growing pain for these organizations, and that's just on the software side. If I think about the hardware side, when I've seen companies try to you know, start a new type of airframe. so I'll use the example I think you might have asked me about what my favorite aircraft is. The first aircraft that I ever worked on is the Scan Eagle at In situ, Boeing Incitu. and Okay. the Scan Eagle is a fixed wing rail launch system, so it's not EV tall. And it has a decent amount of ground-based equipment required for launch and recovery. At the time, Sounds like it. Yeah. super novel, but you know, these days with EVTOL like, you know, you can get a much smaller package to be able to launch. And taking, trying to take that fixed wing platform to a closer to EVTOL type set of launch and recovery equipment ended up with a system called Flares, Okay. Flying Launch and Recovery System. It is quite literally a multicopter that picks up the fixed wing aircraft, takes it to altitude, and then drops it so that the fixed wing can fly off. wow. Huh. Sort of no enable And it and if takeoff. Okay. right to enable takeoff. And then it does something similar on recovery where the multicopter actually raises the the rope, the cord that the aircraft is caught on, and the Scan Eagle flies into it and hooks on its hooks on the end of its wing and gets caught kind of like it would on the on a s what's a sky hook, usually a crane holding that. But if you look at how this happened in an engineering department, that you were asked to make your aircraft launch and recover, you know, front like by itself. And instead of adding equipment to the scan eagle fixed-wing aircraft, you built a second aircraft. We ended up with Right. Right. Holy cow. two aircraft. This is, I think, what happens when you try to do a different type of airframe with an organization that is used to building one type of airframe. Right. You're going to try to take as much as you can from your legacy aircraft to save time and money, but Uh-huh. often what you're taking is technical debt. Yeah. Yeah. my gosh. That now has to be resolved for a different use case. and so this is the challenge that I see, you know, companies that have proven out, you know, that they have an airframe that operates really well for multicopter use cases. If they try to get into fixed swing, they're gonna run into something similar and then similar Right. vice versa. And so as the end user, when I'm thinking, you know, I have these use cases that you know really fit multiple types of airframes, I might have to buy my airframes from different vendors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And now you've got integration challenges and everything else. Okay. No, I have an integration problem. So Bree's talking about the concept of technical debt, and that's not an acronym, but I'll I'll fill it in. so this is a software term where we talk about how sometimes you need to go fast and that means you cut a certain corner. It might mean not a safety corner, right? And not a critical corner, but you might like release it without all the features. and this allows you to to go out faster. and this allows you to get to market faster. And we call this debt. It's like borrowing. It's like borrowing to to pay for your house. And you could wait twenty five years and and buy it when you have all the money, but how about we borrow instead? And the idea is you have to pay that back, right? Or else you just end up swamped with debt payments and you can't move. You can't do anything anymore. And it's a good analogy for for software development and technology development, because if you just keep cutting all those corners, like you can't innovate anymore. You're just surrounded by your debt payments and not able to do anything else. Okay. So to your point, like if I'm If I've been focused on just quadcopters for the for for the longest time and I have certain assumptions about how the way the world works, I'm gonna have certain capabilities and systems built up around those as well. And if I do move into a different kind of architecture, I'm probably gonna try to drag my old stuff with me, even when I shouldn't. And that's gonna make things worse. Interesting. Bri, I'm mindful of time. I've you've been very generous, questions I like to ask everybody, what do you see the future for electric aviation to be? The future for electric aviation, you know, the reason that I'm most interested in UAS is because that's where the regulations are moving the fastest right now. And so electric aviation in the low, slow, small or UAS low altitude economy, I see it really expanding. And the future that I see is yeah, drones in low altitude over urban areas kind of constantly and then kind of seeping out into suburban and rural areas as kind of a normal thing that. That you see. future-wise, I see, you know, at first we're gonna have problems with noise and safety. Those are gonna be the biggest public complaints, Yeah. is gonna be that thing landed where it wasn't supposed to, or it's loud over my house. and Mm-hmm. the technology will evolve. We we wrote a noise standard in ASTM. So meeting the noise standard is like, you know, that that'll be the way to I guess alleviate those concerns from the public. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. But yeah, in innovating on the safety side is really where I see, and I'm glad you mentioned electric aircraft because that that's really where you know safety and the use of battery management systems and the telemetry that you can get from battery management systems and how it can make these systems smarter, and how you know, things like heterogeneous fleets can can operate more efficiently and effectively using that type of telemetry. I I see that really opening up the possibilities to solve customer. use cases in just a more efficient and effective way. Cool. When I first got obsessed with electric aviation, I I went looking and expected to find that, you know, electric trainers would be the biggest use case. It was drones. I I don't know why I didn't expect that, but you know, the number Mm-hmm. of Amazon Prime drones in the FAA registry is just astronomical, right? And ZAG and and everybody else. Zipline, they're they're not always sometimes those are you find those registrations on Cessnas, which is weird. But but that's a whole other story. Okay, what about lessons you've learned? Stuff that you didn't think at first, right? And maybe it wasn't intuitive, but you came to realize, wait, that's how that works. Can you tell a story there? Absolutely. you know, it's gonna be more on the the business and commercial side than on the engineering side. I'm an engineer, so I would love to talk technology all day, but the biggest lessons for me have been about how to build a business in this space as regulations are evolving. if you show up and just say, I want to contribute to the drone economy, but I don't know how. you're gonna end up with too much trade space and it's gonna be really hard Yeah. Mm-hmm. to focus your time. I have worked for and worked with many drone companies that have been acquired or acquired by larger companies and shortly after shut down. I'm sorry, I've seen it happen. And I think really where it comes from is lack of focus. Lack of focus and lack of kind of eye on the funding comes from. That's Yeah. why we're in a really exciting time right now is that there are end users who actually are allocating budget to this. And so if you can kind of narrow in and find out what problems they have and what Right. Right. problems they're going to have soon, I think the success success will be a lot higher if you can do that as opposed to I just want to do cool drone stuff. Right, right, right, right. It's you so okay, so the the lesson there is you've you've got to sort of focus in, find your niche, find like a a customer and problem spot combination that you understand. Yeah. Yep. Instead of trying to solve it all. Nice. I like it. something you're most proud of. I'm most proud of? A little bit of a tangent. I've been a woman my whole life and an engineer my whole adult life and so promoting other women in engineering is something that I'm really proud of. when I have worked corporate I have you know really tried to create opportunities for other women engineers whether that's in technical leadership or people leadership or both. and then yeah as a business owner I really try to build up a diverse team with diverse backgrounds because especially entering such a new space it's really important to have different perspectives. one of the reasons that I think those you know, that some of the failures have happened in this space is because they have really focused on we're gonna use our traditional aviation skills to enter the new era or we're gonna use our SaaS skills to enter the new era. And really what you need is the combination. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. In in software, I mean, the first, you know, fifteen, twenty years of my career, like it there was not a lot of women at all, right? And then more recently it felt like it was really improving, but still, if I'm honest, it felt like two, three, four out of twenty, you know. and and that's that's that's an improvement compared to where it was. Is aviation better than that? Or is it about the same? Like what's what's your experience there? Yeah, I'm afraid aviation is slightly worse than general software engineering as far as gender diversity goes. that said, you know, there's a lot of organizations, women in aviation type groups that that exist to try to support this. And then, you know, folks like me and the women that work on my team, we try to do a lot of outreach and working especially with, you know, younger generations so that they can see Yeah, yeah. that this is a space that you should consider as a career. Amen. Amen. I I I assume something that definitely works in software, I assume works in aviation, that teams that would that have a mixture of some diversity to it just work better than teams that don't. I don't know what it is, but you just get a group of all dudes and like sometimes this things just go the wrong way, right? And and so yeah, diversity is so important in so many ways. So yeah, I'll just put that in Espe especially in a space that is so ripe for innovation and that needs Yeah. really unusual innovation in innovative type approaches, Yep. Yep. because it's you know it's there's a lot of technical innovation that needs to happen, but there's also a lot of like policy and regulation and socializing type of innovation that we have to do in order to, Yeah. Yeah. you know, put robots in the sky and make that socially acceptable. Yeah, yep, a hundred percent. Okay, lightning round, favorite airport. I am so lucky to have grown up in Portland and PDX just always, if you've never been, I suggest you look at some pictures online because it is the most gorgeous airport. I will never be late to a flight because I show up hours early just to hang out there and enjoy it. Very nice. And I think you mentioned this already, but maybe talk about it a bit more. Favorite aircraft. Favorite aircraft is the Scan Eagle It just has such a cool story going from being something that was built to use off of boats for fishing, to being used in the military, and then having, you know, at the time this very innovative launch and recovery system that's runway independent. That was really what we were looking that they were looking for at the time is we need to be able to operate without a runway. And it this was pre-E VTOL. so yeah, that's my favorite. Amazing. Amazing. Bri, Thank you so much for spending time with us today on the Sky's Your I.O. podcast. It was an absolute pleasure, Kyle. Thanks for having me.

Bobby Healy is the founder and CEO of Manna. I think of Manna as one of the coolest owned companies out there, having taken first Ireland and now Europe by storm, working on the states next, they've delivered food in West Dublin, in Cork, in central Ireland, all over, and also in Helsinki and Finland, and they participated in the Key Program in Dallas Fort Worth. they were integrating the airspace between different drone companies. had Wing and Manna and Zipline all operating in the same space, which to me seems like a nice little laboratory towards integrating drones not only with each other, but potentially eventually with aviation. Bobby Healy is our guest today on the skyzero.io podcast. Bobby, thank you so much for being on the show today. We really appreciate having you on. Great to be here. Thanks for having me, Kyle. talk a little bit about how you got started. Like like I say, you're one of these really cool drone startups that have successfully delivered a lot of food, largely, so far, and participated in a lot of really cool programs And, you know, maybe like a zipline, you're more of a startup and not like backed by some giant, like Amazon and Google's wing. so yeah, talk a little bit about how you got started and what drew you to all of this and ~ and what that's been like so far. Yeah, so we're we're eight years old as a company. We've been flying for six of those eight years. We started kind of around COVID, the first COVID lockdowns when we first started really flying ~ commercially. And done a just over half a million delivery flights now. ~ primarily food. ~ we've done lots of other things. We've done pharmacy, we've done grocery, everything in between. And We we don't see ourselves necessarily as a as a food delivery company. We see ourselves as a logistics company powering other distributors of various products, be a be it a parcel company, be it a restaurant, be it a food delivery aggregator like a DoorDash or an Uber Eats or one of those guys. So all all we wanna do, our mission is just to give every city the infrastructure to move everything around from from anywhere to everywhere else. It's literally that simple. So, a lot of the industry is kind of bit preoccupied with pizzas and that's the story. It isn't the story is when we look at the next in from ten years on when we're ubiquitous and everyone can access it basically digital delivery, ~ what would you do with it? How would you transform local economies, the job creation that would happen in small businesses? How would a a retail footprint reorganize itself to reach consumers? How would brands reorganize themselves to reach consumers and households? So it's it's a there there's a lot of there there are a lot of headlines in this industry because it's a kind of sexy industry. It's interesting to talk about. But when you break down the the strategy, the strategy is is logistics at scale safely. ~ that's the product. it isn't a burrito, it isn't a cup of coffee, it's it's a flight. ~ And and there's a lot in that, but you know, we can we can I'm sure we'll crack into the detail soon enough. Yeah. But so so like yeah, we're we're two hundred and fifty people, you know, raise venture capital just over a hundred million dollars. So we're one of the smaller players ~ relatively to Amazon and Google for sure. Even Zipline have raised, I think, close to three billion now. ~ so we're definitely we're definitely a smaller player in terms of capital, but our product is on a par, if not better, than anyone else. So You know, so we're we're there, we we intend to be a leader in the United States. I'm living there now. ~ although you wouldn't think it by this background, 'cause I'm in Ireland today. I live in I live in Oklahoma now where we have our manufacturing, where we have all Well. of our operations and that's just ~ for regulatory reasons, legal reasons, the USA now is the place to scale and that's evident I think that in certification and scaling part is is maybe one of the interesting questions. we we talked about how you guys participated in the key site. I understand it right, like this was where I think it was FAA sort of decided like, hey, we're gonna do this. We're gonna allow multiple drone operators to sort of operate in the same space and essentially exchange Flight plans with each other so that we can imagine it was safe. So I imagine that there's like a couple of different safety things being looked at at the same time. And one is each operator, you know, like can they fly reliably? But next is this like can we interoperate them? But am I getting this right? Like this you you lived it and I'm I'm like reading about it from the outside. That was the first time in the world that happened. ~ it was ourselves and Google, Wing is Google's drone delivery program, and we connected our UTM systems. So we we use a company called ANRA for UTM. UTM is an unmanned traffic management system. Essentially it's a digital, it's a piece of software that you know that that connects with other operators. So we have ours, Wing have theirs. We connect our UTMs together and before we take off, literally ten seconds before we take off, we allocate a a three D corridor through s through space and time. And we say we're going to be in this section of airspace for the next six minutes or whatever it is. And we allocate Yeah. that, then we publish that, it's called strategic deconfliction. We publish that and wing would receive that. They would agree that, give us an acknowledgement, which means that Mm. we know that they're not going to fly into that space. So We demonstrated that in Dallas with with the folks from the FAA and the Department of Transportation. And everyone everyone was at it, like all the key stakeholders were there. And you could literally see Google's aircraft flying underneath our aircraft together in the same airspace. And that was a great demonstration. A great demonstration of mature technology. I mean, we we've been working on this for years, so have Google. We're all very confident of this solution, but it was the first time we actually fluid in you know in in an actual physical location rather than simulation. ~ it isn't rocket science, but it is good governance and good good architecture to allow free access to the airspace for anyone that wants to fly in the airspace safely. And it's a software only system. So ~ you Yeah. don't need air traffic controllers, you don't need any complex hardware, radar, anything like that. It just It's just a cooperative federated system and it worked great. We're very proud to be first in the world to do it with Google. ~ and it's kind of you know, we're we we like to think of ourselves as probably the t from a software stack and technology point of view, probably the leader in the industry. And that was just a good example of that. And it's an interesting industry as well because you you have a bunch of companies that are apparently competitors, but we're not really we all We have to work together to share the airspace. Yeah. Yep. We have to cooperate. We have to agree standards and approaches to doing things. And we actually enjoy I'd say we enjoy each other's company in the sky. You know, like we we celebrate each other's successes. ~ and we, you know, like w it's an industry built on safety, right? So we share Yeah, right. a lot together. We we depend on each other to get it right because, you know, b you know, bad policy in one company reflects on all of us. So It's an industry that collectively cooperates very closely. Yeah. That's cool. That's cool. Yeah. so yeah, it's an interesting one. let me see if I understood it right. So it to rewind a little bit, you were saying that you would transmit some sort of flight plan and say this is the three D space we intend to operate in and I think you said Wing would then like not approve it maybe or or reply. Ignol they would approve exactly. Acknowledge. Yeah. Like they can't say no because we don't we don't want you to fly. Right. They just have to say yes, they are aware of that flight, Okay. they won't fly in the same airspace. It's it's just traffic, it it's just traffic management. But if you think about it, it's quite funny because it means that we all see each other's flights. You know, Absolutely. Yeah. Yep. but that's that's the way airspace has to work. If we're gonna share the airspace It is. It we have to be what's called conspicuous. So we we need to digitally tell each other about our flight. So yeah, Google get that message and in a millisecond they come back and they say, Yes, we agree. That's blocked off now. And by the way, it's it it's it's a flight is basically a ton of twenty meter hexagons for us, three dimensional Mm. hexagons, with a time stamp that for us lasts twenty seconds. So we're gonna be there at nine fifteen and twenty seconds, and we'll be there Huh. For a maximum of twenty seconds. So so that airspace is only allocated for a tiny amount of time, which means that the the airspace is very efficiently used. So you can have On it. a lot of aircraft in a tight space and it's not going to be a problem. I think part of what was behind my question is like if there were ten of them and all of them had to like review it and get back to you, like that could be time consuming and and you could but but there's no like review, it's more just acknowledge I have received. ~ so is this broadcast ish where like you you're sort of yelling into everyone in the room like here's my flight plan and they're all acknowledging or if there were ten, would you have to like do that ten times and like tell them Yeah. Any anyone yeah. who wants to share that same physical airspace must be part of the UTM Federation and has to subscribe Right. to alerts and warnings and all sorts of other stuff. So everyone has their own UTM, which is a standard. But then if you want to share the airspace, like i if if Zipline were sharing the airspace with us or or Amazon were it they would have to fly with a UTM because there's just no other way to safely avoid each Right. other. Yeah. Right. Get in getting into BVL OS. It's not like you've got an operator down there like looking at the Yeah. Right. So f Well and also detect, like th there's a there's this kind of a sensor approach to detect where you could use radar, too expensive, not really viable, too much infrastructure. There there there's some acoustic detection measures, they're just not reliable at a at at the level you need for safety. Like sure you can acoustically detect some drone signatures, but they're not safe at scale. It's just it's too ambiguous. So the only way we Mm. No that makes sense. the only way really way to do it is cooperative. So you know so so for drones because they're little things we can't carry a lot of equipment we have to be lightweight so ~ w so we would know ADSB so we would see a helicopter for ambulance helicopter we would No, right. okay. see their transporter and that Right. that's all automated on our side but for drones we're too small we're too light ~ so therefore we have to do through what's called what's called cooperative deconfliction or strategic deconfliction and i it just it works. We've done this In Ireland, ~ we've done it in the USA and we've done it in the UK recently, actually a few months ago we flew together again with Google in the UK. So, you know, this this is a kind of an international approach. Cool. And I I promise to stop nerding out on the details momentarily, but but one more question. When I think of drones, I think of remote ID, which is like Bluetooth and Wi Fi based. But you're saying you've got ADSB too. Like do you mean that like you're picking up an ADSB like you've got ADSB in gear? Or or you're broadcasting ADSB out, or you're like doing mode S response? Like how sorry, I'm probably way too nerdy about ADSB there. Yeah. We don't broadcast we we don't broadcast ADSB, we read it, and we Got it. we read it centrally and we stream it out. So if you think about there's different there's different ways to do this. We we could have an ADSB receiver on board, but Right. the other way is centralized ADSB receiver with redundancy at a base that's close to the aircraft, and we stream. So for example, we have two LTE modems on our aircraft, so we've two separate. connections to the aircraft to two separate masts to two separate physical stacks. So at any at any time we have two physical connections on the aircraft and we don't take off if unless we have a high quality signal on both carriers. So like there's a lot of redundancy in there. ~ and then we have centralized ADSB feeds as well for a an extra Got it. redundancy. So ADSB is good, but it's not it's not the full answer because you have a lot of dark traffic, you know, maybe police, army whatever even, you know, non cooperative manned aviation where you might have a private pilot just refusing to transpond. Yeah, yep. So like that's we still have to solve for all of that. So it's not that's why why you'll see in the United States a lot of operations, in fact nearly all the operations now are in areas of airspace called Mode C Veil which is area Mm-hmm. twenty nautical miles around a Class B airport, a large airport. And the reason that w that everyone is scaling there is because it's mandatory to have an ADSB transponder if you're flying in that airspace. So therefore Yeah, yeah. we're guaranteed that we know everyone is conspicuous and we can detect them. ~ so there there's some things still to be ironed out for I see. full scale. ~ like uncontrolled airspace in the USA is complex because it's everyone's got an airplane in the USA and there's a lot of crop dusters, there's lot of private helys everything in between. And it's not you can legally fly without being conspicuous in the USA in uncontrolled airspace. Right, right. So for for that the only real solution is actually radar. And the for example in Tulsa that's what we're doing. So the city of Tulsa ~ has a radar system that covers our area and we have a feed into that that lets us see if there's someone operating a private aircraft, we know that they're there or or illegally a drone. we'll know that they're there as well through that radar. amazing. Wow. Okay. Is this like w like a tower at the Oklahoma, you know, international airport or something? Or is this like no, no, the city's put one ~ in the The city the city have have funded a system called Safe T, which is a it's a it's a city initiative to basically support drone technology in their airspace because they're not near Tulsa International Airport's not a Class B airport, so it doesn't have the requisite radar that we would be able to tap into. So the city essentially funded a infrastructure for for the entire city and the surrounding area. to allow and support drone operators. And so like Tulsa has declared itself the drone delivery capital of the United States. So Very cool. it's meaningful. I was I was at last week in Oklahoma City, sorry, this week in Oklahoma City where I I did a talk with the governor of Oklahoma and he was announcing that they've now reached 58 billion dollars in receipts and revenue for the state in their aerospace sector. And they see drones and drone technology and drone manufacturing becoming a huge part of that fifty eight billion. It's expanding it to have a target for about twice that over the next twenty years. Yeah. Well and and you mentioned earlier, like that you're you're rehoming to Oklahoma, right? and and like like we said, you you guys have operated in in Europe and and the Key Site, but but yeah, if I go to your website now, it's all about Oklahoma. It's all about Tulsa being sort of the Yeah, yeah. next big direction. ~ yeah, tell us about that. Like tell us about what what are the plans and ~ and and all of that. Yeah. So like I would say we we were kind of born in Ireland, raised in America. ~ you know, we're you know, Ireland's a small country, but it's a great country at building technology, particularly aerospace and regulated aviation. We've the largest regulator in Europe, aviation regulator in Europe. They're superb at at you know, I won't say they're easy, they're a very tough regulator, but they're an industrial grade one. So Ireland has always been the right place For us to build this business and build the technology and demonstrate it at scale. And having half a million delivery flights under our belt in such a small country is is impressive. And we've, you know, at any one base, we could be doing 50 or 60 deliveries an hour, no problem, you know, routinely. Mm. So we've been able to stretch it. And the other good thing about Ireland is the weather is brutal here. So you get to test every kind of form of weather: rain, hail, snow, strong winds, gusts, everything. So it's a good kind of a hardening of the platform to make sure that you're able for anything. And we were able Yeah. Yeah. to fly in 97% of Irish weather. So that's Wow. good. And then why USA? Well, I mean, it's it's it's obvious USA is the biggest cohesive market in the world by far ~ for this type of technology. Even though there's half a billion people in Europe, you know, and less than that in the United States, Europe is hugely fragmented, both culturally, language, currency. regulations and laws, permitting everything is just everywhere you go. Social norms, yeah, architectural style, It's just yeah. Correct. like all of it. Yeah. Yep. So it's just even even though Europe is an interesting market and we fully plan to grow in Europe, the first market we want to really throttle up in and become a leader is the United States simply because of the size of the market. And by the way, and how business friendly the market is towards this technology. Yeah. Yeah. And you see with the executive order The President Trump issued an executive order in last June. ~ and ~ essentially that order called American unleashing American drone dominance. Drone dominance. Yep. That's right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Unleashing American drone dominance. We w we celebrated that Because it was leashed before. That's correct. in Ireland. We were delighted because up until then the USA had fallen behind on this technology because there just wasn't sufficient regulations required for us to scale as a business, for the industry to scale. Yeah. And the Chinese were were making a mockery of the world with dumping Yeah. dumping you know product into markets. And and USA needed that executive order and the following approval from both sides of the aisle in the Senate. So very clearly it has bipartisan support that USA wants to become a leader in drone technology. So we we could see when that executive order came out that this is meaningful and it's going to mean change at the FAA, FCC, DOT level to really, you know, have a mandate to make this happen. And that was for us the that was the the the time for us, the inflection point, if you will, for us that said, now is the time to start planning for our USA. Yeah. Yeah. Like we've been flying with USA for three years. We've had a base in Texas for a long time, but it just there was no point even trying to scale because the regulations weren't there. And now with the imminent Part 108 regulations that are coming out from From the FAA, which you have essentially the USA is going to be first in the world at this technology because of that administration's policy to enable the Part 108 regulations to happen. So all of that happened so quickly. We've been we were caught a little behind. We didn't think it would happen that quickly, but the executive order certainly made that happen. And the result is very clear. You see the scale, you know, Amazon will be by the end of the year, they'll have a million deliveries under their belt. Zipline a little bit less than that, I think, in the USA, a lot in Africa, but in the USA, quite a bit smaller. ~ Google are probably the biggest. Google Wing are probably the biggest. So collectively, I think the industry will have between five and ten million orders by the end of the year. And of that, our capacity at the end of this year will be just shy of two million orders, ~ deliveries, flights, whatever you want to call it. So it's a tiny, that's a tiny number because if you think about Just food delivery. There's probably over four billion food deliveries a year in the United States and largely provided by Doordash and Uber, but also provided All right. individual companies, smaller companies. So it's a huge Mm-hmm. market. So ten million orders is you know not even scratching the surface. So it's gonna take our industry ten plus years to get any kind of ~ hope. where drone delivery is a bigger vol by volume than road based delivery. ~ it's a more popular product. Yeah. Once people use drone delivery they they don't go back. They never use road based delivery Sure. again. But rolling out that many aircraft and that many bases and all that comes with that is just gonna take all of us a lot of time. It's a chicken and egg infrastructure kind of yeah. And it's Yeah Yeah, Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well well correct. Yeah it's a lot hold let's rewind to Part one eight. I I I I'm not as up on the regulatory reality as I maybe should be, and and maybe other listeners won't. What's what is it about part one eight that's that's changing things? So th right now everyone flies under something called Part One Three Five, which is a c it's a cargo airline license essentially, and it comes with a very heavy burden both on the FAA and on the operator, every new place you want to fly. It it just takes a year, year and a half to go through the paperwork for that. It's not really fit for purpose for what for the kind of distributed nature of a industry like we have. Like I mean, Amazon has stated they're gonna be in five hundred cities in the next three years. Or two years, I think. Like that it d the FA wouldn't have the resources to do that. Sure, to even respond to all that. And you Amazon. Yeah. Yep. So Part 108 is federal and it's it's comprehensive. So you get one part one eight approval, it's good for the entire country and you're ready to go. And so long as your your parameters of your one eight say, this is how many flights, this is how high we fly, this is our noise profile, this is our whatever. Once all of that's approved and you have your license, you can Repeat that anywhere you want. It's not tied to a location. And so the environmental part ~ i is removed now from city by city and state by state and it's brought up to a federal level. So all of the rulemaking on Power one eight has had to take into account all the different variances and states and cities and all that stuff. So it's had a ton of comments and and backwards and forwards with all the different stakeholders, which is why it's taken so long. But in in the end The new FAA administrator, ~ Brian Bedford, is Uh-huh. a man that with a mission to get this implemented. And I think on the back of that you've seen billions of dollars of capital coming into our space, specifically because investors and smart money recognizes that now we all have a path to grow. And so, you know, it's it's just good policy. It's good b policy for business. It's open up the skies like China did five years ago with liberalizing the What they call the low altitude economy. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Europe has tried to do it hasn't been as effective. Well now the United States with part one hundred eight. So so one eight is essentially federalises a bunch of standard rules that we can Got it. Right. all agree to operate under and it it just means it's clarity for everyone. Amazing. Okay. So like you say, I I apply once, I get it federally, I can then operate where I need to save you the paperwork time and hassle. I mean, maybe to set up rules, which is good, you know what rules to play by. ~ but it but instead of I have to apply sort of that sounds like city by city before, you know, or some sort of jurisdiction by yeah. Okay, cool. Thank you. ~ I like where you're going in terms of like the the infrastructure needs to get built out and and sort of thinking about how that works. I mean, y y ~ on w I think I I don't remember who it was. Maybe Zipline had something where it's like, you know, they the the it doesn't really matter who it was, but they each each delivery station, each ~ how do you think about this? Like are are we should we think of this as like, we're gonna put these little drone airports in Tulsa? Or is it more like, no, we're gonna sell into Home Depot to pick a name at random and put like a a ~ you know, how how do you think about the infrastructure? How are the bases gonna work? Yeah. Combination. ~ we have a different footprint. ~ so I mean I could go to each of the operators. We all will I think ultimately we'll all converge on quite similar approaches, ~ with the exception of Amazon. So I'll talk about Amazon first. They're very interested in great aircraft, great bit of engineering, incredible bit of engineering actually. ~ and it flies long range, so it's flying, I think, nine mile radius now and going to fifteen mile radius. If I'm not mistaken, that's really difficult to do with a electric small electric aircraft. And theirs is quite a heavy aircraft. ~ so and they they do that because they're operating out of their fulfillment centers, which are you know, not distributed everywhere. So they have to fly a long way to reach customers. So they've solved it that way and they're kind of round trip flights right out of a full fulfillment center out to the customer and back, right? So they've had to solve for a a big deadhead flight, you know, coming back, which is a wasted Right, but they've done a good job of it and I think it works for them and it's specific to them. ~ if I look at wing ~ or ourselves, most most similar where we we'll put aircraft down on pads on the ground at a location. In the case of wing, they're all over with Walmart and they're scaling a lot with Walmart. So you'll see Wing, what they call wing nests in all of the Walmarts, and they've got fifteen, twenty of those small pads and and aircraft and they'll do about one point three, one point four deliveries per hour per aircraft in and around and that's their throughput. So I think 20 aircraft is about fifth thirty, roughly thirty deliveries an hour, let's say, to to manage a peak. So so they put the infrastructure there and then and Walmart load the product. And that that works for a business like that that's high throughput, that has lots of real estate you know, the huge car parks, lots of real estate, lots of products to choose from, so therefore n a natural fit. Our version of that in in the UK and Ireland is Tesco, it's kinda Tesco's the Walmart of of our place, same thing. And we worked for them as well, d delivering groceries and convenience store. ~ we d that that's the common model. So if you look at what we're putting down in Tulsa, we have well plans we haven't implemented them yet, but by the end of the year we'll have about Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty bases on the ground. ~ and those those will be at physical locations where we for for us our aircraft will do eight deliveries per hour, right? So we because we don't have to charge the battery, it's a hot swap system. So therefore with three aircraft and a base, we do about twenty to twenty-four deliveries per hour. So we just put down at most bases only three aircraft will do fine. Some bases five aircraft if we need more throughput. And we just put those aircraft down there and they fly from w we're s slightly different than everybody else in the way we fly. So we'll fly from that base, let's say our Cherry Street base in Tulsa. We fly four or five miles out to a customer and deliver them their burrito or their pizza or whatever it is. But we will fly back to the closest base to that person's house to where we did that delivery. So we won't fly. Got it. We don't need the aircraft to fly home. So we we orchestrate the network dynamically so that we reduce the flight time and therefore increase the capacity of the aircraft and the utilization of the aircraft. So the way the way to model what we do is exactly the way a low-cost airline would work. Low-cost airline won't fly out and back the same route. It'll fly out to from city A to City B and then on to City C, City D, and whatever the aircraft will will figure their way around the network. based on yield optimization or optimizing the seed in the aircraft. And we're no different. So we our aircraft any given day, you never know where they're going to end up. And it'll depend Interesting. on it'll depend on where customers are ordering at any specific moment in time. So if somebody at base D orders within that catchment area orders a burrito and it's going to take 15 minutes for the restaurant to prepare that. And there's no aircraft there, we'll send an aircraft to pick that up and then deliver to the customer and maybe come back to a different base. All that happens automatically for us. We call it a mesh network. And it's the best way to optimize your fleet. And that only works if your mesh covers the entire city, which in the case of Tulsa for us, it will by the end of the year. So that that's a software optimization of a hardware problem. So we're slightly different than everyone else. Wing ~ have the capacity to do that. I don't believe they're doing that now. And then the other thing to think about, and that you're kind of getting into zipline territory now, which they have a super cool system. ~ I I love it, the ambition of it. ~ you know, and they they can pick products up, so they can have a base of n of aircraft somewhere else, fly out there, pick it up, and then fly to a customer and back. There's issues with that around energy and battery and range and all that stuff, because those extra tr trips that you make are punishing on energy levels and your ability to fly Yeah. further. ~ we can pick up as well, so can wing. so so the three of us can pick products products up. Today we have not rolled that out, and I don't believe Wing have rolled that out very much either, because they're focused on Walmart. Right. Well, is part of that gonna be ~ but the the the future is part of that gonna be their architecture, right? Like it I think of wing as a dr is a is a quadcopter, you know, kind of thing. And I you know, I I haven't deeply studied it, but I think you guys are similar, whereas, you know, Zip is sort of doing that combination thing. You know, we're gonna drop that little guy down to you, but then we're gonna pull it back up. Actually no, it's still a quadcopter, isn't it? Yeah, 'cause it still has to hover there. No, it's quite it's the same. We're we're all the same. ~ w we're Yeah. so the the t they're kind of VTOL, so they can go up and forwards it'cause 'cause they have a wing. So they're very efficient in forward flight. The right. That's what I'm missing here. Right. Yeah. It's not that they don't do VTOL, but they do have a wing and they they're so they they they they Yeah. might get more efficient range out of that, I guess, is where I'm going. Yep. They'll they'll get they they'll get more efficient. You just range is not the pr range is not hard. Volume is hard. So like volume of your pro so w our range with a copter, which is very inefficient, is perfectly fine. We have the range we need with a standard size battery. The harder problem to solve, and everyone asks what weight can you carry. It's not weight either. The weight it's kind of a linear connection to weight and battery required, so it's not difficult. Volume is hard. So think big pizza or ~ lar like three happy meals for example a lot of volume there You're carrying a sail. yeah so i i to have a lot of volume you need to have a lot a big aircraft and a bigger big Yeah. aircraft is going to be heavy and has a lot of wind resistance so I think Yeah. Hmm. if you look at all three of us you'll see three ends of the spectrum where w wing have the lightest smallest aircraft consequently with the lightest payload you know pound and a half payload ~ Zipline have an enormous expensive heavy aircraft with a I think a seven pound payload, something like that. ~ but if you look at the volume, probably the same volume as we have. ~ you know, so so our we've designed our volume for the 90th percentile of food delivery. That's kind of where our volume number comes from. But the result is the aircraft is big, right? So if you look at our aircraft, it's hard to tell. When you see it in photos, but it's like one point eight meters motor to motor. It's a big Mm. aircraft. So in order of size, it's wing, mana, zip line, Amazon in size and weight. Right, right. Right. And in order of complexity, I would say it's Amazon and Zipline joint number one, and then us number two and wing number three being the best, the the least complex, the lightest, all that stuff, and the cheapest aircraft. But you have to think about cost of ownership. of the platform, but it's not it's not the the most important thing in this industry isn't how sexy the tech is or how cool it is or how good it looks. It's what is your base cost, fully loaded cost per flight. And so that that factors in motor wear, battery depreciation, depreciation on the aircraft. It also factors in maintenance costs and maintenance time of replacing motors, things like that. So all that when when you factor all of that in. We are the leader in in that. We're we make money on every flight because our costs are so low. We depreciate the aircraft over seventy-five thousand flights. ~ we so so we know that we are the best there. And and we think when you're running a low cost airline, what matters is focus on cost. So safety has to be table stakes. Yeah. Yeah. And then it's about who who can scale with the lowest cost. And Warren Buffett said this in a commodity market. The winner is the one with the lowest unit cost, right? And that's what we've been chasing. So so because we are it it is a commodity market. We're not selling magical pizzas or great coffee or wonderful burritos. We're selling a flight. Customers are not buying drone delivery. They don't care who they get their drone delivery from. They just care about what they're buying. Right. So therefore, ultimately the strategy for us is to Be like a low cost airline, operate like one, relentless focus on unit cost and operational efficiency, and our architecture of our aircraft i i it's designed around having an efficient operation. Amazing. Cool. So what's it been is it been different like in operating in each like you said in Ireland, right? You've got every kind of weather imaginable. ~ and yeah, I can imagine that's a great place to you've got plenty of wind, plenty of humidity, plenty of rain, you know, plenty of all of everything. ~ not Yeah. sure how much snow and ice, ~ but but ~ maybe that's just me being ignorant. We get we get we get ice, we get sub zero. Not as bad as you get in some parts of the USA. But in Finland, for example, we're flying to minus twenty minus Yeah, yeah. Telsinki. Yes. twenty Celsius. Don't ask me what that is in Fahrenheit, but it's r like you know, your No, it's okay. ~ br your you know, you throw water in the air, it freezes before it hits up. And it freezes pretty quick. Yeah, as a Canadian I can I can relate to negative twenty that yeah, of course, of course. So is cold. Yeah. the real issue is icing conditions. That's that's different than cold. Right right. Icing is warmer, right? So icing is this magical kind of combination of barometric pressure, dew point, ~ ambient temperature, and size of droplets in the air. So like Yeah, yeah. and so that's a a nearly impossible scenario to fly in safely. And that that puts us out of business for about one percent of the time in the USA. Got it, got it. Well, I guess in in Tulsa and in Dallas you're you're maybe dealing with more dry heat. Again, out of Houston maybe you've got the humid heat, but but ~ but yeah, like heat itself, and with yeah, conventional aircraft, ~ the heat can be its own problem, right? Dry and hot can be ~ a bit of an issue, especially sort of when you're on the tarmac. ~ what about with UAV? I mean, has have has have these been new challenges for you guys? ~ but I'm also thinking it was just like how buildings work. Right. Like I when I think of Dallas and and Tulsa, I think of pretty sort of spread out cities, you know, with not a lot of height. You know, we're not talking about like apartment block after apartment block. Yeah. Yeah. This is much more sort of suburban backyards and things. ~ or or even rural, you know, with like decent pieces of land. So what when you think about the differences of the the operating spaces that you've moved through, right? Like what where have the challenges been there? ~ yeah, what are you fixing? Yeah. Mean heat he heat heat is a big difficult problem to solve because I mean assuming mechanically you get everything okay in the aircraft, right? All your bonding, all your cables, all that stuff survives. Because y you might have and I apologize to anyone that's listening to being met in metric here, but like you might have in Phoenix forty five, forty six degrees Celsius. which like a hundred and fifteen kind of Yeah. I think. it's very hot, but the solar load makes it even hotter. So your aircraft is experiencing probably fifty percent more than that, or maybe double Wow. the actual ambient. So whatever you feel as a human in your face, the aircraft's getting twice that because of the effect of the sun. ~ so so you gotta deal with a lot, but it's no different than any automotive sector's ever dealt with. Like you're you're you there's all the there's so many cars in Phoenix and they're not going on fire, right? So So we so we we've known about that and we've designed for that and it's not an issue for us. And you also have to think about seasonal changes. So your aircraft will be going from super hot to super cold over the seasons, because our aircraft will live for a couple of years in service in the same place. The real hard problem to solve is the battery. So the battery, both in extreme cold and extreme hot. Like so b battery chemistry, it's a chemical reaction, right? Lithium ion charge, it's a chemical reaction, it's happening. So If anyone remembers their, you know, high school chemistry, you'll remember that temperature is a key factor in the speed of a of a chemical reaction. And so we have to keep the battery at a very narrow temperature in order to both charge it safely and discharge it safely and get the maximum performance out of the battery. So when you have when you're flying and you need the battery to be at let's say, I'm gonna just throw the number out, say seventy degrees Fahrenheit, the battery needs to be optimally to get the most energy out of it or to get the most safety when you're charging it. And but yet you're dealing with an ambient of 115 with a solar load of 150 more. ~ how do you get the battery down to that temperature that you need it to be at? And that's very difficult because we're very we our aircraft have to be very light. You can't afford refrigerant coolers like Teslas have in their batteries. You you you can't Right. pump cooling fluid around your battery on a drone. Right. That's a lot of weight. Yeah, you just Yeah. couldn't afford it. So we're lucky because we we as I said, we have this hot swap system. So when our aircraft Mm-hmm. lands it gets a new battery and that new battery has been indoors in a temperature controlled environment where it's loaded Yeah. Yep. with cargo. So we benefit And it's a significant thermal mass, so it's not gonna like immediately shoot up. It it I would imagine it stays at temperature for most of the flight. And then you've got passive cooling, Yeah, you don't I guess. you don't put much temperature on when you're flying. Like a a j general a high load flight for us might put ten degrees on the battery. If it's flying into wind, it's doing a lot of work and it's a long flight. ~ so you're not putting a lot on there and you as you said, you're you're correct, your passive is doing a lot of work for you as well. the the issue comes when it's sitting on the tarmac and ~ you just can't you just couldn't sit those batteries on the tarmac for any amount of time w without Right. Right. cooling them. So and we don't need to do that. So we're okay. ~ and I I can speak so I think Yeah. Smart. Amazon have the same hot swap system. They swap the whole battery pack each time. They don't charge their aircraft in situ. But but everyone else charges in situ. So Zipline you see when they're hanging on those poles, they're Yeah. charging, but it y you don't know as well on those poles they've got cooling fans on those poles. ~ wow, yeah. Okay. Yeah, pretty cool. Hmm. Great bit of engineering. ~ Wing, I can't speak for Wing, but w Wing are just masters of engineering. I have full confidence that they don't have an issue with this and they've solved it some other way. Yeah. S solve it somehow, sure. Yeah. But but to your point hot swap is ~ or maybe hot swap puts temperature back into the frame in a way that we don't want it to. But quick swapping the batteries or nah, we call it hot swap, don't we? Yeah, the that to your point that sort of solves a big chunk of the problem. B the rest of the aircraft it doesn't care as much about the heat side. Like maybe your motors care a little bit, but b batteries are probably the biggest part if I understand it right. Yeah, motors motors are more tolerant for sure. And and the nice thing about motors, they're very predictable. So we you know, we have temperature sensors on our motors, so we know exactly what temperature they're at and we know if they're if they're out of range, so we just don't fly. Yeah. Very, very straightforward. And then the other thing is when they're flying, they get a lot of passive cooling as well. So you kinda motors are easier to deal with and once you design your motor for a particular temperature, you don't really have a problem. ~ And it's always safe because it's super predictable, right? You know the range that your motor's efficient at temperature wise. ~ and you know if you've done damage to the motor as well in terms of wear Yeah. and tear. ~ so it's straightforward. Batteries are batteries are volatile by their nature, so you have to be really disciplined with them and and our margin, and I'm sure I can speak for the rest of the industry too. We adopt a very conservative margin on our batteries that like we might know that the battery's good for two thousand cycles, but we'll only use it for one thousand cycles. Ha ha ha ha. So and we won't use we'll condition the battery at the start where we'll put a lot of cycles on that battery before its first flight. Because the the worst Yeah. battery is a new battery, and then the second worst battery is an old battery at the end of life. So we we precondition all of our batteries when they're new so as we don't put the We don't fly them as a new battery. So so you can you can build in mars Interesting. for safety for that kind of stuff. Interesting. ~ I didn't realize that. So Bobby, one one of the things I keep thinking about as we do this is like if so you're talking about the the drones are gonna land do a delivery, right? And then they might land somewhere else. Are you gonna end up with a lot of drones like perched near houses and none near the restaurants? How how are you gonna roll this out? Like how are you planning this? I'd I'd love to see behind that curtain. Yeah, so good good. I'm glad you asked me that actually, 'cause I I mentioned earlier on about mesh and like Tulsa is our first big city. Tulsa will be about twenty, thirty bases for us, depending on exactly where the last few end up. Some of those bases won't even be besides supply. They'll just be bases where aircraft live to go out and do work and then come back. So I'll I'll actually show you, right? I've got a video here which shows this very Great. well and which I'll show. ~ assume that is cool. you can see that. Okay. So ~ so w the w what's going on here, right? That's Tulsa by the way. These our bases in Tulsa. And then I'm just Got it. if I drag the slider, you see this is a simulation of flights, by the way, which we use to kind of test and optimize location of bases. But I do this, these are all drones, right? So you what you'll see is drones will go out to one base and then go on to another base, or they'll go out to a location and come back to a different base over time. Right. You'll see aircraft migrating across that area. So I mean, you know. Th th this is just a render of a simulation. We run hundreds of millions of these simulations to get to the right answer for where we put and also to fantastic. Cool. Cool. to kind of educate us on like sometimes depending on the load, you could have a w what's called a lobsided load where you just get too many orders in one place and suddenly all the aircraft are in the north of the city or the south of the city, whatever. So so we have to budget for that because at the end of every day all our aircraft return to our central depot. And that Okay. so they all have to get home. And that's a bit of a logistical nightmare on its own to get that right. So they don't live overnight distributed across the city. They all fly home to our depot where they get a maintenance inspection. So we we look at props, things like that. And so we we have to therefore we have to make sure see those green circles, they're like four mile circles. I was about to ask you about the color. Yeah, they're like four mile Yeah, like what's what's blue versus red versus yellow? kind of four mile radii ~ circles. And and so that kind of that's broadly the coverage of toll. So that's that's only partial. The the the the top part, the top right there has to be rolled out. ~ but but so we we will we'll have certain locations that are just like dark field or the roof of a house or sorry, the roof of building, which we'll actually aircraft will live there during the day. They'll live there from seven in the morning till nine or ten at night, ready to work, and then they'll go out and they'll be ready to work. And critically it's a it's a is spare location when we have too many aircraft in a location, we can just park them over there. All that happens automatically. That's all in our route planning and our route optimization. So it when you're rolling out of the city, that's the way you need to think and that's why the mesh is important. That's why everything has to overlap like this so that it all comes together. Works, you know. Yeah. That's fantastic. That's fantastic. So I can imagine there's a fair amount of like intellectual property and how you think about that and like what what the parameters are, what the math is, what the algorithm is. That's that's really cool. So when you talk about these like hot spots, like you talked about like lopsided orders and things, ~ are there you personally have been doing this for a while, man has been doing this for a while. Are I can imagine stuff like, there is a football game on, and so all of a sudden everybody wants XYZ, whatever that might be. ~ or or maybe it it's Thanksgiving and so maybe everybody's cooking and so they want more deliveries or w is it is it that sort of like calendar event kind of things, or is it more like, you know, going through the day and it's like well dinner time or or or what what are the drivers? Or and and maybe you see stuff which is just plain like nobody expected, but all of a sudden, I don't know, maybe s somebody put put told all their friends in the South about like how great this is and now suddenly there's a lot more orders in southern Tulsa, like What what are the different factors that influence Yeah. that? Yeah. It's viral. I mean, when the moment you roll what we what we learned the hard way was you you can't make it available to everyone on day one because you get a stampede and you just can't deal with it. So you what you'll get is like we we had twelve thousand app lo app downloads in twenty four hours when we announced our service in Dublin. And we just like we only had capacity for three hundred orders a day at the time. It's like it just so we we We we disappointed a lot of customers for quite a bit of time, you know, because we just took us just too long to get enough throughput in there to keep everyone happy. So it it's for a big proportion of residents, they're super excited about getting their first ever drone delivery and they all come in Right. the day 'cause it everyone the radio stations, T V stations, everyone's drone delivery. Right this is news. Yeah, it is. It's big news and so therefore everyone hears about it. And so you have to manage that carefully. ~ to make sure you don't disappoint folks. So we do a slow warm-up. So like in Tulsa it'll take us. So we started flying in July, ~ just the end of July. And it'll take us till the end of December to r to really open it fully to the full, kind of to everyone, to all the vendors, all the population. And so so that's tricky. That shouldn't have been a surprise for us, but it was. What wasn't a surprise for us, but that mo to it is to most people is the biggest thing we deliver is coffee. ~ it's like twelve Mm. percent of our deliveries is is coffees, you know. People order and they don't order one, they'll order two or three coffees with pay freeze because they're getting the delivery to their house. That's Okay. the number one use case for for us ~ is is is beverages. ~ then obviously ice cream donuts, takeaway food, pharmacy, hardware, bookstore. You name it, we have it. But you'll you'll see maybe everyone thinks pharmacy is a great thing, you know, medication, all that stuff. That's what drone delivery should be used for. But we we have that and we've had that for six years, and it's like what less than one in five hundred orders is that type of product. Wow, hm. So you you gotta you gotta deliver what people ask you to deliver, not what you think they should be getting. Yeah. Yeah. We've listened for years to our customers and to the communities that we serve. We know what people want delivered and generally it's it's the simplest things ever and it's the things that just save folks an hour in their car, forty five minutes in their car going out to get the food and driving it back or waiting on, you know, a a delivery driver whatever. So it's the mundane and we're just giving people back that time and also saving them a lot of money because ultimately drone delivery is going to be a lot cheaper ~ for consumers for households than road based delivery 'cause there's no labour cost with ~ ~ Yeah, it. So yeah, yeah. At scale for sure it's gonna be, no doubt. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Wow. ~ Bobby, you've been really generous with your time today so far. Thank you. There's a couple of different questions ~ I like to ask everybody. ~ one of those what do you see for the future? for electrophytes aviation, for ~ for UAV, ~ for all of this new sort of AAM advanced ~ aviation space that we're that we seem to be living in. What do you what do you think the future holds? What holds promise? Well I think I think drone delivery is gonna scale a lot sooner than advanced air mobility than than manned ~ drones. So and that's very clear, that's already happening in our space. It's already at the commercialization phase. ~ and I'm very bullish now, thanks to really great policy that kind of sets the regulations in stone and quickly. ~ I I think it's going to be just the players that are there now. I don't think there's gonna be a proliferation of players. ~ you know, I think if you look at ~ ourselves, Sipline, Google, Amazon, there's a couple of other smaller players. I'd throw fly treks in there as well. Israeli Company, Doordash have recently announced their product. I think there might be one or two more. But I I I don't I I think it's there's gonna be a maximum of six or seven, I think, in the United States. And I I also think that There'll be an aggregation as well. So if you look at DoorDash, you know, w DoorDash will work with every drone delivery company just to get capacity because you there's n there isn't a winner takes all here. Okay, that's the message, right? Mm. There is not a winner takes all in this industry, and there's not going to be because there is no differentiator in the core product. The core product is just a delivery. So there isn't some differentiated thing that makes one thing better than the other. Other than cost, I think. ~ and the difficulty of rolling out capacity. Like out of those four billion deliveries today, they should be three or four times that. It should be fifteen billion deliveries a day, I sorry a year in the USA, but because there's not enough drivers, it's too expensive, it's not reliable constraints. wow, right. Right. Think about fifteen billion deliveries, you know, to to do to make fifteen billion deliveries happen, it's just millions of aircraft flying and it's going to take a decade for that to happen. So everyone's a winner here. Everyone that can responsibly scale with good unit economics, good capital economics, and a reliable, non-complex aircraft will do well. ~ so that that's my outlook. Bigger guys, Yeah. Cool. the beta, the Jobies, all those guys, I can't wait to fly in them, but the the it's a more challenging environment because they have to integrate With humans, if to fly humans, if they integrate with manned airspace in a different way. So it's a it's a longer timeline, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It'll be definitely an interesting question whether or not we will live in that Jepton's future where we're all but but yeah, to your point, like drones are drones are already working, It'd be so awesome. Yeah, drones are already. right? Like we Yeah, the yeah. Yeah. Yeah, drones drones are already. Like most people in the USA will see and be able to get drone delivery within the next five years, I would think. ~ isn't it awesome that we'll also get autonomous driving too? I think autonomous flying will be the the last of the three. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, interesting. So a a question I like to ask, and it's it's not necessarily, you know, about work. It could be almost about anything, but i it something a lesson in your in your life that you've learned. Yeah. Maybe maybe something that you know wasn't intuitive at first, ~ and and maybe it took you a little while to see it. But but yeah, something that you've learned through life that ~ surprised you maybe. Yeah. ~ biggest lesson is in around people. And as a a founder, this is my sixth company I've built. I've hired a lot of people and grown a lot of companies. My last company was a was a very big company. ~ it's very rare that people do succession planning and hire people smarter than them, better than them, bigger than them. So my message is if you're ever hiring or if you're building a company, you're growing a company. The first thing you need to get right is hiring. And it's the first thing that everyone doesn't get right is hiring. Yeah. Yeah. Literally, after building IP, building your team is the most important thing that usually folks get wrong. And I learned that the hard way in a few occasions, ~ by not recognizing that weakness that some people have. ~ Mm. and some people are great at it and some people are not, but it's key. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. I I totally agree. ~ something you're the most proud of. Most proud of my four beautiful children. A great answer, yes. ~ We often in kind of a lightning round, ~ I I often ask what is questions about aviation, which may not hit the same way, but I'll but I'll ask What is your favorite airport? Airport that's a great question. Gotta be Dublin Airport because I'm home. Fantastic. Love it. ~ favorite aircraft? A three eighty. Yeah? Why the three eighty? Because the size, wow. ~ I guess, or it's just a marvel, yeah. I mean, it is it the story as well, the disaster of it being economically they got it wrong, just a whole story that they're breaking them down, and now Emirates is recovering them and re retrofitting them and getting them back into life. But i for anyone that's ever been anyone on takeoff, the takeoff role and then V one and then lifting off the ground, you just like it's impossible. No way can this thing fly, Yeah, yeah. you know, and and it's so smooth. And it it feels like you're going fifty miles an hour when you leave the ground. Like this isn't gonna work. And then there's four big power plants on it. Yeah, yeah. It's just a beautiful it's a it's just a a ~ thrill to ~ to see. Amazing. Bobby, thank you so much for spending your time with us today on the sky zero.io podcast. Thanks for having me. It's been great.

