STRUCK: An Aerospace Engineering & Lightning Protection Show

Textron announced the acquisition of Pipistrel, who is working on interesting electric cargo plane designs, the Nuuva series. Does this move make sense for Textron? Plus, we discuss the recent 737 crash in China and the trial of Mark Forkner over his charges related to the Boeing 737 MAX crashes and ensuing investigation. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Vladimir Putin signed a law that allows Russia to nationalize planes, effectively keeping the planes and breaking the ownership contracts. We also discuss Boeing CEO pay, and how CEO pay is rationalized in general. There is news on JOBY’s S4 crash, plus announcements from CityAirbus. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Allen and Dan discuss the Netflix documentary about Boeing – did it accurately represent the facts in the 737 MAX crashes? Plus, they discuss the PR implications of showing off EVTOL aircraft in public spaces and how that will affect the future acceptance of this new market. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

A Joby Aviation S4 crashed – Will They Still Be Able to Certify? Plus, DARPA is pushing the limits with an unmanned Black Hawk flight. We also discuss Boeing 787 certification issues, F-35 lightning protection solutions, and the flying car safety outlook. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Tom Warner, a lightning researcher, flew the T28 Storm Penetrating aircraft into thunderstorms in the hopes of gathering data and learning more about lightning strikes. Listen in as he share stories from his career as a pilot, atmospheric science and lightning researcher and photographer. Follow up with him on his blog and his YouTube channel. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Natilus is pitching the idea of remotely-piloted cargo aircraft, hoping to disrupt the industry and reduce issues with pilot shortages and current jet designs. But, is it a realistic vision? We also discuss a recent opinion on COVID restrictions from the CEO of TAP airlines in Portugal, Eve’s certification effort, and Eviation’s CEO leaving the company abruptly just before their first flight. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Airbus mentioned the possibility of building their own engines for a future fleet of hydrogen planes–will they really forgo Pratt & Whitney, GE or Rolls Royce and build them in-house? Plus, we discuss Delta’s push for a USA-wide no-fly list to curb passenger disruptions, Jaunt Air Mobility partnering with Flapper in South America, plus the Eviation Alice’s push forward into commercial flight. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Fedex is asking the FAA to put anti-missile lasers on their cargo planes – is this necessary? The Qatar v Airbus fight continues, with Qatar Airways placing a large order with rival Boeing. And, Beta Technologies has partnered with the US Army – will this propel them even further toward the finish line? Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Plus, Ehang gets an order from AirX in Japan, the Airbus and Qatar Airways fight continues to heat up, the 5G rollout in America continues to be a debacle, and more. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Ehang shares it’s new intelligent EVTOL center – are they closing in on launching their aircraft to the public? Plus, we discuss the Airbus A380 returning to service, Airbus vs Boeing 2021 deliveries, Ehang’s intelligent EVTOL center, China’s C919 program and more. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Joby has completed a second aircraft prototype for flight testing; this one will go to the Air Force–does this bring Joby closer to the finish line for certification? Plus, Qatar Airways sues Airbus over lightning protection skin damage, a propeller breaks off and enters the fuselage on a bird strike, and we talk about the future of EVTOL stocks. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Korean Air is using drone swarms to inspect planes – will this work as well as human inspections? The Boeing 777 is getting new directives resulting from their early 2021 engine problems on a United flight from Denver, and Amazon invest in Beta Technologies – will their EVTOL vault ahead of others in the market? Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Six aerospace executives have been indicted on labor collusion charges – will they stick? Plus, a new report shows that the FAA has approached prosecutors, explaining that Mark Forkner, former test pilot for Boeing, is being made a scapegoat in the 737 MAX crashes. What will this mean for the case? We also discuss Eve Urban Air Mobility’s plans to go public as a SPAC and a new Bristow EVTOL design. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

The Ehang 216 may be certified in a few months, according to new reports. Is this realistic? Plus, is the idea of a supersonic EVTOL feasible or even remotely reasonable? We also discuss the current pilot shortage in the US, the Jetson One sales numbers, Archer news and more. [powerpress Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Transcript welcome back to the Struck airspace engineering podcast i’m your co-host Dan Blewett on today’s show got a great lineup first we’ll talk about the rather rather desperate pilot shortage that’s now gripping uh the u.s and also globally we’ll talk about rolls-royce they’ve been testing one of their electric generators now exceeding one megawatt output which is insane we’ll talk about uh hydrogen powered airliners the uk has revealed a plan that they think they can make a long-haul airliner work we’ll see if alan agrees we’ll also chat a little bit through elon musk’s views on the matter obviously he has strong views on electric and hydrogen in the future in general and his are a little bit controversial when it comes to hydrogen power in our EVTOL segment we’ll talk a little bit more about elon musk we’ll talk about archer ehang jetson one uh which their sort of hobbyist uh aircraft have pretty much sold out by this point and a little uh story about apple car engineers and how they’re starting to flee the nearly three trillion dollar company so alan let’s start with this pilot shortage i struggle to understand these things a little bit obviously there’s shortages of workers everywhere but the world hasn’t i mean the world has changed but where did all the people go alan why do we have such a pilot shortage it seems like you know two years ago life was relatively normal obviously covid was a big deal and still is but how could we be desperate that many pilots at this point it doesn’t seem to add up to me well when the when covet hit there was a lot of furloughs and pilots got laid off and in that interim because it was long enough it’s been a year and a half two years going on two years now that pilots are educated people they can they can find jobs in other industries and they did and now that uh some of them are being recalled back they they don’t want to go back in particular maybe they found a better paying job i mean they found a job with better better hours or less stress or a variety of variables there and i there if you look at the tsa numbers we’re at about 85 90 of 2019 levels so the the flights at least the flights in the united states are pretty close to where we were and that means there’s a lot of airplanes flying internally into the united states overseas not so much still and those tend to be kind of the smaller airplanes the 737s airbus a320s 319s uh the 737 maxes are going to be big in that space and so the most senior people don’t tend to fly those airplanes it tends to be the the the towards the youngers younger ages that are flying those airplanes and i think they have other opportunities and and now that uh the the airlines are looking to expand and we have all the evital pilots uber flight kind of pilots that are going to be needed there’s going to be a big demand on pilots and i i don’t know if we have the infrastructure to support it because 50 years ago most pilots came out of the military i think now it’s not nearly that many come out of the maritime like they’re coming out of places like embry riddle and in schools like that or flight schools and they’re just earning their wings over time by flying freight and cargo and all those different kind of airline airplane flights so you’re just getting a different different graphic coming into the marketplace uh and the requirements for hours have gone up the fa jumped the number of hours required so he could fly those particular airplanes has gone up so it’s it’s not easy just to find people and if they don’t want to come back they want to come back and you’re kind of stuck because the pool of new entrants is limited it’s going to be a problem i really think it’s going to be a problem and retirement i assume has also played into this not just uh like lateral moves because the faa is having a problem with you know their senior engineers and all those uh folks also not coming back but retirement is playing into this i think retirement is playing into it i uh i think the covid vaccine mandates played into it on some level i think some people have left their jobs we hear about we don’t hear about that much in the press but i know hospital workers people that are sort of working federal jobs have quit that would mean people at the faa are probably quitting and airline pilots would be that other group right that would leave because of coven mandates and you just can’t really afford to have three five up to ten percent of your workforce just walk out and the fa has a worse problem right fa they’re talking about like 50 of the engineers in retirement age by in the next couple of years that’s not good because it does take time i mean there’s something about having experience experience tends to lead to better outcomes just because you know all the issues lie right so i i don’t know if the airline industry is really accounting for in particular this evital market and what it’s going to do on pilots because at least for the initially we’re not going to have autonomous flights like they do and like we’re talking to talk about in china it’s going to be piloted flights so you’re going to need a bunch of pilots go do those things and you know if it’s a comfortable much more comfortable lifestyle like if you do it in los angeles you’re not leaving los angeles and you can go home at night every night that may be a little more desirable than ending up in you know poughkeepsie overnight just saying well do you think evtol piloting would be in the same order because like you said fa’s increased hours and it seems like from what we’ve heard with the joby flight simulator that these will be like a different order of like difficulty in flying like do you need to be a seasoned commercial airline pilot to to be an evt well pilot obviously you go that direction but uh i mean will the entrance standards be a lot easier to be a you know to pilot a joby evtl in the future compared to a commercial airliner i haven’t looked at that specifically but i think the answer is yes just because the number of passengers on the airplane it’d be it’d be like flying a charter flight like a cessna citation or a leader jet when you have uh a charter flight they know they operate under diff i think they operate under different rules than the airlines operate under uh and there’s different actual codes rules