it's not about removing control from the pilot. The pilot still has sort of the ultimate say in in what the aircraft does. But it's about detecting things really fast, presenting information to the pilot in a way that's very easy to consume. helping the pilot make decisions when when something goes wrong consistent. that's one of our big focuses with this aircraft is just making it the absolute safest aircraft to fly. structural testing on that. And one of the things that we found while Our current aircraft design actually, we've removed the strut Yeah. I'm really getting a sense that this is I mean this is X one experimental one. This is this is Yeah. Yeah. So we've been working on this aircraft for a while now. Right. But we're right on the precipice of flight now, so we're really excited about that. Cool. It's been a long journey. We talked a little bit about the process. the letter from the FAA saying that it was airworthy. Right. And then the process around getting a pilot ~ and and how all that's ~ a bit of a process. is it just sort of like, okay, now you do a test flight and that's it? Is there steps leading up to that? Yeah, so obviously we've been doing a lot of testing on this aircraft even before we get into the air. So we've done structural testing, we've done a lot of systems level testing. We've been out to the runway a number of times to do sort of simulated flight up until the point where you rotate. So we'll go fast down the runway, use the brakes come to a stop, make sure that everything is working right there. ~ so a huge amount of work that's gone into this and you kinda get to the point in any flight test program where it's almost it's almost boring. you know? Yeah. And that's because you've you've practiced everything so much. That's that's really important. And you want the flight to be boring. Yeah. ~ so that's kind of where we're at right now. ~ so you know we're we're very close to the flight. obviously there's a lot of first with that flight. This is a clean sheet aircraft, it's the largest electric aircraft ever flown by weight. Yeah. and there's a lot of new technology on this new systems that we've been working on so we're gonna get a huge amount of data from that. know the flight itself, ~ we hope is boring. But but it can be very specific. Exciting for different reasons. Yeah. Being here at Plattsburgh, like I had to it was a a first in my life because because I'm like I'm here for heart. Yeah. ~ but that must be interesting operating in like the same spaces. Yeah, well Plattsburgh is a great place to do experimental flight. So we've got a super long runway, we've got this big old ramp. Yeah. so it's you know it's relatively remote. so it's really great for for flight test. that's the reason we're here but yeah, it also feels like a hotspot for the the new sort of wave of aviation as well. Let's think about GE aerospace thing for a second too, right? I'm often writing about like what's a what's a hybrid and what's a full battery electric and is this one an independent hybrid or a parallel hybrid? Yeah. And of course they recently flew their parallel hybrid from basically from here to Farnborough Yeah. Stopping in Iceland and stopping in Greenland, like one does. and personally, like I'm much more attracted to the idea that Let's do as much on batteries as we can. But yeah, I mean it it's interesting how many other businesses are doing stuff with hybrids now. Yeah. And you guys, of course, are also a hybrid, the independent hybrid. Yeah. Absolutely. So the X1 is ~ all electric aircraft. Right. ~ so we have four electric motors, we don't have any turbines on this aircraft. The ES30, our production aircraft, will be a hybrid. So we'll have two turbines and two electric motors. And at ES30, what we're trying to optimize for is not size of aircraft but really driving the economics down. So we you know we want a very inexpensive aircraft to fly which in turn means the ticket prices could be cheaper and then also these aircraft will be flown out of more remote airports. That aren't currently economically viable. So that's really what we're going for. Right. so in order to achieve that, we think it's really important that you can fly short missions without using the turbines at all. Yep. So it's a slightly different strategy than you the GE demonstrator they they run the turbines every flight for the entire duration of flight. In our case, for short flights, you can fly all electric. Yeah. That means that you're not paying for the jet fuel. It also means that you're not doing a only a heat cycle in the turbine which means that you can reduce the maintenance costs hours Yeah. Well and it seems like with the approach you guys are taking, I don't think you've announced which turboprop you're gonna look for, but there seems like you would have a lot to choose from. Yeah. And if you were flying into Albuquerque or you know just or or Plattsburgh, probably there's somebody nearby that knows how to work on, right? Yeah. So there's probably some benefit to using something that's a little more stock. Yeah. So that is the benefit of our configuration. So the turbine is ~ a smaller turbine than you would typically have on the same size aircraft. Yeah. so that means that the turbine itself can be a little bit cheaper, little bit more more common for for shops to work on. Well and ~ from a like a big picture, we're kinda talking right now like a big module, this is this is an engine and that's a motor. Yeah. When we deep dive into like how parallel hybrids work, yeah, which of you know, I think of that as the Prius, right? And we've already mentioned that that's that's what GE's doing Yeah. it seems like there'd be a lot of engineering challenges that you would need to tackle in there, like dealing with high heat. I'm imagining gearboxes and clutches and like it just seems like there'd be more moving parts More frictions to worry about. yeah, but but I don't know you you you know this better than I do. I mean I think what I would say here is that, we believe that the future of aviation is hybrid. Yeah. So whether it's 7-3 or 7-8 or a small regional aircraft like this, or you know, very small aircraft like air taxi or something like that, we think that the benefit of the hybrid system is gonna reach all of those categories. Yeah. And in some cases it will allow you to run fully electric as ES-30 will. Yeah. in some cases it will be an assist which allows you to reduce the size of your turbine and get a little bit more fuel efficiency out of it. but you know there's the electrication element represents the step change in the efficiency of the engine which you know We haven't seen in decades. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like even even the most mild hybrid configuration, you're gonna see you know, five, ten, you know, twenty percent reduction that's huge yeah. Which is astronomical for aviation propulsion systems. Yep. And so I think each of these different aircraft configurations is gonna have an optimal hybrid configuration. Yeah. I don't think anyone, really knows what those are yet. I think that's that's still developing as we start to build these aircraft and put them into production. Yeah. so I think that the work that GE is doing is is certainly very interesting. Yeah. You know that you're right, that there may be some additional complexity in that in that power plant. Yeah. But obviously there's a different sort of cost benefit trade-off there. It does seem like if we're gonna get across oceans that some sort of hybrid but also jet at the same time is is gonna be an important part of doing that. absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, the density of jet fuel is so much higher in the batteries that you're not gonna replace a wide body of 787 or an A350 ~ with electric aircraft. Yep. you know, in in in the foreseeable time horizon Yeah. That's that's many decades out. Yeah. so yeah, for aircraft like that, like you wanna you wanna get the benefits of the hybrid system, but you're still gonna be running a turbine. Well, and it seems like there's so many use cases you guys could be doing, right? I was watching some YouTube the other day about people in Montana and they're working with a for a bunch of billionaires and and the billionaires have shot up the price of real estate so much that no one can afford to live there and so they're all driving like two hours and it's mountainous. Yeah. ~ yeah, I mean I I think there's so many use cases, like not only for passenger, for fleets, for cargo. Yeah. Like how how do you guys think about the different use cases? Yeah, and we've been hearing from people all over the US and even you know internationally that many of the regional routes that used to exist have have shut down You know, Plattsburgh I think is a great example. Yeah. It's a city of twenty thousand people. it's in New York, it's relatively placed to large metro areas. Yep. but this airport, which used to have several regional Flights a day has one regional flight a day. And then you know a couple other that are seasonal. And so that's, you know, like why did that happen? it happened because of economics, right? It happened because regional aircraft, they fight short distances. That means you're cycling the turbine a lot, you're spending lot of time climbing. So you're burning a lot of fuel relative to the distance that you're going, and then you're also putting a lot of cycles on the turbine relative to the distance you're going. Airlines have had backed away from offering service in these airports. And to some degree there's been resurgence in regional in recent years driven by the Essential Air Services program. Right. which are allowing new routes to be opened up. And then we're also seeing increased interest in regional with Part 135 carriers like JSX, ~ opening routes high demand areas outside of main hubs, which is really interesting. But when we think about regional we think, you know, this is an ideal use case for electric aircraft like ES30. Yep. You know, this is an aircraft that's designed to go relatively short distances as cheaply as possible. Yep. So if you're flying short distance routes like for example, Santa Monica to Palm Springs or Denver to Aspen, you can fly that all electric. You never need to turn the turbine on. ~ we're gonna get the best possible economics for a route like that. And that's gonna enable, you know, those routes to be flown more and and more people to afford tickets to fly those routes. we expect to see some amount of commuting, maybe not everyone will be commuting on a daily basis, but certainly that will become more possible. Yeah. and then if you look at the slightly longer routes, so for example, ~ Chicago Detroit ~ Or LA to San Francisco, ~ Houston to Dallas. Those routes are outside of the pure electric range, of ES30 but only that. So you'll run, you know, you'll run your turbines, you'll run a little bit of jet fuel, but it will be still far more economical than if you're flying conventional aircraft. funny last night knowing that this was coming today, I sat down on my laptop and I changed the code on the pilot app Sky Zero, we've got a small pilot app that helps pilots find where the chargers are. Yeah. Because there are some some airports that have chargers. So I added the Hart ~ ranger. So that we could go in and say I wanna set my aircraft to the ES 30 And I noticed while I was like you know filming this that I I can get from Plattsburgh to JFK Yeah. Right. So I can I can imagine like right now You're basically probably driving to Montreal if you live in Plattsburgh Yeah. Yeah. You know, if if you if you're resident of Plattsburgh and you're trying to, get international, Montreal's one of your best bets for that. Or Burlington, which which right across the lake. Right. so I I think for regional communities, it's certainly doable, but it's a challenge because now you're leaving your car in a in a different city, right as opposed to just you know, getting on the plane in in your home city and Or uber uber to the airport because it's it's gonna be eight dollars, not a hundred. Exactly. Yeah, it's a lot easier to to imagine. Cool. Okay. After we had you on the show the last time, ~ I did a little bit of a piece, I don't know if you got to see it, about like regional economics between Bergen and Stavanger. Right. just me and Google, maybe there was some Claude I don't know. But just looking at like, all right, if I flew that with a Saab 340, yeah and not the Saab that flew to Farnborough but like a regular Saab 340. Yeah, there you've got 30 people roughly that it's seating, right? And ~ if I remember right, the economics were like 500 and 60 euro for the fuel. Uh-huh. And when I looked at it, it looked like about a hundred euro for you guys to fly the ES thirty with just the electric ones turned on, because this is sub 125 miles at that point. Yeah. right. And to me, that looks like pretty dang good economics. But is that the right way to think about it? Like what what are your internal yard sticks and measurements that you know obviously the cost of electricity varies depending on where you are. 125 miles the electric range on our aircraft in Plattsburgh works out to around fifty dollars. Wow. So it's it's very inexpensive. It's not like that everywhere in the world. That's it's a you know, there's a lot of hydro here, so that's kind of a unusual case. Yep. but yeah, you know, pretty much anywhere it's gonna be dramatically cheaper than the equivalent you know cost of jet fuel. Yep. and when you think about the size of these aircraft, regional aircraft, seat aircraft, airline maybe isn't filling all those seats on every flight. So you know maybe you can imagine it's twenty-five or or twenty people sitting on the plane. When you divide maybe even five hundred dollars by by twenty, that's significant change of the ticket price ~ for these kind of short distance flights. So that's that's one of the big savings. And then obviously the Other big advantage of an aircraft like this is you're reducing the number of cycles that you can get on the turbine, so that's that's another savings. And for regional aircraft like this, ~ the the maintenance of the turbines can be comparable to the cost of the fuel for a flight. Yep. So Now when we start to look at those economics, not unit economics necessarily, but operational ~ expenses. ~ we also interviewed Mateus ~ Collard ~ e Flight Academy and he talked about how they had gotten, luckily, a pretty good warranty on the batteries from Pipistrel Yeah. But they've had to replace those a few more times than they hoped Yeah. What do you know yet about the chemistries you're using, about the batteries that you're you're sourcing? What's what How are you factoring that into the economics? Yeah, so when we talk to airlines about this aircraft, ~ we're always including the cost of the battery replacement ~ in in the air comics that we go to airlines. So so that's always that's always included. if you're really running the plane hard, which we we want our customers to do, you know, if you're flying at eight or ten flights a day, you are gonna wear the batteries out and you know, you're gonna have to replace them multiple times in the life of the aircraft. And ~ and when you do so that's over time that's gonna actually improve the aircraft which is kind of cool. Yeah right right Yeah, if I have to replace the battery two years from now, I might get more Yeah. So, you know, over time, you know, these aircraft they'll be in service thirty years or more. ~ over time you're gonna see the range creep up and you're also gonna see the longevity of the batteries creep up. Yeah, yeah. you know, as as the ass of the batteries increases, you're using less of it for the same distance flight ~ so we think that that's a really attractive thing about electric aircraft, which you don't really see in conventional aircraft. Yeah. ~ but you know, we're we're Like we're all about the economics day one. We want this to be a a really attractive aircraft for our customers day one. I think who were like worried about the losing out on their market, like to point this out as like, there's a gotcha. Yeah. but I mean it seemed like it's just the cost of doing business and it's all factored. much less expensive than the equivalent maintenance that you would be doing on the turbines. So you can really just kind of do an apples to apples comparison with that. Like I mean using the turbines. then you still have the energy costs like that. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So we think that that's really attractive. Now the the chemistry that we're using, we haven't announced a a cell partner to date and that's ~ we're not ready to do that yet, but the the optimization function for us is a little bit different than some of the other mentioned Pipistrel so Pipistrel their aircraft is all electric. they don't have the turbines so both of it. It's like a new It's all the tech, that's true. ~ but both the flight distance plus any reserves that you would want to hold ~ that's all ~ stored in the battery. So you're really, really sensitive to getting the most energy that you're gonna Every time. Yeah. And yeah. For us, we have a hybrid system, right? So our reserves are primarily stored in in the in the jet fuel in the hybrid system and you can use those one in a hundred flights or something like that. ~ so for us, when we think about the battery, we're really optimizing for economics. That's the number one thing. It's not about range, it's not about how light the battery is necessarily. Like both those just flows, but ~ it's really about economics. So we're we're expecting a minimum of two thousand. flight cycles on these batteries. Wow. We're we're using you know we're not using the absolute cutting edge fancier cells you can buy. We're you know a couple notches back from that. Right. So the the battery is less expensive and you get more cycles out of it and you end up sacrificing a little bit of electric range there. Right. But you know we're not we're not trying to make a Ferrari here. We're trying to make a vehicle that you know gives the lowest possible Yeah, that's what it's all about. recently TwoBIt Da Vinci, one of these other YouTube guys that's ~ that's it's pretty good at looking at batteries. Yep. ~ I remember I sent you an email like yeah a little bit after you were on the show and said like, my gosh, there's these people and they're from Finland and of course that ended up not being a dead. Yeah. We kinda knew that was gonna come that way. Yeah. But After that, and and this is a completely separate company, right? TwoBit DaVinci actually went to Taiwan and toured the factory and got to like participate in like hands-on testing, which he filmed. Yeah. ~ I wanna say they called Prologium out of Taiwan. Yeah. They're doing a solid state battery. Yeah. And I wanna say it's like six hundred and forty watt hours a kilowatt. Yeah. freaking good. And like he the like he just literally like cuts the battery well a cell yeah in its very small pouch. Cuts it in half with scissors. Yeah. Like while it's power powering a small LED. Yeah. And the LED flicks off for a second and then comes back on. But there's no fire. There's no like so no obviously like are you gonna buy them? Like the who knows. But yeah. It does seem like battery tech, battery chemistry, like there's more of an upside. There's more the ceiling is higher than I would have thought maybe a year ago Yeah, it's it's exciting what's happening in battery technology. Yeah, energy densities are increasing. we're we're always receiving cells from vendors and testing them ourselves and sort of running flight profiles through them. ~ and we've seen densities tick up, you know, a little faster than we were expecting, which is really great. you know, the solid state promise of being sort of immune to puncture. Yeah. ~ that's very exciting. I think there's there's some trade offs there and ~ I don't think that we're quite at the point where there's a cell out there that we could use in an aircraft like this there's some ~ mechanical challenges with some of the solid state cells and you need to get some pressure on them can be quite high. so this obviously we're really excited about it. We think, you know like One of the main challenges in electric aircraft is making the battery safe, right? Because in an electric car, if there's a runaway event, you can pull over to the side of the road, you can get to pull out in an electric plane. If there's a runaway event, you know, you may be thirty minutes from being able to safely touch down on the runaway. So you have to maintain that. You have to make sure that it doesn't spread, you know, through the aircraft or cabin. ~ so that's a big challenge. And obviously if cell technology improves and you get safer cells, that's that's a win. So Well, and if I remember right, the way we handle this now, the way we make this this kind of aircraft safe, it's just a lot of engineering going into cooling systems, liquid cooling systems, and all of those systems add to weight Yeah. so there's the cooling element and then there's also just the container. So have you know, exotic materials like titanium, which we use to enclose the cells. And if you know if there's a thermal event in the cells you can you can store that energy and then eject it off the side of the aircraft and just keep it away from anything that it can damage. Yeah. ~ so yeah, you're right, there's a lot of engineering that goes into that and there is a lot of weight that goes into that. Right. So an aviation battery. know, you gotta do more than an automotive battery to to contain that kind of event. Yep. But you also are more weight constraints than automotive, right? ~ so yeah, yeah. It's a bit more of challenge. I was doing some research ~ coming into this. And you guys, ~ if I remember right, won a grant from a system the PH. ~ So we have a project going with with the FAA, and it's related to the hybrid control system. So we have electric motor, we have a turbine, and you may be wanting one or both of them depending on what phase of flight you're at. It's whether you're a hybrid mode or an electric mode So it's a little bit more complex than a conventional aircraft where you have one power plant and use it the whole time. there's obviously transitions that occur as well between two electric engines and ~ hybrid mode. Right. So so that was essentially what the project was for. It's to how do we get the most out the system? You know, what do the controls look like, how do we interface with these two dis- similar components? I'm thinking about my workload when I was in there in sim and like trying to figure out like what what wrench had been thrown into my engine and trying to land at the same time. I can only imagine thinking, ~ hmm, right, should I introduce the gas turbines now? Yeah. I mean, I I expect pilots would want to control that or have the ability to if they needed to, but not maybe not all the time. And that's that's really the trick. You know, when you're flying any aircraft, yeah, you know, there are times when everything is like easy, yeah, busy in a straight line, weather's good, everything's operating as normal. And then there are other times when the workload can get extremely Yeah. So you know, you can imagine coming into an adport in bad weather and you're c you know, on the radio, maybe if it's buzz on radio and something happens in the aircraft that you don't expect and you have to figure out what that is and respond to it. And so this is this is what drives the difficulty of being a pilot and you know why it's such an important role. Yeah. And you know, as we as we build this aircraft, it's a clean sheet aircraft. Yeah. It's a clean sheet fly by wire aircraft. you think about the last time the clean sheet regional aircraft was designed that was decades ago. Yeah. It's a lot more technology now. Yeah. We can use technology to make the plane safely fly. Yeah. And that's exactly what we're doing. Yeah. So we have electronics, we have software. monitoring systems and it's not about removing control from the pilot. The pilot still has sort of the ultimate say in in what the aircraft does. But it's about detecting things really fast, presenting information to the pilot in a way that's very easy to consume. helping the pilot make decisions when when something goes wrong consistent. that's one of our big focuses with this aircraft is just making it the absolute safest aircraft to fly. Yeah. And we expect also that, you know, a lot of the pilots that will be flying this aircraft will be relatively early in their career. So it's kind of the entry point once you get out of flight school, once you've been a flight instructor, you'll go into ~ the regional fleet and flight school. jump straight to A350s They're not gonna be going across the Pacific on day one. ~ the aircraft is designed with that in mind. So the avionic suite we are using the Garmin system is gonna be familiar to a lot of pilots who stepped into this aircraft from experience that they might have had on the 172 or a trainer aircraft like that. Yeah. ~ and it's designed to be, you know, a fun plane to fly, like easy, easy handling, but also very sort of direct feel for the aircraft and then like I said this this automation in the background to give the pilot all the tools they need so to fly safely. Ben, I'd I've taken a lot of your time today and ~ and and I was saying earlier, I feel like we've been just climbing all over this thing because it's our personal jungle gym at this point. Well it's been great to have you here. And you know, you've been with us for for a large part of the journey here with the X1. So it's really exciting to be here, you know, getting ready for the first flight with you. Yeah. And yeah, I hope you'll come visit us in LA as well and see some of what we're working on for ES30 Yeah. Awesome. All right, thanks Kyle

Anybody who knows me knows I am really excited about electric aircraft. I like to talk about how this is the future. I also like to say we're probably not getting over oceans in these things anytime soon. I think most people imagine that means we're never gonna get something that looks like an airliner. But Well, with Heart Aerospace, we might. We've talked a little bit about how the ES thirty, could definitely move people around on all electric, as long as the flights are fairly short, which we don't have a lot right now because economically we've kind of devastated our regional air capabilities. Turns out that jet fuel is kind of expensive when you're trying to use it that way. But electricity might really salvage this, which is why I've been excited about Heart Aerospace for a really long time. You guys might remember, some of you, that back in November, I did an episode with Ben Stabler, the CTO of Heart Aerospace And he happened to mention that their experimental aircraft, the X-1, it was gonna be in Plattsburgh, New York. Now, some of you might think that's exciting because Plattsburgh New York is where Beta operates, and that's true. But it's also only a six and a half hour drive from my house. I'm really ex excited about The X one, which is our prototype aircraft that's in in Plattsburgh right now. I think the team has done really phenomenal work on that. When it flies, and we're hoping to fly in ~ Q two of next year. ~ we're, in integration and testing of the aircraft right now. ~ when it flies, it will be the largest aircraft by mass, all electric aircraft ever flown. wow. so that's really exciting. ~ it won't be the largest wingspan, I think ~ solar impulse has us on on that but Sure. but it is a big plane. So. Did I really expect him to call me? I mean I told him to. I texted him and got his number and got his LinkedIn and and harassed him, really, for a little while. I wasn't sure. was I gonna get an invite? Well, it turns out just maybe I would. Let's take an electric road trip. We're heading east on the 401 from Toronto, all the way to Plattsburgh International Airport. N301HX. For the first time. And it's right over there. Ben, I think what, was it a year ago that I interviewed you on the show and harassed you about like letting me actually come to visit you here in Plattsburgh? ~ And here we are. Right? Yeah, so we I think about a year ago we were just starting the rebuild of the wing. So we ~ this plane came to Plattsburgh with a different wing. Right. And we did a lot of structural testing on that. And one of the things that we found while we were testing the wing was evidence of disbonding in the in the composite, which obviously is Not not what want. Meaning like fibers just not. It was actually adhesive layers. So adhesive layers between different structures in the composite wing. Got it. and so we ended up rebuilding the wing and and the empennage as well. And the fuselage is the original fuselage. But it got a little bit of reinforcement. So a lot of work happened on this plane in the last year. We also integrated all the systems. We've done structural testing, we've done systems level testing. And we've also done almost all the flight testing except for the actual first flight at this point. So yeah, so we're when when we're talking we're we're days away from first flight and when this goes out we'll have we'll have flown So I when I think about you guys, I think about the hangar day, which was like a YouTube hit well for me it was Yeah, yeah. So it was it was this aircraft. Like I said, it was ~ same fuselage. Right. The original wing is actually over there. You can see that. wow behind the forklifts. Yeah. Yeah. So that's all wrapped up and ready to be shipped now. Okay. but yeah, so it was this aircraft and ~ at hangaday we had the interior in as well. So you could go into the aircraft and you could sit in the aircraft. ~ now that it's a test article. we've pulled that out, we've replaced it with sensors and ~ equipment and instrumentation. ~ so it's not as comfortable on the inside. But ~ but yeah. Yeah, we'll we'll take a look inside. Yeah. And so this is the this is the biggest electric aircraft ever flown when we fly it. Yeah. so it weighs about ~ eleven thousand five hundred kilos, ~ so a little over twenty thousand pounds. ~ Okay, so I'm being pedantic, I'm being a nerd and I'm thinking of the lighter than air Okay, we'll say airplane then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. I think then you are absolutely safe. And then there's the ~ by wingspan, it's solar impulse. So we don't have quite the same wingspan as solar impulse. We've got about a hundred-foot wingspan. Of course. solar impulse, I think, is about 240. Yeah. so yeah, but you know, in terms of volume it's the biggest, in terms of mass it's the biggest. I'm noticing when we look over at the wing, like this is a pretty big space. It seems like a little bit bigger than what you need. What was what was this originally? Yeah, so the the hangar makes the plane look small. Which is kind of yeah. So ~ so this so we're at Plattsburgh in upstate New York. So this is a really great airport for flight testing. it's got an eleven thousand foot long runway, ~ it's got a huge ramp area as well, which you can use for emergency landing. ~ so really good for flight test. ~ and it's also got these great hangars. So this was originally a B-52 hangar in the Cold War. ~ So there was ~ you know strategic bombers were were located here and ~ would have would have loaded up and flown out of here if if we'd ever gotten into a shooting war. so quite an interesting history ~ and obviously you know great place for us to build, integrate and test. We've been able to do the structural testing in this hangar because we have so much space, ~ and all the rest of the integration is the aircraft as well. So it's a really great, great spot for us. We have space to stretch out, which is nice. Yeah. Okay, Well, okay, so let's maybe do a quick So let's so show me your round. Yes. Cool. All right. Well let's take a look around here. So This is the, so the aircraft is fully, fully integrated and ready to go now. ~ so we've got four motors, four hundred kilowatt motors. You can see the strut is in this aircraft configuration. So the strut was part of our aircraft design ~ back when this was this project was started. Our current aircraft design actually, we've removed the strut to make it a little bit more aerodynamic. ~ so if you look on the website. At our production aircraft it won't have that. But this this this aircraft still has that. ~ That's right. Yeah. So this aircraft has four electric motors. Each of them are about four hundred kilowatts. So we've got about one point six megawatt of total power on the aircraft. ~ and it's continuous too. You can you can climb out with that one point six megawatts. So that's that's a lot of power for a long time. if you've ~ if you've been shopping for a Bugatti, you might have seen numbers like, you know, 1000 horsepower, two thousand horsepower. but this can do that continuously and and sort of you know fly the fly the plane with that level of power. Amazing. ~ Is that kind of overpowered for the size of it then? Or is that about So you use that for takeoff and you use that for if you lose an engine, you want to have some additional power on the remaining engines. So that's that's when you can use that power. Yeah. Yeah. And then the production aircraft actually has a little bit more. So the production aircraft will have two electric motors and each of those electric motors is one point six megawatts individually. So the production aircraft single motor has as much power as the four motors on this aircraft. Got it. ~ and we're about three megawatts total. ~ And so that allows us to, you know, carry more payload. So this is a lighter aircraft than the production aircraft will be. ~ and it gives the gives the production aircraft a bit more performance as well. Cool. Ma I don't know how much of a nerd listeners are, but I am just enough of a nerd to recognize the Yeah. So we've got Hartzell propellers on this aircraft. ~ four of them. And there's two of them rotating clockwise and then two of them rotating counterclockwise. really? Yeah, so you can see these two are rotating opposite directions here. that jumps into my brain is that way you don't have to rudder right when you're doing takeoff is that the Exactly, yeah. you don't have any sort of turning tendencies during takeoff. Okay, cool. All right, let's keep going around here. So you can see big experimental marker on the side here. Yep. ~ this door here, you can see this oval, this is the emergency exit. Yep. So that the pilot can egress from either side of the aircraft if if he needs to. Got it. we have ~ sensors on the nose here for airspeed and attitude and temperature. So we're gathering data when we fly this aircraft. Yeah. And then here's the here's the air stairs Should we take a look inside? All right. So this aircraft, this is a test aircraft. So it's been stripped out, all the interior is gone. We're storing the batteries on the floor of the aircraft here. So these are all the high voltage batteries that you can see. In the production aircraft, they'll be out of the fuselage, they'll be ~ above and below and in the wings, so they'll they'll be out of the way. ~ but you know, for for this aircraft, for ~ you know simplicity of the design, we're we've we've got them stored here. Looks like pretty neat wiring. This is a for a server closet, yeah. I would say well done. Yep, yep. So obviously, ~ you know, want to be really ~ precise with all the wiring, make sure that it's as safe as possible. You can see some of the low voltage system here. So we have ~ low voltage batteries which power the flight controls. those are separate from the high voltage system. We have some power distribution here. Okay. And then if we look to the left over here. yep, important. I don't know which one is which. Yep. And then here's the cockpit. So ~ this aircraft has a single seat, ~ will have a single pilot in for the test flight. The ES30 will have two pilots, pilot and co-pilot. Okay. just like a conventional airliner. Yep. And you can see all the equipment is out and accessible here. So we have flight computers, we have telemetry systems, we have all the controls that the pilot has. And it's really about giving the test pilot access to everything that he might need in either ~ a nominal or a contingency scenario. ~ because you know, this is a test vehicle and you know, we're gonna be learning a lot when we fly it. We wanna have the give the pilot everything he can possibly need to respond to whatever situation might happen. Right. Now what's this guy over here? All right. Well that's our working document. That's our airworthiness certificate. So ~ we received that a couple weeks ago now, so that's our authorization to fly this aircraft. Amazing. I'm not sure if you can I'm not sure if there's any sensitivities on zooming in that. I can blur it later. Yep. ~ so this this aircraft is airworthy under the experimental category. So we're ready to fly here. so we're gonna be flying in the next few days. Cool. we're waiting on some final closeout paperwork and then we're ready to go. Got it. What sort of paperwork like we we saw then the the news brief the other day that the FAA has like cleared the test flight, is that right? Yeah. So the aircraft is so we have the airworthiness, which is the main document that sort of says that the aircraft is ready to fly. Yeah. ~ so on the aircraft side we're good. ~ and we're just closing up some loose ends on you know pilot insurance, that kind of thing, which which we need to have in place. Yeah, so so this aircraft ~ is a clean sheet design. So there is no type rating ~ for this aircraft. and it's over twelve thousand five hundred pounds, which is kind of the threshold above which you need a type rating to fly the aircraft. Right. So the normal process ~ you know doesn't work for an experimental aircraft like this. So ~ we've applied with the FAA for an exemption to allow the test pilot to fly this aircraft. And obviously ~ there's a lot of training that goes in before we get to that point. So we have a simulator which we'll take a look at later where the pilot has been practicing all kinds of, you know, normal flights, but then also what happens if, you know, kind of flights, what happens if an aileron doesn't respond or you lose power in an engine or you know, all the things that could possibly happen that would ~ that that pilots would practice as part of the typewriting for any conventional airliner. There's a simulator f for for it, even though it's okay got Yeah. So we've so we've built a simulator ~ which contains the aerodynamic model of this aircraft, all the weight and balance data, basically all the characteristics of this aircraft, and it will ~ so it will behave like the aircraft will when we fly it. That's awesome. and we use that for training. That's Awesome. Okay. Well okay, did you use like Xplane or Microsoft or It's based on X-Plane, yeah. Yeah, of course. Yep, yeah. Cool. So the so the everything that you see rendered is X-plane, and then the flight dynamics are ~ our own our own model of the aircraft. Okay. okay, so famously Beta sort of worked with X Plane to design the Alia and now you can fly it. Are we g are we gonna get to download this anytime soon? Well we've got an ES30 in Microsoft Flight Simulator actually. No way. ~ yeah, so ~ so we worked with Microsoft Flight Simulator for I think it was the 2025 release. That's awesome. ~ so you can fly and that's kind of a snapshot of what our ES30 design looked like at that point in time. ~ so certainly hope to you know get an updated ~ version of that in soon. So when I'm flying that, am I gonna need to think about do I want electric or gas turbine on? Do I'm gonna get to control that? Like how does Yeah. So in the in the Microsoft flight simulator version, ~ you have full control over all four engines, the turbines and the electric motors. Right. ~ you know, obviously we're looking for ways to ~ reduce the burden on the pilot to make it easier to fly the aircraft. Right. So we're looking at ways to ~ sort of add some automation there without taking away the pilot's ability to control it when he needs to. Got it. Okay, 'cause I can imagine from a workload perspective in the actual aircraft, yeah, you'd want to take make that problem go away if you if but still be accessible to trim it specifically if they wanted to. Yeah. Trim's not the right word there, but okay, Ben. Cool. W can we do something crazy? Can you like take this from me and I can sit in the Sure, absolutely. Amazing. So this is gonna be the clunkiest sitting in a Yeah. Elegant chair. The ergonomics of getting into the pilot chair are not are not perfected yet. Nor are the designs for someone of our height Yeah. The test pilot must be Five foot six. The test pilot is not as tall as you are. That is that is true. But that's actually not All right. the pedals are yaw, like I would expect. So in the test, in this aircraft, the pedals are the brakes. Okay. So you have the brake control there. Got it. You've got your stick on the left. Got it. ~ there's a tiller, which is often used on ~ commercial aircraft. Yeah. Commercial aircraft to steer the nose on the ground. Got it. And then the rudder is actually the the stick. You can twist the stick. Okay. ~ Okay, I saw this thing leaving off here. But that's trim, I see. Yeah. So it's meant to be three axis there. Okay. And then the throttle's on the right. This is the tiller? Is that this guy? Yeah, yeah, the till is kind of behind. Yeah. Okay. Cool. And this is likely not all that representative ~ of how it'll be in final, or is it Right, yeah. So this has been designed you know for a single pilot. Yep. ~ to give the pilot ~ all the inputs they could possibly need so you can see some switches in front of you which ~ would not be you know placed in those locations in the in the production aircraft. Right. Right. And then we also have an experimental avionics suite in this aircraft. Uh-huh. So you can see the displays are kind of small and they're ~ you know, there's there's ~ there's three of them. ~ and that was all chosen to ~ sort of expedite that. So we're working with no for sure. I This is a this airplane right now has one job and that's do this test run. So yeah, it's sort of built for exactly what you Yeah, we're working with Garmin for the production aircraft. Cool. And so it's going have a full glass ~ avionic suite. It's going to be really great. Nice. They've got some really great technology that we're that we're look looking to integrate. So yeah, the the cockpit, and actually, if you come down to LA to see us in person in our facility, we've got a mock-up of the cockpit down there, which is very nice. Okay, now I'm really excited. Very different than this experience. I also see this little you know, the red yarn, right? Which we which we use that's a watch like how wind is going over the you tell me. I'm gonna get it wrong. Yeah, so we've got in addition to all the electronics and the avionics, we have a couple sort of, you know, stupid simple sensors as well. ~ so you can see on the on the windshield we have this yarn. ~ this will ~ blow back with the streamlines as as we move through the air. And you can use that as a ~ as a beta. ~ measurement. So it will kind of tell you if the aircraft is yawing ~ through the air. Got it. So that's just a backup so that you know if the pilot, first of all it's like straight in his view, so he can obviously look ahead and see it very easily. And second of all if for whatever reason he thinks that something's going on with the avionics, he can just look out the window and get that information. So we often see these like ~ I'm thinking Horizon out of Canada when the when the cavorite did its transition, the the little strings were all over it. I think Lilium did a similar thing, you could see them. So I guess then that was more about like looking at ~ turbulent flow versus smooth airflow. Yeah. Whereas this is like literally more of an indicator. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Yeah, this is a specific sensor, whereas yeah, like you said, you can put little strands all over the aircraft and get kind of a in-flight wind tunnel experience. Yeah. That's awesome. Cool. Yeah, so this is, you know, this strut ~ looks like an aerodynamic part, but this is carrying most of the wing load ~ in this wing configuration. Yeah. So, you know, many tons of force coming down through that strut when we're when we're in flight. Bringing that load back down to the body so that it Yeah. So behind here, so this is this is a aesthetic fairing and an aerodynamic fairing. And then behind here we have an aluminum structure which connects the strut, the landing gear, and then also the fuselage of the aircraft. And then that runs through, and I think ~ when we went in the fuselage, you saw these circumferential frames in the center of the aircraft. They connect through to the wing. So everything is kind of connected through the aircraft right at this point. so this is one of the strongest parts of the aircraft. the weight ends up hitting that that circle then that circle. Yeah, yeah. All the left comes through here. Cool. Yeah. What else is behind that faring so we've got this frame structure, you can see the landing gear down here, they're mounted in there. ~ in the production aircraft, ~ you know, this this is where the charger would be. We don't have that ~ installed on this aircraft because it's just a test aircraft. so this is all sort of bolted close. but that's where you would connect to to charged aircraft. So MCS That's right. So the production aircraft will have MCS, which means that for a typical electric flight, so around you know hundred, hundred thirty miles, ~ you'll be able to ~ charge the battery after that flight in about thirty minutes. So this aircraft will get back to the gate, you'll plug it in, thirty minutes later it'll be ready to go. What sort is sort of what size grid connection or or I guess a better question is what size charger and thereby grid connection an Yeah. airport you need to be able to do to pull Yeah, so the charger is very similar to what you would use for a truck. ~ or ~ you know often you'll see maybe like a pod of four electric car charges. Yep. ~ and the power level's about the same as you would you would need for a pod of four. I guess it's in around a megawatt. Yeah, around a megawatt. Yeah. Yeah. We're well it's a megawatt standard, but we're actually using six hundred Between one point seven or two. No. Yeah. Yeah. So it's actually not that big a footprint for a typical airport. You might already have electric car charging on site. Yep. ~ and so, you know, to support charging an aircraft in thirty minutes, ~ that's the the equivalent of four stalls for for a car. Nice. Right. so this is where we keep the simulator. So this is where the the pilot training happens.

good logistics for um urgent logistics for various participants, including medical. We definitely believe that will be there. The entertainment industry, it will be there. The VTOL and passenger traffic, it will be there. Inspection, it will be there. um So those five typologies that you see in this picture, we all believe it will be there. The question is... Do we have sufficient airspace to cover this all at the same time, at the same location? Vries Strookman's fascination with aviation started young. Growing up near a military air base, he spent hours managing virtual air traffic playing a game called Kennedy Control. I can relate to this. I had a similar procedural game called SCRAM that was nuclear power plants, Years later, watching a military helicopter land noisily in the middle of Amsterdam, he had a simple thought. There's gotta be a better way to do this. that thought proved prophetic. Through his company, Kennedy Approach, Strookman works at the intersection of government, academia, residence, and industry. He brings hands-on flying experience, holding the full range of drone pilot certifications, alongside a sharp eye for spatial planning, ethics, and the societal questions surrounding new forms of flight. Dual master's degrees in Business Administration, University of Amsterdam, and Communication Science, University of Groningen give him a rare ability to bridge technology, policy, and the public. From Den Helder to Rotterdam, he leads pilot projects and helps build tests and research facilities where emergency services, municipalities, and training institutions collaborate on the future of aviation, translating real-world experience into the broader conversation about how drones and eVTOLS will find their place in our cities. Central to this work is the Urban Central to this work is the Urban Skylab, a public-private collaboration that tests new applications, develops policy, and shares knowledge to ensure urban aviation is integrated safely, efficiently, and responsibly. It's where vision, technology, and practice quite literally take flight. And I can say very personally and very directly this, Totally lights up my brain. Like when I was at the Intertraffic conference and I got to go and visit the maquette, the architectural model that Vries and his colleague built out together. It really made all of this come alive, right? Seeing that sort of 3D three dimensional and all the thought that they put into it was just really fantastic. And ever since I've wanted to have him on Sky Zero and today Vries is our guest on the skyzero.io podcast. Vries, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Kyle. take a few minutes and add anything to the bio. Did I miss anything? I think it's good interpretation of what my life has been so far and it's good for you to understand that a few years ago when I was on the military base within the city of Amsterdam, saw this Chinook landing, you ended up with the quote, this could have gone differently. I was really fascinated by the idea. We're already thinking with the team of the city of Amsterdam about what drones could do in the city. And I was like, is the exact, this is the great place to do this stuff. why don't we start here? And this was the point in time when I was really getting curious about what drones could do for the city, how we could prepare ourselves for a future with drones in an urban setting. And then I went to the US, to California on a trade mission, innovation mission with the province of North Holland. And I got to see the VTOL developments, the Joby, the Archer, the Elroy Air. We visited their facilities. And then I was like, this is also the future of drones. This is also the future of innovative aviation and the future is already here. It's not far fetched idea. It's being built in the US and I should bring in this thinking to Europe, to the little city of Amsterdam, and take it with me and include that in our approach. I was on. one of the same trade mission also organized by Coast to Coast Foundation readers of our substack newsletter will know I got to publish a little bit about that. we were there at Den Helder and And you're used to thinking of airports in terms of like like where's the runway, and Den Helder has a runway, but it also has 11 of these large helicopter takeoff and landing points or T lofs. And, and I felt like I was looking at the future there in the Netherlands, just like you felt like you were looking at the future in California. are we going to need something like this at like all of the airports? Like if air taxi to the airport is going to end up being the mission. It seems, where are we gonna find? Like patches of, anyhow, uh all of these questions are questions that are sort of dancing around in my head right now. In your bio, we talked about uh helicopters and vertical as a kid, and then we talk about drones now. Was there a moment where you, or is it really more about the trade mission that you were on and getting to see the eVTOLS in California? Was that the moment, or was there something already before that? it's a combination of moments in time that have really fueled my thinking. As a kid, working on the traffic control software uh running an airport, it was already my initial idea. But then when I came into contact with the drones in the city of Amsterdam, and especially the Chinook landing, it was like, this should be done differently here. But I guess the visit to California all added up to the idea. And that was also for me the thinking we should look at this from an integrated perspective. It's not solely drones that will be flying in our airspace, whether it's low airspace or higher airspace, it will be in urban settings anyway. And we really should start organizing this in such a way that we allow room and space for that. we should also prepare ourselves not to be, overwhelmed by it. the Chinook is an overwhelmingly large helicopter, right? Like this is one of these big two bladed, like do they carry something like 12 people? I mean, I don't mean to put you on the spot, but they are large. What was it doing in Amsterdam? Like where are you in the city center? like, where was it landing? Like I can't even imagine. Well, next time you're around, Kyle, you should see this. This is actually landing within the inner city of the city of Amsterdam. It's called the Navy barracks, the Marine terrein in Dutch. uh It's a military base that is slowly but surely allowing the city itself to put on buildings over there. Hmm. transform the area as a whole. The Navy and the military will stay there, but will have different space. But still, there is a helicopter path. There is this H on the ground. There is this ground space that is defense space. And a number of times per year, this Chinook or another military helicopter does test runs or demonstration runs or practice runs. by landing in inner city area and Amsterdam is this place for it. And I've been having the fortunate situation to experience this landing a few times, It's overwhelming, it's magnificent, it's loud, it's noisy, there's a lot of wind effect to it. And I was like, this will continue in the next decades, and we'll also have drones larger and small, be landing over there on this spot or other places. What do we need to do to prepare ourselves for that? As a city. Yeah, right. as a city, as you say, like we're, kind of at this place as a society where we say under 500 feet, that's where drones go, not airports. That's where drones go airplanes everywhere else. Right. And sort of, uh, separation versus integration. Right. And I think that's only going to get us so far in what happens when the Chinook does need to land, or if an emergency hospital transfer needs to happen or. eVTOLs? I think you're you're asking the right question at a very, very interesting time. And I love what I got to see in Amsterdam about how you're approaching it. So tell me about Urban Sky Lab like for one thing, So the whole project started off by the colleagues and I doing use cases, do some policy exploration, and some drone detection and public perception research. projects to understand the impact of drones on our city. At the same time, it's quite easy then to talk about drones flying in the air. they need to land and take off somewhere as well. And one of the first ideas that came to mind by me was we should also include city planners and urban planners, architects into our projects and our thinking, because if we look at the ground infrastructure and ground facilities, they will have a say in that as well. And they need to be activated as well, slowly but surely. And from this thinking, Urban Skylab, as a project was founded. It was in a way founded by me and some other people within the city of Amsterdam that were also part of the team. And ARCOM Institute, which is an architectural center in Amsterdam. Well, we did a design sprint for three days and one of the participants was Fabrications. It's an architectural firm led by among others, Eric Frijters. And Eric and I continued our conversations after this design sprint and said to each other, we want to do more with this project. There's more to be done than only thinking and doing in three days. So we set up Urban Skylab as a dedicated project team run by Kennedy Approach and Fabrications Part of our group at that point in time were the several provinces and the ministries as well. We visited them, we talked about Urban Sky Lab as a concept, as a research facility, and they said we want to be part of that, we're going to be sponsors of that. So we had three provinces, North Holland, South Holland and Flevoland, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water, the Stimulation Fund for Creative Industries put together. funding to run an eight-month research in which the question was how do we do spatial planning for drones and other forms of innovative aviation in urban setting. So in the Netherlands, but it could also be other urban areas in the world. That was the research question and that's we started our work. So maybe we could show the audience a little bit about this. I do this somewhat hesitantly, some people only listen, so we'll have to sort of describe what we're looking at as we go. But I wonder if you've got any visuals that help people understand, what came out of that design sprint and sort of the three-dimensional nature of this. So what you see here is a topology of a city in the Netherlands. It's a real city, but to a certain extent, we made a real interface out of it. based on a topology of a harbor area in Rotterdam, the city of Rotterdam. And it shows the waterways and it shows also the room and the space that is there for various kind of applications. And what we see here is different colors. So we see, for example, uh good logistics flying with EVTOL facilities. Next to the water we see in purple a VTOL landing space on a big building in the north. We see green lines of agricultural and inspection drones doing their work in the harbor area. And we see, for example, crisscross medical drone facilities running their programs, bringing in medication and other medical related logistics. to people at home or to those facilities. And they fly crisscross. You see patterns for some applications, but there's also this medical drone that can go everywhere anytime. And I think it's a nice interpretation of if you do spatial integration, you have to look at various angles of drones and even innovative aviation to do this properly. And what we try to do is bring everything together. in this research. Yep, this is great. And for listeners who can't uh see, think of like the Google Maps view where you're sort of in 3D mode and you're kind of seeing it aerial view, not necessarily straight on. And this version is more schematic, less the satellite photo. And of course, we're looking at a city in the Netherlands. So there are canals, right? And the waterways are very important. There's a big waterway going through the center of it. We've got ships on that. As we just described, we've got sort of this purple area where it looks like a helicopter. You said VTOL can land on a larger building. And then to the right of that canal, that waterway, we've got these yellow conical shapes. I wonder, is this the goods uh shipment? this is EVT, or sorry, drones bringing goods in? there will be cargo drones or eVTOL bigger systems and smaller systems that bring in that bring in goods from other areas of the harbor from ships, or it could be the things that have been dropped by ships over there. find their way to other areas, urban areas in the city. This is the fresh area of the Rotterdam harbour, so there's fresh produce being brought in from abroad, and it can be distributed quite easily to other areas of the bigger metropolitan area of Rotterdam. This has really helped me understand, the depth, right? And certain things are marked 800 meters and 120 meters. And when we were in person with the architectural model, the maquette there, like, of course, it was much more visual. Like you're, you're, can just tell through the wonders of stereoscopic vision that this is higher than that, because all of this was modeled out in 3D instead of this 2D version that viewers can see and our listeners cannot. and I think what this helped me see at the time is that like you said, there are patterns, but then there are other things which are sort of crisscrossed in and out, right? So yeah, this is fantastic. This really helped me understand. Thank you, thank you. Please. see the blue elements in the visual. The blue is entertainment and training. We believe it's also important to allow especially little drone systems to put on shows for people. For example, end of year, we have fireworks in the Netherlands. It's not good for people's health, all those fireworks going off in the airspace. And we believe drones could really be an environmental friendly version. So we also plotted various areas where drone shows could be put up for uh special occasions. and also training center for youngsters that want to become a drone pilot or want to do gamification with drones. We all have this background, of course, with flying model, flight models, you know, as a youngster. But we believe drones could be the future fun aspect as well. And then we should also design areas in our environment where people and youngsters can freely explore and experiment with flying with drones. Yeah, that's very interesting. there's a. podcast that I follow, is these air traffic controllers in the States. it's called opposing bases. It's really, really great. I'll drop a link to it in the show notes. one of the recurring themes in opposing bases is that there are certain areas of the airspace in the States that feel like they're not funded correctly to continue to support training activities, right? How are pilots going to be trained if they, can't do practice runs? So I love that you've included that, right? Not only the entertainment aspect, but the training aspect. You think about what China's doing with drone displays for, you know, things like celebrations and fourth of July, or other celebrations that involve fireworks. Yeah, I love this. You're sort of thinking of everything. Now, this seems like it's intentionally modeling a very busy day. There's training and there's celebration and there's medical and there's cargo. But one imagines that it won't be too far into the future before like this might be somewhat normal busy day, not sort of a once in a decade, but once in a month kind of busy day. Do you have any sort of sense of timeline around that? Well, it's hard to understand what the future will be like and which business models or business cases speed up earlier than others or even uh find the market. But we believe that the applications that we see here on this visual will indeed be the applications that we will be seeing in urban settings. So just to get it straight, good logistics for urgent logistics for various participants, including medical. We definitely believe that will be there. The entertainment industry, it will be there. The VTOL and passenger traffic, it will be there. Inspection, it will be there. um So those five typologies that you see in this picture, we all believe it will be there. The question is... Do we have sufficient airspace to cover this all at the same time, at the same location? And we believe that is one of the learnings of our project. We'll see that some of the useful applications will see daylight earlier than others or will be prioritized in the airspace. We cannot cover this all at the same time. So we believe public services, including medical services, will probably... be prioritized in lower airspace in urban settings, they will go first and the rest will need to follow. That's one of our insights that we believe is feasible on the flight home. I did a bunch of research, like what's happening in Toronto where I live? Like what drone applications are happening here? And it turned out that there is already sort of a medical corridor where there's a drone that's lying back and forth between two hospitals, sort of in the Southwestern Burbs to the Northwestern Burbs. So not like crossing the downtown yet, but still crossing quite a few highways and a lot of dense residential and dense commercial areas. I think you're right to include medical. the cargo drones totally make sense as well. And of course, inspection, that's the other thing that's already happening, pipeline inspections and windmills and bridge inspections and these kinds of things. when you're working with municipality stakeholders, What sorts of concerns do they bring that might be different that we might not be thinking of? Well, what this visual doesn't show, of course, is the impact of all those applications and systems running in the air with regards to sound nuisance. wind flows of bigger systems that all of a sudden land multiple times a day on a rooftop or near your residential area. So uh this is a big concern also in our project. We try to find and understand what kind of distance we should take into account of those systems running in this urban setting. What distance should we take into account? flying from buildings, flying from park settings. And it's really hard, there's no scientific proof yet of what distance we should apply here, because it's all based on bigger systems like general aviation, Boeing 747s. We know a lot about nuisance levels of those systems, but we hardly have any idea or clue what these kind of new systems will do in an urban setting. And this is a big concern. It's privacy, of course, with the drones that have cameras that will also fly over our back gardens, around our workspaces. How should we deal with privacy and law about this? It's, of course, the sound nuisance that could potentially be there. It's wind effects that we should take into account, and of course, also safety from flying close to people. to the ground risk that is there. These are all concerns of those municipalities and cities that are also part of our project. At the same time, they're also curious to understand what we believe is feasible to do. What you see here on this same visual is this purple-colored, VTOL landing approach on a big building. What we identified, in the Netherlands at least, it's not feasible to think that we can land a VTOL system on each and every residential area or something. We believe it's only perhaps one or two spots in the smaller cities that we have in the Netherlands that really allow enough space and distance from people that live there, work there, because it's too a big of a system to really allow it to... land and take off in our small cities. This situation is of course totally different than perhaps the US cities or even the Asian cities. I know for example that Tokyo, that all big high rises in Tokyo have helicopter pads on top of them. They were there for a specific reason of earthquakes and be able to really take away, bring away people in urgent situations from those buildings on the top. So Tokyo, for example, seems to be much better equipped from an architectural point of view that all the roofs have helicopter of those big high rises. We don't have this situation in the Netherlands. We don't have the designs of our buildings are not have not been the roofs have not been taken into account to do something with it. And we now slowly but surely start to think about that. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. I know in the States and in Canada, it's very common. And in fact, there may be regulations that say all tall buildings must have helipads, you in order to facilitate emergency medical and things like that. But one of the things that you find with all these regulatory compliance helipads is that they're somewhat disused. They aren't necessarily maintained. They aren't necessarily free from obstacles or detritus that might get caught up in the wind. And so they're there, but they might take some investment to get to the point where they'd be more usable. at least the minimums are there, right? has been set up so that you know that you could land that amount of. to see on the roof, for instance. the age of architecture in Amsterdam is a little bit older than it is in those US cities, which is wonderful and beautiful to visit. they probably weren't. They were thinking about how to hoist cargo up into the top story of the building, not how to land a helicopter on it. No, and the funny thing is that those rooftops, that's one of the other insights that we have, are on an ideal height at least, to really say, if we really want to run operations with drones and other forms of innovative aviation in urban settings, we believe we should not use the ground space too much. we may... prefer to use the rooftops of those big distribution centers, hospital roofs and other big buildings to stay away from the noise, stay away from the downwash of wind, sound and everything. So we should start preparing ourselves. And it's also the vision of Fabrications to really start designing new types of buildings from the ground up start thinking about how we use the roof for drones or for eVTOLS in the last image, we were kind of seeing, like we talked about, a busy day um with an EVTOL here and maybe a helicopter there and drones over here, constantly moving and drones moving, not unpredictably, but at least not necessarily between the same two locations with the medical delivery. How do you imagine all this working? in road traffic, we have lanes, in air traffic, there's often sort of corridors. do you imagine this working inside of a city? Well, what we did in our research is to understand what kind of traffic zones will we have in our lower airspace. And one of the things that we explored is by looking at the urban fabric of a city, you naturally find space for drones and EVTOLs for example, in the open spaces that are out there already in the city, which is rivers, parks. roadways, on top of those, above those, there's sufficient space to do stuff. But then, of course, the question is, will we use the urban fabric to fly how do we have larger volumes of drones and eVTOLS flying together? Will they fly crisscross in our city from A to B in the shortest way possible? and will the digital systems that we will be having do the detect and avoid of those systems because the systems should not collide of course and there is all kind of software development going on which those systems can avoid each other. The question is, is that most effective way to use our airspace because if all the system have to stop continuously for other traffic and have to decide who goes first, it may be. Much more inefficient than for example if you use a bundled flying system, which you of course know from traffic We are used to traffic on our roads. We are used to traffic lights people passing streets in a way that's been organized That is being prioritized in a way that Road traffic runs smoothly if we copy this to the air we see a bundled flying situation in different lanes in which different applications can fly in the same direction for the same application or with the same speed. It depends on what kind of application you give to this corridor. bundled flying is a option to really manage the traffic in the air. And of course, there is this hybrid way of thinking in which you will have corridors and crisscross flying combined in, for example, different layers of our airspace. this is the way we have been thinking and also have been testing our urban fabric, what is feasible. Yeah, I love this. For listeners, when Vries is talking about crisscross flying, sort of looks like, a very long straight pasta, like a spaghetti or a fettuccine, but still dry in the pot, right? So everything's sort of crisscrossed around and everything's sort of crossing at irregular angles. And I can imagine it working, right? And then in the bundled flying, it's much more like a ribbon, you know, a series of lines where everything's following, which very much feels more like the way roads work today. or the way that airspace works today, where things are flying definitely between structured points so that you kind of know where they're going to be. And of course, hybrid is a mixture of the two. of course, Amsterdam, Rotterdam canals, yes, waterways, right? And roads also give you a lot of vertical separation, right? Obviously there's there's lots of room above the cars. But one thing that I've read or I've heard about in drone regulation in the States, and probably Canada too, is that there's a little bit of a worry that if a drone did come down over a highway, it's not so much that the drone would damage the car or anything, the car would obviously damage the drone, but that's okay, there's nobody in it. It's more that if someone started to brake because they saw this drone falling out of the sky, you could create really dangerous situations in traffic. And so there's a regulatory concern there around making sure that the drones are safe enough But I'm almost jealous of your canals now, right? Because we have all these roads in North America, lots and lots and lots of roads. But I'm not confident that, especially on faster highways, we're going be able to use them. Maybe slower city streets. Maybe it won't be so bad, right? If a drone falls on a car at 40 kilometers an hour, It's not going to be as big of a deal. I want you to understand that if we are going to see drones or eVTOLS flying, if potentially they would be flying over our roadways, highways, motorways across our nations, it will probably be bigger systems that have a big battery capacity and that can fly from one city to another to bring something over there that should be brought over there. But these bigger systems will also have parachutes or other ways to prevent them from coming down on our roads directly the small recreational drones that may come down now directly because they don't have a parachute. Those smaller systems, 249 grams, can also create... damage and collisions and a lot of nasty situations on our big national highways but it won't be normal to see them over there. That will be the bigger systems that have other things to make sure that they land softly or safely not on our roads but then besides them for example. like rail also. Right. think rail is a much more controlled environment. And again, if a 249 gram drone landed on a freight train, it's going to be fine. So what we discovered is that in our lower airspace, in our urban fabric, it would be feasible to think that bundled flying is the most efficient way, the most safe way, but also from public acceptance point of view. If we see drones flying at certain bundles, certain corridors in our airspace, can sooner or later get used to it. If we see drones, fly criss-cross over a city, you never know when to expect one or a bunch of them. because they come and go like they want we believe that the nuisance level and the acceptance level will be very low. And we need the citizens to really adopt them as well. Because if they start complaining and complaining, the business case won't work because the municipalities have to act. So we believe that a lower airspace in urban fabric bundled flying is the way forward. but we of course need exemptions for at higher altitudes for use cases and applications that can fly directly, including medical drone. like a trauma helicopter now also flies from A to B and the other traffic in the air will need to segregate themselves from this urgent flight. So the left, we believe, is the situation on a much higher level or in the more rural areas of the Netherlands when there is no controlled airspace, when there's not too much traffic. All the traffic that is there can safely but surely detect and avoid with systems fly crisscross, lower airspace bundled. And on the right, it could be that we have a little bit higher airspace and we can create this combination. Vries you've talked about different kinds of traffic. We've talked about routing them differently, point to point versus bundled. What about the actual different kinds of aircraft? Like what's the research you've done there? Well. When you want to do a spatial integration of drones and other forms of innovative aviation, you need to of course know about the natural character of the various systems that are there, the amount of battery capacity that they have, the amount of payload that they can carry. Otherwise, it's very hard to say about how to spatially integrate it. Then it's more or less of a child's picture flying from A to B and you don't get into the details. also really have a good feeling of what is feasible in our lower airspace. So we researched the various systems that are already on the market. Of course, the quadcopters are quite heavy on the market already, including the fixed wing drones. So the drones that have a wing and can fly and... uh and float in the airspace, but they can also land vertically in most cases. So the quadcopter and fixed wing are the system, the drone systems that are being uh operated from a distance. um We looked into the five bigger systems that are already on the market and compared their specifications and used the average. of those specifications to get an understanding of what a quadcopter could do in the airspace, what its behavior will be in terms of flying, but also how far can it get, what does it require to be recharged, how many space does it require to land on the ground, and what kind of noise or airflow buffers should be taken into account with those top five systems in general. So we identified the quadcopter, the fixed wing, the EVTOL, which is in the Netherlands and in Europe, not on the market yet. We see, of course, Joby in the US, other systems that are being test run in certification right now. And on the other side of the globe, we have, of course, the Asian parties in Middle East. The US systems are being run over there. There's Chinese systems that. Fly in Shenzen for example, we took the five biggest systems that will be on the market in the near future and we made also comparison of their specification and brought it into one EVTOL generic specification that you see here. What kind of FATO does it require to fly and to land in an urban setting? How far can it fly? What kind of noise and airflow buffers are there that also require from us to fly on a bigger distance, for example, from buildings than a quadcopter or fixed wing drone because of the noise index. And then, of course, We have this eSTOL so the short takeoff and landing, these airplanes that require a shorter runway, and we have the electronic, and that's of course what your podcast is all about, the conventional takeoff and landing airplanes, electric. It also requires a certain runway, that have a certain battery capacity that we can use in our research. And we took those five systems into our research, and that's what we did. What you see, is we combine those systems also with their applications we believe are feasible because they have a use. All these systems either run cargo, they do inspections or they transfer people It seems like these different aircraft might also have different altitude characteristics. I would expect a quadcopter mostly to be operating lower, for instance, than the fixed wing. And EVTOL probably higher, but again, EVTOL will probably be lower than CTOL, for instance. So there's sort of a banding in the third dimension that we see. But I love how you're thinking through different landing types and dimensions, like obviously the urban footprint is gonna be different, not only from noise characteristics, but from the amount of land that's going to use or building roof space it's going to use. cool. So when looking at the graphic, for listeners, it's sort of a chart and you've got landing and takeoff, you've got landing type, landing dimensions and noise and airflow buffers. And then we've got quadcopter, fixed wing, EVTOL, eSTOL and CTOL. There's also sort of a the vertical slope you've got in each one like plus seven point one glide. It was seven five glide. Tell us about that. I assume this is sort of the steepness with which they can come down to a landing. But walk us through that visual there. Well, what you see here, it shows the behavior of the aircraft in the city. So the quadcopter doesn't require much horizontal space because it's born and being built to really do vertical activity or horizontal activity on a higher level. But as you can see, it doesn't go very far. It's not being built to fly on a longer distance, whether a fixed wing drone, can easily go vertically to above and then fly horizontal for a vast amount of kilometers, 20, 30 kilometers. It's easy. They can even go up 100 kilometers as you have been seeing in Den Helder, for example. And this visual that you see here shows the behavior of the system in the aerospace. And this is also what we took into account. When we want to fly in eSTOL it should bring in people or goods. from another city probably to a next city or a next situation, it flies horizontally most of the time at a certain airspace level. But if it lands, it needs this glide path as well. And this may conflict with other kinds of traffic that is there. So we should have the proper segregation over there. So this was for us a playing field of understanding what the system needs, requires. but also what it can do for applications, inspection, good logistics or people logistics and what we can expect from the system. Yeah, yeah, think speeds and altitudes and all of this is going to definitely impact like what should be the bundled laneways, right? On some level, not just what space do we have? Is it rail? Is it road? Is it canal? Is it water? Is it what? But also, yeah, I think really interesting. Thank you, Ries. This is also important for us to also inform our audiences. mean, we are not reaching out to those people that are already active in the drone or innovative aviation already. They know this figure themselves and they may even have better numbers to it at some certain level. What we wanted to do is educate people around us, policymakers, city planners, that they should really start preparing themselves for these kind of systems. with the applications that we uh used with them to really start to thinking because that's also a big important thing for our research. We see that there's not too many people. still eager to think about this because they don't know where to start. And our research is also a conversation starter for a lot of audiences that we saw at Intertraffic you know, the conference, but also in the future discussions that we'll be having because the physical presentation will also do a travel in the country. It will be at the various province houses and the ministry as a conversation starter for colleagues, for example. Okay, let's say a city has, for instance, Joby coming in. They're probably a likely candidate. So at first, maybe they're only going to be in one or two segregated spaces. We've heard about them going into Dubai and this location or that location. But let's say they want to start expanding, right? How should a city go about thinking about where in the city it's safe to let them expand? How should they answer that? Well, what we did in our research is that we researched three typologies in the Netherlands, uh typical areas that we would could see these kinds of operations come into the airspace sooner or later. These are a harbor setting, an airport setting and an urban setting The funny thing is that we expected to see a lot of difference between those typologies, but there are some generic findings here. And I think they also relate to your question. What if a Joby like aviation company wants to run or a Uber wants to run a VTOL service in the Netherlands or in one of the US cities? What we discovered is that each typology, but also each city has a different urban fabric that should be taken into account for for VTOL experiences. And we have a lot of rivers and water in the Netherlands. So we believe Rotterdam, Amsterdam, even other cities in the Netherlands have rivers. We believe that those rivers are ideal. fabrics to be used for VTOL flight patterns. We believe that, if Joby would want to really raise the bar and start up flights in cities, they would want to follow waterways, railways or roadways as a means to really follow the urban fabric in a natural way. The roadways also allow recharging VTOLs for example, by using the fuel stations that could be also transformed into, various power and fuel technologies, but also electric charging facilities. The same goes of course for train tracks that also naturally have energy supply over there already. So we believe those existing road facilities, railway or water facilities are ideal because there is space, there is a charging facility or there is an escape facility if you need to come down at certain point in time to drop people or to refuel or for emergency situations. actions. Another thing is that we believe VTOL should, it can also easily be incorporated into airports. We researched Lelystad Airport, which is one of our regional airports in the Netherlands. And we discovered that if there's room to really run a VTOL operation in the same circuits as general aviation or use special VTOL circuits in the lower airspace. parallel to existing circuits that are there for general aviation. That's for starters. We also see that when you want to cross a existing corridor for general aviation, you want to cross it in 90 degrees as much as possible because when you cross an existing circuit with a VTOL, the risk of collision is limited to a maximum extent if you cross 90 degrees because you will go past it fast enough rather than fly in the same direction with multiple systems that could collide halfway or further on in the process of this flight. So cross 90 degrees, use the corridor, the circuit system that is there on airports and use existing hubs for people and goods. So train stations, distribution centers, and airports of course, as hubs for people and goods, also as a base for for VTOL applications. And then the one concrete situation that is ideal is of course the parking lots that the bigger conference centers, airports have parking lots for cars and the rooftops of those parking lots could be ideal places to also have VTOL land or take off. Right. And potentially charging as well, to your point. Yeah. Yeah. Especially if a parking lot is already sort of outfitting itself for charging. I could see that being really easy. We've got a graphic of Lelystad Airport here. And to your point about the 90 degrees, are you saying that EVTOL traffic should If this airport you can see is sort of oriented like north, northeast, are you saying that like they should not fly in the same direction as general aviation, but sort of fly across it? Is that what you're saying with that? maybe, okay, why is that? Because then you can, because they have a different, they have a different speed, obviously, than let's say general aviation. And you want to have the same speed in the same circuit. uh And we believe that VTOLs will have a different application than general aviation has. So should also go to other areas and have other takeoff, they need to fly to other cities. they will probably and therefore it's natural to think that you can really fly out to the north west or south east as flying in or fly out tonight. So, okay, so to your point, we should imagine sort of, you know, traffic that's moving at like maybe 150 knots or something like this, you know, coming in North Northeast in order to make an approach at this runway or the other direction, depending on the wind. um And so if in our eVTOL it's going to be coming in at a completely different speed and in a different pattern. So having it approach from the other way makes a lot of sense. Got it. and at a different altitude as Well, one thing, and this of course is the typology Lelystad airports. So we did a collision test with it. Okay, what if we're gonna have drones and eVTOLS be using this airport? How could it work? And at the right side of Lelystad Airport, there is this general aviation area where there is also training centers, there's maintenance and repair. And we believe a VTOL landing zone could ideally place, at that side of the airport, rather than on the left side where there's the takeoff and landing airport will be having also fighter jets coming up in the future. The military has designated this as a military airport now. the government decided we need F-35 fighter jets. also use this airport. So it will be an interesting mix. So what we try to do in our research is design and plot where could we have VTOL elements in there, but also drones. I'm going to raise the bar here as well for your listeners. to what extent is it dangerous to have drones flying on airports like this airport here? Mm-hmm. of course. How do we bring everything together? Because the experience is there with having airplanes in the air, bigger and small. They have air traffic control. They have maintenance and repair. They have charging facilities right now. Also for electric flights. They have agriculture around it. You can see a lot of agricultural feeds are sent to the airport. Maybe it's feasible to think that we also do big services to agriculture. solar also can use drones in order to inspect panels and things like that. Lots, lots of, but into your point, I mean, I think the safety question today is, well, you don't want it being ingested in the engine of a 737 or Airbus 320 as it lands, but you can also see lots of reasons that you would wanna start. So how do we make it safe, I guess? Yeah, yeah, interesting. Vries, this has been great. Thank you so much. We've taken a lot of your time today. So we've heard a lot today about the future of air mobility. What do you think holds the most promise? I think drones is the biggest promise because they are small, they are versatile, they can do inspections, they can be used by governments and they can help And we believe that the sentiment in the Netherlands and I think I understand is that a VTOL can only carry two or three people or a little bit more. It's hard to bring in the societal value of this in a country that is densely populated that has limited ground space. So I believe drones are the accelerator for other ways of innovative aviation. And if we don't the way to get used to drones first, it's hard to get used to other systems as well. Any lessons that you've learned, anything that you set out and thought like, certainly this is true and learned later, like, no, that's not true at all. Like, what lessons have you learned as part of this? um The importance to really look at an urban fabric in such a detailed way that you can really do it properly. I thought it would be easy to bring in generic findings, but what we discovered Fabrications and I, it's still complex. We are not done yet. We thought we could easily do the spatial integrations with the things that we know already. but we don't know everything yet because what about privacy, noise sounds, downwash effects, wind effects, all those aspects are still gray for everybody. And we definitely need to make a move on that as a society first in order to understand the implication of everything. something you're most proud of. that we were able to really do this project. I think we are one of the first in the world to go to this amount of detail, to look at this topic from a ground perspective rather than an air perspective, and be able to find partners that were curious to work with us for a few months to really do this work together. And by having governments and institutions working with us, I think it's the best approach. I'm not here to fuel commercial applications. I'm here to bring in a soft landing to this topic. And I'm really proud of that. were able to do this and I think there's still much work to do. It goes back to that Chinook, there must be a better way. Okay, we are to the lightning round, which is sort of a few very quick questions. What is your favorite airport? JFK. Kennedy put no, think, I think I really like, I really liked the Dutch airport. And I think Den Helder airport is really, it's really special to me. I think it's the same for you, Kyle, because it shows us the, the, future in a way. Uh, but having a lot of history over there, it's so fun to see the history and the future in such a location. Um, Fokker Fokker friendship. Yeah. and one last question before I let you go what's giving you joy right now? Talking with people about this topic, there's so much fun in our work and what's happening in our airspace and what could be potentially happening. It's so fun to be one of the first to really work in this and start thinking that having the conversations with each other like this, Kyle, is for me the best energy. Vries thank you so much for joining us today on the SkyZero.io podcast. Thank you, Kyle. Thanks for having me.