regulations laws that uh different operators work under different size operators work under so i i don’t think that the jobies and the archers of the world will have not gone the requirements of a 737 pilot right but a 737 pilot could clearly fly uh a joby right and but i i think it comes to a question of lifestyle and airlines haven’t competed with that right airlines have not competed what’s what’s the alternative you’re going to fly cargo you’re going to fly sort of these business flights and that’s a different it probably doesn’t it doesn’t have as it doesn’t didn’t used to have as rich as a pension um some of the french benefits you get you’re a captain on a triple seven that’s a pretty good gig and i’m not sure the jobies of the world would ever get to that level but there’s other factors that play into it like if i want to see my family all the time and come home every night that’s it people make lifestyle decisions like that and it will drive where the marketplace goes so airlines may be a little more of a pinch than they think well if standards are are very different which it seems like you said they probably will be then you wonder if a lot of drone hobbyists would you know be able to like hey i’d like to fly one of those and they sort of make the leap from like you know experience drone pilot obviously just you know handheld like very different but also not that different right that would be a logical leap for the the growing pool of people who love flying drones in the us yeah well i think that the neat thing about drones today is that like the drone racing league that you see on espn every once in a while uh it’s a 3d experience right it isn’t like you’re flying a radio control airplane in the in the olden times you actually have a visor on this headset headsets right you get a 3d view of what you’re doing so it is like you’re flying in the pilot seat and like the joby doesn’t have any rudder pedals well neither does the drone pilot right they just got these control sticks and so their experience well if they can meet the medical requirements and the vision obviously vision requirements and health requirements um that transition may be a lot easier than you would think so it’s it’s it’s not out of the realm of possibility i think if you’re really interested in flying drones and you have been flying basically virtually all that time yeah it wouldn’t be that much of a transition yeah so moving on rolls-royce uh they’re excited they’ve just broken through one megawatt output in testing of their power generation system one uh alan this is a lot of electricity i mean we talk about wind turbines on our other podcast and a megawatt is a significant amount of power and their goal is to reach up to two and a half megawatts at some point in the future um what what engine is going to need to gobble up that much power and what are the implications for for all that like what’s the difference between one megawatt and two and a half megawatts is that just more thrust is that more like they can fly at a higher speed or they can just go longer yes well all the above right yeah all of them that they didn’t really lay this out in the article very well but i’ll i’ll try to connect the dots here i what they were talking is about was hooking a turbo fan engine to a generator and then my assumption was that they were going to drive electric motors that are spinning propellers or have some sort of thrust mechanism of some sort turbo electric turbo fans or something of the sort so that they could in a sense use hydrogen but that’s what it seemed like like they’re going to right now they’re using jet a or maybe sustainable fuels right to power the jet engine to drive the generator and that generator will drive all the other stuff which i’m not sure weight-wise that makes sense at least that’s what i interpreted that to mean uh because there’s like in the hydrogen world there’s like two different pathways that are going on right now basically take the existing jet engine and transform it into a hydrogen burning engine but i think there’s a lot of infrastructure problems with that like how do you store the hydrogen how do you get it to the engine oh it’s so cold right you got all this piping if things get brittle and then get that cold what are you going to do there and then the second way is we’ll make all those motors or make them electric motors and so instead of engines right make them all electrically driven turbo fans essentially and then have a big generator in the back that’s burning hydrogen in a much more condensed area that’s controlled so you’d have a hydrogen tank or sustainable aircraft fuel driving little apu kind of device which is turning a generator and that generator drives all the motors that’ll be out in the wing more than likely right and so i that’s i think that’s where it’s going because there’s just so much weirdly enough there’s a lot of effort by roles and other companies looking at electric motors um because if you think about how much this this this motor the generator they’re talking about uh i think this says it’s about the size of a beer keg yeah which is impressive right that’s that’s a lot i mean that’s way beyond anything we would see in wind power but you know wind power one megawatts the size of a small car so they’ve shoved a lot more energy in a much smaller package uh to cut the weight out and they’re going to have to have some cooling systems to do that uh so it’s just really fascinating how much time and effort they’re using to engineer a much smaller compact lighter more probably more durable generator than we would normally see in in the wild here interesting so moving on uh the uk’s aerospace technology institute has unveiled a concept for a hydrogen powered long-haul airliner they think they can get up to 279 passengers on it and haul out to flights on up to a little over 5 000 nautical miles so alan we’ve talked about hydrogen that still seems to be a really difficult problem to solve uh having read through this what do you think about this project with uh ati i think they got a it’s an interesting project it’s going to be really difficult to get done and you only see the difficulty once you start digging down off the top level a little bit the the hydrogen i think conceptually burning hydrogen or using hydrogen for propulsion pretty straightforward right and just burning the stuff i think it really gets down to like how you’re going to store it how are you going to keep it cold how are you going to move it around how are you going to burn it is what’s the reliability of this thing what kind of electronics do you need can electronics take the temperature extremes do you need to have a cooling system because there’s just so many different variables to it yeah right i mean it’s a materials problem like in the extreme and it’s uh a reliability problem because we don’t we haven’t probably used some of these materials before we don’t know how they react in in this hydrogen world hydrogen and britain is a thing right on materials and metals and things so there’s just so many different aspects that we don’t have any history on and you would like to like with aircraft you know the aircraft started within um internal combustion engines which were used in autumn autumn motive for years before they kind of really got going in airplanes so we had some history we’re not going to have any history with hydrogen before we stick it in airplanes what are what are the other uses of internal combustion engines or or turbofan engines that are using hydrogen on the ground today i i even in generators like power generators we don’t use hydrogen for power generation so we don’t really know anything about the reliability of that system the answer don’t you see like is that the place to be trying it with passengers or should it be like a military application or a drone application which would be my vote a drone application to make a lot of sense what’s with loading the throw of 200 people it just feels it just feels i’m not saying it’s unsafe well it feels unsafe because you just don’t have the data and engineers love data and right now you don’t have any data and there’s a lot of variables here that’s where you start to feel uncomfortable about it and i think it’s it’s i think engineers would be working on that would have the same questions about it particularly the system safety people would just go i don’t know what to do here yeah you don’t well to throw another obviously influential voice into the mix elon musk’s views on hydrogen fuel cell powered cars are that he said it’s uh full cells was his one of his tweets he said that basically the best case the best case fuel cell car uh is not better than today’s current case battery-powered car um now is that generalizable to the skies obviously especially in an airliner there’s a lot more space to put you know like you said the hydrogen storage storage tanks all that stuff where there’s very limited space with that in a car but first i mean taking a lateral leap how do you feel about his views on hydrogen cars are they accurate and and again i mean are battery is battery technology going to just catch up if hydrogen planes are 10 years away 15 20 years away our is battery technology just going to maybe make that obsolete i don’t think battery power is ever going to get us to cross an ocean and so obviously somebody something will be some of today’s charles lindbergh that will fly from new york to to paris and an electric battery airplane i’m waiting for that to happen actually that would be a really good uh you know uh musk prize or an x prize or google google prize what do they call those things to go do that because that’s a long flight right and i think that’s where the where the problem lies in airplanes it’s just so energy intensive versus automobiles that you just need so much more battery which is why we’re using fossil fuel sustainable fuels and talk about hydrogen because the math doesn’t work out for batteries right now except for shorter flights well here’s a question we obviously have these refueling tankers that fly in the sky and you know extend their fueling could that be a thing with an electric cable could you just tap into a electric vehicle or electric plane and charge it up they fly linked for 30 minutes and just have a crazy high amperage or whatever it is to i mean is that would that be ever realistic to charge it on the fly for military purposes i think absolutely if you had to do that yeah i i think that would be doable whatever that refueling plane would look like it could just be like that ship we were talking about the battery ship it’d be an airplane ship yeah i’d be very similar to that uh i think militarily you could do that and you have to be pulling a lot of current to go do that but you know if given enough demand and requirements yeah i think you could do it refilling a civilian airplane is a big no-no there’s too much chance for a problem to occur there and if you’re over the atlantic ocean and you can’t mate up or something happens do you just plummet into the ocean that’s you know yeah not ideal well moving on so back to your thoughts on on hydrogen yeah i the the hydrogen piece an automotive i think is essentially dead uh that happened 10 years ago and the batteries have caught up enough and tesla’s demonstrated that severely enough across the united states and across the world that i think hydrogen is