I think it's better to get started than to waste another five years in discussing. I also saw the episode on Joby and I visited Joby last year. Impressive company, really, really impressive tech. I do understand why they use their own plug, but it's not a plug. It's a whole system. That's right. And basically Joby is... starting as a closed circuit operator and so so they have their own vertiports they have their own vitals and and their big challenge is to get that up and running and then it's good that you control everything but if you look from a broader perspective and especially from an airport perspective the last thing you want is to have 10 different chargers i can imagine that as especially in the beginning you need a specific system for that something but then i would advise that go for the the GEACS, sounds like a good standard so it would be great that other eVTOL manufacturers work at least on that same standard but then it's important to have on the back side of the charger OCPP implemented Then from the network side that you can at least give directions from the network that at least power of the GEACS EVSE, is in the Internet of Energy network with the other charges. And basically the open standards, so OCPP and OCPI, are even more important than the form factor of the plugs. Jurijen is an entrepreneur working in e -mobility and renewable energy. In 2010, he founded an EV charging network. called GreenFlux, one of the early trailblazers in the e -mobility space. They started as a charge point operator, but would evolve to focus more and more on the software that makes it all work. He guided GreenFlux to a successful acquisition in 2021. His journey with GreenFlux was a testament to building a globally recognized charging network, connecting 1 million charge points and powering over 15 billion zero emission kilometers. After GreenFlux, he took some time to recover from the roller coaster, focused on health, windsurfing, relations with friends, and travelling with family. During this time, he decided, I know, let's do planes. And he co -founded NRG2Fly, dedicated to realizing a future where every type of electric aircraft and vehicle can be seamlessly and sustainably charged at any airport across the globe. Jurjen also serves as the chairman of the Electric Flying Connection, a pioneering association with members that include industry leaders such as KLM, Transavia, Maeve Aerospace, Vaeridion, Elysian, many airports, the eFlight Academy, and I hope one day, Sky Zero. Jurjen is an investor and front runner of electric aviation like eFlight and Maeve, but also AI robotic weeding company Introbotics, which powers sustainable agriculture. He's also a very enthusiastic supporter of Africa Wood Grow, planting over 150 ,000 trees to restore nature and directly reduce our carbon footprint. Before, Jurjen worked at Accenture, internet firms, and started several ventures. He holds an MBA degree from the University of Groningen. And he's our guest today on the Sky Zero podcast. Jurjen, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate having you. Yes, thanks, Kyle. I'm also honored to be in your show. Thanks. Very kind. So that's quite a bio that we just read off just now. And I have to ask, if you founded it in 2010, you had to have started even before then. But I'm trying to think of what EVs were on the road in 2008, 2009. How is it that you were able to see the future with that? What gave you the idea to do this at that early age? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was actually 2008 that I was really involved with electric cars. And at that moment, there were only refurbished cars, so not real production electric cars. Yeah, basically, it started a little earlier. I was travelling with friends in Africa and I thought... what what will be on my tombstone you know reorganized companies did a lot of big project with multinationals but what what what is really making a difference and then i thought i really want to do something which is helping the environment and i i looked into solar energy looked into wind energy detailed also analysis of hydrogen and then electric mobility and then i thought if you can change electric mobility if if that really works then then the whole system has to change the whole oil system uh the the the power system has to change so so it's basically the snowballs getting rolling when you change uh mobility so that that was my choice uh in in yeah 2007 i think amazing amazing so yeah i mean Yeah, there's so many places I want to go from your answers just there. But just quickly, where in Africa were you and what brought you there? I was travelling in a certain part of Africa and I was with my fraternity and it was a really unforgettable trip. Botswana especially was really, really nice with all the wildlife. So it was really, yeah, great, great. Journey. Yeah. I've gotten to work out of Cape Town and also Joburg, Johannesburg, but haven't made it to Botswana yet. So amazing. Very cool. I love what you're doing with so many things, right? EFC, like I say, I'd like to be a member someday. But I think we have to focus on NRG2fly, right? Like that seems like a really practical hands -on, again, maybe starting a snowball kind of thing. So I think of NRG2fly I mean, it's one of the networks on SkyZero,io right? So I think of it as an aviation forward charging company, airside charging even. How would you describe it? Yeah, I describe it a little broader. Basically, it's a company which helps airports electrify and in the broadest sense. So basically power airports mostly via local renewable energy and distribute that to everything what moves in on the airport. So that can be cars, ground service equipment. trucks, buses, and of course, electric planes. There's obviously a lot of promise there, right? I mean, there's plenty of electric... vehicles already on the airside that are ground vehicles, right? And you see airlines talking about ground support equipment that's electrified, but you've also just got people driving Nissan Leafs and Ford F -150 Lightnings around the airside. They're obviously not flying, but yeah. So I can see the promise of that, right? And then being able to provide it as sort of a basic infrastructure. Cool. So who all does Energy to Fly think of as customers? Like what's your sort of go -to -market position right now? Yeah, for the moment, being a charge point operator, you don't generate much revenue, especially not in aviation. I think that will be the case for the coming, basically for the coming five years. It will be really, if you compare it to electric mobility, it's very limited. But I think it's important to set the basis today. So our customers, main customers are airports. And we help them getting their strategy together on electric aviation, do all the preparations. You need time to do that with all the grid connections, etc. And also government bodies. A lot of local or regional airports are owned by municipalities, at least in Europe, or by provinces or governments. So it's important to involve them. Also operators who want to start electric air. airlines or have a planning to get electric planes, ground handlers and last but not least the OEMs. So basically the producers of electric planes and we really need to help them to get them up to speed on standards. My experience with them is that They are not aware of all the standards and for the journey I did for the last 15 years, I think it could be very valuable to help them get up to speed. Right. And to touch on that for a minute, when you started, you know, Green Flux, I'm trying to think, like, what would the standards have been? I think of Type 2 Menekes in Europe as sort of the AC standard. For DC, you've got, you know, CHAdeMO and CCS and so on today. But what did you even have back then, right? And how did you sort of choose standards back in the day on the automotive side? Basically, there were no standards at all. So we started with the first charging stations. You could not even call them charging stations. They were a charging pole with an industrial plug or with the household plug. So the generic household plug in Europe was used. Like the Schuko 240 volts? Yeah, the 240 volts, 16 amps. which is actually quite dangerous if you charge a car for 8 or 12 hours with full power 16 amps. I would not advise it actually to do that every day. So that's where we started and the first 100 were placed in Amsterdam. in the end they had to be refurbished because then we started to work on standards with government bodies with a few OEMS and also in cooperation with the Netherlands France Germany and we decided basically on the the Menekes type 2 connector and that was then the first standard and in parallel we also started developing OCPP so the open charge point protocol Wow. Okay. So, right. So to your point, you were early enough that you had to pick what would become standards. Did you know at that point that these would be as long lived as they would? No, no, I had no idea. It was basically a learning by doing. It was really learning by doing. And in the beginning, the plugs were not connected. So they were dumb plugs, like we call them. And then when... the open charge point protocol came, then you basically had the first version of an intelligent plug. And I think that is a big breakthrough, which most people still don't realize what it means. I mean, most electrical appliances still have dumb plugs. So I think if you have intelligent plugs or... at least if the appliances are intelligent, then you can create flexibility and flexibility is the key word for our energy system. I also call it basically the starting of the internet of energy. Right, right. So I know just enough about OCPP to have heard of it and not even to be dangerous, but I think of it as like, you know, the protocol that lets me talk to chargers and things. So, but walk us through it. Like when you say smart versus dumb, like, right, I can imagine, okay, to rewind a little bit, EVSEs, chargers really aren't chargers. The charger's in the car with... It's not necessarily the case with aircraft, but for cars, it's in the car, right? And what you're doing is providing AC to it, and that turns that into DC and then shuts that off to the battery. So when you talk about smart, I assume what you're getting at here is a little bit more than just, oh, the car can request the amperage at once. This is getting into like, oh, can I track how many kilowatts were provided? Can I turn it on and off? Can I accept payment? But I'm just guessing. Like, help us understand OCPP better. I think it'll be a good foundation for as we go forward into the aviation side. So let's start there. Yeah, maybe there's one other protocol. Basically, the automotive industry chose the Mode 3 protocol, which is the protocol between the charge station and the car. And basically, it's connecting the charge station to the battery management system of the car. AC, the controller is on board in the car. And with via the Mode 3 protocol, I think it was already in 2009, we did the first test that we were able to change the amps on the cars, on the first car. I think it was a refurbished car, which we first did it. So it was a refurbished Volkswagen. But that finding was really interesting that we were able to give a car a zero amps load. And that means that the car is connected, but it doesn't charge at that moment. And then you can basically vary the charging speed. Basically, we worked out that concept and we called it smart charging. Right. So you could vary, not only vary the speed, but vary whether or not, like when you get into like, oh, I don't want to charge until 7 p .m. when my tariff is reduced. That's the same kind of like, that's the zero amp charging that you're talking about on some level. They're connected. Okay. And if I think about like lots of cars, you can go in and literally say like, don't give me any more than 12 amps. And so that wouldn't be possible. Yeah. And then. And then the real intelligence starts happening because then you have the dumb plug, which is you plug it in and it goes full power. That's the only thing a dumb plug can do and which most household appliances, you put it on and it uses the power the car defines basically. But with a smart plug, you are. able to set the from the charger side that that's the most important so from the network side you're able to set the maximum charge at that moment and then you can prevent that at very busy times in example between 5 and 8 in the afternoon early evening uh that is a busy time on the network and then you can reduce uh the bandwidth and and yeah basically we started we started playing with it we were already very early it was still with uh better place at that moment maybe you heard of it the big battery exchange project i i did a few projects for for better place and together with the networking companies and there we did those kind of testing and then we thought wow this is really interesting Because in the Netherlands, you have about 10 million cars. If you could, suppose they're all electric, where we are going to, basically you can manage the load. And if you look at that load, it's multiple power plants, which you can play with that load. And that's what we realized. And yeah, then we started building from that. On the other hand, of course. we also saw that you have to pay for your charging transactions. So it was also important to set up a system for payment. In the beginning, in the Netherlands, the first two years, charging was free. It was more complicated to build a payment network than the cost of charging, the cost of electricity, because there were not many cars and there were only a few charging stations. So the first few years was free. And then together with all the parties in the ecosystem, we built the OCPP protocol was important for that. And basically, we built a payment system via, at that moment, charge cards. Right. Wow. Okay, so does OCPP have concepts like who is the driver, I guess, or pilot in the aviation sense? And who is like the charge point operator? It can get pretty complicated, right? Like when I think here in the North American landscape, if I go to an Electrify America charger, I think it's like kind of all the same, but maybe ABB makes the actual charging equipment. But beyond that, it's kind of one. But then like something like ChargePoint, it's like, no, they might have sold the unit to somebody and it might be a car dealership and it's kind of on their network. You know, there's all these different business models. So like how much does OCPP care about those business models? The main property of OCPP is that it's open and that means that in the beginning the automotive manufacturers, they all built their own chargers. So BMW had their own charger. Volkswagen had their own charger. And I talked to the management from BMW and said, yeah, we are building a big ecosystem around our car and they only charge at our chargers and et cetera, et cetera. That was their ideal view of the world. But luckily that didn't work out. Yeah, OEMs have their own chargers. uh 10 times as many charges than we have now and now we have basically via OCPP we can have we have hundreds of different types of charger but they all speak the same language and that's also important for that internet of energy and basically it doesn't matter what kind of charger have you have but your car can charge and that's uh the the concept of open standards and of course uh sometimes you have not the same flexibility which an OEM could build with their own charger. So it's always a trade -off between the standard and the functionality. But of course, OCPP developed over the years and it got a lot of functionality. So I think it's still room for improvement, but we made a big difference. many market models like you were mentioning are are possible these days okay okay so it doesn't necessarily lock us into you know the existing automotive landscape when i think about the aviation landscape a lot of it might be similar, right? I mean, when we think about fuelling at an airport, you've got sort of fuel providers and, you know, tank farms and FBOs. And sometimes it's the airport selling you the gas. Sometimes it's the FBO. Sometimes you're a big airline and you've got your own tank farm. So yeah, there's kind of existing business models that we, I don't know how much that's going to guide us in the end, but that we at least have customers that are used to those business models. So it seems like if we come in and not like... Let's make it just like cars. That's probably good, right? But maybe I'm thinking about it wrong. How do you think about it? Do you think about this as like, oh, this is the right way to go? Or are you sort of an exploratory in terms of thinking through how to work with aviation? Yeah, for me, it's an interesting journey. The last three to four years, I was new to aviation. I was a consumer of aviation, but not into the whole aviation ecosystem, which... is a huge uh system with many many expertise so so i will never reach and become a full expert on on aviation but i i saw some uh similarities and especially from my experience that it took 10 years to come to to the standards we built in uh in immobility and and basically uh for for the speed and and During those 10 years, there was never the guidance, a clear laser focus on where the developments would go. And luckily, a few parties did make decisions. And in the Netherlands, we said with all public tenders, all charge stations had to use OCPP, an example. So at least you know that all charges can be used. In the end, other governments, like we worked together a lot with California, they took also that into their mandates and also other European governments. So basically, OCPP became de facto a world standard. And I think for aviation, that part is important that you give clarity. And therefore, it would be good to pick. Well, I think at least two standards on the connectors to say if you look at automotive, ideal would be CCS for more. Yeah. So CCS for a low powered plane. So basically, let's say it's currently CCS standard goes to 400 kilowatts. And then you have MCS, which is currently used for trucks, and that goes to about 3 .54 megawatts. And then you can service currently all the models. I think the biggest plane in development now is the Elysium, and you can still service those planes. So I think that's right in terms of thinking about it like you've got sort of your general aviation, your H -55 Bristel Energique, and you've got your, you know, Pipistrel -Velis and Pipistrel -Alpha, your sort of smaller aircraft. And you've also got your much larger aircraft, like you mentioned, Elysian, Vaeridion, Heart Aerospace, and this sort of middle ground, which is maybe more akin to the larger in terms of their needs, like Joby and Beta and Archer and Ehang and the sort of eVTOL crowd. And they've all got sort of different needs, right? I think that's it. But to your point, like CCS and MCS, I think of these both as char and standards, part of the CHARIN ecosystem. So first of all, I'm very mindful of the fact that I'm speaking to a real expert on these things. And I've sat by the sidelines and looked at things with sort of an engineering eye, but I wasn't there. And I don't know what I don't know, and I'm aware of that. The C and CCS, the first one anyway, is combined, right? Combined charging system. And the thing that it combines is AC and DC. And so you end up with these fairly large plugs because they've got to have room for the AC and the DC. Aviation is not using the AC though. So I can see there's several things about it that are smart though. I mean, CCS is... the standard in Europe, right? And there's more CCS equipment in the world probably than all the others combined, right? And if it weren't for Tesla and the NACS, it would be probably the one standard for card charging. So that means it's got very well tested. That means it's commodity equipment. It's so obtainable. It's very well optimized. So there's lots of smarts in there, but it's like one trick that it has besides all of that. is that it's combined, and we don't need that part. We don't even want the AC. But I don't know. We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, I guess. But how do you square that? CCS doesn't seem really purpose -built for aviation. It seems like it's a very good standard that could work. So what gives you the confidence to say, like, no, let's do CCS today? I think the stability is... is key and basically of course i know the the the European situation best but but basically in the us you have NACS and also CCS but I've showed you a pyramid of the electric airport and basically at every airport currently there are already chargers and in europe those are CCS chargers. So the cars at the car park, an example, Schiphol Airport has parking space for 40 ,000 cars. I think there are over 3 ,000 chargers already. So basically you do have CCS. So then I say use CCS, which is the standard for automotive and that doesn't change. So use it for the cars. use it for small trucks use it for ground service equipment and for ground service equipment for some you could also use the the ac side and so there there still you have the the c is still uh relevant i i do agree with you that the uh the ac side for a Pipistrel plane so basically for all electric planes is not necessary so maybe That will evolve. Basically, you could also use a CCS plug without the AC part, that you only have the two DC pins. So I think that also saves some weight. Maybe in the end, you could have a DC standard for small planes, but I'm not sure if... If it's necessary. Because I was mentioning the internet of energy. And if you have 10 different chargers, you are not able to manage those chargers from the same system. And therefore, we developed the pyramid of our electric airport. that basically first you have to to have the whole basis of your airport being electrified so local renewable energy batteries to store it cars to charge to charge truck to charge and if all those appliances and all those things are working together then you can fully manage the the energy load of the airport and then It's not that difficult to make room for small electric planes and larger electric planes. An example of the Schiphol example, you have, suppose all those 40 ,000 cars are, some are parked for a week or two weeks. Suppose you lower the power for, say, half an hour, you can charge maybe 40 Vaeridions just by... lowering the power of the parked cars so right and therefore it's important that you have one energy management system which is managing all the chargers and if you have all kind of proprietary systems that won't work and it essentially means that you have to have 10 times the power which is really necessary because it's it's all locked locked up in the the black boxes of the proprietary solutions from the manufacturers so that that is the basic trade -off i think yeah i think that's right and you're illustrating a few things i've kind of conflated and incorrectly combined things like you know the the connector standard uh versus like the actual you know all the protocols that go around it uh so i think I'm glad you teased that apart I think there's also something smart to what you're saying about, like, don't wait, just go. And on some level, like general aviation, you know, all the way up to beta and, you know, the EVTOLs, they can't necessarily wait, you know, for GEACS to have, you know, some sort of general availability. They had to do something. Would I have suggested that they sit on their hands? No, go, go and do something. So I think I'm with you. And if they were going to go and do something, I guess your options at that point look like GBT or CCS. But so, yeah, I see CCS of those two being perfectly reasonable, you know. So get to your point. It is going to be something that's known. It's going to be something that they can use in all of their systems. And, yeah, and it's a little bit of a red herring to talk about the size of the connector. You don't have the weight problem of actually having to have the AC charger on board. And it's just a little bit of extra plastic. But it is taking up some room on the fuselage. So, yeah. But I think I'm with you that getting started is better than not getting started, for sure. And, you know, it's perhaps unfair criticism for me to say, like, well, ignore all of the good things about CCS. Why choose it? Those good things are the important bits, like the fact that it is very well tested, the fact that it's very well understood and very available. Yeah, and it's it basically saves you another have we know the timelines in a I learned myself the hardware, the timelines in aviation are really long, especially developing new aeroplanes. So But also, if you look from an investment perspective, investors want to have security. And also from airports, they have to strengthen their grid connections. They already had to do that because it basically goes for every company. So not even for electric planes, but also for all kind of other kind of appliances. So you have to think. 10 years ahead. And then you need to know what to invest in. And maybe it's not the perfect solution yet, but nobody knows. Nobody knows the perfect solution. So I say, let's get started and give the maximum guidance for the coming years. And when a better standard... uh evolves it's it's it's fine with me but but at least start with a standard and not with 10 different uh proprietary solutions because uh yeah i i saw it in in electric cars and it took a lot of time to to to get it together again Right, right, right, right. You end up, yeah, you think about all the back and forth that automotive has had and even just the major stuff that we know about around lecture demo and CCS and then later Tesla coming out with its own. There was probably a lot more going on under the hood that we didn't even see. So, yeah, and all of this causes, you know, slows people down and makes people say, oh, I'll wait until the next version, you know. So I'm with you. Like standards are good. When I think about. geeks or GEACS you know the Joby connector the Joby approach it's more than that connector i think it might be really well suited to air taxi right but maybe not for general aviation right when when i talked to we we interviewed Ben Stabler over at Heart Aerospace recently and talked to him about like would GEACS make sense for the es -30 their their airliner He's not convinced that it does. It doesn't allow him to save that much weight because their aircraft are going to be in the air long enough that they're going to need a cooling system regardless. So it might save him the size of that cooling system, but it doesn't save him as much versus that air taxi situation where you're only flying for 20 minutes. It really does allow you a lot. It gets you that extra 10 % speed on the turnaround, which is big in the economics for air taxi. Prior to that conversation, I was thinking like you, like, oh, yeah, we're going to need the sub megawatt and we're going to need the megawatt. I'm starting to wonder if like we need two streams, like the air taxi stream and everybody else, which is more about like short duration flights and longer duration flights or something. But it's just a guess. I agree that I also talked to the guys from Joby and I think they are playing in the Champions League. It's short term. They need maximum energy and maximum power. So it's really the Champions League. I think for the regular electric planes, it's a little less extreme. So what you mentioned with Heart, and that's what we also see with Vaeridion and Elysian. But still, compared to cars, it's still extreme. But I think the eVTOLs are Champions League. I can imagine that, especially in the beginning, you need a specific system for that. Then I would advise that go for the geeks. Sounds like a good standard. So it would be great that other eVTOL manufacturers work at least that same standard. But then it's important to have on the back side of those chargers, OCPP implemented. then from the network side that you can at least give directions from the network that at least the power of the EVSE, GEACS EVSE, is in the Internet of Energy network with the other charges. And basically, the open standards, so OCPP and OCPI, are even more important than the form factor of the plugs. Totally agreed. So, Jurjen, when we talked about OCPP earlier, you said the O is for open, right? And that's really important. What sorts of change do you think OCPP might need to go through for aviation? Or is it pretty well set up already to handle what we're going to see? Well, the interesting thing is that basically on electric mobility is from a software platform side is more complicated than from aviation side. Aviation, I think in the US you have about 5 ,000 airports. You count everything, the airfields, etc. Let's say 5 ,000. In Europe, it's about 4 ,000. That's it. And then you have 30 ports we have to see. And with cars, it's basically, you can say, cars is almost one -on -one. So you have 2 billion cars in the world, so you need 2 billion charges in the end. Or let it be one or two, 1 billion or 500 million. I don't mind. But it's so many more variables. So I think from the variable side, we are good. But of course, there are some specific characteristics like a reservation of charges. You have the slots allocation, of course, on airports, which... is crucial especially for commercial aviation so you need a reservation but for the big trucks you also already have a reservation functionality which is currently also built into OCPI that is already available so for the moment i don't see big chunks of, of course you need interfaces with all the aviation platforms, but basically the interfaces are already there. So I don't see any big chunks on OCPP and OCPI, but basically every year new functionality is added. The OCA, the Open Charge Alliance, is governing those protocols. And we started an aviation chapter of so energy to fly us into the aviation chapter of the OCA. And we started discussing that. But the thing is, we can theorize a lot. But the best thing is just to get started and learn from. from reality and and that's what we're doing so currently we are building a charging network currently we have eight locations the the second thing we had so we we want to build a european network but of course we also want to do roaming with other CPOs (charge point operators) and so on these charges We act as a CPO. We also want to act as a mobile service provider or call it, we still have to find a term for that, aviation service provider, but basically to roam with other networks so that when you start your trip, you can already reserve your charger. Suppose you travel from... let's say Amsterdam to London and you go to a different charge point operator you want to reserve your slot you want to reserve your charging speed is the power really there at that moment right and you want to already negotiate the price beforehand i think those three elements are very important uh price you have a pricing module in OCPP, you have a reservation module, and there is a power module. So basically, that functionality is there. But of course, the depth is in a detail. And there will be adjustments, but we can learn by doing. We don't have to wait for the big Elysian 90 -seater planes. We can already start with the Pipistrels or the Jobys. Basically, you can all start that kind of functionality. And of course, an Elysian needs 10 times the power of a smaller plane. dimensions are not that much of a problem. You can basically tackle most software things already beforehand. Interesting. One of the things that comes up for me while you're talking is... You said it, like you kind of need one charger per car. And that's about right. Like that, I don't know if that'll hold true forever, but most people with electric vehicles that they're driving on a day -to -day basis have a charger at their house, you know. At my house, there's one charger and two cars. And so that's right. And 99 % of my charging happens at home with that one little charger. You know, I can use these fancy CCS and 350 kilowatt chargers. I can, you know, and that's great. I love that on road trips. But that doesn't matter to me, 360 days a year. It's the other five that I care about. That may be different in aviation, right? To your point, like the idea of reserving may become a lot more important. In automotive, we could just sort of throw a big parking lot with a lot of charge stations in it that are high power and let it sort itself out. So you can give it like a buffer as a buffering solution. It's going to be hard to buffer at airports. They're somewhat space constrained. So yeah, the idea that, no, no, no, I need to know exactly which charger I'm going to use, and I need to know that it's going to be mine. That may be a lot more important. That's interesting. Cool. Yeah, I think it's crucial, especially for commercial aviation. For general aviation, you have some flexibility, turnaround times, the synchronous ground handling, et cetera. It has to be one flawless system. you should spend time in in testing that but but reservation is is key and also uh the amount of power you need to know the the the state of charge uh when uh when when the plane arrives uh etc etc so so that that will be a very close uh corporation in there yep Awesome. What do you see for the future? What do you think sort of outside of what we've already talked about? Do you see other things that hold promise or catch your interest in terms of electrified aviation or even emissions -free aviation in some other way? Yeah, I think the future, I think my main message is to think big. envision that that significant part of regional aviation especially within continents within the US Africa Asia Europe you can electrify a long haul over the ocean I don't see any possibilities for the future but that let's see but I think it's it's Especially finding the coalition of the willing. So basically with the electric flying connection, we find all the parties in Europe who are already willing to go. So all the parties who are already experimenting with electric flying and basically built that network can be with small charges first. and slowly upgrade to the bigger chargers and more robust systems so so basically you you built it bottom up i think that that approach is important and that's that's how we did it with electric cars and now it's uh yeah becoming a major industry with with major disruptions and um yeah i hope that that will be the same with aviation, because I think aviation adds huge value to society, but it would even be much nicer if there's less noise and less pollution. And yeah, I think electrification really, really has a big promise, and especially if it's an integral part of the energy system. And therefore you need to really electrify your whole airport and all modalities have to communicate with each other. I think that's crucial. And then you were mentioning that you need to buffer a lot of power. Yeah, you do with the big planes you do, with the small planes you don't. But if it's really a good internet of energy, you can, of course, battery storage is getting cheaper and cheaper and more compact. But even planes can share energy from each other. They can share energy from the cars which are parked. Vehicle to grid is coming. I don't think vehicle to grid from electric planes will be really... I think vehicle to grid from electric cars is more interesting than from planes. But I think, of course, sometimes you need to upgrade the grid. If we look in the Netherlands, we are going to a major countrywide upgrade of the grid. And I think most countries will go there. Aviation, it will not be a revolution. It will be an evolution. It takes at least 20 years. So, of course, I like it to go faster, but that's not realistic. It's a real evolution. A lot of seminars I get asked, oh, they had the grid congestion, et cetera, and also those large amounts of power and energy. I think it's an evolution. And if you integrate the systems on the right way with basically the ingredients I mentioned, yeah, I think it's not that big of a challenge. I think there are bigger challenges than that for the world. I love that. Great answer. Okay. Any lessons you've learned? And this is almost like career -wide and life -wide. Things that you thought worked one way and you found out, like, nope, that works a different way than you thought. What comes to mind for you? Yeah, what comes to mind? I think running a startup in, yeah, basically when electric driving started, everybody, well, thinks it's funny. Yeah, they sort of laugh at you and it's difficult to get finance. So it's really hard to, you really have to have an uphill fight. It's really important to look for the coalition of the willing, the people really who want to make a difference and really have the vision that in this case, electric aviation. can work and uh i think you're one of them Kyle so so uh it's it's great that that uh that we meet and and um i think that enthusiasm and you don't need that many people it's it's but you do need the right people who want to go the extra mile but also have the vision that that it can be realized uh i think that is the the and and that's most of the times that's not the the the big established companies because they they have a different agenda so most of the the big changes in society come from bottom up from from those people who really uh have a shared vision and uh yeah i think on on sustainability we really need to make a change and luckily a lot of people are convinced but but you need the people who not only convince but also act like it i think find those people and and form effective cooperation with them and and of course standards are important and basically together you build a pie and later on you fight for the pieces of the pie but first you build the pie and I think that's what we learned in Holland it's a really small country but we have the dikes around our country and if we don't cooperate on the dikes one part of the dike is neglected or uh then the whole system doesn't work and and i think that was an important lesson for me that that uh the the the system is as strong as the weakest link and um and and yeah basically uh uh yeah it it it it's always a roller coaster with uh funding um also on on technology you have to make choices while technology is not not final it's it's always you always have to make 80 20 guesses continuously and sometimes they they prove to be wrong and but still it's important to make a decision and hey you have a technical podcast and and from a technical perspective there are 100 reasons to to have better solutions that's I work for the last 20 years. I work with engineers on a daily basis and they always have better solutions. I know. I know. But we also need 80. We need 80, 20. We need to move. That's right. We need to move. And because you learn much more from doing than from. And of course, there is in aviation. It's. We are not with the Wright brothers anymore. So, of course, it's much more sophisticated. But it's continuous balance, I think. Yeah, I agree. I like that you brought up the dikes in the Netherlands and Holland and so on. I think that's right. While we were talking, I remembered that I read... a piece recently talking about how, you know, like they were talking about the United States and China and they were saying, Oh, China is a nation of engineers and the US is a nation of lawyers. And I don't, I don't know if I buy into that very much, but But I do think maybe the Netherlands is definitely a country of engineers, right? And if you didn't, almost like Iceland, right? If Iceland couldn't figure out how to live on top of a volcano, then it wouldn't exist. And they've managed it, building big berms around lava flows and geothermal energy to make use of all the heat on the ground. And similarly with you guys. If the Netherlands couldn't manage to engineer the dikes and hold back the water, you wouldn't be a country. No, 50 % would be below the water. Yeah. So maybe it makes sense that the Mennekes standard was chosen for automotive in the Netherlands. Maybe it makes sense that the very first electrified aviation airport like Teuge and eFlight Academy would be in the Netherlands. Maybe it does make sense. Seeing those parallels has been a really interesting part of this journey. Another parallel is that for electric cars was also important. It was a flat country, so we didn't have mountains. It was a small country, so we only needed a few charge stations to have a network. But more important was that the Netherlands does not have... a tier one automotive industry. The big automotive industry in Europe are in France, Italy, and Germany. And the same goes for aviation. We don't have tier one aviation industry. Also aviation industry in Europe, it's in Germany and in France, basically, and in the UK. And that helps because then we are a little... and a little less influenced by the big industrial conglomerates. And Boeing and Airbus, basically their plan is to fly 30 years with the big kerosene planes. Don't change too much. Don't change the winning team. And the same goes... for the automotive so you you don't have to look for innovation with the big uh elephants uh and the innovation has to come bottom up i think china is a little different case because china basically china is more in where the Netherlands is because uh i visited china In 2008, so really early. And then I saw the 10 -year plans for electric cars. They wanted to be a dominant player, and they succeeded in that. But it was all there in the plans because they didn't have an automotive industry at all. And the same, they only have a limited aviation industry. They are building it now, but they can integrate. Electric aviation is integrated in their strategy. For countries which are... available, basically are dependent on the established industry, it's much harder to make that change and to sort of start from zero. They started with the dirty stuff like critical minerals and lithium processing and built it into a battery empire. And now, yeah, when you go to build an electrified automotive industry and you already have the battery empire, it's easier to do. Right. So, no, I mean, it's pretty smart to get out of world politics for a moment. It's probably smart. Yeah. I think I can imagine what how how you'll answer this. But but I'll ask anyway, what are you most proud of? Yeah, I think from from the we got the snowball rolling that. our co2 footprint that i think we are at the turning point and electric mobility is is an important uh part of of uh really reducing our co2 footprint and I'm really happy it worked out uh not not for myself it's it's nice that uh i successfully sold off my my my company but uh i i really went into this i was really worried and I'm still worried about uh what we are heading but i also see a lot of positive uh developments and I'm proud that I've been part of of this movement and uh yeah basically it stimulates me to to to keep on going because i see uh yeah many sim i mentioned the similarities i i don't forget the differences there are many differences too yeah i think this So it's great that with a small coalition of the willing, we were able to make a big change. And yeah, I'm proud of that. I love this phrase, coalition of the willing. I hear it from Merlijn at NRG2fly. I hear it from Matthijs at eFlight Academy. Yeah, I imagine the EFC sort of is this coalition of the willing, like embodied. Is that a way to think about it? Yeah, the interesting thing with the electric flying connection EFC is that basically we have about 35 companies who represent the whole ecosystem. So the airports are there. The airlines are there. The manufacturers of the electric planes are there. The government is there. Basically, of course, we have meetings to exchange ideas, but especially to strengthen our belief and to hear the latest and the greatest. But most importantly is that we start acting. So we start building the network. We start experimenting. and uh i think now in the Netherlands basically we have all active parties involved and now we reach out to Germany to France uh and also uh across the pond to to you and we we also plan uh from EFC uh next year we we plan a trip to the us and i think an income we will receive an incoming delegation from the US in March coming here. Because that's also how automotive started. I think it was the Netherlands, Norway and California. I think they were the frontrunners and it was important to bring those parties together. And then slowly you involve other parties. And yeah, I love working with these people. And they pop up. Basically, those people, how did we find each other? You sort of find each other automatically, you know? Yeah. If you dive into a subject, you find the people that matter, who can really make a difference. And yeah, I think that's what it's all about. And that's what we try to do with EFC. And we are happy to make you a member and let's get it working. I'll go find the application form right after this. Okay, so we're heading into the lightning round now. So what is your favourite airplane? That's an interesting question. Of course, it has to be an electric airplane. I'm doing flying lessons myself, and I promised myself only to do flying lessons in an electric airplane. But it's not a Pipistrel. It's useful, but of course, it was my first experience. Now, I like the moonshot from the Elysian. It's not there yet, but a 90 -seater electric plane. we can realize that i think then we have cracked commercial electric aviation yeah and so i really hope uh it's it's yeah i compared to when i first drove the model s i thought wow this is going to change the world but i really got emotional when i drove the the the model 3 i really got uh emotional because i thought this is a car which is had a Model S is too expensive. Yeah, sure. Nobody can afford that. Most people, but Model 3 is affordable car. And I think that was the real game changer. And here I see, I think that the Vaeridion, the 10 seater is the real game changer. If you reach that, but then the, yeah, I still choose the Elysian as the big hairy goal. We're going to need higher passenger counts in order to reduce emissions significantly. So, yeah, I love it. Okay, second question in the lightning round. What's your favorite airport? Yeah, I think Teuge Airport. Nobody knows it. It's a very small airport, but it's powered completely by renewable energy. All the cars can be charged electric. ground units are electric and the planes are electric. Yeah, I think that's the future. Amazing. And actually, it's a very nice airport. Yeah. We've talked a bit about Joby during this conversation, right? And I think they're cool, too. Don't get me wrong. But Teuge is doing real work. Pilots are being trained, right? And that's not to say that Joby's S -4s won't do real work someday. I hope they do. I think they will. But it's already happening at Teuge. So, yeah, I like that answer. And the last question, what's something that's giving you joy right now? What's something that you want to shout out? Maybe you're reading or watching or thinking about that you really love? Many things, many things. But yeah, currently, I also learned that I worked very hard, 80 hours, 100 hours a week. And I really... i had to find my my balance again and i think currently i'm quite balanced and uh uh what's helping me is uh windsurfing i'm i'm an addict of windsurfing and uh yeah i think uh uh a sound mind how you need for sound mind uh to to to really have an impact you you need to sound body and uh yeah since um i i have to work out for windsurfing and um Yeah, then I really feel better. I'm a nicer person if I have my exercise and enjoy the speed of going 60 kilometers per hour over the water. I really love it. Fantastic image to leave it on. Jurjen, thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate you coming on. Yes. Thanks very much, Kyle. Yes.

So, why build an electric 30 -seat aircraft that can only fly 125 to 200 miles? And then, why put two turboprops on it, if it can fly its route all electric? Well, the answers to these questions are regional aviation economics and regulations, in that order. All good? Great. If you're not quite sold, stick around for the explanation. Today, we're talking about the Heart Aerospace ES -30, of course. And we'll try to answer both of these questions. When Hart first announced his ES19, I was in love. This was an 19 -seat, all -electric, modern regional airliner. So I got to talk to Ben Stabler the other day about the ES30 and ask him why it looks like they took my beautiful ES19 and replaced two of its electric motors with turboprops. They had a perfectly good Tesla, and they made it a Prius. Well, so here's the thing. Let's start with the regulations part, because it's important to understand what's going on here. We're not going to deep dive through all of this territory, but a key concept is the idea of visual flight rules, or VFR, and also instrument flight rules, or IFR. Basically, VFR is used in good weather where pilots can navigate by sight. IFR is used when visibility is poor and rely on instruments and air traffic control guidance. Suffice it to say that most working aircraft that are trying to fly with any kind of regularity need to consider IFR rules unless they never fly at night or in any kind of weather, which is just too limiting. So as long as your pilot is instrument rated, and as long as your aircraft and airport have instrument landing system capabilities, in addition to altimeters and airspeed, vertical speed, heading, and all the usual instruments, then you can fly when it's cloudy, or you can fly at night. When you're flying IFR, the rules say you need to carry enough energy, either fuel or electricity, to fly your expected route plus an extra 45 minutes, plus the extra distance it might take to land in an alternate airport. Why? Well, because the airport you're aiming for might be closed. Because there might be headwinds that eat up your energy faster than planned. Because air traffic control might send you to an alternate airport. Okay, fine. So what's this got to do with adding two turboprops to our perfectly beautiful all -electric aircraft? Well, it turns out that you can add the extra capacity to handle these IFR reserves in a couple of different ways. On the surface, the simplest is maybe to add more batteries. This way starts to make you pretty crazy pretty quickly, however. Let's take the base case of 125 miles and add in what's needed for the reserve. Given that the ES -30 flies at 200 knots, the 45 -minute reserve alone is another 150 nautical miles. That's 172 statute miles. Now, let's add in another 50 nautical miles for alternate. Now, our 125 -mile flight needs 350 miles of range to be able to get it done. So, how many batteries is that? This is now several tons of extra batteries to cover the reserve. And they take up more and more room. So the entire aircraft gets bigger. Which means that those batteries don't take you as far, which means you need even more batteries. And, while lithium -ion batteries are the coolest thing to happen in a long time, and they get cheaper and cheaper every year, they are not yet as good as jet fuel at storing energy per pound. So, Heart decided, fine, let's add two turboprops and a fuel tank. Our customers won't have to fill the fuel tank unless they want to fly beyond our electric -only range. They just need to put in enough to cover the reserve. So assuming that 99 times out of 100, they won't be redirected to another airport, they'll never have to turn on those turboprops. Turned out that all the extra weight and extra drag is still penciling out to be more efficient than the extra batteries would have been. They're not dead weight. In fact, they're a mass savings. So great. But why bother with an aircraft that can only go 125 miles in the first place? Well, because there are tons of routes out there that just aren't that far. And today... They're mostly served, well, by cars and trains or possibly jets. Sometimes larger jets burn a ton of fuel. An Airbus A350 -1000 burns 6 .9 tons per hour of kerosene, jet A fuel, while climbing. While climbing. So if it reaches cruising altitude in 15 to 20 minutes, it took it 1 .7 to 2 .3 tons of jet fuel just to get in the air. See, fuel -burning airliners are most cost -effective when they're flying longer -haul trips. The amount of fuel it costs to get the aircraft up to its cruising altitude is disproportionately large. Let's take a fictional route, but one that ES -30 might be called to do. Stavanger to Bergen in Norway. It's only 160 kilometers great circle. Aircraft routinely do this flight in about 173 kilometers when you factor in navigation. Let's assume a Saab 340. A Dornier 328 would be similar economics. ATR 42 is a little worse. But we're trying to go apples to apples with the ES -30. And the ATR -42 carries, well, 42 people. So let's stick with the Saab. The Saab can do this route in 30 to 40 minutes. Let's call it 35. We'll assume a cruising altitude of around 15 ,000 feet. So we're just not going to be in the air long enough to warrant going up much higher than that. Let's assume that takes 8 minutes and 27 minutes of cruise and descent afterward. The Saab burns 1 ,125 liters of fuel per hour at max power across both engines. 560 or so each. At a cruise power, it's much more economical, only burning less than half of that, 500 liters per hour total. So for our flight, if we assume eight minutes of full power and 27 minutes of cruise, the first eight minutes cost 200 euro, and the remainder of the flight costs 300. Your total fuel cost is about 505 euro. Plus, you accrued engine time. That means you are that much closer to your next overhaul. This is not great economics for a few reasons. One, If we'd been going further, we could have flown higher and met lower air density. So we might have reduced our fuel burn per hour in that cruise. But for a short flight like this, it doesn't make sense. The 500 liters per hour fuel burn is way more economical than the 1 ,125 liters per hour fuel burn during takeoff. But we don't have enough cruise time in the flight to make up for that takeoff cost. Ben shared that for a 150 -kilometer flight like this one, they're projecting total energy consumption of around 550 kilowatt hours. That sounds like a lot. That's nearly, that's half of a megawatt, right? The airport's going to need a big connection to the grid to recharge that on a 30 -minute turn, right? But how much will it cost? About 100 euro. That's one -fifth of what it would have cost to fly this up. Plus, assuming we didn't have to turn on those turboprops, we're not accruing engine hours. So no paying for no paying.

Quite interesting also for our authority to see how we would build up PPL with shorter flights, two different aircrafts, how we're going to do the migration between the two aircrafts and in the end fly the 45 hours with all the solo hours in it. So it was more like a puzzle and talking to the authorities and also for the exam, for example, because it was not really clear for us if we could also do an exam on an electric aircraft or if that was not possible. And then the next problem, we need examiners. that actually have the conversion to the Pipistrel you know because that's also has to be done so it was just a lot of steps and a lot of puzzles and a lot of discussions and talks with our authorities yeah to to get it going so a lot of fly schools ask for the syllabus but we we rather don't send it because well spend quite a lot of time on it for sure yeah yeah but uh yeah it looks Like, well, all the exercises are the same as any other PPL. But of course, the flights and the arrangement within the syllabus is a bit different. Having graduated from TU Delft with a master's degree in industrial design engineering, Matthijs Collard went on to found not one, but two different businesses in digital product design and front -end development, respectively. After 24 years in digital product design and entrepreneurship, he switched to aviation and co -founded the E -Flight Academy in Teuge Netherlands in 2021. eFlight Academy trains pilots, an admirable goal. They do it sustainably, too, conducting 90 % of training flights in electric aircraft, flying emissions -free with electricity generated by their own solar microgrid. Now, would you believe that they hold not one but two records in electric aviation? eFlight Academy is currently the largest operator of piloted electric aircraft in the world. And going by our data, they are the operator of the electric aircraft with the most flight time, a Pipistrel Velis Electro with tail registration FHGBC. Matthjis is also our guest today on the Sky Zero podcast. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining. Yeah, thank you. Good to be here. Yeah, I'm glad. So yeah, so let's start with you. Tell us a little bit. I mean, we just heard your bio, but yeah, tell it a little bit in your own words and why the switch to aviation maybe. That sort of doesn't come out in what I just read. No, yeah. So it was quite a big switch because it's a totally new industry for me. So I was mostly in the digital design space user experience. That was my subject. good running company design agency but i was also interested in electric propulsion and like 2013 i had my first electric car and i really liked experiencing this new type of technology in in a really conventional sector explodes more or less you know from really a car that everybody said that's not going to be anything and then 10 years later it's really big and i can drive everywhere and there's charging all over europe and it kind of works and i was always following all the companies there And I really was a bit jealous on people in that industry that just experienced a boom of technology and especially, well, one that is, I think, good for the environment, less emissions. But I also wanted to do something like that. But then I was thinking maybe not in automotive because that's a bit late if I step into automotive in 2020. So what's another sector that still has to be electrified and is maybe a little bit challenging so I could, well... pick up a nice task, pick up the glove to start working on that. And then it became aviation because in my efforts to lower my own footprint. uh i think not flying was the most difficult one because uh eating less meat or well driving electric or having solar panels on your roof it's all has all a lot of positive effects yeah but not travelling i i cannot uh imagine any positive effect on that so uh also for myself and for my kids and future generation i just want to still be able to travel but hopefully on a more sustainable way so that's why i i started looking for the sector where to start something. And I had quite a lot of different ideas until I met my co -founder who was in flight training already. And he convinced me that flight training would be the easiest way to start with getting experience into electric aviation, because that's what I was lacking, experience in aviation. So I now got to do both just running a company in this sector. And learning a lot at the same time. So that's how I got into it. So were you a pilot before or had any interest in aviation? Not really. Just as a passenger travelling the world. That was one of my hobbies until not too long ago. Yeah, I got my license in my school. So I was actually a test pilot or how would you say it? Yeah, I was. Student pilot, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, I know. But I mean, I was. testing out the syllabus and the program and school because I was the first client as well. Got it. Right. So, uh, yeah, among a few others, but, uh, this was really good. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Felt like that. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, during that, that, uh, period, I, I made a lot of improvements on the company and how everything worked and, uh, processes and, uh, customer journey and everything. So, uh, yeah, that was, uh, was quite good. And now I am a pilot. I'm a PPL, and I'm currently studying for my instrument rating. So I like it, of course. It's a nice hobby. But it's also professionally important to have that in this sector. No doubt. No doubt. So in 2013, you probably didn't have too many choices, like Nissan Leaf or Mitsubishi iMiev. Yeah, I had the first Model S. So I was just there. Yeah. So many parallels. I remember in a very similar way, the roadster. I'd heard about and, you know, I didn't really care. But when the Model S came out, I'm like, wait a minute, that looks like a car my neighbours might drive. And you're telling me it's all electric. And there was this part of me that as a kid was really interested in anything that moved, you know, whether cars or airplanes or anything else. But then growing up, sort of realized like, okay, they're all burning stuff. So, you know, like I kind of became a public transit nerd, you know, on some level, which I still enjoy, but I missed the machinery, you know, and yeah. And so when the Model S came out, I started to think like, wait, how can I help? You know, it's too bad I didn't study automotive design or batteries or something, you know, it's too bad I'm only a software person. So I really admire and yeah, I feel that there's almost a lot of parallels between your path and mine here. That's cool. Cool. But so as we go in through eFlight, though, and yeah, I think you're right that, I mean, this is one of the few businesses you can do with electric aviation, right? It's one of the few things you can at the moment. Endurance is still kind of limited, you know. So, OK, so we've talked a little bit about the genesis there. Cool. So if I understand it right, the eFlight Academy fleet includes, is it five Pipistrel Velis Electros and also a Bristel, not the Bristel Energic, not the electric one. but the gas burning one. So yeah, how long have you guys been doing this? And what have you learned about operating a fleet of electric aircraft? We started with two aircraft in the beginning in 2021. We didn't want to start with one aircraft because, well, especially because it's a new model, there's a big chance that something, well, it's grounded and you cannot perform your business. So we started with two. We bought them. I actually paid them from the profits of my design agency. And later on, I found a bank to finance the aircraft. And we started in the middle of the COVID pandemic. And we found a hangar that was actually being used for events. And all those events were gone. So we could get a really nice place and a really nice hangar. where we could start. There was nothing else. It was completely empty. There were a few airplanes, but it was really big. So it was a really nice place to start. And Teuge is a great airfield because it's uncontrolled, still quiet, a lot of green areas around it. So that was a good place. And I think the good thing is that me and my co -founder just totally focused on electric flying. And during the time, there were a few other flight schools looking at it. But existing flight schools, they have a lot of issues adding electric to the fleet. So our focus was for about half a year on how to get this company running, how to write a PPL syllabus for an electric aircraft. Where do we get the insurance for this airplane? Because there were hardly any insurance who understood this technology and wanted to insure the aircraft. We had to talk to the authorities. We could do of course our branding completely into this electric flying thing, which is also difficult for competitors as they have been flying for 30 years with. combustion engines. So I think that it took us a lot of time, but because we had to full focus on these two types of aircraft, it was easier for us to implement them and to make it work than other flight schools. How different did the syllabus need to be? I mean, obviously, you know, I've looked at the manual for the Velis versus the Velis Electro, and it's like, you know, there's an extra chapter or something, right? So they're not super different. But I've never developed a syllabus for training pilots. Like, how different was it in the end? All exercises that we are flying under EASA, so all the EASA exercise for PPL, we have to fly, of course. But then we have to decide what exercise are we going to fly with what aircraft. Especially in the navigation part, there are a few three long navigation flights that we cannot do with the Velis. So we need another aircraft for that. And we had the PPL Virus, which is actually a predecessor of, it's the same airframe, but just with a Rotax engine. And of course, it was quite interesting also for our authority to see how we would build up PPL with shorter flights, two different aircrafts, how we're going to do the migration between the two aircraft and in the end fly the 45 hours with all the solo hours in it. So it was more like a puzzle. Right. And talking to the authorities. and also for the exam for example because it was not really clear for us if we could also do an exam on an electric aircraft or if that was not possible and then the next problem we need examiners that actually have the conversion to the Pipistrel you know because that's also has to be done so it was just a lot of steps and a lot of puzzles and a lot of discussions and talks with our authorities yeah to to get it going so it's maybe not as straightforward as something else but it was not like we had huge issues with certification or something. But it is different. A lot of flight schools ask for the syllabus, but we rather don't send it because, well, we spend quite a lot of time on it. For sure. It's part of your intellectual property at this point. It looks like, well, all the exercises are the same as any other PPL. But of course, the flights and the arrangement within the syllabus is a bit different. Got it. So you mentioned, I think of it as the cross -country part where you sort of have to go from multiple airports and so on. And if I remember right, and I'm probably more thinking about the Canadian or even FAA regs, but I think there's a certain number of miles you have to travel. Yeah, 150. Yeah. So is that... going to be possible i know a lot of flight schools who are who are looking at this and even you know Pipistrel's advertising themselves says buy the Velis club and and that's how you know the gas aircraft and that's how you can finish your your certification testing with with the advent of charging which especially where you are like NRG2fly is building out chargers uh and you know of course flight schools can own chargers and can install them in nearby airports Will that be possible? I mean, given the current endurance limitations? Or is there something about the regs that just means like, no, it won't be possible at all? No, it's definitely the batteries at the moment. Charging is not really a problem. We can drive chargers to every place we want. And we already did that. So all our airports in our neighborhood have a mobile charger that we can use. It's the battery. It has an hour of capacity. And if you fly A, B flights, so from one airport to the other, there is a... 30 -minute reserve that you have to keep track of. You can only fly 30 minutes, 80 knots cruise. So that's, yeah, you can calculate it. That's 40 knots miles. Got it. So you're never going to make 150. Got it, got it. You need a leg, which is 150. Okay, got it. So there's a literal challenge there then. Okay, got it. Thank you. How have they been holding up? I mean, maintenance and those kinds of things. You know, in electric car land, you know, we often talk about, oh, maintenance is much simpler. There's no oil changes. And, you know, it's just tires and windshield wipers, which is maybe a little bit hyperbole, but not exactly. That's pretty true to my experience. And we assume, I think, that in aviation is going to be similar, no engine overhauls and so on. But what have you found? I mean, another thing that aviation manufacturers might do is say, like, all right, we're not going to worry about. battery cycle counts being as high. We're going to sort of charge them more and you're going to have to replace the batteries every so often. What have you found in terms of maintenance with the electric aviation so far? So, of course, we have 100 hours to our 100 hours inspections. And I don't think that is less time or work than a regular aircraft, because if we see what's being done and hours being spent, it's not so much different. The batteries is the biggest maintenance thing. Not that you need to look at it all the time, but you have to replace them quite often. So we are already, for most aircrafts, on the third set right now. yeah and that's um not what was expected that's also not what the manufacturer has told us but we we got good guarantees on everything so uh okay it's all right but that definitely there's something wrong uh still in the software or in we are thinking experimenting ourselves what what is the problem is it the full power every time when you do a takeoff so currently we have a project that we have one aircraft we do 45 kilowatts and one full power 65 kilowatts wow so we have one aircraft that never has full power necessary only an emergency situation and we're going to see if that changes the battery another problem i think with the batteries is that you always have to charge it to 100 otherwise you're your flight is just too short yeah and that's normally not a good thing for batteries right so you you ought to have 20 to 80. uh it never comes under 20 because we stop at 30 percent right but that that might also be something um and then there's a lot of specific software things that measure the the healthiness the state of health of the different battery cells And there should be some improvements over there. So when we send back a battery, I'm sure it's still very good, but some cells are not good. And then the whole battery says, I'm not going to perform as I promised I would. Wow. So the battery, for us, it's financially not really a big issue at the moment because, well, we have good contact with the manufacturer. But that's definitely something we thought would be better and also would improve more. Another thing that we noticed in the beginning, but now I think it's kind of straightened out. We had to train all the maintenance personnel for this aircraft. So they all had to go to Italy for a week and quite expensive with hotel and everything in it. Of course, it's being charged to the client, which is us. a startup with two aircraft, you know, so that was quite a feat. And what we have, and I don't think a lot of other companies have that, is that we are the fleet leader. So our aircraft, I think all of them have most of the hours of any Pipistrel, Velis, Electro in the world. And that means EASA, but also the manufacturer, they really like to see what's going on in our aircraft. we need to do some more checks and maybe some replacements here and there. But here again, we get a lot of good agreements on this. But the aircraft might be a little bit longer on ground now and then. yeah yeah well right so to your point the warranty is sort of covering the cost of that but that battery pack yeah um but that's only because we're the first of course that's not going to be for everybody yeah yeah yeah but it's still downtime right and then still the labor cost of doing so and so on yeah so it's not it's not without cost yeah yeah but uh but for the for the rest like uh the the the thing we have to change the most are the tires yeah that's because we have asphalt uh runway if we would have grass then it wouldn't be so much of a problem but we have asphalt. And for the rest we are really happy with the performance. If you don't look at the batteries, we hardly have any issues flying or charging. Of course, there's always something, but our maintenance organization is really fast in fixing it. In the beginning, we had a few things we didn't understand and we had a few weeks of outage of one aircraft, but now we know them so well. We know what's going on. We know how to fix it. So now we're quite happy with how they hold up. After so many hours. What caused that issue that you're referring to? It was some circuit breaker that was not on the main panel. It was somewhere hidden in the engine, and nobody knew it existed. Oh, okay. It was like a five -minute repair, but it took three weeks to figure it out. Yeah, it takes three weeks to find the button and very little time to push it. So I mentioned that you've got a Bristel, from what I can see, too, the B23. Are you interested in the B23e, the Energic version? yeah definitely that's that's why we actually not ours um we have uh two of our first students got their PPL and they're really into electric aviation as well but they wanted to fly and learn to be a good pilot as well also outside of the electric uh limited range so they decided to buy a b23 because they couldn't buy the the other one yeah but they probably will swap it if the other one comes out right but we really needed an IFR (instrument flight rules) aircraft for also our new training and so it's it's their aircraft and and we use it and we rent it out as well and yeah it's really nice to have those really enthusiastic students we call them they're grown men of course but we call them students and uh they they come uh yeah it's nice that they help us out and we help them out and uh got it really cool and we have quite a community already uh cool in our airfield yeah cool cool yeah i really like what H55 is doing with with that i think it's going to be a really great aircraft if i remember right the certification is done with EASA and i can't remember if they're close with FAA or beyond it so it should just be a matter of getting it to market now i mean is that what you're hearing? CORRECTION: H55 Bristell Energic is not yet certified this is expected in EU in 2026, for FAA in 2027 candidate for us for longer flights and well, especially IFR capability. I'm not sure if the first electric version will be IFR, but that's probably more like a trainer for basic training. But yeah, we definitely look at a lot of different manufacturers at the moment. Finally, after we thought in 2020, that in 2023 2024 there would be a lot aircraft in the market right well right almost in 2026 and now we hopefully start seeing some new players when you say that Diamond comes to mind they talked about what was it the da e36 or something i've forgotten the model number are there others that i'm not thinking of No, not that far in their development at the moment. We were with F2 flight design, the flight design F2, which we're making the F2E. It's a German company, but they were building it in the Ukraine. So they had a huge problem and they went bankrupt. And that was a pity because that was also a really nice setup. And of course, there are quite a few companies that have been gone bankrupt last year. Lots of change. Not easy. Yeah. Yeah. I wondered if Pipistrel saw you guys as a leader like we do on the SkyZero website. So yeah, that's cool to hear about that relationship. So they've been really supportive, I imagine. That's helpful. Yeah, definitely. Okay, so... Another thing I wanted to talk to you about was the solar end of what you guys are doing. Every now and again, I get to thinking about how much, you know, open land airports normally have. And, of course, it wouldn't be safe to paper all of that with solar panels. But this is just sort of naive daydreaming on my part. You've done it. You've put a solar array on or near an airport. I mean, what can you say about that? I mean, has that been a good fit? Obviously, the emissions for the electricity. and the low -cost electricity, I'm sure have been good, but don't tell me what you're thinking there too. But what's it been like operating a solar farm that close to an airport? Has that been like a natural fit or have there been challenges? What's the experience? Yeah, there was actually only the roof construction because we have it on the roof. I think that was the only thing that we doubted if that would be okay. The biggest problem was the financing, of course, because it's not really cheap to... purchase 500 panels and also a 500 kilowatt hour battery because we store our solar in our own battery which is on our site next to the hangar because our biggest problem was that our our grid uh could not handle more than three times 80 amps so with that you can only charge two and a half aircraft at max power and we had already four aircraft so we couldn't, we really had to think about our planning because we couldn't charge all aircraft at the same time and it would cost at least two years to have a larger grid connection and would also cost a lot of subscription for that right and then we said we have to build our own grid and we have to have our own power because that was always a dream for me as well as yeah we're going to fly electric we have to have our own solar power because you don't want to have some coal burning to fuel your aircraft so you want to have your own solar energy and also be able to prove that with dashboards and whatever so we applied for a subsidy for making our hangar a space where electric aviation can be developed And we said we need to, we bought that hangar, by the way, that event hangar that I told you in the beginning. So we could actually do the renovation and we could invest in the battery, in the charging stations and in the solar panels. And we got quite a big subsidy from the European Union to do that, to make a center for accelerating electric aviation. So the NRG2fly company that you're... I was saying about charging infrastructure. They're also in our hangar and they work together next to the flight school. And there are a few others as well. So it's really nice that if you walk into our flight school, you meet a lot of other people who are working in this sector and doing all kinds of different stuff. Amazing. And we still host a lot of events, specifically on sustainable aviation, where we have ministers walking in and policymakers and journalists and whatever. Everybody comes to our place to check it out and to feel the energy. I looked into for a little while the idea of, oh gosh, I hope I get the words right, but sort of aviation carbon credits. And if I remember right, there is a regulatory market. And I think like... EU was looking at doing something, but then ICAO, ICAO stepped in and said, no, we're doing something different. But I wondered, like, would a large operator like you guys, is there something there that I'm missing in terms of being able to offer carbon credits in terms of, like, yeah, I mean, the... Gas -burning aircraft are going to have to pay for their carbon emissions. Could you not sell offsets against that, similar to the way Tesla sells sort of carbon offsets to the other automakers? Is there regulatory support for that, or have you looked into it at all? Yeah, well, of course we looked into a lot of these kinds, but I don't think that it's called carbon credits here in Europe that we can use. I have to check it but what we do have is that there is a subsidy for it's mainly like trucks if you have an electric truck and you have your own solar energy and you charge your own trucks with your own solar energy you get also some kind of units they call it and We applied for that also from an aviation perspective. And it was not in the law, of course, because, well, nobody thought about electric airplanes. But they said, okay, it's also transport and you do actually the same thing. So you can also get those. So for all these things, it's finding out what the law is and how it's being set up. And if you're also going to be part of that. Also for buying the electric aircraft, there's a lot of subsidies. if you buy electric tractors or electric cars or buses or things like that so It also is true now for electric helicopters and airplanes and everything. So yeah, we can also get those subsidies. Canada, where I live, recently started doing a thing where drivers of electric cars can essentially be paid to charge their cars somehow. And I wonder if it's similar to this unit thing you're talking about. A couple of Canadian charger manufacturers are now doing programs where it essentially pays for the charger and pays for some of your electricity costs. So I'm wondering if it's a similar kind of thing. The difficult thing for aviation, electric aviation, is that if you want the government to help you with something, it's always too small because we're the only one. in the Netherlands flying this aircraft on a little bit of scale. But still, it's peanuts. So they have to spend so much time making the regulations just for this one company. So on one hand, it would be nice because then maybe others also start using it. um but now they would just make it for us and then they say okay well we'll wait a bit yeah yeah so yeah cool so no i mean and i i think that's that's one of the things that I've thought about with you guys too is like why aren't there more of these there's there's another school out of Fresno in California um that i think they're mostly Pipistrel alphas i think they got started before the Velis uh and so they actually had to get like an FAA you know There's a word for this (exemption) where it's like, okay, you can fly those, but it doesn't mean everyone else can. But there are, and of course, Beta Technologies, the eVTOL manufacturer, they fly a lot of Velis out of their Burlington, Vermont facility. They have a program where all of their employees can learn to fly. And of course, they want to do that with all electric aircraft. And so they're not nearly as big as you guys, but they're also big. um and there appear to be a few in France too there's like three different centers that are doing a fair amount maybe Norwich in UK as well um but yeah i mean are you starting to see others like people who are kind of following your lead or do you do you think it's gonna like take off like what's i mean i see your point about how an existing flight school has a real challenge they've already paid to train maintenance people and like everything all of their workflows are going to be set up around this their cost structures are going to be set up around this It's not an easy switch. But building a new one, it seems like you wouldn't do it the other way if you were going to open a new flight school right now. But I can't see what I can't see. What's your experience been like? Do you think this is going to grow? Yeah, it's definitely going to grow, but it's all dependent on the technology. I think if we would get like a 20, 30 minute more battery or flight time, that would make a big difference. for a lot of schools because then they think it's more comparable to their current flight lessons. Everybody thinks our flights are too short, but we don't experience that. And we also don't get any complaints from our students. pass their exams really well. So it's just really good flight training with the current setup. It also should be a little bit more price competitive because, well, we have to buy new aircraft. The insurance is quite high. The maintenance is not any less than another aircraft. And we have to charge batteries every now and then. So it's still not, I don't think it's really, if you have a Cessna like 40 years old, That's way cheaper, even though you pay a lot of gas, of course, for gas, but still that's a cheaper option. So if that changes, which will change, if this aircraft will maybe secondhand or a new battery comes in or the insurance company starts thinking, okay, these are actually quite safe planes, let's halve the price there. So then it starts getting interesting. And then I think the first schools who will... switch are the big airlines who have their own schools yeah because they um they also have the uh obligation to their mother companies they have to be more sustainable they have to do these programs and they are they have money to invest in that so they will probably swap out their fleet for their for their basic training with electric aircraft and then i think later the commercial other commercial flight schools will will start looking at it if it's economically beneficial for them yeah i think it's interesting how you mentioned the the impact of the used market right like i i think we can kind of see that now finally they're starting to be like a reasonable used electric vehicle market at least at least where i live you know and in the states like it's it's even cheaper yeah getting used to these now um and to your point like you you occasionally see like a used Velis come up on different aircraft trading sites but uh yeah we see we see quite quite a few at the moment because um when they first came out a lot of flight schools uh also got got money from governments to try it out and that those were three -year programs and they kind of stopped and then the thing is just in the anger doing nothing and then they said okay maybe somebody else can can use it so there are there are quite a few for sale at the moment and we're looking we're looking at them as well because it says well they flew like 100 200 hours so it's still very good We are looking at it. Yep. Right. So an expansion plan potentially to your point there. Yep. And you just put in a new battery and you can fly again for a few hundred hours. Yep. I flew Velis, well, I took a training hour in a Velis Electro in Aachen, Germany. Westflug something, I don't remember the name of the flying school, but I wonder if it's a similar kind of thing. I don't think they have it anymore, I've noticed. So yeah, I'm wondering if it's this sort of subsidy -oriented three -year program. Yeah, that's probably, yeah. yeah probably yeah okay and i think to get back to the alpha i also like that aircraft a lot because it has more endurance but it's not an EASA certified aircraft so we cannot use it here yeah But I think it's FAA certified, so you can do lessons with that. I don't remember if it fully got certified or this one company just got an exception. And they had to work on that exception for like five years, but they did eventually get one. But yeah, it just took them a terribly long amount of time. But, uh, but yeah, beta is using the Veilis. I think the Veilis is going to, is certified with FAA finally. I think that took a while too, but, uh, but Alpha wasn't designed to be certified as I understand it. Uh, so yeah, it makes sense. Okay. So any surprises along the path? Yeah. Well, um, I think it has, uh, what I always say is that we found it really difficult to position ourselves in the market because We are unique. We are the only one. I think we are the first in the world to actually start a new flight school with two aircraft fully electric. So we call ourselves the E -Flight Academy. And we were just telling everybody we were the new new generation flight school and we fly electric. And of course, it got picked up by the media and everybody was we were on TV and everybody wanted to have us on their shows. And that was really a success. But then we noticed that everybody who wants to do flight training, the first question was, yeah, but what do I need with an electric license? I cannot get anywhere. I'm not going to do a lesson with you because I want to fly an aircraft and not specifically this electric thing. And we always had to explain, okay, the aircraft is electric, but the license is just a PPL because there is no specific EASA license for electric aircraft. So that was a bit of a problem in the beginning because we had to explain so much. And now we changed a little bit our marketing strategy. So we are a very modern flight school. You can get a lot of different licenses in our place. And yeah, we also fly electric, but that's just a bonus, you know? So for me, it was a bit difficult because I really liked that we were so special and that we were totally focused on this zero emission aviation. But that just didn't work in the marketing because people didn't understand that we were just a regular flight school. uh so we had to change that a little bit and i think we uh we didn't grow in the beginning as fast as we're doing right now because now now people start to understand and uh we we get more attraction on on yeah all type of people come for us for for the quality and we also have a lot of people who don't care about the electric flight but they just want a really good flight school with modern tools and good instructors and a really nice hangar and good coffee and just good customer experience. That's what they think is important. And then they fly electric, which is also really comfortable because it's really quiet and no vibrations. And yeah, it's just a really nice plane to fly. So that's what they get as a bonus then. So that's something we had to change. It's funny, I think about choosing co -working facilities and at one point it's like, yeah, the WeWork does have really good coffee. I can say that almost been a selling point. That shaped a decision at least once. It can be in the little things indeed, yeah. And that's interesting because of my background, because I was a designer for so long. I really like to think about customer journey. So from the beginning, the person finds our logo, sees it somewhere, visits our websites until he has finished this. uh course and goes talking to others everything in between i i like to design and think about and see where i can get a better experience yeah and that's that's not something that a lot of flight schools do no no right they're sort of aviation fanatics who have been like i want to work in this so yeah they sort of yeah Or they've been pilots all their lives and then they start a flight school and they never thought about also IT. That's also what I see from other flight schools. I think, whoa, we are set up so differently than others because that was also a big advantage because we didn't have anything to start with. We don't have any legacy software. We have everything built from scratch and new. And all quite good user experience wise. So yeah, that also makes us stand out. And maybe that's better even to tell people than that we are just an electric flight school. Okay. So we talked about what surprised you. We talked about the solar. What advice would you give folks thinking about getting into pilot training with electric aircraft? I may be asking for a friend. Honestly, I've thought about it. What advice would you give anybody who is thinking about starting something like this? Starting doing the course. Building a business around electric aviation, you know, of any kind. I know that in Australia, there's a company that's like literally doing like air taxis with Pipistrel. They're obviously short runs, you know, back and forth across a little bit of water where it's... But yeah, I mean, like starting any kind of business around electrified aviation, what advice would you give? What I like about that example you give right now as well is that... you actually already have revenue and you are you can prove your business before you well we sold our first flight lesson before we started flying you know because that's the business we we actually operate an electric aircraft and i think we're also the first company in the world that actually make makes money with electric aviation because everybody else is investing of course for the future and yeah it will look a lot different but that's what i liked about our business we could a proof that the way our company is set up and the product we offer is viable and it's working. So that's what I really like about ours. It's really tangible and you can just try it out and it works. You can pay for it and that's business. Yeah. And I see a lot of other companies coming up with a lot of new ideas about new model aircraft and things like that and that's not really my cup of tea it's maybe too technically complicated for me and also I wouldn't take the risk there but that's of course somebody else should do that definitely but I think in that space I think the certification is really well it's so difficult and especially with all the things going on in the world with military drones, with Boeing having issues, whatever. There are just not enough people in EASA or FAA, I think it's the same thing, to look at this new type of technology and to find... ways to certify, to create new laws in the amount of time that we actually want to have it. Because we can fly electric for a long time, but we are not allowed to because, well, it's not certified. So our battery in the Velis is indeed like a Nissan Leaf battery. which is in automotive, it's 15 years old. If I would put the new Mercedes battery they just announced in my plane, I could maybe go for three, four hours. But it will take a few years before I have it. It will come, of course. So that's really interesting as well for if you want to start a business, look at what's going to happen in the future and build your company towards that goal. That's also what you see in aircraft manufacturers. They design an aircraft. for a battery that doesn't exist. That only exists in six years when they start. So there are two concurrent paths to that technology. And then hopefully it comes at a certain point together and then you can have your full product. I like that. Yeah. So there are different things. But I think it's really difficult to give advice to other entrepreneurs. I'm happy and I'm lucky that I rolled into this business. I found a co -founder who was really great in instructing and knows everything about flying. And I knew a lot about IT, customer experience and running a business. And together we were just a great match. And yeah, this flight school came out. So yeah. Sometimes it just goes as it goes. It's interesting. You talked about, like, you know, building a business around a technology that will be available later, you know. And I think about Moore's Law, you know, and how people in software have building. We can build software that's a little bit slow on today's computers because computers two years from now will be so much faster, you know. So it's fine, you know. And batteries have a similar trajectory in terms of cost and in terms of, like, energy per volume. Energy per weight is a little bit harder, obviously. But we're getting there. CATL has announced what, like 500, 600 watt hour per kilogram, stuff that they're targeting. And maybe that's exactly what I mean. It's four times as much density as we have currently. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We have around 130. So yeah. Wow. Oh my gosh. I didn't realize there was only one. Wow. Okay. So there's a lot. So there's some not that difficult changes to make then that could really. No, it's really not that difficult. But also for the data specifically, like also on your data. I really liked that. And I was quite surprised that we do one third of all the Pipistrel electro flights in the last year. And we have five aircraft. So as a manufacturer, you're thinking, I'm going to design a new battery. And I'm going to sell it to those guys in Teuge. So I probably, I might sell five, you know, that's actually what's happening. Yeah. Yeah, that's a fair point. So our data, I know that there's at least one flight school in Sweden that barely at all shows up in our numbers and they... Green Flight Academy, yeah. Okay, you're aware of them. And I'm not sure exactly what sort of numbers they would be adding. But, you know, Sky Zero is completely based on ADS -B data, which is not universal. It's not everywhere. So, I mean, there are certain areas. There may be others. But, yeah, it's... Pretty close, though. So, yeah, you're definitely way ahead of the pack. And I don't suspect there's another Teuge out there. To your point, I think you're the leader, I would guess. I'm quite sure, yeah. And it's nice to be there because we can, of course, have our records and everything. And Teuge is really, in the Netherlands, there's a lot of people who don't even know the name Teuge. It's not like a big city. It's a really small village. So then it was really nice when they showed, I have your chart also now in the presentation. And people are saying, okay, what's that big green bar? That's you. Yeah. And then there's all these airports. and all Americans, and then there's little village Teuge with most electric flights. That's what is really interesting. It was before as well that we have a lot of airfields approaching us. Because I think you said, what would you advise another business or flight school to do? But I don't think maybe flight schools will move, but... the airfields they really want to move because they and especially in the Netherlands and Europe they have a lot of issues with the residents with emissions but mainly noise because of course that's a big issue in the Netherlands because it's a small country with a lot of flight movements and they all want an electric flight school on their fields And so we get a lot of requests to start a business on another airfield. And sometimes it's really interesting and sometimes it's not so interesting, but that's probably what we're going to do next. We're going to see what airfields are interesting for us to just start a new flight school, competing with the existing flight schools, of course. We get so many enthusiastic airfield authorities and also some financial incentives and things like that. that we could actually start doing, creating our network. I don't know a ton about airport economics, but I assume they're getting paid by, I don't know, landings or movements or something, or also, I mean, they're obviously not going to be selling petrol to an electric aircraft. But yeah, so I guess the Venn diagram is airports that are looking for more revenue, but also are operating in jurisdictions where noise regulations or just angry neighbors would prevent. them from having a gas -burning school there. Do I have that right? Yeah, something like that. Yeah, that's correct. And I think most regulations about how many flight movements you can do are based on noise and sound levels. So if they have aircraft that make less sound, they can do more movements. So that's their incentive. And indeed, they make money based on the landing fees. and they sell gas, more gas, one, but they won't be charging aircraft, I think, because we're doing that in our own hangar. And I think every flight school will do it. Well, right. Well, and especially the way Pipistrel's set it up, like you kind of end up buying a charger with the aircraft and because, you know, the endurance is such that you're not going to be flying it to a lot of nearby airports and the ones that you are going to be so nearby that you could just buy another charger, like you say, and just drive it out there. Yeah, it's an interesting space right now. Yeah, in terms of, honestly, that's why I started SkyZero is I was thinking like, oh, I want to start. a charging network for, for electrified aviation. And I thought, Oh, I should find out where they are actually flying. Right. And this is, this is how I found out about you guys. Yeah. And, and just kind of thinking about like, okay, well it's, all these little Pipistrel flight schools and they probably have their own chargers. So then it's not a market. It is interesting when I talk to people about electrified aviation, I often describe it as like there's these two buckets which almost don't overlap at all, right? You've got companies like yours. You've got, you know, pilot training where people are, you know, sort of doing real work with these things. And I don't know why I'm putting that in air quotes. It is. It's real work. uh and these aircraft are not that different from a conventional aircraft you know in a lot of ways you know it's just powered by electricity just that one chapter difference in the manual that's it and that's quietly doing all of this work over here while this very noisy sector you know with Joby and Archer and now BETA all these stock tickers all these different evtol companies which are now publicly traded and like getting all this press about their air taxis And very little real work is being accomplished. You know, BETA has a couple of aircraft, one in Norway and one in New Zealand with customers. Bristow in Norway is looking at figuring out like how to actually use it for cargo operations. New Zealand Airlines is doing a similar thing in New Zealand. Like, could we actually use this thing? So you can see a path to real work getting done with those. But like, there's almost so little in common between you, you know, but it's all both electrified aviation in the end. Yeah, but we meet each other and we learn from each other. And I would really like to train BETA pilots. That's going to be probably a time -braided aircraft. So it'd be really nice to work together on those things. And I think we will also try to get those aircraft to our airfields once they are operational. And we have some Dutch people using it or abroad or whatever. Yeah, why not? So it will merge one day. because it's all the same regulation that that's what you have in common so uh yeah and BETA aircraft charged with CCS so i think uh NRG2fly already has a CCS charger on Teuge uh on the airfield somewhere so yeah we also have four CCS charges ourselves and then the people still is is connected with that via an adapter which is also a well a special cable also had to be certified by EASA so it's not a it's not the nicest solution but at least we can use our own chargers. Oh, I see. So you're not just limited to the little sort of suitcase on wheels things that you normally see. No, we can plug them into our 40 kilowatt hour chargers, 40 kilowatt capacity. Interesting. Have you guys been doing that the whole time or is that more recent? No, we had to charge for a while, but we had to wait for the cable for a long time. But we have it. It works now. Yeah. So there's no relationship correlative or and certainly not causative between that and the battery issues then because the plenty of those. Yeah. Okay. Got it. Yeah. Their manual gets so specific about you have to use our chargers, right? Or you're avoiding your warranty. So I think it was. Merlijn at NRG2Fly who told me about those in the first place and I'm like no no no that's not possible and he's like yes yeah and so he's the one that educated me on this but yeah interesting okay cool it's always the first mover that was also with automotive the first mover thinks he can invent the charging standard and then also the charging network yeah and then and then yeah that doesn't work because well you have to be open and generic and everybody should use charger otherwise the whole system won't work yeah we're hopefully getting to the the CCS every everything and uh hopefully uh we'll get a lot of chargers on different air airfields yeah cool great cool okay okay so yeah we're coming up on time i there's a i kind of just want to keep talking to you all day but yeah but you probably got other things to do and we are coming up on time so yeah And I wanted to do another thing that was interesting. You said that you started thinking about also charging network and then gathering data. That was actually my first idea before I started eFlight. I was doing a lot of research to all the companies that were out there, and I thought it was super difficult to find information because there are a lot of news sites. There's a Wikipedia page. There are several newsletters. Of course, all the manufacturers have their own blog posts and and social media posts and whatever but it just takes months to to get a grasp of of this market and what's going on and i was putting everything i i got in a database in an air table database so i could actually nicely look at it and make interface out of it And I was just putting in all the data. This aircraft, this is the commercial date that is being launched. This is the battery that's in there. The battery is made by this company. This company also makes battery for these aircraft. These aircraft are two -seater. This has a 500 -kilometer range. So all this data was in my... I was quite far. I had like 80 aircraft in it. Out of the 300, I think, are in there. And then I met my partner and I actually stopped working on it and it therefore came live. But I was actually making the IMDB of electric aviation. Wow. Yeah. So of those 80, though, I mean, how many are operational in the end? Or are a lot of those experimental? Two or three, yeah. Not so much. And I think half of it is maybe stopped. It's something you have to keep track of all the time, of course. But that's the whole idea, that you have one single source that has the latest information and you don't have to go looking for it. Maybe we'll have to do a collaboration. It could be fun. Yeah, it would be interesting. I really believe that... and also what you're doing, that the sector really benefits from good information. And they see where are things going on, what's happening, what are the numbers. And also for policymakers, for investors, for journalists, they all need to know these things. And currently it's so new that it's so fragmented. So it's really, really great to have some more. It is growing though, right? I think that the number of flights daily grows on average. I think there's some seasonality in there. And so I expect next summer to be really, really good. It seems to be that there's some season around summer time. I expect next summer to be good from Doha, at least. Yeah, okay, good. Yeah, we've got to be really busy. Yeah, cool, cool, cool, cool. And I am seeing, like I say, the Fresno one, and there's another one, Pitt Meadows in British Columbia, you know, Beta in Burlington, of course. And France, France is starting to really take off. They don't have a single Teuge where there's like this huge center of activity. But if you sum up all their smaller ones, they're actually, you know, it's bigger than the Netherlands in terms of operations. So, yeah, it must feel a little bit lonely being such a leader. And to your point, you know, thinking like, oh, how many I'm going to sell these to those guys in Teuge and that's it. But there appears to be more from what I can see. So, yeah, I think you're going to be finding yourself in good company shortly, if not already. We talked a little bit about what surprises you've had. Any lessons you've learned? And this is almost outside of just e -flight or just aviation, but just in life. Do you remember learning something and thinking like, oh, I just assumed that this is true and learning, nope, nope, that's not true. This world is different than how I thought. So I come from more from the software and IT like you and well, I started that in 1997 and everything is possible. You know, you just can build something and you publish it and it's done and nobody ever tells you there's something wrong with it, you know, because there are currently there are some regulations, GDPR and things like that, but security and everything, but it wasn't in there in the beginning. And it is there, of course, in aviation. So for me, that was quite a shock that things wouldn't go as fast as I would like to have them going, that I was used to. So I had to learn to have more patience. And if I had a good idea that I might walk into a wall somewhere and that I had to handle that correctly so I could actually have... energy again for the next idea. So that I found quite challenging, but I still like that we still have those ideas and that we are different than others and we keep trying those things. I think it's good to keep that going. What I also experienced is that there are some conventional people but i understand if you don't like the aircraft it's you don't like electric cars you want to have it make it a lot of noise that's okay but there we have actually had some people who are really how do you say, they really tried to block us or stop us or really try to work against us. So it's okay if you're not helping us, that's fine, or not mentioning our business, but they did the other way around. They were actually fighting us on social media and telling us that what we were doing was not okay and things like that. And that I also never experienced because, well, you have so much public. media and also ourselves we do a lot of social media so we tell a lot about our business we have more followers than I think all other flight schools combined in the Netherlands you know so yeah and we're only four years old so I understand there might be some fear of those other people that we go really big or take clients but still I didn't really think about that and the other thing about the media is that what I really like and that's also interesting that I never had in my company before that because you're doing something really new and in a different way it's really easy to find the press and to be visible because with well our thousandth landing we're just gonna invite a well -known Dutch person we put him in aircraft make a video and well it's on the news again you know and then we have two aircraft flying for the first time in formation in the Netherlands you know or first charging abroad from international flight the Netherlands Germany so all the time we could figure out some way to to to be in the picture of people yeah and uh yeah that that that's really i i didn't i didn't know that existed and Also that we have a really good marketing partner in the company. Harder to do that with software. Are you just going to film someone at a computer, right? Yeah, that's true. We have such a great product now compared to that. You're also reminding me. I went into Google Images, which is funny. A lot of my database building is Google Images, searching for tail registrations and things like that. Just search for Pipistrel Velis Electro and see what you get back. And one time I did that. And I found a picture of a Pipistrel Vellis flying in front of a volcano. And it's labeled like first electric aircraft flying in front of a volcano. And of course, it's in Iceland, right? Like where else would it be? Yeah, of course. So even in Iceland, they have these things. Okay, something you're most proud of? Well, my dream of... My goal was to do something in the world of electric aviation. And I'm really proud that after four or five years of hard work that we have almost 4000 hours and the last one and a half years completely on our own energy. So we don't get anything from the grid. We actually put a lot of electricity back to the grid every year because we have too much. But yeah, that's pretty cool. Sometimes if I see the images from the air, from the hangar on a sunny day, then I think, wow, this is quite amazing that this somehow worked out like this. Because before I started, I even didn't know I would have a flight school. So it was not like a long time dream. It was something for me to start learning about electric aviation. and then this came out so that's yeah that's quite uh quite cool yep awesome any shout outs you'd like to give anything that's giving you joy right now yeah i i would like to shout out to all the um entrepreneurs building aircraft for the future i think uh that's uh always when i meet somebody who's doing that i got a lot of respect for uh taking up that really big uh uh big goal and big emission and uh trying to uh to supply the world with better aircraft Yeah, I've got a lot of respect for those guys. Amazing. Cool. So we'll come in. I call this the lightning round, but I don't know why, because it doesn't usually go all that fast. But it's the same three questions. What is your favorite aircraft? The Velis. Yeah? Good answer. What is your favorite airport? Yeah, I think also Teuge, because I don't know so much airports. So, yeah, it's the one I know best. You said you traveled a lot. earlier so i wondered if you did you pull something out from your travels i wonder yeah oh right yeah um airport um maybe uh then santiago de chile because i really like to go there in the past where my friends live there so yeah sounds amazing sounds amazing okay and that's it for the lightning round thank you so much for being with us today we really enjoyed this interview awesome all right

So I think that, you know, electric aircraft, you know, when they're on the market, like the ES30, they're going to win for the routes that they're capable of flying. Right. And then as the technology improves, you know, eventually you'll get to the place where you can... You can say, okay, for these short flights, we can be all electric. We can remove the turbine system. We can make the aircraft a little bit cheaper by doing that. But you're also going to be pushing into those longer flights at the same time and saying, okay, now we can do 300 -mile flights with a hybrid aircraft. Now we can do 400 -mile flights with a hybrid aircraft. Right. So let hybrids be the pioneer and battery -only can sort of come along behind it. Yeah. That's how I see it. I think that when the technology gets to that point, the short flights, electric only, that's going to be the way that we really lower the cost of flying as much as we possibly can. And then the hybrids, you will realize cost savings with the hybrid system as well relative to a fully conventional aircraft. And we'll just keep pushing that up to get the most range that we can. Ben Stabler is the CTO at Hart Aerospace, a Los Angeles -based startup developing a hybrid battery electric regional aircraft. Prior to joining Heart, Ben was co -founder at Parallel Systems, a startup building battery electric rail vehicles for freight transportation, and spent five years at SpaceX designing power systems for the Crew Dragon aircraft and leading the avionics software team. Ben is also the guest on today's episode of the Sky Zero podcast. Ben, yeah, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate you coming on. Yeah, thank you. Excited to be here. Yeah, for sure. Me too. So I wanted to sort of start with, like, about you, you know, and how you got into all of this. We heard a little bit about your bio just now, but, you know, tell us a little bit more about your background. As you said earlier, I was at SpaceX for five years. I was working on the Dragon capsule, which is a manned space capsule. Got to work on Starship a little bit as well. Cool. Yeah, so I was working on the... actuators for the flaps for Starship, which allow it to sort of, you know, act like a little bit of a lifting body as it comes through the atmosphere and then, you know, sort of navigate to the landing. Yeah. So that was really exciting, working with pretty high power systems. So on Starship now, that's an electric system. So there's high voltage batteries, there's big electric motors. That's really my background. Most of my roles have had something to do with motors or batteries or power systems. I've done that in automotive. I was at a couple of startups that were doing battery electric, road vehicles, motorbikes, fast cars. Working on that at SpaceX on space shows, which is kind of an odd one. And then after that, I founded Parallel with some other engineers from SpaceX. We were working on rail vehicles. So in some ways, what I'm doing here at Heart is a continuation of a theme. Yeah. You're collecting them all. I guess it's boats next, right? Yeah, boats next. But it's an exciting space to be in. It's moving super fast. Obviously, we're seeing success in electric vehicles on the road, huge advances in battery technology, improvements on the propulsion side as well, electric motors. And so aviation is really the hardest of all of them because you have really high power demands and you also have really high energy demands and you're incredibly mass constrained. So what we're doing at Heart is really the first baby step towards... decarbonization in in the aviation sector and this is a this is a huge incredibly difficult problem the technology doesn't exist today to build long -haul aircraft that are electric right but it does exist to build you know small regional aircraft that are battery electric right so that's really what we're trying to do yep cool cool so how did you find out about Heart like how did you end up there and you're and you may as well talk about your role too yeah Yeah, yeah. Well, so I'm the CTO at Heart. So Heart was started in California as part of Y Combinator in the Bay Area. And then the founder, Anders, moved the company to Sweden back in 2019. And the goal there was to, you know. you know, service a market that is, you know, much more common in Northern Scandinavia than it is in the US. These sort of short regional flights, you see a lot more of those. And then also, you know, leverage the aviation talent that exists in Sweden. So Sweden, you know, relatively small country, but has exactly, yeah, Saab and SKF and, you know, various other, you know, like core industrial. you know engineering companies long long lasted yeah long lived yep um so um so move the company to Sweden and grew the company and obviously Heart found uh you know market fit in a way that many of the other sort of regional uh electrified uh aviation startups um you know struggled to um so really compelling product and story, but as the company grew and got deeper into development of the product, realized just how challenging this engineering product is. It's not something where you can integrate batteries and electric motors that exist in the market today because they just don't exist. All the technology has to be built from scratch. And really when you're thinking about building the aircraft, integrating the aircraft, You know, the battery weighs, you know, 30 plus percent of the mass of the dry aircraft. You have to really design that in from day one. So you have to design the aircraft from scratch. If you don't do that, you're never going to get the efficiencies that you want in the structural design of the aircraft and get the performance that you want. So the focus of the company over time kind of shifted from, you know, what we originally saw ourselves as more of an integrator. you know, shifted towards a company that needed to be more vertically integrated. And so that's, you know, when Anders, you know, looked at, you know, where the company was and, you know, where in the world, you know, you can find that sort of experience designing, you know, clean sheet vehicles, electric vehicles. And, you know, he really... found himself pulled to LA, to the California ecosystem, particularly the LA ecosystem. And so I got involved with the company around that time and now we've actually shifted all of our engineering operations and our headquarters. here to LA. Right. Which was big news. And it's interesting. You talk about it. We started out as an integrator and now we think ourselves as more vertically integrated. Like, I mean, to me, yeah, I totally get that. You know, I mean, most of the aviation community today is built around, you know, I make this and you make that and somebody else integrates, you know, there's air firm, there's some propulsion companies. And, but yeah, I think I agree with your premise that that's not going to work. Right. And so at some point you. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. And I can also see why California, you spelled it out, but that was my guess, right? You've got Tesla, you've got SpaceX. If there's two companies doing clean sheet, throwing everything away and starting from scratch, it's those. So how might you absorb some of that talent? By the way, when you look at the industry, today there is a lot of disaggregation. The big players outsource a lot of the design of the avionics and propulsion and even structural manufacturing in some cases. That's not how they started out. And when the big names today were sort of developing their aircraft. you know the first time around they were much more vertically integrated right so you know what we're doing is is not really you know uh you you sort of mentioned you know throwing it out and starting from scratch and it's not really the intent of what we're doing it's you know we're kind of responding to this um you know technology paradigm shift um and you know you have to have that level of design ownership that level of vertical integration yep to really uh you know get the design right when you have this big you know, sort of like foundational technology shift. Yep. And, you know, that's what we're doing. Yep. Awesome. So I kind of want to talk about the ES30 powertrain next. Yeah. And I think you guys stand out. Right. Like if you think about the EVTOLs, it's all sort of battery electric and which kind of in the vein of the ES -19 in a way. Right. The previous aircraft. And then you've got other players like your VoltAero and not so much Vaeridian, but definitely Ampaire, you know, parallel hybrids. You know, I think, well, technically, VoltAero often flies independent hybrids now. but they're talking about going towards a parallel hybrid for where they're going with the Casio. So a lot of folks are sort of moving in that direction. But, you know, you guys, I really, I like the movement between the ES -19 and the ES -30, but I have to imagine that there was conversations about that, right? Like, and how we got there and everything. So do you want to start by, I'm kind of hinting at all this stuff. Like, how would you tell the story of the ES -30 powertrain and how you got to where you are? Yeah, well. we see the ES -30 as an aircraft that can drop in you know pretty directly to existing airline operations for these you know shorter regional flights and be a workhorse of these kind of you know short regional routes and so um you know to achieve that um you need to have you know first of all really good economics so that's that's really our focus pretty much everything we do is it's focused on how do you get really good economics um and so um you know passenger count is an important factor there um you know even with the ES -19 you know our goal was to basically push the passenger count as high as we could push the range as high as we could um within the Part 23 um sort of limitations and What we found as we did that is that we were left with an aircraft that was somewhat compromised, really mass constrained with battery technology that exists today, if you try and stay within the Part 23 mass budget. And your economics in a 19 -seater are also pretty challenged. And so that pushed us into Part 25. And so within the Part 25 framework, The ES -30 really represents what we think is the largest aircraft that you can build with battery technology that exists today that makes sense. Your range for your electric vehicle is somewhat independent of the size of the aircraft. If you have a 6 -seater or a 19 -seater or a 30 -seater, your achievable range is... is about the same. It's sort of in the range of 125, 200 miles, which is where we're sitting right now. And that's because the mass of the battery is so dominant. If you want to double the range, put twice as big a battery in, the entire aircraft needs to grow, maybe not twice as much, but almost twice as much. And then your passenger sort of mass fraction really shrinks down. So that's what's driving us. If you build a bigger aircraft, if you try to build a 70 -seater or 100 -seater that's battery electric that has a range of, you know, 120 to 200 miles, that doesn't make any sense, right? You know, aircraft that are 100 seats, they need to be going, you know, 400 miles, 500 miles, 600 miles to make sense for the airline. Sort of economically. Yeah. Yeah. So that's where we sit. And obviously, as battery technology improves, you know, so that's the… the basis for the ES30 sizing. The ES30 is a hybrid, and it's a hybrid so that you can meet the Part 25 and IFR requirements using conventional fuel, which is obviously much more energy dense than the battery. If you try to meet those requirements with purely battery, powered aircraft like the ES-19 was you end up carrying a huge mass of battery that you know gets used maybe 100 flights um so it's really inefficient to do that you're carrying that mass around for every single flight and you're using it one percent of the time um so what about when you say IFR I think we're getting into like oh how much reserve do I need and when you say the different like Part 23 and 25 like i think i vaguely know that part 25 is like transport category but can you can you break it down a little bit like what is it about the jump to 25 or or IFR that means you need a bigger battery is it just that reserve or is it something else yeah so the the part um sorry that the IFR reserves um are 45 minutes of flight time plus the distance to your alternate airport okay so you know we typically use something like 100 miles as a sort of a nominal distance to your alternate airport obviously depends on the route that you're flying so your energy reserves even depend on a specific route but but even even if you just look at the 45 minutes that's similar to the average flight time for you know one of our flights or even in some cases longer so it's a huge amount of energy that you end up carrying if you try to carry that in the battery yep um and you're right so Part 25 is a transport category airplane so that's you know your 737s your um a320s of the world um Part 23 is um normal category so if you um like a Cessna or okay you know it's a small aircraft so the 19 seater ES -19 was designed to be, like, basically on the upper end of the... Fits into, okay, fits into the bottom, okay, into the top of 23. So 25 would include, like, a Q -400 or an ES -19. Sorry, you guys are the ES -19. I guess I mean E -195 or something like that. Okay, gone. Yeah, exactly, yeah. They're all in there. And the safety requirements for Part 25 aircraft are higher, so it's a more challenging category to certify an aircraft in because, obviously, the expectation is that you're... typically carrying, paying members of the public in regular scheduled airline operations. Okay. So we've touched on a number of things. I think of you guys as an independent hybrid as opposed to, say, a parallel hybrid, right? Or a series hybrid, right? And if series is, you know, sure, there's a combustion engine somewhere, but all it's doing is charging a battery. In my mind, I think that's serial. Parallel is like, you know, they're both spinning the shaft, the drive shaft at the same time, whether that's, or the propeller in this case, whether it's the battery and the electric motor or the internal combustion engine, you know, they can both do it. But I think of you guys as another thing. You have both at the same time, which is cool, right? And like I said, I like it. Like I could immediately see it and like kind of understand it, which I liked. But what trade -offs does that bring? Like what don't we know about what... independent hybrid does to the decisions you're making as an engineering team? Yeah, so there's a couple different things that we're looking for. So one of them is how do we build a really reliable aircraft? So safety obviously is of extreme import. So the nice thing about having the independent hybrid is that you have a turbine you have an electric motor you can run either of those systems you can run both of those systems and they're largely um you know as as the name says independent um you know if you have a fault of some kind in your um electric power chain obviously there's levels of redundancy there to sort of reduce the probability of that but if you if you were to have a fault um you know your turbine you know it doesn't really need to know about that it can operate independently um so that's that's really exciting um to us Should help with certification too, right? I mean, you just choose a certified powertrain and hopefully that helps, I imagine. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that's the second part here. So the turbine on the wing in our independent hybrid configuration is very similar to how the turbine is installed in other aircraft. So it's an existing turbine that we're using and it's mounted in a fairly conventional way. From the perspective of the turbine, there's really not that much new about our aircraft compared to any other aircraft that you might be flying today. Which makes regulators happy. Yeah, so there's a lot of really good things about it. Now, obviously, the efficiency of the aircraft is also really important. We want to get the most range that we can out of the batteries. And whether we're running on battery or on fuel, we want to use the least amount of energy because that's obviously a driver for the cost of operating the aircraft. So with this configuration with the independent powertrains, there is a trade -off there, right? Because you've got additional drag from having additional nacelles and additional propellers on the aircraft. So we're really working pretty hard here on continuing to improve the propulsion configuration for the aircraft. And we're pretty early into this. There are no aircraft out there right now which are... which is a hybrid you can buy today. Correct. So we're like really on the cutting edge here and, you know, continuing to explore, you know, like how do we continue to improve the efficiency, improve the reliability of this propulsion configuration, just build a better aircraft. So, right. So drag, obviously. I mean, yeah, that seems to me like it would be the obvious one. Maybe a weight penalty you're carrying around some, not dead mass, but. I guess it depends on how often you see it operating and which use case. Like if it's going to be operating on battery sort of, I don't know, 60 % of the time, then that turbine is maybe dead weight. But is it the other way around though? Like if you're operating with the turbine most of the time, is the battery system dead weight? Or I don't know. How do you think about it in that way? Yeah. Well, we think that our customers will typically be operating in the electric mode and try to operate in the electric mode because the economics is going to be the best there. So that's what we think our customers will try to do. So you need to carry reserve energy for this IFR minimum, right? So the 45 minutes plus your distance, your alternate. So you can do that by carrying additional battery or you can do it by carrying, in our case, we have the additional turbines and the fuel. And, you know, because the fuel is so much more energy dense than the battery, even with the weight of the turbines, we're still, you know, very much. the advantage is very strong to carry the turbines and the fuel rather than the battery. So that's how we're making that trade -off. Yep, got it. But you mentioned the drag first, so I imagine it's drag over mass in terms of the hit that they're bringing to the performance penalty. Yeah, yeah. So the drag is obviously significant. That's part of the equation for sort of optimizing the aircraft configuration. You mentioned earlier there's a number of different ways that you can do a hybrid configuration. You can do a series hybrid, for example, in a series hybrid, which we've had various configurations in the past which have looked at the series hybrid. And in that case, you have the turbine with a generator, and then that communicates electric power to the... So the nacelles where you have thrust produced by another electric motor. So in that case, you only have two propellers rather than four propellers, right? So there's a drag advantage there. And obviously, there's other trade -offs associated with that configuration. So yeah, so obviously, the goal is to generate the best economics for the aircraft. You want to minimize the total operating cost, which is the function of drag. And it's a function of the size of the battery that you have and the mass of the aircraft. And so that's what we're focused on is how do we achieve that. Cool. So one of the questions I sometimes think to myself about is, and apologies if this is a rabbit hole, but how independent is independent? Like when some of the hybrid systems that we see... I think like Electra, you know, definitely in that series configuration, EL2, EL9, very much the generator has to be running pretty well all of the time. But that's more of a function of battery size. I assume ES19 did not have to have a combustion engine to fly. And I assume that that means you guys had already solved significant engineering challenges around pneumatics, hydraulic systems, you know. de -icing, you know, HVAC, all of the things. But yeah, I guess answer my question instead of me daydreaming like I normally do. How independent is independent? You've hit on a really good point, which is that it's not as easy as just taking out the turbines and replacing them with electric motors. And this is true of anyone who's working on electric aircraft. There's so many systems in aircraft. today which are powered by the turbines right so the pressurization of the cabin is powered by you know most aircraft the bleed air from the turbine and the flight controls in most aircraft is most turbine aircraft is hydraulic and the hydraulics are pressurized by the turbine and so if you if you remove the turbine or in our case you still have the turbine but you're not using it all the time you don't have those systems available so you need to you need to produce those things in some other way. So our flight controls are going to be electric. We're going to have a distributed electric flight control system. Our cabin pressurization is going to be electric as well. We have a really big battery, which is helpful. And by the way, you're seeing this trend in... conventional aircraft as well. So the 787 adopts several of these systems for sort of secondary flight controls and systems related to cabin environment control as well. And the reason that you switch from sort of your engine power supply to your electric power supply is a mass savings, right? If you don't have to run hydraulic lines through the aircraft, then that's a mass savings. It's also a reliability savings. various incidents in the past where hydraulic lines have been ruptured, and if you rupture a hydraulic line, you can lose several systems at once. Electric systems are generally more robust to that. It can also be an efficiency improvement. So there is a general trend in the industry to try to get towards more distributed. Electrification, yeah. Exactly, yeah. We had Ed Lovelace from Ampaire on, and I asked him, what's your favorite aircraft? And he said the 787. Did he say it's like 1 .4 megawatts worth of electrified? I mean, I'm not sure if I've got the number right, but it's a lot, and it's impressive. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. The scale of aircraft is always, you know, you go from, you know, our ES -30 is a relatively big plane when you stand next to it, but then you compare it to a 787 or an A350 or something like that, and it's tiny. We'll get there. We'll get there. Yeah. But, yeah, always incredible to, like, see the scale between small and big aircraft. um so yeah so you know obviously the technology that we're looking at really forces us into some of those decisions um but you know we see it as a favorable decision overall but it you know obviously it does um just reflect you know the challenge of of going to a new power source going to an electric aircraft there's so many things that need to be rethought re -optimized uh because uh you're changing your propulsion system yeah i think of like the way you guys started with the you know battery -only es -19 sort of approach kind of giving you a leg up in some of the ancillary systems. I think everybody else kind of gets to kick that can down the road, which is a benefit to them, I guess. They don't have to deal with it, but you guys already have, or you're at least in progress on it already. So I don't know. I think it gives you kind of an interesting leg up. It's interesting. Yeah, we had to buy that bill early. Obviously, a lot of the EVTOL and advanced air mobility companies are tackling similar problems. Our aircraft is pressurized. Whereas some of those aircraft are not. So there's different but similar challenges there. One of them, which I love and won't name, but doesn't even have air conditioning. When you watch them on YouTube, the dude is wearing gloves when he's up there flying it. They don't even have HVAC yet, much less they have pressurized cabins. And I don't know how de -icing is going to work. But to your point, carrier class, there's a lot more systems that you're going to have to think about, right? I should ask if you're doing, I forget, do you have landing gear? Well, I mean, obviously. But does it extend and retract? So the prototype that we're flying next year, the X -1, has fixed landing gear. So when we release videos of that, you'll see the landing gear do not retract. But in the production aircraft, they will be retractable. Yeah, okay. So right, even more systems, right? And you guys will be forced to pioneer. Yeah, on some level. Okay, cool. Right. OK, so this means you definitely also have to get good at charging. Right. And a lot of the parallel folks and even some of the series folks aren't bothering. I'll ask them, do you intend to use CCS or GBT? And they're like, yeah, we're not doing it at all. You have to put gas in it in order to make it go. But you guys, if I remember right, in Hangar Day 2024, talked a fair amount about CHARIN, right? And the megawatt charging system. If I remember right, there was even like the triangular face of it, you know, being plugged into an aircraft. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know. Tell me about charging and how it's different on aviation to other things. And what's it like working with MCS so far? Yeah, yeah. So we've done some demonstration projects. We've shown publicly some work on charging. So we're looking at MCS megawatt charging standards. Our battery. in the production aircraft is going to be i'm not going to give that specific capacity but it's going to be a little bit north of a megawatt hour okay um so a megawatt is uh you know you have to charge faster than obviously than a than an electric car you know electric car charges are typically around the sort of 150 to 350 kilowatt range um we're going to want to charge you know around a megawatt for our So this is 3x to 333 or something, like roughly 3x automobile? Yeah. It's not 30 or 300x, it's 3x, yeah? Right, exactly. Yeah, roughly 3x. And it's similar to the power level that you would charge a semi -truck with, an electric semi -truck on the road. And actually our battery size is also very similar to a semi -truck. Yeah, okay. Which is quite interesting. So that will allow us to... recharge after a typical mission so we use for typical mission we use something on the order of 125 miles you know from you know origin to destination um so sort of like ground distance and then obviously the aircraft you know it's climbing it's consuming a lot of power it's flying the cruise mission then descending and then there's some taxi time on either side but our typical mission is 125 miles and we'll be able to recharge after that mission in roughly 30 minutes okay um so that's that's uh obviously allows us to fit into conventional uh airport operations a conventional turnaround is on the order of you know 30 to 45 minutes so within that time period you'll be able to you know recharge the battery the energy that you depleted over that flight um and um you know obviously standardizing on uh MCS gives us access to that ecosystem. There's a huge amount of work that's going into that for particularly trucks on the highway. So that technology, we can basically directly reuse that and some tweaks for the aviation use case. But generally speaking, it's the same technology. If I remember right, MCS is essentially CCS, but, you know, sort of scaled up. But, you know, similar. Obviously, the electrical specifications are much higher. But otherwise, very similar to CHARIN CCS in the end. So to your point, half an hour turnaround. Yeah. So you're going to have to taxi. And, well, obviously, everybody has to taxi. So I guess just like with the gas engine. aircraft you know you're going to be pulling the the fuel hose to it right away same thing with this you're going to be getting the the electrical and we sort of saw that in action in the hangar day videos on in 2020. um okay cool so we tried to minimize the impact on you know airlines and airport operations you know obviously it's not exactly the same as a conventional fuel aircraft today there is you know you do need to get it hooked up Relatively soon when you get to the gate, if you want to have that full charge window, it's a hybrid aircraft, so there's also fuel ports. So depending on the mission that you're flying, if you're flying a hybrid mission where you're consuming both electricity and jet fuel, then you would need to fuel the aircraft as well. And then there's often aircraft, particularly at regional airports, are fueled by fuel trucks. Whereas the electric infrastructure, you can't put that on a truck because it needs to be plugged into the grid or a large battery. So that's going to be located probably close to the terminal so that you can plug it in when the aircraft arrives at the gate. So there's a few differences here operationally, but really we're designing it to be as easy to integrate as we can for a typical airline. Got it. I guess you could do a charging truck, but you don't want a battery to throw at it. More batteries. Yeah. Batteries for your batteries at that point. Yeah. Right. That makes sense of what you're thinking about it. So one question I've got, I don't know if you've taken a look at Joby's geeks or G -E -A -C -S system that they've been. Did you guys review other standards? I totally get it. I mean, to your point, Tesla Semi, MCS, I think Volvo, MCS, like so many of the trucking companies, I want to say Peterbilt. I'm not sure. I'm not super expert there. But from what I understand, a lot of the trucking industry has sort of said MCS all the way. I can see the intelligence and like, this is a thing. It is obtainable. This is going to be commoditized. It's also going to be tested like crazy by others, right? Yay. But did you look at, I don't know, did you think about any other standards or what was the selling factor? Was there a decision around that or was it a pretty quick call? Yeah, so Joby is working on... uh charging standards and um from what i understand that the emphasis there is on kind of the front end you know so maybe on the back the charging equipment is similar to what you would use in an MCS system but on the front end they have um redundancies that you can charge multiple independent battery packs with less hardware on the vehicle, which is exciting, particularly if you have a smaller, lighter aircraft. And so the mass penalty of having the switch gear on the aircraft to sort of isolate the different packs is more expensive. And then the other thing that they have, which is really interesting, is the fluid port so that you can... use ground -side cooling equipment to take heat out of the battery in the aircraft. And take some mass out of your aircraft instead of having to have liquid cooling on board. And then there's other, I think GAMA did a white paper that you can read about where they sort of proposed a common charging standard. And I think Joby was not involved with that, but many of the other... um EVTOL companies were and it was you know kind of similar to the the jb center that you mentioned and then i think that's turning into some kind of an industry standard or proposal right now i think there's some drafts flying around uh in in the industry on that so yeah it's quite an interesting challenge i think i think many of the EVTOL companies um have been doing a lot of work on that for us um our optimization um is a little bit different because obviously our our peak power demand is lower than it would be for an EVTOL and we're a fixed winged aircraft so our sort of peak power load is as high as it's lower than if you need to sort of vertically take off yep um so that means that the batteries that we're looking at and the cooling system that we're looking at is a little bit different than a typical um EVTOL and the other thing is that you know our Aircraft is just physically larger, so some of these systems that we're talking about, the penalty is lower to include them in our aircraft. Fair. Right, right, right. We're exploring these options. I think that this technology is advancing quickly, and obviously airports are involved and thinking about how it affects their operations. So we're certainly paying attention to it. considering it in in the trades that we're looking at but um Yeah, right now we're looking at the MCS system. Cool. There's a little bit of podcast time travel to do here because I'll be releasing the Joby episode soon, so you could not have watched it. But they're going to be talking about how they intend to be. They really need to focus on getting certified, obviously, is my take from what I can tell. But I think they're interested in getting the standard out there more than they have in the past. I think they've sort of always kind of wanted it. with that one PDF that they put on X and that's really it. And a single email address. I think they intend to do more. So watch this space, I guess. Yeah. But of course, you can't watch it yet because we're still finishing touches on the editing. So yeah, I'll just put that bird in your ear and we can move on from it from there. And I think it's really exciting how collaborative this industry is. There's different players working on electrified aviation. There is a lot of... cross -pollination, there is a lot of sort of collaboration on standards. I think, you know, Joby some of the others, certainly thought leaders and, you know, very proactive at, you know, getting these ideas out there and trying to work with others to advance the industry as a whole. It's fun watching it for me right now, that's for sure. And I think part of what you're saying is part of why. Yep, no doubt. If you could get one free breakthrough, what challenge would you solve with it? well i think you'll probably get the same answer from most people working on electric aviation i mean my my thing would be you know if we get 600 to a thousand watt hours per kilogram at the cell level or at the pack level that would be amazing yeah would really enable a lot a lot more in electrified aviation um so yeah i think most people would say that battery is the uh No doubt. I think they would want to push the. There was a light bulb moment for me when I realized cars are sitting on the ground, Kyle. They don't have to use their energy storage to keep themselves in the air, right? And doing so via fixed wing, you get lift, which is nice, as opposed to having to do it all with a rotor, which is great. But it still costs energy to keep it in the air. So, yeah, every ounce counts, and it's just different. We had this tipping point moment, I think, with automotive where it was – I was talking about this with Ed. BMW put out the i3, which was their series. hybrid uh automobile um right around the same time well in order to solve a problem that was common of evs back in that era which is like they've got like 100 miles range maybe umI've got an older Kia soul EV at home and it's got 111 miles range you know and it's still going we love it but that's just not a lot and BMW was like we can solve this with a range extender and they put a little you know three -cylinder engine in the trunk And this is right around the time that the Model S comes out. And they're like, oh, you could have just put a thousand laptop batteries in it instead. Right. And so I think, you know, uninformed me just sort of assuming like, yeah, of course, we're going to see the same thing in aviation. But yeah, we will eventually. OK, the batteries will get better. And then at some point you'll be able to build an ES30 equivalent that will be. You know, all electric, won't have the turbines on. And at the same time, we'll be sort of pushing up to the higher range. And, you know, the IFR reserves, you know, being able to carry enough energy so that if you miss your approach and you need to fly to an alternate and you're in inclement weather. And you don't have the ability to put the aircraft on the ground. You know, this is a real challenge that automotive just doesn't have. Right. Yep. Like a typical driver might take their car down to, you know, 5%, 4%, 3 % of the energy in the car. And that's totally fine. You can do that very safely. That's right. Worst case, you pull over and you call an Uber, right? Yeah. Exactly. Yep. And you just can't do that with the aircraft. So you're always carrying this huge battery reserve or energy reserve in some form in order to protect against that fairly unusual case where you just can't land the aircraft because of weather and you have to go fly to another destination. So that's a huge difference. And it's a real mass driver if you try to do that with just the battery. So there's always going to be... a category of aircraft where the economics are really driven by that nominal flight right 99 out of 100 flights right i'm flying within the capacity of the electric system the battery i can get the economics of the electric aircraft and then 100 flights or even even more infrequently i need to turn on that turbine and say my economics are going to suffer on that one percent of my flights Um, but at least I don't have to carry that mass every single time. So that's, that's why hybrid aviation, um, it's a more direct solution to the problem than, than it is in, in automotive. Um, you know, my belief is that if it's possible to electrify the flight, so for example, these, these short distance, a hundred mile flights that we're looking at with the ES30, if it's possible to electrify it, that's going to be your cheapest overall system, right? Because Relative to any other energy source, electricity is going to be the cheapest. And then you have the batteries, you have the electric motors. The electric motors, relatively inexpensive as well, last for a long time. The batteries are a little bit more expensive, a little bit more life -limited. But overall, you're still going to be in a better place than if you... use another energy source, whether it's conventional fuel or it's hydrogen or some other energy source where you have round -trip inefficiencies that sort of drive the cost up. So I think that electric aircraft, when they're on the market, like the ES -30, they're going to win for the routes that they're capable of flying. And then as the technology improves, eventually you'll get to the place where you can... You can say, okay, like for these short flights, we can be all electric. We can remove the turbine system. We can make the aircraft a little bit cheaper by doing that. But you're also going to be pushing into those longer flights at the same time and saying, okay, like now we can do 300 -mile flights with a hybrid aircraft. Now we can do 400 -mile flights with a hybrid aircraft. Right. So let hybrids be the pioneer and battery only can sort of come along behind it. Yeah. That's how I see it. I think that when the technology gets to that point, the short flights, electric only, that's going to be the way that we really lower the cost of flying as much as we possibly can. And then the hybrids, you will realize cost savings with the hybrid system as well relative to a fully conventional aircraft. And we'll just keep pushing that up to get the most range that we can. Cool. So 600 to 1 ,000. Press release universe, you know, MagniX or MagniX, I guess, is talking about 400 watt hours per kilogram. I think CATL is talking about 500 watt hours per kilogram. But, you know, that's press release land. I mean, I don't know anyone who's actually getting to procure that anytime soon. What are you seeing? I mean, you're in there dealing, talking to manufacturers, talking to OEMs. Is there something on the horizon coming? Sometimes I worry that as an industry, Aviation's demand won't be big enough to force the weight curve down as fast as the price curve has come down. Lithium batteries famously just get better and better every year on a price perspective, but the mass side is harder, right? What are you seeing when you're talking to OEMs and providers there? Well, automotive is driving both the cost and the mass of cells down. The energy density in cells is improving as a function of automotive demand. That's really exciting. And I think that you're right. The reality is that the aviation demand for sales today is not large enough to really drive the innovation that we need. So that innovation is being driven by the automotive demand. And that's really exciting because, as you say, the press releases that we see, there are huge improvements happening all the time. When we look at cells, there's silicon -rich cells that are starting to hit the market now that are going into some automotive applications. Price point's a little high, so they're available for aviation applications as well. There's some semi -solid -state cells which are starting to get into pre -production. There's some solid -state on the horizon, which is, I don't have anyone that's using... solid -state cells in aviation applications yet, but that's coming soon. Batteries, it typically takes quite a long time to go from your prototype to something that's, you know, manufacturable in volumes that you can actually ship to customers. With good yields and everything else, yep. We had a previous guest on (Haroon Junaidi) that was talking about how the way he sees it, that energy battery density is sort of somewhat like a trade -off with safety, right? It kind of makes sense. I mean, just on the face of it, the more energy in the battery, the more there might be a possibility of thermal runaway. But I don't know enough to be able to validate that. What do you think? It's a complicated topic. There's some chemistries that were looking at the silicon -rich lithium ion designs. Some of those cells you're packing in. um more energy but you are there is a safety compromise there um you you know like the the the uh not necessarily the energy emitted from the cell during a run of event but but also the sort of like the the rate um so the aggressiveness of the of the thermal event okay it's higher so you know for some technologies there's a trade -off for some technologies you know there's really promising results from some of the solid state concepts where you really don't see those highly aggressive thermal events it's it's a really complex um engineering challenge and you mentioned solid state too right like solid state also has a has a function here i i take it those are safer i guess there's less flammability because the the electrolyte something but this isn't my area yep yeah i mean you know those cells are generally not in production they're a little bit further out on the horizon or the ones that are in production um are not necessarily getting the cycle life or the discharge rates that are that are necessary um so there's um i would say that we you know we're going to learn more about solid state cells over the next few years yeah um but you know there's there's a lot of different um advances happening in different directions and different technologies, different areas. And so, you know, it's quite a rich landscape. Do you see any other, you know, future possibilities for emissions reduction? I mean, we've talked a fair amount about like, you know, 600 to 1 ,000 watt -hour kilogram batteries and how that's not, you know, immediate horizon, but we're seeing some improvements to your point. And I like how you talked about having hybrids sort of push the envelope and then battery electrics coming behind. Well, that's the way I phrase it anyway. But do you see other trends or other technologies that could be involved in reducing emissions in aviation? These technologies that we're talking about really apply to the shorter distance flights, say regional and then short haul, at least for the next. you know a few decades like that's the kind of area that we're playing in for longer distance flights there is you know some opportunity to employ hybrid systems um to improve the efficiency of you know the engine particularly you know around takeoff and so there's some opportunity for hybrid to to have an impact there but you know as you get to longer and longer distance flights uh you know the sort of marginal improvement you get from the hybrid system It becomes less, and you spend more of your time in crews. From an emissions perspective, long haul is a real challenge. So there's various technologies in research and in various stages of development for that. There's obviously synthetic fuels, which if we can get to a good cost structure there, that could be really exciting. There's hydrogen. blended wing design. So, you know, for example, is working on, you know, just, you know, significant aerodynamic improvements to the aircraft to really reduce your emissions that way. So it's a really hard problem to solve. And, you know, I think that, I think there's a lot of interesting ideas and innovations going into it, but I think probably too early to tell, you know, what the outcome will be. A couple of miracles needed for some of the SAF stuff, but maybe fewer. Hydrogen, it seems like a good number of miracles, but gosh, is it compelling given how much energy you can pack into a hydrogen atom. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Yeah. Hydrogen is certainly interesting. This definitely challenges the volumetric density and also the handling of the fuel. It's an easier shift to add some electric charging stations at an airport than it is to support less conventional fuel. Automotive has really struggled, right? I guess there's fewer airports than we would need gas stations, so fine. It's probably worth the research. But yeah, there's a couple of miracles in there for sure. What about lessons you've learned? Anything that you, you know, used to think was true and throughout this journey or through your journey in your career, things that you, you know, used to think that were true and now you don't see it that way anymore. Well, I think that we talked about this a little bit earlier, but I think that vertical integration in the development process, and we're not talking about designing every single bolt, owning every single bolt that's on the aircraft. uh you know a broad supply chain that we're leveraging um all levels of complexity just the way you said that it makes me imagine that you have designed a bolt though at least at least one maybe but but i follow your point though yeah sorry keep going um yeah i personally have not designed a bolt yep got it got it um but yeah so you know what i really mean is owning The design and you know, it's the design that matter and you know, this is such a complicated aircraft we're introducing new propulsion systems the batteries the electric motors were Addressing the complexities that arise because of that so we talked about the flight controls Earlier and the environmental control system pressurization of the aircraft There's structural challenges you know how do you you know where do you put the battery how do you fit it in a way that's structurally efficient um that allows you to have the lightest you know wing and aircraft structure as well um so so there's a huge number of um nuances and complexities yeah in the development and so like really having ownership as an organization of that full stack and being able to respond to discoveries um as you prototype as you fly aircraft as you as you understand um you know better the technology that you're building and then be able to respond to that quickly you know get back out on the test stand you know within a week or within a few days right right with a new design and try something new reducing your cycles there yeah being able to learn faster yep yep so and i and i you know i think that this is true about any radically new aircraft technology that you're introducing and i think that um There's a strong and growing community of startups out there that are sort of tackling these challenges and building the skill set and building the organization to handle this. And I think that's really exciting for the industry as a whole. I think it's going to inject a lot of energy into the industry. Cool. Awesome. What are you most proud of? Well, I'm really excited about the X1, which is our prototype aircraft that's in Plattsburgh right now. I think the team has done... Really phenomenal work on that. When it flies, and we're hoping to fly in Q2 of next year, we're in integration and testing of the aircraft right now. When it flies, it will be the largest aircraft by mass, all electric aircraft. Wow. So that's really exciting. It won't be the largest wingspan. I think Solar Impulse has us on that. Sure, yeah. But it is a big plane. So that's really exciting. So we're pushing hard to make that happen. And then obviously we're continuing to work on our future prototypes as well. So you're testing X2 as battery only? I assumed it was going to be full independent hybrid, you know, with the turbo prompts and everything. X1 will be battery only. It's an all -electric aircraft. It doesn't have the turbines. And then X2, which is our next prototype, will have the turbines as well and be fully hybrid. Got it. Okay, that's cool. I live too close to Plattsburgh, New York to not want to ask for – but I can only imagine that you would keep your fresh flights under wraps. So never mind. I'll reach out for LinkedIn later or something. You might see it, but you probably won't hear it. Oh, that's a fair point. That's a really fair point. Okay, so we'll head into the lightning round now. So what is your favorite airplane? Oh, well, there's a lot of airplanes I love. You probably get this answer a lot, but the SS -71 I think is a fantastic airplane. That's now the second time we've gotten that one. Yep, yep. I love that plane. I'm a big fan of Kelly Johnson. I've read most of the books about him. I'm a huge fan of his approach to... you know engineering in general you know just getting teams really close together yeah um putting them right next to the wind tunnel um just really like trying to like accelerate those those feedback loops and and the results you know obviously were incredible as well you know he's he was building planes yeah there's one aircraft that he built in um i think under 100 days um from sort of like kickoff of the project to first flight wow incredible stories oh my god and he did all of this obviously without um you know simulation tools that we have right right computational dynamics and like no none of that yeah yeah yeah not even 3d design tools yeah exactly and the s71 obviously is an example of an aircraft that um incredibly challenging if you were to approach that today you know yeah yeah there's a few engineering teams in the world that i think could recreate his results on that yep cool what's your favorite airport my favorite airport i have a private pilot so um not a not a serious pilot but you know casual pilot but i fly from la into catalina and i think that's very cool that's a that's a pretty cool airport for people who aren't familiar it's uh i think it's about 2500 feet up in the air on a mesa um so when you fly into it you're sort of flying over the cliffs of catalina and then they have a a great little restaurant um up at the top there so you can sit there and eat a burger and you know occasionally military planes will come and buzz it for fun so that's awesome out of santa monica or lax or there's lots of choices yeah cool cool there is a uh a vellus electro that that often shows up out of santa monica yeah yeah electric planes out there in the real world that was not yours no no okay yeah you got it okay cool yeah so my next question do you have any shout outs anything that's giving you joy right now that you want to talk about Anything that's giving me joy. I'm not sure. I didn't prepare for this one. I imagine you're working a lot. I'm busy. We just moved into a new office here in Torrance in California, so I'm excited to be in the new space. A lot more room for hardware, so we're going to be building parts, building systems. I guess that's what I'm excited about today. Okay, that's cool. That's cool. That's worth it. And then, yeah, I guess just a final question. Where should we follow you? Should we check you out on LinkedIn or Twitter? Like, yeah, where should we follow you? Yeah, so we've got a, obviously our website, our aerospace .com. We do post on LinkedIn. We have a YouTube channel, I believe. So we're trying to get some more material out there. We're going to have some. videos of, um, revulsion testing going up in the next few months. Um, obviously we've got the flight of the X one coming up. So, um, you know, hoping to fly that in Q2 of next year. And then obviously we'll, we'll have some, uh, media, um, around that. So yeah, hoping to have a lot more to share in, in the next few months. And, um, and then, you know, obviously continuing to, to, you know, prototype and push forward. Awesome. Awesome. Ben, thank you so much for spending some time with us today. We really appreciate it. Great conversation. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

We are laser focused right now on getting through the certification process, getting the production ramped up. As soon as that's done, which is coming very soon, we are going to publish the specification and begin very detailed talks with the other industry stakeholders to potentially publish this as a standard. we will be in parallel to that supporting the commercial rollout of our systems. So there's some first vertiports that are already in the works that are already being constructed today, and we need to supply chargers to them. Formerly the captain for an electric car racing team for the University of Waterloo, where he studied, who later co -founded a robotics company that made pitching robots for the Chicago Cubs, Robert Rowland is an engineer on the ground support equipment team at Joby Aviation. where they are developing an all -new charging system to address the unique challenges of high -tempo electric aircraft operations, creating the critical infrastructure needed to make widespread zero -emission air taxis a reality. Robert is also our guest today, and this is the Sky Zero Podcast. with Joby talking to us about the GEACS charging system. So Robert, thank you so much for taking the time out. I really appreciate you taking the time to come speak to us today. Yeah, of course. I'm excited to share more of what we've been working on. Very cool. It's been pretty secret up to now. Right. You know, it's weirdly hard to get information about GEACS sometimes. Should I call it GX or GEA? I keep spelling it out. It sounds silly. What do you call it? Most people internally seem to call it geeks for now. No way. But I think it's still up for debate. We don't have a hard idea on how that's to be said. Okay, that's awesome. I'm calling it geeks now. That's just too cool. So yeah, let's start with you. I mean, talk about who you are and a little bit about your background. Sure, yeah. So I'm a mechanical engineer. I went to the University of Waterloo in Canada, which is a co -op program. Got to work for a bunch of cool companies as the... over the course of that co -op program including like toyota babcox and wilcox tesla apple and then a ev research lab where i got to see some like very early days uh r d efforts that general motors was uh was doing uh in the electric vehicle space And then I was also, during my schooling, part of the University of Waterloo Formula SAE team for the electric side. So we were designing and building an electric race car as students to compete in a student competition. And that's where I initially made a lot of connections in the EV world and really got my feet wet working on all aspects of designing and building electric vehicle systems and kind of fell in love with that. When I graduated, I went and did some other things for a while. I designed pitching machines for Major League Baseball. And I went to work for Apple eventually, but then felt the pull back to the EV engineering world. And one of my close friends from the Waterloo Formula SAE team, Alex Bondarenko, heard me grumbling about being bored with other work. asked me to come back to jovi to work on uh charging very cool i came back in 2021 cool cool so so uh personally i'm in toronto so i mean waterloo means a lot to me that's really neat uh i i i'm aware that i had an sae team that's really cool did you guys win that year is this the big australian race or am i getting that wrong uh we have performed well recently but not not one Great. Thank you. That's really cool. So to your point about getting connected, it was a fellow Waterloo alum that pulled you in. Okay, cool. What's it been like so far? How have you found it working there? It's like a super exciting company. When I joined in 2021, it was only two people working officially on the charging team at that time. There had been some different efforts across the company to build charging solutions for Joby's early aircraft. They had always been more from the perspective of just like get it done and explore different ways to charge the aircraft. And then starting in 2021, there was a concerted effort to actually make, okay, like what are we going to do long -term? And that was the beginning of what became GEACS. Kind of before I joined, there'd been a lot of research on different aircraft architectures. how eVTOLs might need to be designed to perform well in an air taxi environment. And they came to some of the conclusions that drove the decision to build GACS. Yeah, tell me about that. I was going to get to it, but I imagine they looked at... CCS and GBT and sort of all the others, or did they just, or maybe, I've known, definitely have known teams that were pre -inclined to build versus bring in. But how, did they sort of look at those and say, oh, it doesn't meet the spec, or to your point, they were really looking at, like, what would an air taxi need, right? So what about that led them to build and, yeah, like, just start talking about GCS, basically. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. So, I mean, that's like something we definitely want to do always. If there's an off -the -shelf solution that meets our needs, of course, we want to buy that. It's always cheaper usually to buy something than to make something. But when Joby's thinking about operating air taxis, we need to not think about like the cheapest solution just for charging or the best solution just for charging. We need to think about the whole picture. How are we going to operate? air taxis in a way that is efficient for the whole system and safe for the whole system and it turns out that when looking at the global optimization problem it's worth it to trade some more complexity onto the charging system and in some cases move some of the cost of the overall system onto the charging system in order to yield some overall benefits so by Moving to a system like GACS versus CCS, we can charge faster, we can have a safer aircraft, and we can get that aircraft to have some additional capabilities that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Yeah. So I'm sitting here biting my tongue because I've been looking at like there's this one PDF you can get on Twitter. If you search for like... you know, GX geeks. Um, this, it's this one thing that comes up and it shows you like what, what it looks like. Um, you know, and then at the Oshkosh air show recently, I actually got to hold the handle for the first time. I'm like, okay, wow, this is great. You know, like the, the engineering on it. Oh, you've got one right there. Yeah, of course you do. Yeah. But for folks who are just tuning in and they have not spent as much time obsessed over this as I have, or not nearly as much as you have, right? So walk us through, because it is pretty different, right? If you think about CCS versus GDEMO versus GBT, they're pretty similar. There's some communication pins, and there's DC and there's AC, and that's kind of it. But with geeks, it's pretty different. So walk us through what those differences are. Yeah, so GEEX, I should say for a second, is really just a definition of the interface. It is defining the boundary between the vehicle and the charging system. And right now, there's only one implementation, Joby's implementation of GEACS. But in the future, once we publish this as an open specification, hopefully being adopted into a standard, we think that... There will be many other implementations of GACS with different ground systems and different ways of aircraft connecting and using the charging system. That standard consists of, or that interface definition, consists of fluid ports, so we can pump fluid on and off the aircraft. In our case, it's 40 % ethylene glycol with some corrosion inhibitors. And then we have two independent DC charging channels, so we can independently send plus and minus. two separate independent channels to charge in our case two separate battery packs and then we also have a data connection so in the middle it's kind of hard to see with the lighting but we have a set of pogo pins that allow us to communicate between the aircraft and the charging system one way and also have some interlock functionality between the aircraft and the charger so they can both agree that they're in a safe state and then The remaining pins are to provide auxiliary 48 -volt power from the charging system to the air. Oh, okay. And you are 48 -volt auxiliary. Right. I want to deep dive in all of the places at once. And that's difficult to do in a conversation. So let's start with the liquid part. Because to me, that's the part that usually blows people away. It's like, they're doing what? I remember when I first got an EV, my neighbors were like, can you wash it? I'm like, well, yes, of course. Can you charge it in the rain? And of course, right? And when I explain, that's the thing about geeks that makes it so different is, or to your point, that's just the interface. But that's what makes the Joby charging. systems are different, is that you are running coolant through it and not just electricity. So let's start there. Walk our listeners through why. Would you do it that way? I've got my guesses, but I want you to tell the story. Sure. So specifically on the... fluid side if we take a step back for a second and think about like how do we charge faster uh what is the limiting factor at a physics level to charge a battery very very fast and usually at the end of the day it's actually a thermal problem um batteries battery cells have this like complex matrix of variables or factors that affect the ability to charge and discharge the battery cell and the most important one of those is temperature If the cell gets too hot then you risk going into thermal runaway so you need to slow down the rate you are charging or discharging the cell to ensure you don't exceed that temperature limit. If the cell is too cold then if you charge too fast you risk lithium plating or other negative effects. on the cell's electrodes that could limit the life of the battery pack. So when we are designing a charging curve, so the relationship between state of charge and the current we're going to push into the battery pack, we're constantly looking at for that specific state of charge, what temperature ranges do we need to stay inside? When you're dealing with large battery packs that are charged fast, you're almost always going to have some form of active thermal management system. In your automotive electric vehicle, pretty much all EVs on the road that are built recently have some sort of liquid cooling system where they're pumping liquid through the battery pack to some form of heat exchanger, like think of a radiator in the front of the car, which air passes over it and cools that coolant down, and then it goes back to the battery pack. And it's not just about keeping the battery pack cold, but you also have to bring the battery up to temperature. So they'll also have a heating system in that loop. Those systems, you have to strike a balance between the amount of mass and the amount of volume you're going to take up in the car versus the amount of cooling capacity you have available. So in your average EV, oftentimes when you hook it up to a very high power DC fast charging system, they're going to charge at a high rate for... few minutes in some cases, and then they're going to slowly start tapering off the power, not because the charging system you're connecting it to doesn't have the power available, it's because you're starting to over -temp the battery. The thermal exchange system on the vehicle wasn't designed to continuously reject the amount of heat that's being generated by the battery pack during charging. So when we sit down to design an aircraft, we have to think, okay, do we want to put a active thermal management system onboard the aircraft and how much continuous heat rejection capacity did we want to design into that thermal management system governing how quickly we can charge. And in an aircraft, the... Mass is very, very important, like far more so than an automotive application. We want to shave out every possible gram that we can out of the system, especially for dead weight. So a cooling system is considered dead weight to us because it's not energy to extend the flight, and it's not generating power, and it's not structural necessarily. It's not like supporting the airframe. So that mass, every additional... unit of mass that we add in dead mass means that we have to add mass elsewhere in the aircraft to support it. Right. So if that liquid cooling loop took up, I don't know, 100 pounds, probably not that much, but let's say, and you could take it out, then that's 100 pounds more people. you can carry uh and and and of course there's these famous equations around weight and aviation where it can actually be even better than that sometimes i'm probably getting it wrong but basically you can size everything else smaller uh the smaller you get so yeah That's what I wondered, right, that we're able to take it out. And to your point, like if I charge my EV on a hot summer day and then I'm driving down the highway after and I still have the AC on afterward, like the heat pump is running like mad. And I think it's because like I just like supercharged, you know, the Ioniq 5 charges at like 230 kilowatt or something. And so it's using the same cooling system to cool down the battery and us. And I've never heard the heat pump go so loud as when I've just been charging. Does this mean you get to take all active cooling off board? I mean, I guess if you're operating at like 4 ,000 feet, it's cooler than when you're sitting on the asphalt in Phoenix in the summertime. But how much cooling are you able to take off board? Do you still have some on board or not? So in the Joby aircraft, we actually have no active thermal management systems on board the aircraft for the battery packs in flight. thermal management systems that are rejecting heat to the outside environment. We do leave coolant on board, but that's not for the purpose of rejecting heat. We do have a thermal management system on board the aircraft, but it's for the cabin. Just an air conditioning system to cool the cabin. And that is also something that is enabled by GEACS. So batteries are very dependent on being within an optimal temperature range for their state of charge not only for the charging process but for the discharging process so with GACS if we keep it connected right before the aircraft takes off we can bring the battery packs to an optimal temperature for takeoff and then in an air taxi environment you're usually doing short flights we can identify what the next flight is going to be and bring the battery packs to a temperature before that next flight that is going to be able to see them through to the landing. Right, right. You've got a decent thermal mass. It's going to take time for its temperature to have changed too much. And right, in short times, we're not talking about eight hours across the Atlantic here. Okay, neat. So that's considerable weight savings, and you're able to find a lot of dead weight there. That's neat. Massive weight savings, and we're also able to have a much bigger, more powerful cooling and heating system. in an off -board system where we don't care about mass, we don't care about gallium, we can go buy a chiller off the shelf pretty much and stick it 100 feet away from the vertiport with a set of lines going to our dispenser and we can have far more cooling capacity on the ground to be able to exert a high degree of control over the temperatures of the battery pack throughout the charging process. So we can keep the battery packs in that optimal temperature range throughout pretty much the entire charging sequence. Amazing, amazing. What can you say about what this does for your charging curve? I can't share any specific numbers for the currents and voltages that we're running with, but I can say that GACS can support up to 1 ,000 volts and 300 amps continuous. Wow, wow, wow, wow, okay. Okay, but also I'm thinking about sort of shape. And to your point, can't talk speeds and feeds, and I get that. But if I think about, like, I mentioned my Ioniq 5. I'll be an automotive nerd for a minute. It sort of goes, like, high, and then it stays high for a little bit, and then it doesn't come down that much, but then it sort of flattens out. And then sort of around 60, 70, it starts to really kind of slow down, right? And other cars will sort of like – like the Tesla famously is like – goes really high and then sort of comes down really fast. And they're almost like encouraging you to like gas and go quick and don't sit there forever. But then other cars, they sort of get to like – I don't know. 70 and just sit there the whole time you know and that's in part because of limitations they've got when i think about your charging curve should i am i going to imagine like one of these mountains that goes high and stays like a table or is this more like a high curve that's got then flushes down or can you talk about the shape of the curve yeah so due to our ability to control the temperatures of the battery packs we can stay at high currents for longer right which is the big part of why GACS enables faster charging. It's not because we're going to higher absolute powers. It's because we're able to stay at high powers for longer. Right. Right, right, right, right. Got it. Which usually ends up winning in the end instead of a super big number at the beginning and then slowing it down. Okay. Awesome. Awesome. Cool. Thank you. To your point, two DC channels. If I remember right, on the S -4, the charging port is under the wing. So I think I just assumed that there would be one on each wing. But if there's two DC channels in the one port, is that right? Is there sort of just one for the entire aircraft? Or how does that work? There's two charge ports per aircraft. Got it. Okay. So each Joby aircraft, which is the first one that we're launching, has one charge port on the left and one charge port on the right. And when that aircraft comes into land, we plug two identical GACS charge handles in. So each wing has two batteries. So you're talking a total of four. Correct. Got it. Okay, cool. Cool. Which, again, is better for redundancy and everything else. And if I remember right, charging speed, too, I guess. Although, if you're putting all of that into one big cable, But it still seems like it would help with charging speed. Is that right? Yeah. If you were to combine it into one handle, you could do that. If we were to have four of the same size channels as we're putting in our two -channel system in one cable, you could do it. The limitation might just be the mass of the cable. These cables are already getting quite heavy. But that's not the reason why we did what we did. There's other reasons to click the... keep the charge ports separated on the aircraft, both for keeping the systems isolated and not having mass passing over the center of the wing. Yeah. Hopefully one day someone from the charging team can come on and tell that story. Got it. Sorry, from the aircraft team. So we covered the liquid cooling system. We covered DC inputs. Were there other types of things about CCS that you wanted to improve on? Yes. So when we began developing Geeks, We were initially focused primarily on safety. We still are. Safety is our number one priority. And then we also wanted to get to faster charging. And in looking through what was required to enable our standards for safety and charging speed, we started to see some desires in... cybersecurity, our ability to pull data off the aircraft, and where we were doing the computation for optimal charging that necessitated a better data and communication pipeline than existing charging standards such as CCS could enable. CCS has the option to use power line communication to transfer data from the vehicle to the charging station, but it's limited to about one megabit per second. And our math indicated that we wanted to go far beyond that, multiple orders of magnitude, more data bandwidth. So what developing an all -new standard unlocks with GACS is that we could add a new means of transferring data between the vehicle and the charging station. We added a 2 .5 gigabit per second T1 Ethernet connection. uh in the charge handle connection in the charge interface that allows the aircraft to stream data down to the charging station in a secure fashion the data stream is limited in hardware to be one way so there's no cyber security risk in that interface okay but the aircraft can stream vast quantities of data about its current state through the charging process as well as just general purpose data let's say if we want to transfer data from the previous flights records of the previous flights down to the charging equipment we can do that and that enables us to one have a faster charging season i'll talk about in a second but we can have data available on the ground support equipment that's been securely pulled off the aircraft that can be used to analyze the current state of the aircraft for predictive maintenance, for example. So we can see, is some component onboard the aircraft trending in a bad direction? We can then preemptively or proactively schedule maintenance work that we otherwise wouldn't have been able to know that we needed to do. Got it. On the charging side, With existing charging standards, the decisions around the charging process are primarily made on the vehicle side. So the vehicle looks at all of the sensor data that's coming in from its batteries, its records of what the batteries have been up to over the period previous to the charge, and it decides, this is the voltage and current that I want to be charged at, and it sends a current limit to the charging station. And then the charging station basically just tries to do its best to get up to that current request. We wanted to go beyond that. When you're running an air taxi operation, you have the opportunity to forecast what is the next mission this aircraft is going to be doing. What is the current state of the power infrastructure at the building where the vertiport is situated? What is the current state in our case of the cooling system? And knowing all that information allows you to maybe make a different decision than you would if you only had the information that the vehicle has on hand. So by streaming a large amount of data from the aircraft, in this case like raw battery temperature data, individual cell voltages, pressures of various points in the fluid system, we're able to have a higher... more complex level of charging optimization by transferring all that to the aircraft, running computations on board the ground support equipment with more computational power to make a decision for the optimal charging profile. So there's another weight savings there. We can now have more computation because it's part of the charging system, or is there more to it? Yeah, so it could potentially be a weight savings. You could have... more complex computing hardware on the ground it's also a benefit from a continuous development perspective so anything on board the aircraft in the sake of safety we want to have anything that goes on board the aircraft any change to the software or hardware on board the aircraft has to go through a very very rigorous review and testing process but for charging we might want to continuously update uh the optimal charging sequence for a given aircraft maybe every week we want to be continuously pushing small little tweaks and updates to optimize that process which if we were to put those algorithm optimizations onto the aircraft side, we would be very delayed in our development process. But by having it on the ground support equipment, we are freed to be continuously updating in a much faster way. We still go through a rigorous review process, but it's not quite to the same levels as is necessary. for an aircraft that you're trusting with your life. So I think about Tesla doing over -the -air updates. Maybe you can do that with the S4, but to your point, it would still have to go through like a full certification round. And so now, by being able to make this software changes to the ground support equipment instead, yeah, it allows a faster... Wow, so you're really speaking my language on the continuous delivery side. That's a very software thing to do and thinking about how can we continuously... get the software updated. Okay, cool, cool, okay. So I guess the one megabit per second that CCS did have, I can see that being as maybe enough if all you're doing is saying, this is how many amps I want right now, this is how many amps I want right now, over and over and over again. But to your point, you're doing a lot more with it. Okay, neat. For us, it's very, very critical that the ground support equipment is not able to modify the aircraft in any way that is not immediately and reliably detectable by the aircraft. Right. That's what drives this. Got it. Cool. So famously, you guys have flown in Dubai now. With some digging, I found that you guys did some serious flying in Korea, right? And almost like a championship kind of competition kind of situation. And of course, there in Marina, K -O -A -R, I think, is where you normally do your flying. So at least those three locations, right? And there's a fair amount of difference between those three. When you think about what it takes to charge and how the situation changes it, like, yeah, what can you say there? I mean, have you learned anything taking it to different situations, for instance? Yeah, absolutely. And we're also currently flying in Osaka, Japan, every day. That's right. And we flew at the Salinas Air Show. How did I forget Osaka? That's the one that's happening now. Yeah, and there's a host of others. When we developed our actual charging system to support aircraft flight testing and continue supporting the aircraft, we took kind of a phased approach where we started off by building a very agile, lightweight charging system out of a series of power supplies connected directly up to mock -up charge cables. And then after that, we took that solution, we learned from it, then