dead in automobiles but that doesn’t mean it’s dead in hilarious industrial equipment big big uh construction equipment that may make total sense hydrogen may be an alternative there you know you’ve propane and buses and things in the united states for a long time yeah so hydrogen may be that next piece and and maybe it is in airplanes too uh again it’s not going to be it’s not going to be a you know a conceptual problem with hydrogen it’s really going to be all about the details of hydrogen and how you’re going to put a system a reliable repeatable um 20-year lifespan system together that has incredible incredible reliability you know an accident once every billion hours sort of thing that’s that’s a remarkable if you just think about the requirements for airplanes right now and when you can have a quote-unquote catastrophic event it’s crazy the the reliability numbers that we’ve we’ve gotten to unbelievable i mean unheard of 100 jericho you would never ever think we would ever be able to put 300 400 people on an airplane and reliably fly them wherever they want but we do it every day and but we only do that through a lot of learned lessons and hard lessons hydrogen just introduces so many new technical challenges that i’m not sure when they make like 20 30 deadlines or 20 40 deadlines it’s going to be tough really really hard to do that and politicians make light of that because they’re not doing it right you’re not regulating it you’re not uh designing it you’re not looking at the materials and the qualification and the testing and all the things that keep engineers up at night uh and the infrastructure to make it happen i just it’s it’s too easy of a word to throw around and i think that’s the issue with hydrogen right now it just seems too perfect and it is too perfect well let’s uh get your quick take on one other elon musk tweet so he’s tweeted i guess a couple of times about supersonic evtols so we won’t spend a lot of time here but is this a possible thing and would there even be a use case for it no and no uh going supersonic at least at this point requires uh burning fossil fuel and sort of like rocket mode i think uh maybe the f-35 can get to supersonic without that but i mean there is some portion of thrust which is uh the explosive gas coming out the back end of the airplane to get it to go that fast a fan really can’t do that because you need fan rotation speeds that are faster than supersonic and that doesn’t really work well and no one’s done it no one’s done it uh and yeah you’d be breaking mock numbers on the tips of these fans and yeah that would not at least my general understanding of aerodynamics like that’s not really a thing you do so it’s really impo i think it’s impossible uh and i haven’t heard anybody say it’s impossible but i think it’s kind of impossible and maybe you don’t know what an msx motor designer could say oh no we could we could if you had enough horsepower you can do it i don’t think so i think that’s when the hydrogen comes in this you just make yourself into a rocket and let go but well like the supersonic here let’s dive into the supersonic thing for a minute because there’s a couple of projects going on supersonic right now boom and there’s one down in atlanta going on right now the the use case in the the the economics of those have not really proven out and and arion obviously folded during cove at times which is down in florida the the use case for supersonic just really hasn’t been there except militarily and i i’m not sure that changing my flight from new york to london from five hours to three hours is such a huge difference i’m willing to pay the extra to get that happen the concord couldn’t make that work and that was in regulated times right and when we conquered wars around there the government regulated airline prices in a free-for-all environment like we have now an unregulated and uh economic environment on airlines i’m not sure that uh basically you’re talking about the elite and i’m not sure there’s enough elite to do that it’s from a company standpoint to make the airplane into con thinking to produce like a thousand of these things i don’t see that as uh a marketplace yet i’d say it wouldn’t develop but we’re not there yet yeah plus when you start to talk about the elite like why would they want to be on essentially like a like a commercial flight that’s scheduled to take off with other people that they don’t know on it when they could just again like all right this is gonna shave two hours off my uh translate on a flight but i have to be there on a certain time because it’s a like a commercial flight rather than just take my private jet whenever i want in my in in exceeding comfort right like it it probably wouldn’t trump that you know like why now i’m not going to spend 30 000 on a ticket to save two hours and i got to be there at a certain time i’m sure it would have its own little luxury port at the airport or something but you know like yeah just take your just take your private jet at that point you know what what’s the difference right two more hours of luxury you’re like okay sure i’ll do that yeah that makes sense and the the the ev2 all thing yeah i just couldn’t think of a case where that unless you’re landing on an aircraft carrier you know what do you need to land this on where the vertical takeoff and landing matters i i couldn’t figure out what that would what that would be plus it would have to be big like those planes are very long their fineness ratio is is it it’s a big ratio or a small ratio small right i think yeah very long very long so yeah anyway that was interesting quick topic but let’s move on to uh to ehang so they’re saying that they’re hopeful they can achieve full-time certification for their eh 216 in the next few months uh of course that’s over in china and their civil aviation administration of china um they think that the guiding principles uh are going to get there and they’re sort of moving ahead so alan is this really going to happen as quickly as they say sure why not but i i i don’t see any reason why they won’t do it it’s more of a the the articles i’ve seen don’t really talk about what the certification process is in china for this particular aircraft uh but there’s a lot of like anti-america look we beat america to the e-vital market stuff like why do you why do you care right you got enough people in your own country that america doesn’t make any difference here right uh we’re not we’re not snapping our pencils like ah they beat us like yeah oh you beat us to the moon no nobody cares right we’re busy tweeting and making tick tocks right now yeah well we’re making the best electric cars in the world uh that’s what we’re doing right now and china’s importing them uh so you know one of the well i think the the issue with ehang is what they’re going to have problems with is getting whatever they quote unquote certify in china to be applicable to the rest of the world they’re going to export this aircraft and they going to send it to paris and to london into stockholm i don’t think so i think the regulators in other countries will look at that very closely and decide that that wasn’t adequate and the the the piece that i think is probably the most difficult for me watching it is they have videos of what i consider to be tourists there’s no pilot in the thing right so it’s like two two tourists and one of these airplanes drones i guess large drones i call it that are flying across water and promotional videos you would never ever see average people in an air in a flight test airplane uh that’s not going to happen in a promotional video like cessna is not doing that right just not how that works in flight test world because it’s just too much risk right there’s too much risk to put a random person in that airplane and plus they don’t have don’t have a pilot it’s all controlled by the ground right so there’s no way if something were to go wrong there’s nothing that the people inside of it can do it’s it’s over and i i think that doesn’t help the transition to outside of china i like i i don’t see the brazilians thinking oh that’s a great way to certify it and we’ll gladly take that that aircraft into brazil which could probably use it honestly uh that just makes everybody really reluctant so i i don’t understand the politics of this and and let’s just make clear that airplanes are poly political pieces in this bigger chess game that’s being played that uh we’ve seen it a lot recently and we’ll talk about it later but you know ehang great technology cool probably works great love it uh so what certification means i i really don’t know yet well moving on archer is also uh eyeing certification of course it seems like they’re just taking the same steps that you know joby has reached but it says they have a special airworthiness certificate in hand and path to certification in sight what does that mean i think it just means allowed to do flight testing i think that’s what they’re saying there’s a lot of little manufacturing quality pieces before you go flight test um if you’re doing a conforming flight test like you’ve got a conforming vehicle then the fa is going to go look at the aircraft make sure all the pieces are right and then it’s been built like the drawings say it’s going to be built and it’s it complies with the aircraft design on paper or on the computer that’s most of it and the archer the archerpiece i think is interesting because uh the speed at which they’re moving and the the people which they brought on to support the project if you if you look at joby if you look at beta if you look at whisk kitty hawk um i could probably name a couple others they’ve been working on this they’ve been working on these aircraft for like um five ten years ish right like beta went through a number of iterations before it got to where it is today whisk it went through a number of iterations before they got to where they are today uh joby went through a number of iterations before they got to where they are today name that name the development cycle an archer like how long has the development cycle been in archer a year maybe two years it’s been no it’s been not that long and the the little you know bell that goes off in the back your head is like man this is moving really fast did they miss something that’s the concern i think that the faa would have is like okay this thing’s really rocking along and i’m sure it’s being super aggressive because of the financial stakes that are involved with it is it right and and aren’t just going to fall right in the middle of this faa exercise that’s going on right now where they’re being uh extra cautious with delegates and conformity and quality and making with the with all the boeing stuff that’s happening the faa is not going to let or is going to be very reluctant to to accelerate any aircraft program just because the investors are antsy faa shouldn’t care and and i hope that they don’t and i i it to me just watching from the outside it’s like okay the joby thing i get the beta i get kitty hawk whisk all those other ones i get because they’re on the normal development cycle archer’s not on that same pathway so what are we going to see when they get to flight test not sure hopefully it goes well i mean that’s the goal is all this stuff goes really well but it doesn’t feel right to me right now hopefully prove me wrong well there’s definitely a lot of buzz about it and so you can imagine that all these companies are trying to get to market as quick as they can speaking of which uh the jetson one which is one of these personal ninety two thousand dollar experimental aircraft that we reported on you know a bunch of months ago it says they’ve pretty much sold out which was not a large run it sounds like um upwards of 60 orders have been placed but that’s you know small company so that seems like that’s about tapping them out does this surprise you that this that this has sold out that quickly that there was so much interest it doesn’t surprise me you know it seems like there’s enough rich people who would love a cool new toy right right you got eight billion people on the planet you can find a couple hundred to buy an aircraft typically right it just comes on the other side of economics do you have the cash to buy the materials to make the thing and deliver it and then you use use those proceeds from that first sale to fund the next airplane that’s that’s the way it works right you sell the first airplane so you can make airplane five it’s that kind of continual flushing of cash ask tesla how that goes right it’s that you need the cash to build the next set of airplanes or cars uh and so that’s why you see the build rates probably so low and that in order to get to higher build rates they have to invest in a lot of tooling and infrastructure which they don’t want to do because they’re concerned at the at the first accident or there’s something that happens that they could lose their shirt and so they’re being really smart about this i got to give them some credit like the airplane is cool i like the way they put some guards around the propellers i don’t know if you saw that last last video down they got actually some guards on the propellers which it feels better to me a little bit better uh yeah so i mean i think they’re thinking about what the marketplace is also thinking uh but they’re also being very cautious it’s like they’re bootstrapping this design and in the company so that they don’t go bankrupt that they’re going to make a little bit of money uh get a product out there and then if it all works well then gen 2 will happen right and that’s the goal to get to the next get to the next one get to the next one and then maybe you have an airplane company yeah cool so last on the docket today uh apple has lost some talented engineers to the evtl market so they’ve been having obviously apple attracts top talent whether it’s design engineering whatever and they had some pretty good people on their apple car project but it seemed like they’ve had a lot of difficulties retaining some of them and you know apple’s very secret a very secretive company so we don’t know what’s been going on behind the scenes but we do know that a handful have left eric rogers who is a former chief engineer for radar systems is now a joby alex claire but went from hardware engineering to engineering manager of battery systems at archer steven spateri is now archer’s power electronics manager so people are moving laterally of course you know this always happens in every industry people move jobs etc but this is being reported like it seems like maybe there’s a little bit of an exodus and maybe this apple car project isn’t coming to fruition as fast as people would like and they’re seeing maybe something better in evtl what’s your take here yeah the apple car situation has been really odd the last well i think kobe had really affected it in terms of the marketplace the ability to dump cash into that project the car design i’ve seen bits and pieces of the car design starting about three years ago and at that point it was kind of developed uh but i figured the timeline for it was never really established and tim cook never really said anything about the project that was definitive uh so i’m wondering if apple’s going to eventually shut that thing down you know the the the kicker on the airplane side when everybody moves over to the airplane side because they want to stay in the silicon valley region which is where archer and joe b and these companies are that’s where the investment money is they’re walking into a completely different world right designing automobiles or designing battery packs or designing radar systems on a on a vehicle on the ground is not the same as designing them and using them in aviation the requirements are totally different and the system safety aspects are are majorly different because someone’s going to hold you accountable to them you have to demonstrate them and you have to demonstrate just crazy high reliability uh that there’s a learning curve there and it’s not a media when i’ve seen people make the transition from automotive to aerospace it does take a year or two to kind of get acclimated to all the stuff that has to happen and all like why do i have to have some somebody come and look at my part that i just built before i go off to test well that’s the way that system works right uh or why do why do i have to have this engineer sitting here watching my testing go on yeah because that’s the way the fa told you it’s going to go right and it works opposite from aerospace to automotive if you go from aerospace to automotive it’s like i can do a lot of things i can’t do in airplanes oh yeah i can tighten the bolts on this on this uh car yeah well i can’t do that on an airplane no you cannot right it’s so it’s just a different it’s just a whole different level of uh oversight and it just and when i think that when i think they want to bring people in who have been experts in one particular automotive or computer field and i bring him in as a manager to a bunch of airplane engineers the success rate for that is has not been tremendously high from what i’ve seen uh it’s been well below average and just because there’s so much to to learn like all all the engineers know what all these little details are that are going to have to go do and yet they’re managed by somebody who doesn’t know anything really little about what the faa world is telling them and so you have to not only do your job you’re training this guy who’s your supervisor or not guy but person who’s your supervisor that’s not what you want to be doing there right you got enough on your plate designing the aircraft then you got to go teach somebody else like what’s going on that’s just not maybe not a very good use of resource if they come in as a technical expert like if they’re doing battery design and they’re going to help you on just on the battery design forget about certification awesome put it put them in the technical side and leave them over there but it’s when you start to cross-pollinate the technical people with the certification people where you know nuclear fission starts to happen it doesn’t always go the way you want it to so that’s that’s i think that’s what the concern is so if you know the apple project may be dead but the transition to airplanes is not going to be easy yeah it’ll be interesting to see what happens with the apple car because apple doesn’t typically enter markets second right or if they do it’s for some peripheral thing like their headphones i mean they obviously have had wild success with their their air pods uh because of their brand clout so they know they can sort of push you know barrel through and make a hole for their products but their airpods were also like kind of game changing a little bit right but as far as the apple car you wonder if they can really barrel into that market and have the same clout with tesla there because tesla has that similar high quality prestigious trendy well-designed and market leader first you know first into that market really so yeah you wonder if apple’s kind of like ah maybe this isn’t worth the resources full self drive dan i think the full self drive is the real game chamber changer there and that i think apple was looking at the full self drive so it was google but tesla has basically opened that up in the last week or two right the full self drive and and some beta version of the computer system that they have and and they’re letting people with like perfect driving records do full self-drive that’s the holy grail and if tesla’s there then why would you build a billion-dollar factory to make a car if tesla’s it’s going to take you too long to get you’re right i think you’re totally right about that it’s gonna take you too long to get to market you’ll spend a bunch of money and it’s not a marketplace that you have been before so if you’re not the first one in like tesla is now you will always be second so tesla’s gonna own 50 plus the market probably 70 percent of the marketplace no matter who comes in next they’re just not going to own that space well that’s going to do it for this week’s episode of the struck aerospace engineering podcast thanks so much for listening be sure to subscribe on youtube spotify itunes stitcher wherever you listen leave us a review share with a friend and we will see you here next week on struck striketape weatherguard lightning tech’s proprietary lightning protection for radomes provides unmatched durability for years to come if you need help with your radome’s lightning protection reach out to us at weatherguardaero.com that’s weatherguard aero.com

Sydney Seaplanes placed a large aircraft order from Eve Urban Air Mobility, a division of Embraer. Will it work out for them? The Airbus A350 has lightning protection issues stemming from expanded metal foils and paint peeling, leading to a contentious relationship between Airbus and Qatar. We also discuss new EVTOL designs, FAA regulations and more. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Transcript Sydney Seaplanes Adds EVTOL Order, Airbus A350 Has Lightning Protection Problems & More 00:00:00:05 – 00:00:24:10UnknownThis episode is brought to you by weather guard Lightning Tech at Weather Guard. We support design engineers and make lightning protection easy. You’re listening to the Struck podcast. I’m Dan Blewett. I’m Allen Hall. And here on Struck we talk about everything aviation, aerospace engineering and lightning protection. 00:00:28:09 – 00:00:43:05UnknownAll right, welcome back to the Struck Aerospace Engineering podcast. I’m your co-host Dan Blewett. On today’s show, we’ve got number one something for Allen to really dig his teeth in. We’ve got some issues with Airbus aircraft and their lightning protection systems. 00:00:43:15 – 00:01:01:16UnknownSome paint feeling some controversy over expanded metal foils, and there’s a pretty heavy dispute between Qatar Airways and Airbus. We’ll dove into that. We’re going to talk about the Dayton Zoning Board has voted to demolish the site of the Wright Brothers first bike shop. 00:01:02:08 – 00:01:20:18UnknownYou know, disappointing decision, obviously for a huge, huge end of innovators in aviation. The grandfathers of aviation. We’ll talk about United deciding to put passengers on a safe flight. Not completely safe for one engine will be completely powered by sustainable airline fuel. 00:01:21:12 – 00:01:40:04UnknownAlso, seems like a curious decision. We’ll talk about Pratt, they’ve announced an update to their A320 neo engine. It’s going to have more thrust, and we’ll see how that might affect their sales and their efficiency. And lastly, in our video segment, we’ll talk about Sydney Sea planes striking a big deal for 50 aircraft of Eve Urban Air Mobility 00:01:40:12 – 00:01:54:09Unknownfour passenger EVTOL. They do a lot of commuter and tourism flights down Australia, so sounds like a really interesting proposition there. And lastly, we talked a little bit about Joby’s Simulator, which Allen that lacks foot pedals, right? 