we built a next -generation charging system that... allowed us to pack all of the functional bits required to build a GEACS compliant charging system into a 20 -foot shaped container. We built a number of those systems and we've deployed them around the world. So every time you see the Joby aircraft fly in Osaka or in Dubai or for those Korea demo flights that you were discussing or at our flight test facility in Marina, that's all using that 20 -foot shipping containerized solution. And that's exactly the same functional system as we plan to launch commercially at our first VertiPorts. But now we are on the next phase where we're taking that system, we are miniaturizing it, we're packing it down into a system that can be integrated into real commercial sites, which have different kind of layout requirements and different spacing requirements. And we are currently now done the design phase for that program, and we are in the process of ramping up the manufacturing and going through the certification of it within NRTL. Oh, that's exciting. Okay, cool. So you should see some news about that system soon. When you say certification, my brain leaps in two directions at once. And one is sort of like, you know, UL or in Europe, there's a similar one, EC, I think. But you could mean FAA and EASA. What sort of certifications end up being required? So as this is a piece of ground equipment, we are able to certify it with a nationally recognized test lab in the American case. Those test labs usually offer... multi -market certification options where we can work with one recognized test lab. to certify the product in a variety of markets at once. So we're working with a test lab like that. This process is the same as the process we would use to certify any other automotive charger or even your washing machine or toaster in your house. UL is one example of a nationally recognized test lab, but there's others. Got it, got it, got it. Yeah, fair. So, okay, but we don't need to go the FAA route. They're not looking into this. No, we work hand -in -hand with the FAA. They are aware of what we're doing. But the aircraft is capable of ensuring its safety before the next flight. The aircraft is always monitoring the condition of the charging process and the condition of its batteries. And it's able to stop the situation at any time automatically if anything was to go wrong. And that's really what the FAA cares about is the safety of the aircraft. Right. It's more the aircraft itself and not the ground equipment is sort of what I was getting at. Okay, cool. So charging system architecture. avoided numbers, and I get that. In automotive, we think of it as, you know, there's sort of 400 volt and 800 volt. But also, it's not just the number, is it, right? It's sort of like the battery pack is maybe at one voltage, but then inverter systems might be at others, and motors might be at others. Like, how have you thought about the architecture? Like, what can you talk about in terms of, like, how are all the components matched up? Or I think it's the Hummer EV that I'm thinking of that's literally, like, it's too... 400 volt packs you know but so it's really a 400 volt system but it's kind of an 800 volt battery and so they could do the 800 volt charging or something i'm sure i'm getting all this wrong sure so the gacs standard uh is a thousand volt charging solution so and those uh the implementations of that system that we are building and installing uh can support the full range of the implementation so we can support up to a thousand volts independently across all four channels Joby's aircraft uses a range of that, a little bit below the 1 ,000 volts. And each battery pack that we're charging stays completely isolated and independent of the other battery packs. Right, right, right. So to your point, whatever that number is, it's not divided by four, it's times four. It's times four. So when I said we can do 300 amps, it's 300 amps times four. Wow. Times 1 ,000 volts to get your power. Right, right, right, right, right. Okay, holy cow. That's pretty insane. Yeah, that is definitely pretty insane. Gosh, is that megawatt level then? So it can theoretically support up to 1 .2 megawatts. Wow. For a single station install. Got it. So you're giving China one for its money in a way. Okay, that sort of gets into another direction that I want to go with this. You said earlier, you know, we want to... I don't know if open source is my words or yours, but release it, right, and make it a public standard, a public specification, if I understood you right. How would you see that working? Like would you, I mean, just to pick two other large North American OEMs out of a hat, like if Archer and Beta were suddenly, or if Ehang were going to suddenly start looking at this, or Heart Aerospace were going to suddenly start looking at this. Like how, what's the ambition inside of Joby for that? And yeah, it seems like it would be good in a general way if that standard were out there, I guess. But yeah, like how do you guys see it and what's the ambition for it? And yeah, talk about that part. So our ambition is to publish this GACS specification as a standard. eventually that can be adopted by anybody who wants to adopt it. That includes other charging equipment manufacturers and other aircraft OEMs such as the ones you mentioned. We haven't gotten there yet because we want to stay laser focused on focusing Joby's own needs. So being able to support Joby aircraft flying every day and also make sure that we retain the flexibility to modify our system as we're going through the certification process. There might be some last minute tweaks as we work with the test labs to get our system through to being a certified product that we can deploy. Once we get through that process, we fully intend to publish a full set of documents of the entire interface specification that can be used by other people looking to manufacture their own solutions. But in the meantime, our door is open today. And we have a email alias that anyone can contact. It's groundsupportequipment at jobeaviation .com. It was on the bottom of that PDF that you were referencing. there is an aircraft OEM or a charging equipment manufacturer that wants to reach out to us and start working with us today to adopt GACS or to suggest alternative design choices we are open to that and in fact we already have had a number of different aircraft OEMs and other people in the industry other stakeholders reach out to us express interest and provide alternative suggestions some of which we have implemented yep I don't know if you got a chance to read it, but I had published – actually, I think you might have – an article about charging, right, and aviation versus automotive. And I sort of wrestled with it. It's like – so I can totally see the allure of something like CCS. You could charge the F -150 Lightning that's airside that's getting crew around at the airport on an apron or anything else that you've got, which is a ground vehicle. I mean, that's a benefit. to something like CCS. But at the same time, like the combined in CCS means combined AC and DC, and nobody's doing AC charging in aviation right now. They're all doing DC charging. I assume that's for the same reason as what you talked about earlier, which is that that AC equipment on board is extra weight that you don't need to have. So like CCS is one party trick in a way is that it does both and you don't need that. In fact, it seems like it could be extra. If not weight, at least volume. I mean, these are not small plugs. Like the one that you were showing is also not small, but you're getting a lot more out of the footprint. You're getting cooling, data, and two separate DC loops. Whereas with CCS, you're getting one DC loop, and you're not getting any of those other things. So I can totally see what would have pushed you guys that way. I think also, I think it was Josh. port lock at um out of australia for electro electro electro the one that doesn't make an airplane the one that makes chargers um was talking about how the thing about ccs that's kind of not great um when you're plugging it in horizontally it works pretty well like that's how cars go but when you want to plug it into a wing it doesn't and it's not that it doesn't have locks it does but that those locks generally weren't implemented with this orientation in mind. And so they're more likely to fall out and be dangerous and cause shorts and things like that. So yeah, all of this to say, like, I can see why you guys went the way you did. But have you ever had a heartache about that? Like thinking like, does it make sense for ground vehicles to also use geeks as a potential down the road in order to get some of that value that CCS brings? I mean, I couldn't have been an easy... conversation i guess is where i'm going um yeah i mean if you want to talk about that at all yeah certainly so we don't take the decision to develop a new solution lightly um like the the proliferation of new standards is is not something anybody wants like we would like to consolidate to one solution yeah um I think that there are other industries that would probably benefit from adopting GACS eventually, especially once we've done all the work to develop it and it's out there and available. It might make sense to adopt it. But what really drives it and the main use case to make a new solution is just air taxis. The mission is just so demanding and unique that... If you want to operate eVTOLs in an air taxi environment efficiently, we see something like GACS as really the only solution. You can't have just a CCS connector and efficiently operate air taxis because you're just going to be spending too much time on the ground or you're going to have too heavy of an aircraft. Yeah. I mean, the cooling, being able to operate your cooling, certainly to me, that's like, okay. I get it. You know, it's worth it at that point. And being able to combine two and one isn't bad either. So, yeah. So could we imagine an airside – maybe I should stop trying to make it so that airside ground vehicles can use it too. I don't know. I mean, is that crazy to think that airside ground vehicles maybe – they don't have the same challenges, but – I guess I'm trying to save a buck for small airports that don't want to have multiple charging systems out there, I guess. So they could adopt it, yeah. And GACS is quite flexible because of the way the communication protocol works to do a range of different things using the same interface. So you can plug in a vehicle that, let's say, only has one battery pack, and you can just tell the charger that, hey, your two charging channels are now paralleled. We've connected them to a single bus bar on board the vehicle, and we want you to charge in unison, and the dispenser will happily do that. Same deal if you were dealing with a vehicle that doesn't have cooling, let's say, or has a different cooling temperature range. You can command the ground charger to not use the cooling or to follow a particular temperature profile that's needed by that vehicle. I haven't seen any driving forces for that yet, but it's not to say that it's not possible. Yeah. I mean, it seems a little bit silly. I mean, could I actually imagine like an S4 taking off and then somebody pulling up an F -150 Lightning? I mean, it seems like probably no, like you may be having another one land shortly after, but I don't know. Just, but I'm, yeah. So thank you. Thank you for humoring me on that one. I appreciate it. The other consideration is that, These chargers are installed airside. And at FOBs, there's a high degree of control between airside and general public. So it's not like the general public would ever be able to pull up to these. And most of the vertiport sites that we're going to be operating at are also separate, elevated structures in urban environments or in other areas where you don't necessarily need to have ground equipment around. Right, right, right, right, right. Yeah, I've got to start thinking vertiport and not airport. You know, I mean, airports have baggage handling trucks and all sorts of stuff running around, but a vertiport may or may not yet. Yeah, they may be smaller and choosing sites that are tight might be something you want to do. Okay, fine. I get it. I get it. So you definitely need that mini system to your point. Yeah. What can you say about the miniaturized version? When I say miniaturized, we're miniaturizing the dispenser. So that's the piece of equipment that gate keeps the flow of liquids, coolants, and the data and the electricity on and off the aircraft. We're taking that piece of equipment and making it as small as possible such that we can fit it into creative locations on these very constrained vertiports. So vertiports have some restrictions on clearance zones you need to have a big circle around the landing pad that needs to be kept completely clear on the surface of the landing pad and then also there's restrictions about where you can place things even outside that zone with like a cone that expands out from the landing pad so we want to be able to either put them low to the ground to the side of that landing pad, or in some cases, even under the landing pad and pop up through the surface of the landing deck. Got it. Okay. Got it. So instead of like a 20 foot, you know, TEU container, you know, where we're talking about something that it's almost sounds like it might be distributed to into sort of multiple modular components, like part of it's under the pad or? Yep. So we're taking a modular approach where there is a dispenser. which the actual charge cable pops up out of that has to be at the landing site or wherever the aircraft taxis into for charging. And in that... dispenser there's a core module which houses all of the functional bits to do with the charging process and then we package that core module into different configurations uh to be reused at many different sites so we're going to have a mobile solution that's on wheels and you can drag it around and we've also got a solution that goes under the ground such that you can have a completely flat landing deck and then when you need the chargers it pops up out of the ground and you can connect it to the aircraft very quickly and efficiently And then the dispenser, I think I said it's just the gatekeeper. It's connected to AC to DC power conversion equipment, which thanks to the automotive market is largely commoditized. We can buy AC to DC power conversion modules from various markets around the world for very, very competitive prices. And then... On the fluid side, we're connected to a large coolant reservoir, so an insulated tank of coolant, which is then connected to a chiller. The tank serves as like a capacitor for the coolant, so when we first connect to the aircraft, we have this big reserve of very cold coolant to pump into the aircraft. without having to size the chiller necessarily for the peak thermal exchange rates. Okay, cool, cool. So componentized, modularized, and also sort of, yeah. Okay. So it sounds like certain things like that coolant tank could almost be sized up or down based on use case, need, available space. But to your point, this does also allow you to sort of go with sort of commodity equipment, like you're saying, the ACDC equipment from the charging side. Okay, cool. Cool. That definitely makes more sense. I mean, for now, having it in a shippable container makes a lot of sense. And I think in certain circumstances, disaster relief in terms of, like, were there a natural disaster? Yeah. I mean, a shipping container is, again, exactly what you would want. Of course, that's a disaster that's going to have to have a very large electrical connection still. But still, I could imagine it being dropped into place in a lot of different places and used. But, yeah, in a vertiport, that's a big, chunky. cubular thing which is kind of in the way so yeah all right cool thank you can you talk about partnerships at all like when you think about um current collaborations strategic relationships in the charging ecosystem anything you can speak to there unfortunately no i can't share specific details beyond what's been already publicly announced uh but you can see from our other public announcements we've got pretty strong relationships with toyota delta uber ana and a bunch of others yeah toyota especially They've been very, very supportive of us. I run into members of the Toyota team every day at our San Carlos site. Nice. Okay. Yeah. And there's also multiple ways to book a Joby flight through those partners. So you've probably seen our relationship with Uber that may enable us to book a Joby flight through an Uber and do multimodal transit. Let's say with a car share on the start of the ride. that is synchronized with your ability to take a Joby flight and then have a car waiting for you on the other side. Yep. The story where you guys sort of started out of Uber Elevate is such a neat tie -in, right? I mean, you can totally imagine you guys having Uber at launch and just having it work, where you can't necessarily imagine that with anybody else. But I think that's a part of my question for you guys around charging, too. We don't know how this is going to go in aviation. There's not a lot of aviation charging networks yet. It kind of is. Aerovolta in the U .K., which is very, like, general aviation, trainer -oriented, the little GBT, Pipistrel's. E -Grid in Switzerland, very similar. There's a new one, Energy to Fly, out of the Netherlands that I'm talking to right now, and they're doing exciting things too, GBT and CCS2, if I understand it. Beta, of course, right, with the 40, 50 stations across the northeastern U .S. and even the southern U .S. and one in California, if I remember right. But, you know, so I can imagine all sorts of companies buying a beta aircraft and needing a place to stop and charge it. And I can imagine them either throwing a mini cube in the back and using the GPU, ground power unit, or, you know, plugging into a beta charger. With you guys, it's a little bit different. Like, I don't really want to get too much into, like, business model, but it probably impacts some of your decision making. Like, could I ever, what would the need be for a Joby? geeks charging network would you imagine that or i almost imagine you guys doing it a little bit more like an apple style like no no no we take care of it all for you like you don't have to think about where it charges um but maybe i'm wrong like i don't know how i got to that assumption right what what can you say about like how you envision the charging that you're working on getting out there in the world yeah so it it depends on the path to commercialization for the market that you're talking about. This is not my area of expertise. Right. We've laid out three paths for commercialization in the quarterly earnings calls. So one of them is a Joby owned and operated air taxi service that you alluded to in which we would control the full stack. We may also do direct sales of our aircraft. And then there's partner operations, like what we're working on with ANA. Right, right, right. Or Delta, maybe. Okay. So in each of those types of markets, there would be a different solution to deploy the chargers, which is my job. My job is to build GACS. certified GACS solutions and then we want to have that optimal charging system available to be deployed to those markets very quickly so we are like I said building it to be like super modular so we can deploy it really really fast and we've got all sorts of different options for how it can be put out so we have a solution for every type of vertiport or landing site And then we are also ramping up the production capacity to exceed the rate at which we're building aircraft. So you're never going to be bottlenecked by your ability to get a charger. Right. Right, right, right. It does seem like that needs to be kept up, right? I mean, if there's no way to energize these batteries, they're not going anywhere. Yeah. So like getting a proliferation of the equipment out there seems like it would be a big job. Okay. But to your point, like you and your, I wish I was the kind of person that read earnings calls. I should have done that as part of my strategy here. But to your point, it could be either like Adobe owned and operated, but there's also, we could sell the equipment and there's also operating with partners. Okay. So you could. imagine based on that like a geacs sort of charging network out there then whether it's like joe b brandon or not i mean there'd be all sorts of models for that okay but we might actually get hands -on with this as a as a aviation industry uh it won't all be behind under wraps okay cool yeah it won't be under wraps there's definitely going to be uh units that are able to be owned by other entities and if other entities want to start thinking about how to install a GACS solution, there's things they can start getting ready for today. So that's making sure you have a large grid feed available. You can start working on the space claim to install a system. And there's some other little details. We're probably going to start publishing some of those standards eventually soon or advisements. If anyone who's listening to this wants to reach out to us about how can I install a GACO solution, just send us an email. We're happy to send you over some documents. Okay. I imagine it wouldn't be too different than an automotive charging site. I mean, obviously, higher electrical supply and siting, obviously. Hopefully, it's sited near somewhere where these things can land. So, I mean, that's big picture. But otherwise, like... I don't know. Any other requirements that would be impactful? The only big difference from an automotive charger is just the layout of the dispensers on the landing pad. Got it. Got it. There's a range of options there. You can go and just place it at the edge at the disadvantage of having to land and taxi over. If you want to be more optimal, we have some other solutions that we can share to those that reach out to us. Hopefully we'll be able to be public about that soon. Okay. Cool. Cool. Thank you. Appreciate that. What can you, can you say anything about the future? Like what's, where's the standard going next? What's up next for you? So we are laser focused right now on getting through the certification process, getting the production ramped up. As soon as that's done, we're, which is coming very soon. We are going to publish the specification and begin. very detailed talks with the other industry stakeholders to potentially publish this as a standard. And we will be in parallel to that supporting the commercial rollout of our systems. So there's some first vertiports that are already in the works that are already being constructed today. And we need to supply chargers to them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, big job. Kind of switching from design, build to manufacture, scale, you know, ship, deliver, implement, install. Yeah, biggest challenges so far in anything, you know, design, build, implementation, anywhere you want to go. I would say that the... We were able to get to the 90 % solution quite quickly. And then it's the next 90%, which really bogs you down. There's lots of little details involved in making a complex system like this. I can't say there's any one big, massive technical challenge that has blocked us. It's a collection of little things that you would not expect really being the bane of our existence as an engineering team. But there's no real big blockers. If I had to ask Santa for some solutions to some of our problems, it would basically be more thermally conductive, flexible materials. That would be a great one. A moment you're most proud of? I think once we completed the containerized system and really being able to stand back and look at it and say, this thing fully works and watching it charge the aircraft for the first time that's always a happy moment seeing your your baby actually do its job for the first time yeah yeah cool where can you talk about where that was uh marina california yeah okay cool i wondered if it was like oh we had to do this for the korea thing or or the or yeah okay okay makes sense you would do it at home first yep yep yep try to do everything at home first yep obviously What about, and maybe this is almost more career long and not necessarily just where you are now, but anything that you thought you were right about or anything where you've had to change your thinking, right, and learn something and realize, like, oh, no, that's actually not how this works. Anything like that come up for you? Sure, yeah, it happens all the time. I can't think of any, like... anything that would make a great story for a podcast but there's been lots of cases where we spent a lot of time designing one solution one set of geometry then like a year later we realized that it has a uh like a critical gap or we missed one measurement and have to go back and totally redesign it i can relate to that i mean in software engineering you're obviously it's it's it's a different story but you're you're often pursuing a design pursuing a design and like nope that didn't work i'm going in this direction now okay uh so what is your favorite aircraft sr71 yeah Because of the speed? Because of the engineering? Tell me the story. I just finished reading Ben Rich's book, Skunk Works. And I'm getting into Kelly Johnson's book, more than my share of it all. And I really admire how those teams operate. It's something that we as Joby look to. did the people before us develop these aircraft so fast with such a high rate of success? And we try to learn from that. And they were a very admirable team. Cool. I've heard a couple of stories out of that one, but I haven't actually read it yet, so I will go away and do it. So you recommend? I highly recommend you should read it. All right, cool. Favorite airport? SFO is pretty good. Yeah? How come? It's fast, efficient. They've got the new scanners. I like that it has a BART station. But I'm just being a public transit nerd, I suppose. Yeah, no, it's a pretty good airport. All right. Any shout -outs? Anything that you want to call out? Anything that's giving you joy right now or anything you want to shout out? I will say one thing for anybody listening to this that wants to get ready for Vertiports. We have people that own real estate, people that really want to get to their work faster. They want a shorter commute. How can they get ready for building a vertiport? And the number one thing is to start upgrading your grid connections now. If you are working on an airport renovation project and you are looking to upgrade your transformers for more air conditioning, take the time to put in the headroom for aircraft chargers. Ideally, we want up to 500 kVA per charging station. We can work with less, but... that much is ideal. Please, please, please start doing it now. Yep. Yep. These are not always fast permits to get nor, nor fast connections to bring in. Okay. No, good. That's a great call out. Cool. So Robert, thank you so much for being on the show today. We really appreciate you. This is a great conversation. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for giving us the opportunity to tell our story.

Haroun Junaidi is the creator of one of my favorite YouTube channels, Electric Aviation. With a background in mechanical engineering and a PhD in renewable energy, he specializes in modeling and simulation, particularly in computational fluid dynamics. Currently working in the e -mobility sector, Haroun combines his professional expertise with his passion for aviation to advocate for sustainability and promote sustainable transport through his channel. And now, this is the second episode of Sky Zero Podcast. Haroun, I have to say how excited I am to have you today on the podcast. Thank you so much for making the time. Your channel, Electric Aviation, has been like a lifeline to me. When I first started hearing about the Papistrel, it was the Alpha back then, and I wanted to know more. Were there others and these kinds of things? Finding your channel on YouTube was just like a godsend, a rabbit hole that went really, really, really deep down. So I'm really excited to have you on the show today. Yeah. I mean, did I miss anything in your bio? Anything you want to correct or add? No, I think that's about it. Thank you for having me. And it's the very first time actually I'm revealing my face. I've never revealed it on my channel. So that's exclusive for you. Amazing. Maybe we'll have to do some sort of put the. episode on both channels or something like this that'll be up to you maybe maybe yeah we'll talk about it for sure so i was checking i've done about 112 videos by now and i've never revealed Wow. Yeah, that's right. I can, it's normally you with, I think one of the things that I love most about your channel is how you can cover a lot of information in a way that's very understandable and in a way that doesn't take very much time. You have a really concise ability to edit and to get it down to the essential facts and convey something that both like tickles my engineering like imagination, but at the same time is understandable. and sort of not too jargon heavy in a way that's difficult to understand. So I really, you can sense the experience you've built up. What made you start it? Like 112 episodes ago, how long ago was this? And what got you started? I started in October 2020. So we're just coming to five years now. But I really had to wait for, to start this channel because I wanted the stories to come in thick and fast because You might know that for YouTube, you need to deliver content consistently. You can't just have a story there and then come back after one month and upload something else. You have to have at least, you know, weekly content. So I waited till the time I got that because the electric aviation thing started in this sphere about, you can say, 2015. onwards but you know there would be one story here and then six months down the line there would be another story there it wasn't like you had a news that was consistent so i had to wait a bit and in 2020 i decided that yeah it's it's time that we have a channel i've got enough content um on my plate that you know i can deliver to the audience on a regular basis And around about the same time, there was a lot of excitement in the electric aviation world. There were eVTOLs was a fresh concept. Uber had released its urban air mobility white paper. And there were, you know, these new designs, which were really, you know, really inspiring people all around the world. It was in aviation, you notice that innovation is very little. And to see something new, innovative and fresh, people wanted to know more about that. So around about 2020, a lot was happening. And further on two years, there were even more stories. you know that at that time i thought right this is the time i got to do it right now so that's the background so show you forethought and planning in terms of thinking about like oh i'll have to have weekly content so you sort of had to have enough build up uh yeah okay cool yeah that's amazing so i think through the five years, you must have seen a lot of change, right? Like I haven't, I've been paying attention somewhat, but it's very recent where I've started to really pay attention. So you must have seen, you know, what, how have things shifted while you've been watching, you know, to sort of think about past, present, future arc, we'll get to, we'll get to future. But yeah, I mean, how have you seen it change so far? I think we are in a passage of lull right now, because initially there was very high expectations that oh everybody is going to have their personal flying machine but we are coming to the realization that the battery technology hasn't advanced as fast as we would have liked it to advance and in the last 10 years in particular you know we've moved to about a battery energy density of 250 to 300 watt hour per kilogram so not a lot of uh change and in fact we have now reverted to batteries that are much less energy dense but are safer um so we're still waiting for that um solid state battery breakthrough um so at the moment there's it's a period of lull but Three years back, you know, this sector was buzzing. But what I see in the future is it might climb back up again. With the advancement in the battery technology, there's some excitement there in lithium sulfur, the silicon anodes, and also the aluminum air battery. Honestly, the aluminum air battery is maybe one of my favorites on your channel. I went and found that there was actually a Canadian startup, but they specialize in aluminum air batteries. And I checked out their fuel cells almost, you tell me. But I remember checking out their website, and it was talking about it could be used in telcos. Yes, of course, but you could also use it maybe in airplanes. And I emailed the CEO and said, you should think about aviation. My friend Haroon says so. I didn't know who you were at that time, but I'd seen your one episode on it. That was one of my things I wanted to ping you about. Like, we've got to get into the aluminum air batteries. But I want to get back to the rest of your point. I do sense the lull, right? I mean, the way I experience that lull, and it'll be different because my own dynamic through the path has just been a little bit different. But for me, the lull is like... I remember thinking the Aviation Alice was going to be coming out soon. And I think you and I talked about how Wendover Productions did their – they did a really great video on the Aviation Alice and how – oh, gosh, I can't remember the name of the airline now, but there was this airline in the eastern U .S. that was going to buy a bunch of them. I remember actually putting a date on my calendar. They had said that they would be flying, you know, by a certain date in 2024, like a month. And so I put it in my calendar, like go to the East Coast and fly in one of these things. And of course, you know, that didn't happen. And then ES -19, the hard aerospace aircraft, which was originally going to be fully electric, right? And I'm thinking, wow, you know, we're going to have two of these things. Yeah, so the way I've experienced the lull is going from that to aviation is now pretty silent. And ES30 is now sort of an independent hybrid electric. I'm hoping to talk to them soon. So I see a lot more parallel hybrids these days, a few series hybrids, you know, the sort of EL9 and things like that. But yeah, I definitely see like a... A lack of ambition for battery only, I guess, is a good way to put it, except for maybe in trainers. Yeah. So that's how it occurs to me. Yeah. One thing that has happened in the last decade is that, you know, you take a battery, you push more and more energy into it. It's great for aviation, but also in a way it makes it unsafe. So you have to build more around it in terms of safety. contain that thermal propagation if there is one. So the benefit of having that extra energy density is kind of lost by having those extra components in there for fire suppression and stopping the heat propagation, et cetera, and having a very robust cooling system. So we've gone back to batteries that are more inherently safe. And that's what the EV world is using at the moment. So they've gone from lithium, from nickel NCM batteries, which is branch of lithium ion. Right. And from that, manganese cobalt, I think. Yes. Manganese cobalt and nickel. And from NCA or NCM batteries, they've moved on to lithium ion batteries. which are safer, but then, you know, the energy density is lower. So instead of 300 watt hour per kilograms, you are talking about 180 watt hour per kilogram. Yep. But at the same time, they're much safer. Yep. So people realized when, you know, initially when it came to EV, it was all about, we want the range, we want the range. But now people are realizing that They can do with less range, but they would appreciate the safety more. So the EV world has gone in that direction. Interesting. Whereas for electric aviation, we would require batteries that are much higher energy density. And the only place where I'm getting positive news of progress is from China. So CATL. has been developing a battery that they call the condensed battery. And if it comes to fusion, they've said that they have tested 210 jet on that, a 210 aircraft. Oh, I hadn't realized that. So if you've seen the likes of Cessna Citation, they've flown an aircraft of that size. Wow, okay. But they have kept the data. under wraps. So there's not a lot of information available regarding that. Citation is the business jet, if I remember right? It's a business jet. Yeah, it's a business jet. Got it. They have kept a lot of information under wraps, but I'm keeping a close eye on that space. And as soon as any information is available. I'll put it up on the channel. I think of them. They've talked about an aviation battery, and I assume that's the same one you're talking about. I hadn't heard it called condensed. But the two tons is coming to mind, something I'd seen in their press release. Yeah, I think of them. I also think of MagnaX. I think MagnaX has announced like a 500 watt hour per kilogram battery, something, maybe 400. It's doable if they're making a solid state battery. Right. A solid state battery with 500 watt per hour per kilogram is quite realistic. Right, right. I like how you're taking it to safety. I've definitely heard people in aviation talk about, you know, you can pull a car over. if you do have a thermal runaway event. And that's true. Not that I want my EV to have a thermal runaway event while I'm driving it, but I can pull over. And these things are somewhat slow. They're not explosive. I've heard it said that in aviation, we need to prioritize safety more. It can't be a managed thermal runaway. It has to be no possibility of a thermal runaway, or at least very small. And I don't think I'd put two and two together that that means energy density is the expense. I think of LFP and automotive as a solution to a price problem. But yeah, to your point, it's most likely also has a better safety track record as well. So I like how you're tying those two together. I hadn't seen that yet. Once I read an analogy, and that was quite nice. So I would like to share that. Think of the battery as an aircraft and the energy inside it as the number of passengers. You can either put more seats. and reduce the aisles so you will have more energy inside the battery but when it comes to getting that energy out it will be slower uh consequently if you have more aisles more gates and you will have less passengers but you can get that energy out quicker interesting so if you look at the lfp battery it is the battery which has more aisles to get the energy out quicker. So you can discharge it at higher C rates without any problem. And if you look at the other high energy density batteries, yes, they pack in more energy, but it's relatively difficult to get it out. Oh, interesting. So energy goes up, but power goes down in a way. Interesting. Oh, I hadn't thought of that. So there's another tradeoff to your point. It's not just safety. There's something I wanted to get into with you around, I still want to get to aluminum. We'll get to it. But another thing that's maybe equally science fiction or works in the lab. I don't mean science fiction. I mean it works in the lab, but we haven't seen it on the runway, would be structural batteries. And I think this probably covers a range of topics from using a rigid battery module as something structural in order to absorb crash dynamics and things like that. But I wonder, could you see something where... I don't know, a wing is made of batteries somehow, you know, or literally the skin of the aircraft were somehow a battery. Like, I don't like imagining things which are not feasible or just totally fanciful. But what do you know in this area? Have you followed much of the sort of structural battery area? What's promising? What seems far out but maybe possible? What do you think? If you look at the batteries that we had, the shape of them, So they were like cuboid. And how do you call it? They were basically like boxes, thin boxes. Pouch cells. Yes, a pouch cell or a prism cell. But now if you look at some of the new layouts that are coming out, they are called the blade batteries. And they are much longer. So they are extended. in their width, you can say. So the aspect ratio in one direction is very long. So it's almost like a wing shape. It has the same aspect ratio as a wing. So given that the new batteries are flatter and longer, you can adjust them easily inside the wings. So they can be a part the structural part they can provide the structural rigidity and we can pack more into the aircraft with a battery that has a form factor like that right right so so that's happening and it's called the blade battery they they designed it so you know in your traditional ev skateboard chassis you would have several of these batteries across the width of the car, but now you have just two of them. Oh, I see. That's, yeah. So they are that long. So with that form factor, you can also put them in an aircraft wing. I think that would be a good... Put in the wing, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they become structural to the wing. They're not... Yeah, I mean, you're certainly not, I don't know. I was almost imagining like a tubular containing cylinder cells or something like that, but the tube being something that was actually structural. But to your point, this blade battery, I'm thinking of it like a longer pouch, almost like a plank of wood. Is it to the point where you could use that as enough structural rigidity for the wing, or do you also have to have whatever components were there? Well, you probably need more to keep the extra weight up now. I guess. Yeah. I suppose you can place them in the wing closer to the fuse lodge, but if you put them further away, you would have to structurally stiffen the wing, which would defeat the purpose. Right. But with these new blade batteries, it's easier to package them into a battery pack compared to the old ones. You have lesser connections. It makes it more reliable. Right. Compared to, because, you know, each time, you have to weld the terminal on top of the battery, there's a point of failure. So with longer batteries, longer and fewer batteries, you have lesser points of failure. Cool. So another question I've got. is like what what's your favorite like i ask everybody what's their favorite aircraft and we'll get to that on the lightning round but um but for you specifically since you've covered so many different things i was just re -watching uh your synergy prime video uh the dbt uh yes and and that that thing is amazing i mean you you've covered so many really interesting concepts the solera 500 and so on like what's what stands out to you is like something that really captures your fascination yeah the synergy Prime is a good candidate for, you can say, a family -size aircraft. But if I were to look at a single -person aircraft, then I like the Pivotal Helix, formerly called Open Air Black 5. And it's the simplicity of that design. It's quite beautiful. All these new eVTOLs have either a tilting wing or a tilting rotor. But it doesn't have that. It just tilts the whole body up. So you've taken out that complexity just by clever design. And it's got eight motors. And the motors are basically the main recipe of their success. Because the motor weight is just two kilograms. And yet it delivers about... over 40 kilograms of trust. Wow. Wow. And they've got eight of them. You know, I sometimes am daydreaming about the scenario where There's a zombie apocalypse. And I got to have, I find myself little black flies hidden somewhere away. And, you know, it helps me to survive. I make these stories up in my mind. So, yeah, that is my one go -to aircraft. It's a shame that, you know, I can't afford it. We'll have to see if we can get them to sponsor your channel. Maybe. That could be fun. But yeah, another point, technical point that it kind of helps that aircraft is that every motor has a battery behind it, battery module right behind it. So they don't have like these bus, you know, these power cables running to every single motor. if you have your battery right behind your motor you essentially eliminate that weight so they've got like eight smaller packs and only the wires that kind of control those you know batteries regarding how much power that has to be delivered those thinner wires go all the way to the controller I didn't realize that. As far as main power wires are concerned, your bus bars are concerned, they sit right behind the motor. So it's a very short path between the battery and the motor. That's where they also save weight. I imagine the control cables would be lighter. Right. So the only cables that you do need are lighter now. Okay. So instead of sort of a single monolithic battery in the fuselage, it's instead distributed batteries. Oh, I didn't realize that. Cool. Yeah, so there are eight of them, so one for every motor. Very cool. Okay, cool. Good answer. Good answer. I like that. So we've kind of come to the present, and we've talked a little bit about my interesting future stuff. Now, I have to ask about aluminum air one more time, though. I'm so glad you mentioned it. I haven't seen you cover it since, so I wondered if maybe you weren't thinking about it again. But you mentioned it earlier, so you have to tell me. What do you think of these? Let me see if I remember how it goes. Something like an iron air battery, it's essentially the process of oxidation in reverse. It can store and generate electricity through the chemical process of air being exposed to the aluminum. What my fuzzy memory took from that that episode, and I wish I'd rewatched it now, is that, uh, essentially you have to completely recycle the materials upon every flight, like that there's no recharging. Yes. So which is why it's maybe, maybe more of why it's better to think of it as a fuel cell because there's no recharging. There's only recycling. But if I remember, there's these companies making these little sort of metal disks that you could sort of easily load into a cell and perhaps easily unload. So, okay, I've done my bad impression of this. Tell me how it really goes and then tell me what you're seeing. Well, basically, you have a bunch of aluminum plates dipped in an electrolyte. And what happens is as the... aluminum oxidizes. It produces electricity and forms aluminum oxide and that kind of breaks away from the plate that you have. It's like a rust that happens. It mixes with the electrolytes. So you have to also flush out, keep flushing out the aluminum oxide. So as more and more power is drawn, these place dissolve away so when you land or when you've done your mission all you have to do is replace them with fresh plates fresh aluminium plates and that's it you're good to go so recharging it is not a problem you have to have some place to kind of you know that recovered aluminum oxide solution that you have remaining. You have to keep that so that you can recycle it. Although that recycling process is energy intensive. But the benefit of that battery is you get four to five times more energy density compared to what you have right now. What about power density? Sorry? Do you still get the power density you need also? We do get the power density with it. So there has been an aircraft in the UK called Swift, and it has flown using that. Wow. So I was to go and see the demonstration for it, but unfortunately it didn't come to fruition. Oh, no. Yeah. But they did manage to fly it. The flight did happen, but I wasn't there to witness and record it. I'm kicking myself because downtown Toronto, over the last two days, Horizon, the company who's making the EVTOL where they close the veins. Is it Cabaret? Yeah. They had the Cabaret X7? mock -up just downtown, like on the street, as part of a celebration for mining and minerals or something. I don't know. A conference, I think. And I'm kicking myself. I wish I'd gone to see it. So I can relate to the feeling you're having about not having been there. But you're saying they did get to fly it, though. That's awesome. Yeah, they did. Okay. Just once? I can't remember the flight time, but it was more than an hour. They were airborne. Wow. That's pretty impressive. One thing you'll see a lot of development is in electric aviation is the two -seater trainer aircraft. So just like the Pipistrel Valis Electro, you'll see at least five or six other aircraft that will join the Pipistrel Valis in the near future. I know for sure there is buy aerospace. They have eFlyer. And why? Because it's quite cheap to run it. So you can charge it up for about under $5 easily. Whereas, you know, for most of the other... you can say similar aircraft like the Cessna 172, you might have to fill high octane for that or F gas, which is, you know, quite more expensive than just five pounds worth of five dollars worth of electricity. Yeah. So it makes economic sense for a lot of trainers, training schools, flight training schools to have that. also the maintenance requirement is pretty low with the engine every now and then you have to send it for servicing and overhaul etc with this one you know you can have motors flying for years without needing anything uh to be done on them right yeah it i i'm definitely seeing it take off on on skyzero .io um the website where where i track this like trainers are definitely the thing which fly the most, right? The Papistrel Velas and Alpha are hands down, like racking up more miles, kilometers, nautical miles, whatever you want to call it, than anything else right now. And to your point, I think they're really catching on. E -Flight Academy in the Netherlands flies these exclusively. Something Aviation in Fresno in California has four of these. um yeah i mean that's just that's the two off top of my head i think there's another one in pit meadows and british columbia there's a lot of different flying schools that are that are going this way yeah it's easier to also get it certified because it's just a conventional aircraft with a motor instead of an engine yep an ic engine yep Well, and to your point, H55 and BRM Aero with the Bristel Energique recently got that certified in not only EASA, but FAA2 now, if I remember right. I think Mosaic helps with that. Or they might have certified it under Part 23. I'll have to check. But yeah, you're starting, to your point, there's definitely a lot of options in that category. And I can see it growing. Yes. What stands in the way of something like aluminum air getting to the next? When you think about what's blocking us, what's holding us back, what comes to mind to you right now? I think it's just awareness. And once it has more eyeballs and people know what it is, a lot of people would just dismiss it. Oh, it doesn't recharge. I don't want to know about it. But they're overlooking the benefits of it. It's very safe. It gives you... three to four times at least more energy for the same amount of weight. You can charge it back up very, very quickly, fill it back up, whatever you want to call it. So I think once there's more awareness around it, then people will start adopting more of it. That's the only hindrance I see. Very cool. You make me want to take a swing at it for sure. So what else do you think is in the future? I mean, we've talked a bit about the present and we've talked a little bit about what's coming next and some of my favorites in terms of aluminum air and structural batteries and so on. But what do you think? What will we see in 10 years, just to pick a number out of a hat? I think we'll see a lot of hybrid aircraft. And the reason we'll see them is because they're the best of both worlds. They make use of the... efficiency that electrical propulsion offers. And also they gave you the range because of the hybrid turbo gen system. So you can have a turbo generator and Rolls -Royce is developing it. There are other companies that are developing it. I think Honda is developing their own. So the idea is to have a turbo generator. That would deliver you all the power you need. And we've seen that they've developed it till the scale of megawatts. So your normal eVTOL, like you can say vertical aerospace or Joby or Archer, they require maximum of 600 kilowatts to fly while they are hovering. So these gensets or turbine generators, sorry, they are in the megawatt scale. So they can provide not 600, but 2 ,500. So even Joby can fly with them. And the good thing about them is they're very light in terms of their power density. They deliver. the pack punch so they deliver a lot of power for electrical power for their weight so what you can you will be seeing in the near future is you we won't be having many pure battery electric aircraft yes they will have their role kind of in maybe four -seater 60 -mile category but if you want to go further like hot aerospace or aviation alice or many others then you might see the turbine generators inside these aircraft that are delivering power to electrical motors rather than engine driven ic engine driven propellers we we will certainly not replace the jet engine in the near future so Any aircraft that use jets, they're still kind of, you know, they will be unhindered by this development. But aircraft that are using small internal combustion engines, Cessna Caravans, for instance, or a smaller plane, general aviation aircraft, I see a lot of changes in the general aviation aircraft category. Got it. So that's the future because, you know, Your internal combustion engine at most can be 25 % efficient, whereas your electric motor goes up to 90, 95 % efficiency. So you're almost more than three times more efficient in energy from your internal, if you compare the internal combustion engine to... electric motor -driven propeller. Clearly. We had Ed Lovelace on the channel last month, and we were talking about just that. And we talked about sort of independent hybrids like the ES30, where you've just got independent propulsion systems. We talked about Ceres, where I think Viridian's going this way, where they're going to have a small turbo generator only if they need it for VFR reserves, or IFR reserves, I should say. And there's other, EL9, for instance, is also a series hybrid where the turbo generator charges the batteries, and the battery then drives the eight distributed propulsors, four on each wing, if I remember. But then he was talking about his Echo Caravan, where they've taken more of a parallel hybrid approach, where essentially the combustion engine is driving the propeller all the time. and they also have electric motors in there. And I think the engineering thinking going into this is to say, okay, if we can have an electric motor to provide maximum thrust at takeoff, right, when we need 100 % power, when throttle goes to 100, then your combustion engine is going to be at max RPM, and also the electric motor will be kicking in at that rate. And this allows us to use a smaller piston engine than we would have, which means that once we do pull back to, say, 70 % for cruise, then that combustion engine won't, it'll be perfectly sized for its job. It will be optimized for the cruise part. And he would go on to make the point, if I understood him correctly, that when you do a parallel hybrid or even a, no, sorry, when you do a series hybrid. You need to charge the battery and you have some small losses there. Inverters aren't perfect. And then to your point, there's a small loss between the battery and the DC motor. If it's a DC motor, small, but not much. And worse, if it's a DC battery and an AC motor, then you also have extra conversion losses. Of course, you can just avoid that mistake. But he would say that the parallel hybrid allows you to not have to worry much about that extra wasted combustion energy. But I'm with you. At the same time, clearly, electrical motors are more efficient in themselves. Clearly. There's no doubt about it. And I think the point he was trying to make is that in a two -prop or one -prop system, which the Echo Caravan is a big single prop, obviously, that the added efficiency is worthwhile. When you get into something like the EL8 or EL9, I should say, with the eight propulsors, no, go series. Because you're not going to put eight... separate combustion engines on it. It just doesn't make any sense. So it was interesting to hear you go in. So are you making the assumption that distributed propulsion then, when you're talking about series hybrids like that, or what do you think? Let's say distributed propulsion, it's obviously all electrical. So you would have, it doesn't make sense to have distributed propulsion with conventional propellers. driven by ice. Although there is one instance where that has been done. It was Howard Hughes with his epic plane back in the early days of aviation. The Spruce Goose, I think it was. Yeah, yeah, okay. So it had multiple propulsors on its wings, and he managed to achieve a liftoff, but it didn't go very far. To take the benefit of the electric motors which are really low weight and provide you massive amount of trust then you you can have either you can have a battery -based systems for that or you can have you know a battery that is backed up by an electric generator or and also one thing that is often comes in the way of a hybrid system is that is the noise that the generator will produce so it depends if you want to have a noisy aircraft or not because once the generator kicks in it will produce its own noise right because it's a turbine generator so if you have a pure electric propulsion system then yes you have no noise yeah that's the advantage for urban you definitely want something more which is battery driven if you can get it to your point yeah that's definitely true okay so this is our future you're definitely expecting more hybrids i think you're right uh i will say i'm looking forward to maybe getting to jet based hybrids down the road but that's probably there's a number of materials challenges to solve before we can do that can i ask something you're most proud of either in your career so far with ground -based vehicles, if I remember right, or with the channel? Like, yeah, what are you most proud of? I think I did a video called Batteries for Electric Propulsion. And I was contacted by the FAA. And they asked me if they could use that as training material for their program. So, yeah, I was proud about that. So I always wanted to contribute to the aviation world. It's such a passion of mine. So, you know, when they asked me that, I was really delighted over the moon about it. That's amazing. That's amazing. So, like, when you're getting onboarded there or going to a program, that's too cool. I have to mention this, though, that, you know, the FAA. is behind in this new mode of propulsion. They are more reactive than proactive. Whereas in China, we see something, you know, totally vice versa. So over there, they're helping out the regulatory body is helping out there. EV tool and electric plane manufacturers and giving them the tools and leeway they need. Whereas over here, I would say they're at least one year behind the development. So that's why certification is a challenge. And it will be for aircraft like Joby and Archer and others. that follow this route. Yeah, for sure. It seems to me that EASA and maybe UK's CAA are in the middle. They're not supporting it as much as China is. I mean, that's amazing. They're all kind of sitting on the fence with this one. And they're not really embracing this technology. Sometimes I feel that they're waiting for something bad to happen and then they'll say, oh, we want to close the chapter on this one. We don't want to go that route. I get the feeling sometimes that's the case. It may not be. But yeah, they should embrace this technology because this is the way the world will go. And, you know, with destination zero and you want to go low emissions by 2050, this is a way that provides you the way that will take you there. I think one of the things that you've done that's inspiring me the most just this moment is the solar cargo. Anything I think we can do that takes trucks off the road in terms of moving cargo around could be very impactful, right? I mean, and it may be a while before we have something that can carry 300 passengers across the Atlantic Ocean. That may be a while. But man, if we can start to take trucks off the road with something like that, that could be amazing. Yeah, one thing that is quite interesting and it's happening in the solar energy world is that the energy efficiency is climbing for solar cells. So if you remember the planet impulse, solar impulse that happened in 2015, it was an aircraft that circumnavigated the globe with just solar energy and it flew day and night. So the... Cells that were on it were about 23 % efficient. Right. The cells that are now available are about 30 % efficient. Right. Right. So straight away, you have a 7 % efficiency advantage. And they're saying with triple junction solar cells, you can go up to 40. 40 % efficiency. 40 % of the sun's energy would be converted into electricity. That means you'll have more power. The solar impulse went very slowly. It was a very slow aircraft. I think it did about 50 miles an hour, 60 miles an hour. And that was because it was so large. Its wingspan was that of 747. if you can make the aircraft more compact you have more power per unit area you can go faster and that will make the design more practical there have been many aircrafts that have used solar energy and i think there is the stratoflyer that was developed in switzerland that flew there there's the um there's the e -flyer again in usa that did coast to coast uh on solar energy yep yep solar impulse so Once you take this development in the world of solar cells on board on your plane, so you have about 40 % efficiency cells on top, you have more power at your disposal, you can make a smaller plane that goes faster, and you can use it to deliver payloads. You can have autonomous aircraft that will be doing your mid -mile logistics. Right. Right. If you don't have to carry, you know, 100 kilograms of pilot and how many kilograms of safety system and everything else. Yes, exactly. Pressurized cabin, you know, all of a sudden that can all be cargo instead. Yes, exactly. So, yeah, I think UAM and solar in combination have got a really interesting future. What about something you've learned? Is there something that you thought was true when you started this journey that you have since realized wasn't? wasn't what you thought? Any learnings like that? I had a lot of faith in many battery chemistries and that have never come to fruition. I thought that when I started the channel that lithium cell for battery, this is it. This is what we need. But again, it has got its own challenges. Although, even though it was providing like 400 watt hour per kilogram 10 years back. I think it still provides that, but it had some inherent safety and life cycle issues. The other thing is solid state batteries. So I've been hearing this, that they are just around the corner, just around the corner. And that didn't happen. A couple of disappointments that I had was with Lilium. I really like the design. Yeah. But unfortunately, I don't know what their current state is, but I don't think they're very financially stable right now. Right. If I remember right. Volocopter got acquired by the same company that owns Diamond. But I think, yeah, I don't think anything good has come for Lilium yet. There's been a couple of buyers who've come out of the woodwork, but then not done anything. So yeah. And one thing that I used to think in a certain way, but that thinking has changed. I saw a comment once on Lilium and it was that Things that have a low, very high disk loading, which Lilium had, means it had a high number of small propulsors, right? And Volocopter had that too. Several propulsors, but small disk area, you can say. Right. Any aircraft like that would consume tremendous amount of power to get off the ground. Right. He was an aeronautical engineer who had been in the field for a long time. And he said that Lilium will never take off the ground because it has some inherent design problems. And at the moment, I thought, no, you know, it will definitely because I've seen the flight happen and I've seen the test flights and, you know. So it's definitely and I wanted that person to be proven wrong. But unfortunately, it wasn't to be. Yeah. So this is conventional wisdom that he has learned over the years. Yeah. That if you have rotors that are large and they push down air slowly, you require a lot less power to get your lift. Got it. Compared to. several small propulsors. That requires too much power. Any startup, when I see any new design, now I gauge that design based on the disk area or the disk loading. And that gives you a clue if it's going to fly or not. Interesting. Cool. Cool. Okay. I will bring us into our lightning round. And so this is meant to be the same couple of questions that I ask everybody. And I asked you earlier what your favorite aircraft was, and I think that's very much, and you mentioned the Pivotal. So you can use that again if you want, but I'll ask you again. What's your favorite aircraft? Let me go back to this and see if I can find another one, another favorite of mine. The Jetson one, I really like it because Although it's just a drone with a person sitting in between. But in terms of, I feel like flying it is quite fun because it's very responsive. It's very compact. You feel like, just like in a go -kart, you feel like you're out there. So Jetson One is another favorite of mine, you can say. It's very simple. Yeah, the flight time isn't great. And safety -wise, perhaps a lot of people would say that they don't like the sight of open blades and an open cockpit. But I see that, you know, it's very responsive. They often release videos. And I think they released a recent one where they're going around obstacles. I don't think the Pivotal Helix would be able to do that. It's not very responsive. There's a delayed response with that. But Jetson One was able to do that. So in terms of pure flying fun, I would opt for Jetson One. Nice. Okay, what about a favorite airport? I really like the Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. I think it's quite nice. I've traveled from there at least a few times. And Dubai used to be my favorite airport before that. Yeah, I was a frequent flyer. I frequently fly using Emirates, but I think it's become very pricey. So I can't afford it now. Yep. Everybody agreed with you. I'm pushing the prices up. Okay. One more, and this one is more personal to you or just your interest in general. Is there anything you want to give a shout out to? Anything you want to, maybe it's content you made that you're really happy about or excited about, or maybe it's content somebody else made that you're really loving. Any shout outs? I like Real Engineering channel. I think they do really good videos. Mustard. I really like them. But these are big channels already. They, you know, they don't want my shout out probably. But yeah, they do inspire me to make more videos. And they spend quite a lot on their graphic design. Yep. Yep. On their graphics, which I don't, you know, my, my videos are pretty grounded, I would say compared to them. But yeah, I do. Follow those channels. Yeah, no, I agree on both of those. Who's the guy that's often doing stuff about bridges? I want to say his name is Grady, and I don't think it's real engineering. He's similar to real engineering. He covers more stuff than just bridges, but I think he was a hydrological engineer, so I think that's what his sort of speciality is, is dams and bridges and this kind of thing. Yeah, I'll have to look up the title. But yeah, that's one of my favorites right now too. Well, Haroon, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate you making time to come on and talk to us about electrified aviation. This is great. Thanks for having me. It was a joy to speak to you. Okay. You're very knowledgeable as a host, which helps. Yeah, you're being kind. But yeah, thank you. Appreciate the company.