00:01:54:09 – 00:02:12:10UnknownAnd doesn’t have a rudder. Is that right? It’s a totally different configuration than most airplanes. Yeah, it seems really interesting and unique, to say the least. So let’s start with Airbus and Qatar Airways. So Reuters has obtained a number of photos which are pretty shocking. 00:02:12:10 – 00:02:27:21UnknownThey they make this seem like almost a home brew, a homebrew thing like you don’t see paint peeling this badly. Qatar is very unhappy with Airbus. And both sides are sort of in a little bit of a tug of war about, you know, what’s going on, who’s going to fix this and how big of a deal this 00:02:27:21 – 00:02:46:13Unknownis. Yeah. So the A350 is primarily a carbon fiber airplane. It like the 787, so they’re comparable airplanes in that sense. And the the what Airbus has done is they’ve used an expanded what the article say is expanded copper foil as lightning protection. 00:02:46:13 – 00:02:59:04UnknownAnd so what you do is on the top layer, the carbon fiber, you sort of embed this, this mesh is copper mesh into it and that access your lightning protection and then that mesh gets over coated with paint. 00:02:59:04 – 00:03:14:04UnknownSo the outer surface looks white like most airplanes do. So you kind of cutting this three layer thing, you got the outer layer of paint, this expanded copper foil and then carbon fiber structure. So the system that’s been around a long time, that’s a 40 year old kind of design. 00:03:15:01 – 00:03:34:18UnknownAnd one of the issues with any expanded foil. Is paying attention, it can be problematic at times, particularly if you have a repair. And what these photos indicate, like they had some small repairs that happened around the airplane that they tried to fix, and there’s their standard repairs, which happened. 00:03:34:18 – 00:03:54:02UnknownSo as you’re sanding, grinding away on an airplane to make all the parts fit. It’s not unusual that you damage or sand into some of the expanded metal that’s on the surface and then get into your repair situation in which the repair is to put more mesh on top of it to add back the connectivity which you’ve 00:03:54:02 – 00:04:15:00Unknownremoved. When you do that, that secondary process of sticking on metal and it looks like from some of the photos, it looks like it’s aluminum mesh, not copper. And it was stuck on there. Secondarily, is that you just don’t get it here properly and over time, temperature flexing that kind of thing can cause the mesh to kind 00:04:15:00 – 00:04:24:10Unknownof pop off, and it takes the paint with it. So the paint doesn’t like to stick to it, and then the metal doesn’t like to stick to the airplane. And that’s what the photos indicate that Reuters has put up on the website. 00:04:24:22 – 00:04:41:08UnknownSo that’s I would say that’s not unusual. It’s unusual today in the sense that you don’t think you see it coming off a production line. You tend to see it on. Airplanes have been around a lot longer in flight when the Beach Starship came out back in the late eighties early nineties. 00:04:41:16 – 00:05:02:07UnknownThey had an issue very similar to that. Pretty much every composite airplane or composite part with mesh has some sort of issue with paint adhesion because of the mesh that surround it, particularly on the cut edges apart. So like where the mesh can be exposed as you cut along a trim edge that can corrode or cause problems 00:05:02:10 – 00:05:22:01Unknown, it just it’s more cosmetic than it is a lightning issue. And these particular cases are the mesh looks to be visually to me to be a just a cosmetic thing, not anything critical in terms of lightning protection. And in the way you know that that’s not what’s usually critical here is the mesh. 00:05:22:02 – 00:05:34:15UnknownIf the paint, if the paint soft carbon fiber carbon fiber does well with lightning strikes, it’s the problem when you paint the carbon fiber that carbon fiber doesn’t do so well. And the message there to sort of bridge that gap and what a real quick why is that, Alan? 00:05:35:02 – 00:05:49:09UnknownThe paint, the paint controls and limits the were the lightning will go basically forces into a small area, and the carbon fiber, which is great at handling energy, just can’t handle that much focused energy in a small spot. 00:05:50:01 – 00:06:02:14UnknownAnd that just causes the resin to burn off and the carbon fiber to kind of burn off and do all this bad stuff. So once once you paint carbon fiber, the damage gets deeper and just more expensive to repair. 00:06:02:23 – 00:06:15:08UnknownBut the mesh on it keeps a damaged light on the surface, where you can kind of scuff it, fix it, repair it. That’s why you use the mesh a lot of times on a non-critical things airplane structures is that it just keeps the cost down on maintenance. 00:06:16:09 – 00:06:39:05UnknownSo this this one is really interesting because it’s been seen at some airplane airlines now. And Airbus is trying to address it. But if you’re in this really weird spot where I think you’ve got a brand new A350 and you’re already trying to fix on it, and more than likely the maintenance crews at these airlines have been 00:06:39:05 – 00:06:54:19Unknowntrying to repair it and maybe not prepare it the way that it should be repaired. And they’re having sort of this continual problem. Go on. Thereby making the problem worse. That’s and everybody is like, Whoa, whoa, whoa. Probably like, whoa, whoa, whoa. 00:06:55:00 – 00:07:10:10UnknownSlow down a minute. We don’t have to fix it straight out. It’s not like it’s not a safety issue. We could come back and address it. But it’s expensive. Well, Yasa. He also has proposed an airworthiness directive that the expanded copper foil. 00:07:11:08 – 00:07:29:11UnknownYou know, there could potentially be an issue of a cocktail of factors comes together. You know, adjacent fasteners incorrectly installed, then a big lightning strike. Then they’re saying maybe fuel vapor could be ignited. I mean, is that that’s obviously aircraft design they have to look to toward those crazy. 00:07:29:17 – 00:07:39:12UnknownWhat if? What if? What if? What if? What if? Right? Kind of scenario is, is that is that realistic? I mean, what’s what is the action item here? Is you also going to make them fix this or what’s going to go on out? 00:07:39:14 – 00:07:55:03UnknownMaybe the when we talk about fuel tanks, there’s obviously there’s more criticality and more focus on fuel tanks because of the consequences. If you get a spark in the fuel tank with the right temperature and right fuel air mixture inside of that tank like we saw years ago off the coast of New York there. 00:07:55:11 – 00:08:12:19UnknownThe fuel tank can explode and from the lightning protection side, you do a lot of protection in the fuel tank area. Combination of meshes, foils, fasteners, faster types, all kinds of sealants. On the inside. There’s all kinds of layers of protection that go on to a wing. 00:08:13:06 – 00:08:29:00UnknownIf the foil is having trouble on the foils, not a stall properly or the foil has been damaged during manufacture like Boeing. Had some of that happened on the 787 on the wing also, then you’re really losing a layer of protection. 00:08:29:10 – 00:08:42:18UnknownSo instead of having essentially three layers of protection, which is kind of typical, you get knocked down to two. So there’s just less protection there, but you also have to have, you know, less protection. Something really go wrong. 00:08:42:18 – 00:08:58:06UnknownA lightning strike in that particular area. So the chances of that being a serious issue are practically zero. And that’s why no one is freaking out. Grounding airplanes right now is that there’s so many layers of protection that Airbus has just nine of those airplanes. 00:08:58:09 – 00:09:13:15UnknownIt can handle some of these defects and allow them to go back and repair them. So that’s what’s happening right now. Yeah. And of course, Qatar Airways has grounded 20 of its 53 A350s, but it seems like they’re kind of acting on their own a little bit like this as they have their own regulator. 00:09:14:15 – 00:09:27:00UnknownWhat’s the what’s the deal with with Qatar? Why are they? It seems like they’re acting really separately from everyone else on this issue. Delta has some issues, I think, with 11 plane. But the Qatar seems to have the biggest problem. 00:09:27:13 – 00:09:42:14UnknownYeah, and everybody has their own national regulator for the operations side. So when you’re in America, they have the actually the airlines operate under a different set of codes or regulation on how you maintain the airplane, operate the airplane, blah blah blah. 00:09:43:00 – 00:10:03:11UnknownSo what cutter’s saying is that our national agency airworthiness agency is saying this may be an issue, but that’s all. This is political at that level, especially about the money you’re talking about, and the consequences are big for any airline if you have to take airplanes out of service. 00:10:04:20 – 00:10:26:06UnknownSo it becomes part engineering, part political with some finance things done on the backside of it. So you never it’s not. It’s never just an engineering problem. Never, never. All right. So moving on the Wright brothers, obviously, their first bike shop is in Dayton, Ohio. 00:10:26:18 – 00:10:44:10UnknownAnd I suppose nowadays it’s been, you know, the shop has been vacant for years, and it looks like back in 2008, it was declared a public nuisance, you know, disappointing that this shop hasn’t been preserved. You know, it held as a historical, you know, make how many places like this have been made into music, museums and like 00:10:44:10 – 00:11:00:10Unknowncool places for people to be right. But anyway, this one has not. And it looks like city officials are now declaring that they’re going to demolish it. Elena and I think the some of the other historical sort of monuments to the Wright brothers have been moved. 00:11:01:09 – 00:11:21:12UnknownI mean, what? What’s left now in Dayton for the Wright brothers? There’s not a lot in Dayton. Obviously, the Air Force has its Museum Air Force Museum in Dayton, which is massive and beautiful. And if you ever want to get lost for about three days, go wander through that. 00:11:22:06 – 00:11:39:23UnknownBut in terms of the Wright brothers, there’s not a lot there because Henry Ford bought all. I think they bought their family home, and I think the shop, the bicycle airplane shop, I’ll call it and move them up to Dearborn, Michigan. 00:11:39:23 – 00:11:54:18UnknownSo everything’s up in Michigan and out of Ohio. There’s not a lot of Wright brother stuff in Dayton anymore. You know, obviously. You know, that became a big center for aviation because of the Wright brothers were being there, which is now sort of an Air Force thing. 00:11:55:02 – 00:12:13:07UnknownBut there’s not a whole bunch of stuff, and it wasn’t that long ago we were in Dayton itself. We went to the Air Force Museum and I’ve been there a couple of times, but I’ve never spent any time hunting around for Wright Brothers stuff in Dayton because when you go there, there’s no maybe I’m wrong. 00:12:13:08 – 00:12:30:02UnknownI am just a generic tourist at that point, but I would think I’m your your key traveler in that in that marketplace, like I’m the person that would want to go look at cool aviation stuff and there isn’t it much right brother stuff there? 00:12:30:03 – 00:12:44:02UnknownI think we did go look around a little bit, but yeah, it’s sort of sad. Yeah. And of course, some opponents of the demolition on this building, and of course, they’ve deemed the building construction unsafe. But people are still saying, Hey, like, can we redevelop this? 00:12:44:02 – 00:12:59:06UnknownAnd, you know, use the original facade? Which do you see projects like that all over the place, right? Which are really cool. And but then again, I don’t know the the overall topography of of Dayton, and if that would really make any sense, as you know, might not be in an area where redevelopment makes a lot of 00:12:59:06 – 00:13:10:21Unknownsense, you know, who knows, but it would be cool if they could do something like that to preserve it in the air. Forces in the military has done a decent job over the last couple of years of trying to develop the Dayton area. 00:13:12:01 – 00:13:30:14UnknownSo I get emails all the time about Dayton, Dayton start ups and and prove Dayton and bringing new energetic engineering type aviation company space companies in the Dayton. There’s a big promotion to do that, but Dayton obviously going through a transition like a lot of the former industrial towns. 00:13:30:15 – 00:13:43:13UnknownSo this is just par for the course, unfortunately. And you’d think that someone would step up like, you know, Bezos or Musk or somebody would step up and say, Well, here’s $1,000,000 go fix the building. But that hasn’t happened. 00:13:43:21 – 00:14:02:02UnknownWeirdly enough, arts are moving on. Last week, on December first, United flew the world’s first passenger flight on 100% sustainable aviation fuel and one of their engines. So the 737 MAX eight flew from Chicago O’Hare to here in D.C. to Washington Reagan National. 00:14:02:13 – 00:14:18:15UnknownAnd of course, there were two CEOs on board. United CEO Scott Kirby was on the flight, as well as GE Aviation CEO John Slattery. Allen The big question is why did we need to put 115 paying passengers on this flight? 00:14:18:15 – 00:14:41:14UnknownI mean, what did that tell us and is that safe? It didn’t tell us anything, I hope. I think it’s just this sustainable fuel piece is interesting because I thought, Well, am I wrong? Still, that there’s a limitation that it’s 50% is the maximum amount of of sort of jet, a sustainable fuel that you can fly at 00:14:41:14 – 00:14:57:17Unknownthe moment. But in this particular case, that basically filled one. There’s essentially two of your tanks and the 737. So they felt one side up with sustainable fuel and the other side up with jet air. So you got two engines burning slightly different fuels and put passengers on it. 00:14:58:10 – 00:15:15:08UnknownI’m sure it was FAA approved just had to be. But it just feels weird, doesn’t it? Like anytime they say test flights and you’ve got two passengers paying passengers on it that doesn’t ever feel PR wise like a good movie test. 00:15:15:16 – 00:15:28:07UnknownAnd paying past passengers are not the comedies that you wanted to a PR. And that’s that’s what I think. Dan, am I wrong? No, you’re not wrong. And of course, on this on this flight, you’re right on the 50% safe limit. 00:15:28:14 – 00:15:48:16UnknownAnd because one engine had 100% safe in it and the other had 100% jet etiquette in it, that equals the 50%. That’s how why they did this, but rather when they just did 100% on one engine. So interesting way to stay within specs, I suppose, but that doesn’t seem like that’s the same thing as you’ve said, because 00:15:48:16 – 00:16:09:09Unknownthe high performance that you’re burning in each are very different. Yeah, or slightly slightly different. I what United and GE are saying is that, well, fuel molecules are fuel molecule. The engine doesn’t care. Well, yeah, it does, because there’s all kinds of additives and other pieces to the fuel mixture that make it perform the way that it 00:16:09:09 – 00:16:25:09Unknowndoes. So it’s I’m sure this is completely safe. It had to be. But the visuals on this are not great. I just don’t understand. Yeah. Well, it’s one of those things that has very little upside potential and just insane downside risk, right? 00:16:25:09 – 00:16:46:01UnknownIf something had happened, you know it, you’ll be like, This is a baffling why and what world did we need to these hunter 100 plus people, you know? And the upside was a happy press release like one in giving a press release that lasts one day and right in the news cycle, you know, like, well, yeah, of 00:16:46:01 – 00:16:59:11Unknowncourse, I do appreciate that. The CEOs are on board because as we mentioned a little bit in the past, it’s good to have skin in the game right back in the day, people used to be held criminally accountable for their work. 00:16:59:12 – 00:17:12:07UnknownYou know, if you’re a bridge builder back in. Yeah, I don’t know some time in history if that bridge collapsed and killed people. You were going to be in serious criminal trouble. If not, maybe killed yourself. Not say that’s right. 00:17:12:07 – 00:17:28:07UnknownBut yeah. You know, the CEOs are on board like, we believe in this, too. And obviously the best example was the bulletproof vest. You know, the bulletproof vest didn’t catch on until the inventor of it took a revolver and put it to his own chest and pulled the trigger. 00:17:28:20 – 00:17:43:02UnknownAnd that was a heck of a moment. If you’ve never seen that video. But yeah, so at least they were there. And obviously this went off without a hitch. So no big deal. And like you said, I’m sure they knew that, you know, you know, with like 99.9 and 99% certainty. 00:17:43:11 – 00:18:00:16UnknownOh, but still a little bit of an interesting decision. So let’s move on to Pratt. They’ve announced a update to their A320neo engine. They’ve added thrust to it. It’s going to be the boost their fuel efficiency by 1% with 4% higher thrust when it rolls out in 2024. 00:18:01:23 – 00:18:22:18UnknownAlan, how are they going to do this and how two engine makers, you know, continue to just squeeze more out of these engines, computers and technology? Those are the two. If they’ve made some slight changes to the the compressor section, which they probably did in terms of maybe some aerodynamic issues or improvements in terms of the way 00:18:22:18 – 00:18:38:12Unknownthat the the the air fuel mixtures burns maybe a little run a little bit hotter. I mean, that’s one way to do it is to just get better fuel efficiency out it more thrust. I’m always amazed at these engines when they first come out. 00:18:38:21 – 00:18:52:23UnknownThey seem like they’re kind of degraded a little bit. And probably that’s the right move, right? You want to get the engine in service a little while, get some history on to get some flight hours on it, make sure everything’s working right and then they start slowly removing those restrictions are getting more and more and more thrust 00:18:52:23 – 00:19:12:12Unknownat it. So if you watch the evolution of any particular engine, it just goes up and up and up and thrust the G what nine x G90, formerly the thrust on that went up crazily over time and and the when is doing the same thing, obviously. 00:19:12:12 – 00:19:35:19UnknownBut it’s just a wonder when I when there’s a talk about efficiency and the sustainability of aviation, you point to stuff like this, like aviation has done a really good job of moving people efficiently, and it gets more and more efficient every day, every day because every engine manufacturer and every airline is looking for fuel savings and 00:19:36:13 – 00:19:52:13Unknownbetter performance. Yeah, I think that makes sense the way they kind of roll it out a little bit on not underperforming. But, you know, I think a good baseball analogy is when you are trying to get a scout to come watch a kid, you know, say as a pitcher, say the pitcher can throw 95 miles per hour 00:19:52:13 – 00:20:08:00Unknownsome days, but not most days. It’ll probably get there in the future. But today he usually throws 90. Any time you see him. So instead of saying, Hey, I got this kid throws 95, which potentially opens them up to the scout being disappointed, you’d say, Hey, I got this kid, you can throw 90. 00:20:08:03 – 00:20:24:00UnknownYou know, he comes out if he’s better than 90, wonderful, you know, he’s impressed. At the worst, he’s going to be what he was advertised to be, right? Is that kind of how they do this with these engines like set of expectations to a reasonably low but still high performing level? 00:20:24:00 – 00:20:37:03UnknownAnd then they can always exceed? Yeah. And the way that their framers usually pick an engine, they’ll probably pick it on thrust and costs and some other factors familiarity with the manufacturer. As airplanes get developed, you always get heavier. 00:20:37:06 – 00:20:46:19UnknownAnd I think the engine manufacturers know that. So they they have some reserve in the engines and you have to go back and say, Hey, Pratt, we need another 10% thrust so we can get our airplane off the ground. 00:20:46:19 – 00:20:56:14UnknownAnd Pratt goes, Oh, you know, that’s going to be it’s going to be hard, but we’ll we’ll try to make it work. And then magically, you know, six months later, it has more thrust and your airplane projects off the ground. 00:20:56:20 – 00:21:12:04UnknownSo they know they know how airplane designers work. Yeah, it never, never. Airplanes never meet their initial weight, no matter how they how they do it. And then the engine manufacturers got to suck it up and get they get the airplane sold just need more thrust. 00:21:12:04 – 00:21:26:14UnknownThat’s how they do it. All right. So moving on to our whole segment today. first on the docket is Sydney Sea planes, and they’re planning to hit the tourist segment of the market, and they’ve teamed up with Eve Urban Air Mobility to do that. 00:21:26:14 – 00:21:44:13UnknownAnd of course, that’s Embraer’s ALM, so they are agreeing to add 50 of their four passenger atolls. And that’s going to be around 2026 as their anticipated delivery data, I suppose. So, Alan, it seems like, you know, Sydney Sea planes, there’s a lot of tourism. 00:21:44:13 – 00:21:59:02UnknownThey do a lot of flights just. Motoring people around seeing the beautiful country, the beautiful coastline, this seems like a use that we haven’t really heard that much about in the virtual space, but it seems like a great use for it, you know, short flights. 00:21:59:10 – 00:22:19:09UnknownYou don’t need three hour time in the air for you to shoot around and see a lot of beautiful sights. Right. And this is a perfect application for electric aircraft, and we’ve seen some of that in Hawaii recently on some of those little shuttle flights where they’ve converted the Sky, Masterson and Sky Master. 