Ed Lovelace is a CTO and VP of Engineering at Ampere, a really interesting electrified propulsion aircraft company. You might know them from the Electric Eel, an electrified Cessna Skymaster, or from the Echo Caravan, a hybrid powertrain -based grand caravan. Ed has 30 -plus years of new product development and commercialization experience, leading tech and engineering on air, land, and sea. He led electrification technology at Aurora Flight Sciences and at Boeing Next, and he led commercial engine controls development at GE Aviation. Dr. Lovelace is a U .S. Department of Transportation Eisenhower Fellow in Transportation Research with degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering from MIT, and he's chair of the SAE E -40 Electrified Propulsion Aircraft Standards Committee. And this is the very first episode of the Sky Zero podcast. Okay, so Ed, we just read off your bio, and it talks about air, land, and sea, which I loved that part. That was a lot of fun. So yeah, I'm hoping you can tell us a little bit about yourself and your background, and I think you have to explain that. Tell me about air, land, and sea. Yeah, sure. Absolutely. I started my career working for GE Aviation, and that was where I quickly learned that Sort of the transformation to electrify lots of different things, especially in the mobility area, was really one of the key things that was grabbing me intellectually from my career. After six years with GE Aviation, working on commercial certification of jet engines, I then went on to graduate school. and a series of startups that were really all about electrification, whether it was for underwater electrified unmanned vehicles or hybrid electric and fully electric ground vehicles, both military and commercial, and also some consumer work. And then most recently, really returning back to aviation over the last eight years. Cool. Cool. You've had a heck of a journey. And so it sounds like you knew you were in the electrified path really early, too. Like, I'm almost jealous. I don't think I realized I was obsessed with that until maybe 10 years ago. So it sounds like you beat me by a bit. Yeah. So, I mean, of course, I'm aging myself here. But, you know, back in 1988, when I started with GE here in Massachusetts, like I said, I was working on controls for commercial. jet engines and it became pretty clear when I started to get involved in some of the advanced R &D activities we were starting to look at you know now that digital controls and magnetics and high voltage semiconductor switches were becoming more robust and higher reliability what were sort of the next opportunities in terms of aviation and they were all about electrification. At that stage, it was, I'd say, relatively simple stuff like using digital controls to have more complex or tuned startup sequences for the gas turbine engine, which would allow them to have a more efficient compressor design. that would install on startup. But with some of the advanced R &D groups I was working both with directly at GE Aviation and also with their global research center, we were starting to look around the corner at what's next. And one of the first electrification projects I worked on was a high temperature direct drive starter generator for a gas turbine that was being developed for a military tank. And that then led into some graduate research back at MIT. And then it was kind of off to the races after that. Cool. Awesome. Yeah. A heck of a career. So how did you end up at Ampere? Yeah. So I had been at a commercial hybrid electric truck bus and shuttle company, XL Fleet, where I had taken them from. the first two bands on the road with Coca -Cola and Pepsi to delivering at a rate of a thousand vehicles a year here in North America. And we were closing in on our D round funding. And I got a call from one of my friends at Aurora Flight Sciences about some of the new sort of bleeding edge projects they were doing in electrification. And at that point, Aurora was It was still a private company. And I said, hey, for the first half of my career, I've done a lot of one -off prototypes, bleeding edge type of technology. In this second half of my career, I'm really more focused on new product development. So how can we leverage technology that's emerging to actually get something into the marketplace? And then a few months later, Aurora got acquired by Boeing. And then I said, well, now that's kind of interesting because now you have the resources to really turn all of these great ideas into commercial products. So I ended up moving back into aviation, working for Aurora for three years until, you know, they had some of their financially challenging times and they decided to shut down the Boeing Next activity. And at that point, I had a couple of colleagues contact me that used to work at Boeing and were doing some work with Ampere. They said, hey, Ampere is looking for a new CEO. Cool. And they're developing the solution for. hybrid electric aviation. And I heard a little bit more about it. And I said, well, it sounds like exactly what I did with the hybrid electric truck company, but with wings. So I was like, nice. It's funny. I don't know if you've seen my, I'm doing an article series about, you know, electrification lessons from the automotive world. And the next one I'm tackling is all about the hybrids and how all that's going to work. So I'm really glad that we get to have this conversation now. But yeah, I keep thinking about like, it is the same. And then you're like, wait a minute. regen only while landing so you know there's enough similarities and enough differences yeah yeah and that's exactly right there there are some things that are distinctly different but there's a lot of common underpinnings yep for sure cool so your role as a company cto so yeah what would you say you guys are trying to do what's your mission there at ampere Yeah, so I do like to use our mission statement quite a bit because I do think it's quite powerful. And Amp Air's mission is to become the world's most trusted developer of practical and compelling electrified aircraft. Nice. And those have all of kind of the key words that have brought me to Amp Air and keep me excited about what we're doing day to day. Trusted. meaning something that is safe for the marketplace that we can develop with the FAA to get it commercialized and certified. Practical and compelling. Compelling being something that has meaningful advancements and benefits over the current state of the art. Something different, either enabling a new way of travel or doing something more efficiently or cost effectively. And practical. something that we can get into the marketplace this decade. And so those are all the things that drove me here. And really the key mission that our whole team is focused on is bringing the first hybrid electric aircraft to the commercial marketplace. And in our case, that launch product is going to be the hybrid electric Cessna Caravan. Delivered to the marketplace as a supplemental type certified product. Awesome. Awesome. When I think about the Grand Caravan, I think about cargo, but obviously it can do passengers too. I mean, do you know like what missions and use cases and markets you want to tackle first? Yeah, both of those. You know, cargo is definitely a pretty natural one because of the low... fuel consumption of the hybrid electric caravan. It becomes very interesting for some of the longer routes that are used on cargo applications. But we also have a number of customers in the passenger market as well, because this is something that can be dropped into any existing operator's network. with really no barriers to introduction, it becomes a solution for passenger as well. Nice. How should I think about it? Sometimes when I think about you guys, it's almost like a propulsion company, like the way Rolls -Royce sells propulsion to Boeing. But it seems like it's more than that. And your mission statement also talks about it in terms of delivering aircraft. How should I think about you guys that way? You should think about us and really a number of the companies that are in the electrified aviation space. as breaking the traditional boundaries between a traditional propulsion company and a traditional aircraft company. One of the other hats I wear is I chair the SAE E40 Electrified Propulsion Standards Committee. And at the very formation of that, everyone with expertise who came to the table was either coming from a traditional aircraft OEM, a traditional tier one propulsion supplier. And then there were these other groups that started to join that were coming from the automotive supply chain world, or maybe it was an electrified aircraft startup that was just forming. And it became pretty clear early on that a lot of the solutions companies were looking at really sort of blur that boundary right and uh you know the easy one is is the whole ev tall case where you're talking about multi -rotor systems that are not just propulsion they are flight control systems right right and and so uh when you talk about traditional gas turbine propulsion companies yes there's a high level of specialized expertise on a very complex device, which is a commercial gas turbine. And it sort of naturally created an expertise boundary and a very small set of companies that could execute that, do the manufacturing, which requires high precision lines, and do all of the inspection and maintenance and service systems that will allow that to succeed in the commercial marketplace. All of those doors have really been cracked. uh with the advent of electrified aviation uh you've got supply chain coming in from the automotive world still got to meet aviation safety standards right but you're you're when you talk about a propulsion motor an electric propulsion motor something with about 12 parts right as compared to a gas turbine Right. Which are exceedingly complex. Proof that our species is capable of very complicated things. Yeah. But that doesn't mean we should do it forever. Yeah, for sure. Right. Now, that still doesn't mean that, you know, we aren't a propulsion company. Now, the core technology that is part of our launch product is the amp drive, which is integrated parallel hybrid powertrain. And that is the core new piece that we are bringing to the marketplace as part of our first product. But what we are going to sell as a product is a complete upgrade kit. As I said, that's part of an SDC product. And we will be responsible for managing the installation, maintenance, and the support for that whole installation kit. Right. Got it. It's funny, I was watching this Sandy Munro YouTube video, and you're talking about the automotive world, so I feel like it's fair game to bring him in. He's this sort of automotive engineer that does a lot of like... electric car teardowns you know and he'll like tear apart the battery pack and be like they shouldn't have done it this way they should have done that uh and not just the battery pack he'll tear everything down but he was interviewing the folks over at harbor air about their dhc the beaver the e -beaver there yeah and you know just listening to at least for the first version obviously right this this this won't be a production version but oh well you know we've got to have an oil system for the propeller and a separate oil system for the engine and oh the engine used to do both now what are we gonna to do and so you sort of end up with a lot of like stuff in the passenger cabin that used to be didn't need it at all or it was hidden away somewhere so when when i think about you guys selling these kits like it sounds like there could be a fair amount of engineering for folks to do maybe the caravan lends itself to this in a way that i'm not getting though like how how how's that going to work yeah uh there are already hundreds of stc products for um part 23 aircraft and the caravan you know may even have the most that are available out there some of them are powertrain upgrades some of them are other aero mods or other uh interior mods so this really just fits into that very similar category got it of course for our audience that's a brand new tech the abbreviation for our audience stc Supplemental type certificate. Got it. There we go. So a normal aircraft that gets certified is a type certificated aircraft. Yep. That's when you're doing a clean sheet design. When you're just doing a modification to an existing product, it's an STC. Got it, got it, got it. Okay, so this sort of fits into that from a regulatory perspective. That's right. Yeah, cool. Still, a lot of engineering challenges to tackle. Oh yeah, so the kit is not just the powertrain. The kit is the amp drive hybrid powertrain, the amp pack high voltage lithium battery pack, high voltage distribution, some modifications to the fuel system, and some modifications to the flight deck and a new propeller. Got it. Okay, cool. So quite extensive. Nice. Yeah. Nice. Okay. Is it the eel because 337, which is of course like internet leapspeak for eel? Yes. Yes. You got it. Okay. But, uh, you know, as many sort of double meanings as we can, uh, jam in there, we will. So, you know, an eel is also a, uh, potentially an electric animal. So, you know, that's another potential meaning of it. But yes, you got the 337. Nice, nice. OK, cool. So I'm assuming that that one was like a market test, you know, something that, you know, give it a proving ground. But it wasn't necessarily meant to go to production. That's exactly right. So, yeah, for your audience, we have three experimental aircraft that we're flying right now. We have two hybrid electric Skymasters and one. hybrid electric caravan. As you just pointed out, the Skymasters, our current intention is that those are used for market development and as a test bed for advanced technology. For those unfamiliar with the Skymaster, it's two -prop inline push -pull configuration. It's honestly ideal as a flying test bed. because um the configuration of that hybrid is a little bit different than the caravan so the caravan is like you know a classic integrated parallel unit that that might be in a prius or any plug -in hybrid electric vehicle nominally driving one of the axles in your car right um the skymaster which has a prop in the front and a prop in the back along the center body of the aircraft We configure that as what we call a independent parallel system. Right, right. So the analogy to a car is if you had a gas engine driving one axle and an electric motor driving the other axle. Right. The advantage, though, is we can test out some of our new technology on the electric prop system of the Skymaster. And if it shuts off during flight, we still have symmetric thrust. Because the gas powered engine is still in line center in the aircraft. Right. And you still have plenty of power for safety of flight. Right. You don't have to suddenly like yaw the plane considerably in order to go straight. Yeah. And if you look at some of the flying test beds that are being developed for larger aircraft, you know, they either have to substitute one of the winged engines for the experimental engine. Or if you go all the way up to transport class, sometimes they have a... a pylon sticking out of the side of the fuselage. Right, right, right, right. Yeah. Well, I'm thinking the Zero Avia did that with the hydrogen on one side and the original, I think it was a Pratt & Whitney on the other. But to your point, yeah. I mean, like when Boeing does this, it'll be a pylon. Yes. Yep. It'll be just sticking out the side. Yeah. Well, and of course, the other that comes to mind is Volt Aero with their Casio One, also using the Skymaster. I think they put gas in the back and electric on the two pylons. On our two Skymasters, in one of... them the electric prop is in the front and the other the electric prop is in the back oh okay uh the only the major reason for that is is just for center of gravity because in one of those aircraft uh the one we use for market survey that we call our hawaii bird the battery is located in a cargo pod below the fuselage So with that forward weight, we want the heavier gas engine in the back. Got it. Okay. In the other one, the ARPE Bird, which we use, again, for R &D purposes, in that one, we've made the battery pack more accessible in the rear of the main cabin. And so then in that case, we put the heavier gas engine in the front. Got it. So what kind of challenges have you faced? I mean, I mentioned a couple of guesses that I've got, but like when you think back about the challenges you faced and what learning curves you guys have had to climb, like what comes up for you? Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of the typical things that are small business challenges. which is really deciding what's the most urgent and important investments we need to make and being able to break down our project into incremental milestones where we can hit a successful point before moving on to the next one. So really structuring our programs in that way that we can sort of sequentially start with commercial off -shelf equipment and move to modified commercial equipment. then finally move to the Amp Air custom equipment that's more towards commercial intent. So really structuring those programs has been a bit of a Rubik's Cube effort over the years. But I think overall, we've done pretty well with that. We do have some worldwide supply chain. So the other challenges we face are really mundane things like metric parts and fittings and making sure that we have a compatible supply chain. Right, right. Oh, gosh. Wow. Okay. Yeah, I can only imagine that's a fair number of design challenges there for sure. Sorry, I don't mean to drag us back to the hybrid propulsion, but I've got a couple more questions there. So the assumption I make when you talk about the parallel hybrid propulsion, I'm imagining that we're using both during takeoff, right? And I come to this from a software background, and I'm learning as much as I can about aviation as I go. The assumption I make is that means that we can have a somewhat smaller sized piston in order to use less power. And hopefully that helps with like cruise efficiency. But I don't know, like help me out with understanding that better. Yeah, you're exactly right. So there's a few ways you can configure a hybrid in terms of its operational scenario. You can do what you just said, which is exactly the way the caravan. is planned to operate uh you use blended propulsion for 100 power on takeoff and climb and then when a pilot pulls the throttle back to cruise uh you're running at a high efficiency point for the downsized uh jet a engine that's part of the hybrid power plant yep and that's how you really eliminate the payload range challenges that you have with with an all -electric is by using uh a jet a power plant uh that's very efficient for um the the main range operation yep now you the other way you can architect a hybrid of course which has been done in some ground vehicles is as a range extender so the difference there is that your electrification portion so your your electric traction motor has got to be fully rated sufficiently to run all electric for all of your peak and average events. You also, if you're running this as a range extender, you are typically putting in a larger battery and then using gas for just longer trips. So that's the classic example there is your Chevy Volt. Right, right. Chevy Volt, the BMW i3, the sort of REX range extenders. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. I will tell you this. So I worked in that sector for such a long time and had a chance to meet a lot of executives in Detroit who had tried out our hybrid electric commercial product. And I can tell you from talking to some of them, they all know that for most use cases, A hybrid designed for blended propulsion is the more efficient solution from an energy use standpoint. Use battery for what it's good for, for the peak power events. Use a gas burning engine for what it's best at, which is constant rated power capability. But the challenge in the automotive industry is the sales challenge. Right. And the consumer market. really wanted all electric range. So a lot of those vehicles got architected so they could have. small electric range. Well, and when I think about like the i3 and the Volt, I think the Volt cheated a little bit and used parallel at high speeds, like over 70 mile an hour or something. But other than that, yes, it was serious. But I think of it as like a tipping point where did batteries get to a certain specific energy or volume? Well, it was probably by volume when the automotive weight is not as important an automotive as it is in aviation. But I wonder if there was like a tipping point where all of a sudden it was like, okay, we can do 200 miles, you know, and the Model S comes out. And like, I was looking back over the history and the Model S came out sort of like shortly after the i3 Rex. And it was almost like, oh, you could have just done it that way, you know, but you probably couldn't have until you could, right? So do you see like a tipping point moment like that for aviation? Do we need like 600 amp hours per kilogram? Like, what do we need to hit that? So it's a very interesting topic and one that I talk about quite a bit in some of the public events that I speak at. I was just speaking at a battery seminar this summer where I went through exactly the trade -off that you're talking about. The mountain to climb for aviation is much bigger and it has some different constraints. But you're exactly right. In the automotive sector, once... We hit the point where we could get 300 miles range in most environmental conditions in a decent sized car that had less than a $10 ,000 premium. That was really kind of the tipping point. The one remaining challenge for automotive, of course, is the refuel time or the turnaround time. For the vast majority of trips, though. 300 miles or a little bit less in cold weather is a non -issue and you can charge overnight sufficiently to have a ready car the next day. So it's a fantastic solution for that. Charging is getting better. My Ioniq 5 charges in like 18 minutes, but they don't all do that. So that's fair. I hear you. And that becomes more of an infrastructure barrier unless you're doing it at home. True enough. Yeah. To your point, I know not everybody that's doing parallel electrics is thinking about doing charging. Maybe there's, you know, some would argue, I think Horizon is not planning on doing it at all, which makes sense. I mean, where do you guys sit on this? I mean, should I think of it like the mild hybrid, the early Prius, or is this like a plug -in hybrid? How should I think about that part? So it has some characteristics of a Prius, and it has some characteristics of a charge -depleting plug -in hybrid. So like a Prius, we use electric power and the energy from the battery for the peak power events. So all of the humps, which in a flight are primarily at the beginning on takeoff and climb, are served by the energy from the battery. So in that way, it's like a Prius. The way it's like a plug -in hybrid is it is charge depleted. So during that takeoff and climb, you are depleting the battery down to a lower state of charge. Now, like a plug -in hybrid, and most people either aren't aware of it or don't use it, in most plug -in hybrids, there's a switch in the center console where you can set it to triple charge your battery when you're on the highway. Right. And what happens there is you're putting out a little bit more power from the gas engine and operating the electric machine as a generator to trickle charge the battery so that when you're at the end of your trip, you've got a full battery. So that's exactly the way we've architected a hybrid caravan. And that's why there are no barriers for deployment in an existing aircraft fleet. They don't need to wait. for charging stations to be implemented at an airport. They can put this anywhere in their cargo or passenger fleet and it has more range. than the conventional aircraft that they're currently operating. Yep. I want to thank you for not saying it's infrastructure. You're not infrastructure dependent. I've heard people use that term, meaning you don't have to install a charger. And I get it. It's slightly more complicated than that. Your airport might need to upgrade to a larger electrical connection. It's more than just a charger. But when I hear people put it that way, it almost feels like they're... trying to suggest that it'll never make sense, which, I don't know, it just seems short -sighted. So thank you for not putting it that way. I'm glad. No, but just think, if you've got, you know, a fleet of these aircraft operating at a regional airport and they're successfully taking a lot of the passenger load, now the airport and the either public or private organization that owns that airport has more incentive to start investing in infrastructure to grow there. That's right. Otherwise, you're asking them to take a gamble before the aircraft come that they should spend the money on putting infrastructure in. Yep. So it's funny. I was talking to a cousin the other day who flies for British Airways. I think he's flying like 321 XLRs or something. And I got to talking to him and thinking about like, yeah, well, we're probably going to see like hybrid dual aisles and single aisles. And at some point I realized, wait a minute. Kyle, you're inferring that you would hybrid a jet engine. And I started to look it up. I guess NASA has a high -tech program, H -Y -T -E -C, where they're looking at doing just that. But dealing with the heat coming off of a proper jet turbine instead of just a piston engine, to your point, all that automotive goodness comes in. Because it's a piston engine, I assume. Have you looked at the other side of it, like being able to do hybrid with jets? What's your take? I mean, is that going to be a thing? I think that's definitely going to be a thing. And I was just at NASA actually a couple of times over the summer. discussing some of the electrified propulsion projects that they've been supporting over the last years. While some of the bigger investments have been towards Part 25, so the transport class aircraft, one of the points that I was stressing is that, yes, eventually this is all going to make its way to multi -megawatt gas turbine. powered aircraft. We really have to have a portfolio approach right now and help get these Park 23 aircraft into the marketplace because everything that we are commercializing for Park 23, the electric machinery, the power electronics, the control systems, the high voltage batteries, those are all going to be relevant. for the larger aircraft in larger scale, of course. Right. I just think about them as being very hot places. I suppose a piston engine is too, but it just seems like it's inherently more difficult. I think the NASA page literally had a picture of an engineer like... I don't know, with a blowtorch or something, like raising a, you know, a plate that was meant to be like not a cooling plate, but, you know, in order to protect like a firewall. And they were raising it to like 3000 C or something. And I'm like, yeah, that seems like that's the kind of challenge we're going to have to solve to do this. Yeah. Well, the reason I'm smiling a bit about that is I worked on exactly those kinds of projects in the first half of my career when I was doing, you know, bleeding edge prototype work. I had several projects working on. completely oil -free gas turbine system for unmanned aircraft. So that used a combination of magnetic and air bearings with embedded starter generators that were capable of operating at over a thousand degrees C. And yes, we made a lot of sort of incremental component level advancements in that area. All of those things largely driven by material limits. They've still got a ways to go before you're going to see them in any kind of commercial horizon. But it's there. The ideas are there. The proof of concept prototypes. Uh, some of them have been, have been executed. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Okay. So that is one of our possibilities way forward. What else do you, I mean, SAF, people talk about it a lot and I expect it's probably part of the solution too, but, but nevermind what I think, what do you, where do you think the industry's going? Like, what are we, what are we going to see in 10 years? Yeah. So I tend to think about, uh, not, not focusing on maybe one thing that, that is going to win, going to be. marketplaces for a number of different solutions. You know, SAF has a scale issue right now and a feedstock issue right now. So it needs to be green SAF, needs to get to scale, needs to get to a price point that makes sense. But as an example, if you compare it to hydrogen, it likely has fewer miracles that need to happen than hydrogen does. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying abandon hydrogen. I'm a big believer in continuing to fund R &D in that activity. But it's got some big challenges to get to commercial scale and commercial price point and be a green solution. The way Amp Air looks at that is we're ready for all fuel sources. Our hybrid powertrain, we've already tested with 100 % SAF. So when SAF does get to that scale, we'll be ready. A lot of the electrification platform equipment we're going to be commercializing can tie into a high voltage bus supplied by a fuel cell. So when that's available and it makes sense, we'll be ready for that. Now, what do I think the time horizon is for each of these things? I usually try to flip that question as well and say it's not so much a time horizon as it is a funding horizon. These are going to take some pretty massive investments in terms of dollars to get to scale and a price point where the major airlines are going to adopt it en masse rather than... demonstration projects. It seems to me that when I think about scaling and SAF, I mean, to your point about feedstock, there's not enough cooking oil in the world to power our current appetite for international travel. That's not how this is going to go. I read something the other day about Wizz Air buying up biological waste. So I think poop is the right word. And maybe that's a feedstock, you know, and as a species and as a set of species, we do create a lot of that. So maybe, maybe, apologies for the scatological references there, but, you know, it might be a solution. But yeah, I mean, when I think about the hydrogen side, it does seem like hydrogen's one party trick is that it carries more energy per kilogram than even jet fuel does. But its kryptonite is that it's tiny, and it wants to leak out of everything, and it really does not like to be compressed into any sort of reasonable amount of space. I think I did the math the other day, and I'm not an aviation engineer. I'm not even a mechanical engineer. But what would it take to... to even like a reasonable amount of hydrogen would be like an eight meter circular tank or something like this to do like a 737 across the ocean. You know, I'm not asking you to literally do the math, but is that sort of scale? Where would you put that? How am I going to get to the bathroom if there's this eight meter giant sphere in the middle of this aircraft? Can't put it in the back because when it empties, the airplane's going to tip. So I don't, I'm not, it does seem like there's some tough challenges out there, but. Yeah, you do need a reimagined aircraft design for some of these larger transport class aircraft. But as you say, its energy content per weight is great. It does have a volume problem. Depending on whether you're using liquid or gaseous hydrogen, you're still talking about a 3x to 6x volume or more issue. So you do have to reimagine how an aircraft is designed. You know, if you're stuck with sticking with tube and wing, then you're going to be using a portion of the main fuselage or extending it along an underbelly, maybe some of the cargo area, or you're doing pods on the wings. These are your avenues if you stick with tube and wing. Now, if you go to some of the more blended wing designs, then you have other opportunities for how to house it. But it's a volume challenge for sure. I guess spherical tank is probably out of the running as well at that rate. But yeah, well, maybe several smaller ones. I don't know if anyone is trying that. Yeah, yeah. That's a fair point. Maybe that's a straw figure argument. Yeah. Okay, cool. But I do want to go back to a question you asked probably 30 minutes ago. but that I didn't end up answering, which is, you know, is hybrid transitory? Are we going to get battery electric? We talked about how we hit the tipping point for ground vehicles, but the tipping point for aviation is much more significant. You know, whereas you said, and I agree, ground vehicles, they really had a volume issue. They needed to get 300 miles range in a skateboard format. Once they got there, And the price made sense. It was good. Aviation has a significant weight challenge. Today, today's, you know, let's call it Tesla Model S density of batteries. You are in the call it 200 to 250 watt hours per kilo range. At that case, you are about 20 to 25 to one. even including the differences in powertrain efficiency compared to jet A. Let's say you get all the way up to the RPE target of a thousand watt hours per kilo. If you get there, you've improved it by a factor of up to five, or you've taken a 25 to one down to a five to one. You've still got a five to one weight difference compared to jet A. So hybrid is going to be in aviation. not as some kind of short -term transitory solution, but it's going to be here for decades. And eventually it'll be a hybrid with SAF, but for now it's going to be hybrid with Jetta. Yep. Yeah, I'm with you. Well, and I think that's why I'm looking forward towards the, you know, electrified, you know, jet engines. You know, if we're going to imagine a double aisle anytime soon, like, or maybe I'm just counting pistons. Like, do you think it's right to make that leap towards electrified jets to get to like your... A380 or even the 320? There are some interesting reimaginings of how the propulsion system is architected that can get you into somewhat larger aircraft. But if you're talking 737, then yes, you're going to be talking a very efficient gas turbine that's enhanced with electrification. As you've seen, there's a number of companies have put out vision vehicles with distributed electric propulsion along the wing. That could still be part of a transport class hybrid electric solution where you have a gas turbine power plant in the center tail section that is supplementing the battery pack to drive. the distributed electric propulsors fair point i'm i'm like insisting that it be parallel when that need not be true to you to the point you made earlier on independent like a heart aerospace very much independent you know i think they're looking at pt -6s plus like electric uh in addition to the pratt and whitney's there um right so okay or or electra era with the the wind blown wing uh for for your lift power there right so okay yeah there's there's a trade -off though when you do that So I'm pretty agnostic. There's applications where series works, where integrated parallel is the right solution, or where independent parallel is the right solution. It sort of depends what some of your constraints or objectives are. But the one thing you have to remember when you do go to a series hybrid electric is that you've got a number of efficiency hits between the jet A source and the propulsion end. When you go series hybrid electric, you've got the thermal efficiency of your power plant. Then you've got an electric machine and a piece of power electronics to get to the high voltage DC distribution. And another piece of power electronics, then another electric machine. And all of that impacts your fuel economy from the jet A source. I'd argue the biggest one is the engine. But yes, you're right. Inverters are not like 90 % is maybe as much as you're going to get. To your point, you've got to put it in a battery, take it back out of battery. Yeah, I'm with you. So we tend to think once you're beyond an aircraft design that is using more than four propulsors, then going series makes sense. Well, but I think by going independent, I'm avoiding the series versus parallel dichotomy. I mean, that's one tradeoff, right, is to go from that to series. But like what Hart's doing is like literally just saying, OK, we're going to be all electric, but we're also going to put two more props on the thing that are powered entirely by a jet turbine, you know, a turbo prop. And they're not bothering with like, it's like you said earlier with the independent hybrid, you know, instead of parallel or series, independent allows all sorts of different configurations. Yeah. One of the advantages that solution has is a regulatory one. um because you have a certified thermal engine yep you don't have to touch that when you're doing the independent parallel yeah um it has it does have some other operational challenges that you need to get around but you know, these are all trade -offs. One more place I want to go is into certification. I'm glad you mentioned it. I mean, I don't want to like, where are you in terms of your timelines? I don't mean that. I mean, if you want to share, go ahead. But I think more interestingly is like, what have you learned through the certification process? It's designed to learn, I assume, you know, for you guys and for the regulatory body. What kind of learnings have come out of that? The certification is the common challenge that all of the electrified aviation aviation companies have. This is also something I talk about at events quite often. Currently, the market size is zero. I'm not so worried about another company taking all of the market share today. But the thing that we all have in common is getting through the certification process. And again, for those of the listeners who are unfamiliar with it, the regulations for aircraft certification. really didn't imagine electrified propulsion. Fuel cells, hybrid electric, fully electric, that's not written into the regulations anywhere. In fact, if you look through the regulations in detail, you can see places where gas turbine regulations have been stitched on top of reciprocating engine regulations over the decades right uh the regulations have really grown organically with the industry different different aircraft have been uh proposed for the market so the point though is uh the way all of the companies who are trying to go through the get certified and go through the process dealing with this is the FAA has a method, which is the special conditions, where any topic that is relevant for a design type cert that is not covered by the existing regulations, it's handled in a special condition. That is a negotiation between the applicant and the FAA. Once there's agreement there, that special condition topic is published in the Federal Register. There's a public comment period. And then the FAA comes back with responses to all of the public comments. And then you have a final special condition. Every company that's going to get to the finish line is likely going to have to go through that process. Now, like I said, it's applicant by applicant, but you do start to see some convergence on some of the topics now that a few companies have at least gone through that process for their power plants, if not for their aircraft. Okay, right. So if I read you right, you're saying these SCs, sorry, one more time, special condition, which does get abbreviated as SC. Yeah. So these, you didn't abbreviate it, I did, because I was having trouble remembering. But so to your point, those are sort of OEM by OEM. Like if you get one, somebody else can't use it. But I guess you could read it and make guesses that that would get approved if they wrote it similarly, I guess. That's, that's exactly right. And if you look at the fully electric power plants that have gone through the part 33 engine special condition process, uh, that is includes magnets and beta and saffron. Yep. You can see over time, there's a pretty close convergence. Uh, magnets was first, um, quite a bit of changes. Um, in the detailed language by the time you get to beta and saffron, but betas and saffrons are virtually identical. Okay. Interesting. Right. Sort of do it this way, guys. It'll be a little bit faster to go through. Yeah. The FAA is generally open to alternative proposals, but you just have to defend it and justify it. Right, right, right, right. And if it's worth it, I mean, I suppose you go to the extra effort in the end. Yep. Okay, cool. That has been a learning experience for our team. As it turns out, and this was definitely not a plan in my career, this has ended up being the third regulatory environment that I've worked through. Again, with ground vehicles working with CARB and the EPA, convincing them that a hybrid electric upgrade kit for a Ford or GM commercial vehicle was not disturbing the calibration of that gas engine that was part of the original vehicle. That was an interesting challenge with CARB that we successfully got through. And in addition to that, I also in another part of my career was working in renewable power. So I got to work with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. and all of the stovepipe agencies that are concerned with environmental impacts. So going through a regulatory process is very much of a learning experience. Every time. And you've signed up for it three times now. Like I said, unintentionally. But I developed an expertise in negotiating in a regulatory process. Yeah, right. Nobody grows up hoping that they get to do that. But hey, you're doing great work to do it, and we thank you very much for continuing to make progress. We're all chipping away at this thing, and we thank you for your role. That's awesome. Cool. So one more sort of a closing question, and then I want to do a small lightning round that I did not warn you about. Okay. But before we get to that, so when you think back to where Ampere's been and your role in it, what are you most... optimistic about? What are you most proud of? Oh, I mean, it's the thing I am really most proud of is the capital efficiency. I have worked in a CTO and BPF engineering at a few startups. And one of the common themes in all of them has been a real high degree of capital efficiency, meaning making a lot of progress with. modest amount of capital associated with it. And if you think about all of the things that Ampere has achieved and has been shared in the press over the years, you would think we're a larger company than we are today. But we are a pretty tight company that focuses on the tasks and the spending that needs to happen now and doing everything sort of in sequential order. So we're pretty proud and optimistic about about that strategy that we've taken. In terms of other things that I'm really optimistic about, it's been really sort of heartening to see the industry shift over the last two to three years to come around to hybrids. If you looked four or five years ago, Ampere was one of the few companies saying... We're going to launch with a hybrid electric aircraft. That has shifted over the last four years and really accelerated even over the last 12 to 24 months. If you look at everything that's going on with the Department of Defense, even they have now taken up the mantle of, yes, we've made a lot of progress in all electric. We're now going to shift gears. focus on hybrid solutions. So I'm pretty optimistic that everyone is starting to really see the market potential and opportunity with hybrids. I have to say I'm with you. I think you're looking pretty prescient at the moment. It makes me wonder whose crystal ball you were borrowing back then, because yours is pretty good, obviously. Yeah, no, it's funny. I met you, obviously, or saw you present, I should say, at the Vertical Takeoff and Landing Societies. They did an electric aircraft symposium. Yeah, the Oshkosh symposium. That's right, just before Oshkosh there, which was great. It was my first time at Oshkosh, so it was really, really eye -opening and amazing. But you're right. I mean, if I think back sort of like three -ish years ago, four years ago, like you're talking about, it was like, oh, the ES -19 is going to be all electric. Now it's the ES -30 and it's not, it's a hybrid. And I think maybe the Viridian micro liner is like one of the last stalwarts. But even they're looking at going to a series configuration at this point for sort of the extra 10 % you'll need for flight rules. But so yeah, I mean, Voltero though, Horizon, a lot of these players are definitely going the hybrid route. And not even in the series sort of range extended way, but in the parallel configuration. So yeah, you guys are looking like you saw the... future right now. Yep. Very cool. Okay. So lightning round. Um, question number one, what is your favorite airport? Oh, uh, lightning round. Oh, long beach. Yeah. How come? Yeah. Oh, uh, I remember when jet blue used to fly out of there and I had to visit the West coast for meetings. It takes like 10 minutes to get from your car to the plane. in an airport like Long Beach. Nice. And, of course, you can't argue with the weather there. So walking through the airport, it's like half indoors, half outdoors. Well, and I think of that as Ampere as like home base, too. You guys are often between Long Beach and Camarillo. It is now. So we just moved there a year ago. Yeah. But I would say my love of Long Beach goes back more like 15 or 20 years. Got it. Okay, second lightning round. What's your favorite aircraft? Oh, I'm going to say the 787. Yeah? Yeah. Awfully comfortable to fly on, for sure. Lots of balances, too. And that is the more electric aircraft in the transport category. Fair enough. It's got about 1 .4 megawatts of electrification in it. No way. I didn't realize it was that much. Wow. Huh. Cool. Cool, Ed. Well, listen, thank you very much for being on the show today. We really appreciate you. And yeah, this has been great. Likewise. Thank you for having me.

Hey, I'm Kyle. I'm the founder at SkyZero. I'm super excited about electric aviation, and I'm excited to dive into it deep. Thank you for listening to the SkyZero .io podcast. We have interviews lined up with some of the most interesting people in electric aviation. We'll go in -depth on the technology, the capabilities, the machines, and the plans that are making headlines and making waves. Our first episode is an interview with Ed Lovelace, the CTO of Ampere. The first season's interviews will all relate to an article series titled Lessons Aviation Should and Shouldn't Take from EVs. The first two articles on batteries and another one on charging are already online. You can check those out now at skyzero .substack .com. We'll put links in the description. The next article series is on hybrid powertrains, and the conversation with Ed was super timely. After that, we'll do articles on hydrogen, but there's a lot to unpack, and also on vehicle platforms. SkyZero .io is the source for intelligence on electrified aviation. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast so we can drop it in your feed.