00:22:19:09 – 00:22:39:18Unknownone engine is internal combustion, and I think the rear engine is electric, if I remember that correctly. And then there’s been some work over over in Europe doing something very similar. But these little shorter flights make a ton of sense and also because of the so the reduced maintenance costs, because if you’re making a lot of shorter 00:22:39:18 – 00:22:58:03Unknownflights, it can have a lot of wear and tear on an aircraft, and the electric motors should reduce the operating costs a great deal. But this the Sydney firm also had an accident a couple of years ago. I was reading some of the details of it where they had essentially carbon monoxide poisoning of the pilot and they 00:22:58:03 – 00:23:21:04Unknownhad a crash and when they were switching to electric will eliminate that as a possibility, you would think. So it seems like a really good mix of improvements and safety, probably reduction in operating costs, operating expenses, maintenance, reduced maintenance and a quieter experience, probably as the aircraft are going to be quieter. 00:23:21:09 – 00:23:35:21UnknownSo this really fits that that niche that the electric aircraft should be fitting into train aircraft trainers, which I think is by aerospace is doing, which makes total complete sense. Again, it’s a it’s a maintenance operational thing. They’re sightseeing. 00:23:36:16 – 00:23:50:06UnknownYeah, go keep air. Keep of other one to my neck of the woods. Massachusetts is going to have some electric aircraft to shuttle people back and forth to like Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, that kind of thing. So there’s there’s just there’s going to be a lot more of these shorter flights. 00:23:50:06 – 00:24:05:20UnknownI think that’s the right answer. Instead of flying New York to Los Angeles or New York to London, I think you got to start smaller and figure out how these systems operate and then expand it over time. And hopefully that’s the direction this will go. 00:24:05:21 – 00:24:19:14UnknownDo you do you see that too, that that’s going to be the first entry market? It’s not going to be Uber. It’s going to be probably sightseeing. Yeah, I think it makes a ton of sense. I mean, you can rather than having to worry about getting from point A to point B and you know, how do you 00:24:19:14 – 00:24:33:15Unknownrecharge a point be like you need a second? Obviously, there needs to be infrastructure everywhere you land here. You’re just making a big old loop and coming back where you’ve got your own fleet of them. So you’ve got all the batteries you need, you’ve got all the charging stations you need. 00:24:34:02 – 00:24:44:23UnknownYou can set things up exactly how you want so you can rotate planes while ones, you know, charging back up or whatever. Yeah, it seems like it makes a ton of sense. You know, you can be really self-sustaining in your own little ecosystem. 00:24:46:09 – 00:24:59:16UnknownAnd I think people will be really excited to take up next next generation plane around. I know I would if the option was taken e-toll around Sydney or take a helicopter, I’d take it all for sure. Go like, Whoa, that’s cool. 00:24:59:16 – 00:25:12:00UnknownIt’s yeah, let’s do the futuristic one. And like you said to me, yeah, yeah, it seems like a great idea. Yeah, I think that’s where it’s going to find a sweet spot early on. Electrics are and also on the cargo. 00:25:12:00 – 00:25:24:17UnknownI think there’s going to be a decent amount of little shuttle flights for cargo, which electric makes sense for. Also again, Dan to back to your point. Flying to Adobe b to a fixed fixed points, I think that makes total sense for. 00:25:25:00 – 00:25:40:10UnknownSo there’s there is definitely a marketplace. It just may not be as visible to you and I. It’s not we’re not going to Chicago on an electric airplane in the next couple of years. We’re going to be flying a standard 737 type airplane A320 type airplane. 00:25:41:02 – 00:25:57:22UnknownBut that’s OK. That’s OK. You got to start somewhere, you got to figure out the technology, and this is, I think, the best way to do it. So last on the line up today, there’s an interesting article from air and online about flying the job while flying it in their simulator. 00:25:57:22 – 00:26:12:10UnknownSo Alan, one of the unique things about the Jobi aircraft is that it’s just it’s very different because it’s a it’s rather it’s a tilt rotor and B it doesn’t have rudder controls for pedals, that kind of stuff. 00:26:12:10 – 00:26:31:22UnknownIs that right? So I mean, what are what are the differences when you would hop into something like this? Obviously, there’s a lot more sort of engine management things going on because you’ve got these six motors propellers spinning all the time and there’s they’re using a Garmin 3000 series flight display system, but essentially you have two controls 00:26:32:01 – 00:26:52:05Unknownthrust in a direction. So on your left hands are thrust on your right hand direction up down. Left, right, forward back, yeah, pitch. Depends what kind of flight major and so, uh, it flies like you would fly, uh, computer game on an Xbox. 00:26:52:14 – 00:27:08:09UnknownSo this may be this may be the first Xbox generation airplane just because of the way it flies. And one of the interesting things they talked about was the aircraft. When you when you bank an airplane, it tends to stay banked like a standard airplane. 00:27:08:09 – 00:27:20:01UnknownYou put on a tenant and stay there, take your hands off. It tends to stay there or do any any kind of configuration on an airplane. You pointed in a direction. It’ll keep going that direction. And this aircraft, it wants to come back to neutral. 00:27:20:01 – 00:27:36:13UnknownSo it’s always seems to be kind of coming back to neutral, which which is unusual for pilots. So there’s a lot of it may be intuitive for a kid who’s never flown an airplane, but I think for a pilot that would take a little bit of time to figure out, plus the lack of rudder pedals would be 00:27:36:20 – 00:27:49:12Unknownodd. I think, like, what do you do with your feet? Because you do a lot with your feet on the ground, one you steer the airplane. That’s how you get it. Moving around as you taxi is with your feet. 00:27:50:10 – 00:28:18:02UnknownBut then, yeah, so I always wonder if what has evolved in terms of flight controls today is is is is driven only by engineering or is a combination of engineering plus human. Reaction, comfortability, things. It goes back to like the the there’s a big discussion about Tesla and they’re a little steering wheel. 00:28:18:02 – 00:28:30:21UnknownIt does. It’s not round anymore. So it’s kind of got the I don’t know the yoke to handle over the yoke. Yeah, OK. Right, OK. So there’s a lot of discussion, like some people like it, some people really hate it and like, OK, you know, you could really hate it. 00:28:30:21 – 00:28:52:07UnknownThat’s fine. But is is it an improvement on safety as less safe? I think that there’s arguments made in both cases, and I think with Jobi, if you’re taking pilots that have, say, ten years of flight experience, then you know, piston airplanes or king errors or whatever kind of airplane or jets are flying a citation or something 00:28:52:07 – 00:29:06:15Unknownlike that. I think it’s going to take a little bit of time to transition into this different flight configuration. So I mean, that was part of the part 23 rule change that happened a couple of years ago, 2017, where they try to be less. 00:29:07:12 – 00:29:20:05UnknownThe regulations were less prescriptive about what the airplane supposed to look like and just said it needs to perform like this inside this box. You can you can do things, but as long as you don’t go outside the box, it’s fine. 00:29:20:16 – 00:29:34:12UnknownAnd that’s the way the rules are written right now. So I think Joby has taken advantage of that and saying, OK, let’s rethink the way. We interfaced with the pilots. But again, it’s sort of jury is out, if it is, it’s as safe, less safe. 00:29:34:12 – 00:29:46:22UnknownSeem to. You know, better safety. Who knows, until we get some more flight time and we really we haven’t. Joby, has it put, at least to my knowledge. Joby hasn’t put a real human pilot in the airplane yet. 00:29:47:23 – 00:30:03:10UnknownSo we don’t even really have any feedback, precise simulator. Today, so I’m curious as the flight, as you get to flight test pilots getting in an airplane, especially as you get more and more airplanes built and you put in more and more flight test pilots in it and ordinary pilots in it. 00:30:03:13 – 00:30:19:12UnknownWhat that outcome looks like, don’t, don’t you? Can you see how that can be confusing in someone’s head? Like, I know how to fly this way, but this airplane reacts differently. Yeah, of course. This article by Matt Thurber, he was the one invited to try out the simulator. 00:30:19:13 – 00:30:34:16UnknownHe had seemed like a remarkable experience to me, he said. Here’s a quote he said. I’ve never felt so in control of an aircraft and so free to focus on flying tasks rather than on constant control manipulation. This was like a flying, a fictional imaginary perfect aircraft. 00:30:35:01 – 00:30:48:16UnknownI can’t think of any other way to describe it. So he seemed to really enjoy it like this would seemed like. And the way he describes it, how if you let go of certain controls or just sort of back off a certain thing or turn the wheels certain way, it’ll just sort of go back and do a 00:30:48:16 – 00:31:04:14Unknownquick hover. It sounds a lot like the way drones and I’ve, you know, piloted some, yeah, small drones. I’m not certainly not even a drone enthusiast, but flying a drone was very easy to DJI one. I just got rid of it recently, but I’m considering a different one. 00:31:05:00 – 00:31:20:00UnknownBut yeah, in general, they’re super easy to fly. And when you do certain things, they sort of go back to like a neutral, like a hover, and they’re programed to keep everything like, you’re not going to crash a DJI drone unless you try, especially if it has some sort of obstacle avoidance. 00:31:20:12 – 00:31:35:11UnknownAnd it sounds kind of similar with with with the Joby Aviation. So, so yeah, a really interesting. Like I said, I don’t obviously have any experience flying or even building a simulator, but the way he describes it sounds like the future sounds really safe. 00:31:35:11 – 00:32:01:15UnknownIt sounds really intuitive. It sounds really simple, which seems great. Again, the Part 23 regulation change is going to bring up a number of pilot interface aircraft performance changes that we haven’t seen in 50 years, 60 years in terms of how aircraft work, what they do, what they look like even is going to change dramatically because the 00:32:01:15 – 00:32:15:01Unknownregulations have loosened up on them. And I think as we go through this process, we just got to keep in mind. We’re still dealing with humans and human interactions like Boeing went through on the 737 on the MAX. 00:32:15:17 – 00:32:32:23UnknownAnd I saw an article about the MAX today, which was written completely incorrectly about what actually happened there. But the human reaction was part of the reason they had problems. Again, you’ve got to take that consideration, so you only learned that through thousands of hours of flight time. 00:32:33:03 – 00:32:47:02UnknownSo job is going to learn and I’m really I’m really anticipating to hear more and more about how the aircraft flies, especially as it getting into people flight test. Well, that’s going to do it for this week’s episode of the Struc Aerospace Engineering podcast. 00:32:47:02 – 00:32:58:14UnknownThanks so much for listening! Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube, wherever you’re listening or watching. Leave us a review or leave us a comment. Love to hear from you! So thanks again, and we’ll see you here next week on Struck.

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Hyundai has spun off its EVTOL business into Supernal, with an interesting aircraft. And, the company shares a big vision for being a start-to-finish transportation company, with aircraft being on piece of the puzzle along with scooters, cars, etc. Plus, Boeing is in hot water with the FAA, now accused of hiring inexperienced or incompetent certification personnel – is the FAA justified in their warnings to Boeing? Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

AMSL Aero has a boxwing EVTOL design with a prototype that’s nearly ready to fly – can this interesting design work? Rolls Royce flies successfully using 100% SAF fuel, Volocopter sees big things happening in Rome, and more. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

The U.S. has an aging air traffic control tower problem. How will airports replace 100+ aging towers? Plus, is the Jetson One personal EVTOL the future of fun-to-fly aircraft, with little to no barrier to the skies? And, will Alaska Airlines’ backing of hydrogen conversions mean we see jets flying on Hydrogen power sooner than later? Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

The Cyclotech EVTOL is back, with a recent flight vaulting it back into the maintstream media. With a very unorthodox lift system, can it really become airworthy one day and reach mass-market acceptance? We also discuss more of the Forkner charges, Boeing 777x freighter rumors, the Boeing Starliner’s flight date pushback, Lilium and ABB’s partnership on charging stations, Wing’s drone partnership with Walgreens, and more. Cover image copyright: Cyclotech. Check out the Cyclotech in action here. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

In this episode, we discuss the Volodrone EVTOL cargo-hauling drone – is it going to be a game-changer? Boeing’s former test pilot on the 737 MAX project has now been indicted – are the charges fair? The 787 dreamliner has new parts problems, and we discuss the Pratt & Whitney 3D printed jet engine – could we see a full-scale size sooner than later? Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

We discuss the Tetra personal “Buy n Fly” EVTOL, which purports to be a kit experimental aircraft for delivery in 2022. Will this one-seat concept gain mainstream appeal? Southwest Airlines earned a tsunami of bad PR with 1000s of flight cancellations and a dodgy response as to why it all went down. Plus, LA and the UK are taking steps to get ready for Urban Air Mobility, and more. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

The DigiProp program is aiming to bring complex composite propeller designs to life easier and faster – is it working? Plus, we talk about the COVID recovery and a recent report that $201 billion was lost due to the virus’ impact on airlines. Lastly, Ehang showed off its new VT-30 EVTOL recently – where is Ehang going? And, AirBus and Honda are now off and running – will their designs fit a different niche than Joby, Volocopter and others? Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! TRANSCRIPT: Ehang Shows VT-30; Will EVTOLS Ever Have Swappable Batteries? this episode is brought to you by weatherguard lightning tech at weatherguard we support design engineers and make lightning protection easy you’re listening to the struck podcast i’m Dan Blewett i’m Allen Hall and here on struck we talk about everything aviation aerospace engineering and lightning protection All right welcome back to the struck airspace engineering podcast i’m your co-host Dan blewett on today’s show we’ll talk a little bit about uh southwest and some other coveted vaccination rules that airlines are starting to enforce their employees and we’ll talk a little bit about the recovery still kind of an update for the fall season here about uh covet and where the airlines are going we’re going to talk a little bit about digiprop which is a program looking at the use of thermoplastics and braiding and some other interesting techniques for making propellers and we’ve got a bunch of evtol news we’ll chat through today alakai and their sky hydrogen ev2l is looking for investment we’ll talk about their design and some of the challenges there honda’s also throwing their hat into the ring developing a hybrid electric evtol and we’ve also got some announcements from ehang on their vt30 some clarity on airbus as they explain explain their design behind the city airbus and lastly uh just some interesting um info about battery swaps and whether this might be something that could come to aviation or maybe it won’t work we’ll see um alan let’s start with southwest so the latest airline to uh mandate their staff all 56 000 employees to get vaccinated by december 8th and of course this comes at the heel of a of a article by al jazeera that says the global airline industry has seen a 200 billion dollars 201 billion dollar uh loss due to cove at 19. so is this just the latest airline just trying to protect themselves as much as they can obviously hiring and the workforce is a very difficult it’s a very difficult time to find employees and to keep everyone up and running i mean how do you view is this like the natural progression here that all these airlines are doing this well united did it a little while ago and now southwest is into the same position i think uh i think american and delta are in the same boat at the moment uh i think you have a really hard time with this we’re already seeing the same sort of prescriptive uh you either have a vax vaccine or you or you’re fired and we don’t provide severance which is a nice little twist uh that is not working well in my area right now and new york state has had a big purge in a sense of where they’re just firing all the health care workers that refuse vaccinations and that includes all staff it’s not just nurses and doctors it’s everybody that works around the hospital food service clean uh janitorial people it’s a big deal uh and i’m not sure in in the sort of uh environmental today that it this is a good long-term solution for the airlines i know at the short term it raises some pr it makes people a little more comfortable to go fly i think but do i really care if the line mechanic has a vaccination or not or has previously had covet i i don’t think i care as a part of the flying public it seems like more of a personal decision so when these companies are stepping in into sort of health care matters in america it’s going to be a problem there’s going to be a 10 to 20 percent of the population that will not participate in that regardless of what goes down and at a time when the airlines are struggling i’m not sure you need any laying off employees or letting basically firing employees i’m not sure that’s a smart move i think there’s other ways you could have gone about it but here we are do you think that do you think this is going to get mandated beyond airlines right now do you think this is just sort of going to be a universal thing uh i’m not sure i mean part of this announcement from southwest is that they’re a federal contractor right so the us government mandate therefore applies to them and that’s the same boat for american a couple other airlines um you know delta is also a federal contractor but they have not made this announcement yet who knows if they will it seems like it’s probably coming here and of course united united mandated vaccines for their staff and it says 96 have given proof of inoculation so um trying to meet that deadline which was a week ago so it seems like it’s working number one um yeah i don’t know i mean i don’t think mandating vaccines is the right move but then again it seems like we’re going to have to live with covid forever like it’s just so i mean we live with the flu forever COVID’s more contagious than that it seems like it’s never going to go away so for companies that want to get back to normal um especially if they’re on the hook for some of those health care costs which um which airline was was talking about that was that united who said that you know if you don’t want to get vaccinated we don’t want to pay for i’m not sure if it was them or not i can’t remember but yeah they don’t want to pay for you know that that expense if you don’t want to it’s going to be more expensive to get your health care if you don’t want to get vaccinated and i think that’s it’s interesting um i don’t really have a stance on it either way at the moment but you know people have a right to control their own destiny but again when it comes when it also affects a company that needs to move forward you know yeah it it’s it’s complex complex so but you know it’s complicated yeah yeah because yeah you have right to do what you want but our company has the right to do what they feel is best for the company as well and if those two things don’t align then maybe you have to find another company to work for you know that’s i don’t know no one has a right to work for any given company right you don’t have a right to work for southwest you choose to work with southwest and southwest chooses to employ you and and play by the rules there too so it’s you know with private companies it’s hard to sorry to know but yeah i think people do have to kind of play by their rules they they they they well short term right i think uh it’s all depends on how rigorous the validation is i think a lot of people in the united states have already had cove and i think there’s a really good argument to make about if you already have had kova do you need to have the vaccination and also a large part of southwest is in texas in terms of operations and i’m i’m when when you hear anything when you hear any vaccination number that’s above 75 80 percent you really wonder if that is a true true accurate number because the vaccination numbers around the world are somewhere in the 75 to 80 percent then it turned and it kind of tops out so i i’d be surprised if any airline had really 95 plus percent um vaccination status i wonder if some of that has been doctored or not but hey that’s the world we live in right i think there’s going to be some big time drawbacks when the next union negotiation happens because it’s going to come up and i think i think the unions have will have enough power to drive that out of the negotiations like you can’t you can’t start firing union workers because they’re not vaccinated with something that you prescribe because i think from the union’s perspective where does it stop right i i think you know there’s a slippery slope argument going on right now and that’s a valid argument to have uh but workers are not without rights and particularly in the airline industry the units are relatively strong so when you when the next go around happens i’m curious to see if this starts a little bit of a fight and it probably will but it looks like global capacity for airlines is about 70 of 2019 levels so that’s encouraging that that rebound has happened it was around that level back in july and then took a dive back uh between august and and september when you know the outbreak started to accelerate again but it’s like we’re getting there but 70 is pretty low it’s not like that’s a high amount but it’s obviously a lot better than what it was in 2020 which was nothing essentially so right yeah so the rebound is the rebound is rebounding i guess we can put it that way and we’ll see how the vaccination stuff continues to impact that but i mean that might make people more apt to go fly when they know all the employees on you know walk in the aisles have been vaccinated and most people on a flight would have been vaccinated as well so maybe that gets confidence back up where people get out there we’ll see um so moving on some interesting engineering stuff so on this digiprop project where they’re looking at new ways to develop composite propeller blades specifically for turboprop aircraft so obviously these are complex shapes they have a lot of contours they’re difficult what are some of the things that this digi this digital propulsion um project is is trying to solve well when you have to lay up a prop there’s a couple of ways to do it composites wise there’s been in some cases a lot of it i think is still hand layup on the construction which then adds a lot of cost and the complexities of the shape uh are only getting more complicated as we go along right it’s not like the 1950s you got basically one sort of prop design now because we have computational fluid dynamics and the computation power we can make really efficient propellers that maximize thrust or be noise quieting or whatever you want to do so you’re getting some really unique shapes and composites wise that can be difficult to make and and what this project is doing in conjunction with it looks like ge aviation is there basically making a tool and then uh winding carbon fiber over top of that tool much like you would over braid a wire harness i’m gonna put this in electrical world for a minute so if you have a wire harness you actually you’re trying to shield it from lightning or or rocks and dirt and debris and stuff you actually can weave a a sleeve over top of it and that’s what this propeller is relatively doing they’re just kind of weaving the the com composite structure onto this tool you can define where the strength is where the strength isn’t you can really minimize the weight impact you can put fiber exactly where you want it which is fantastic and but the second piece is is they’re using thermoplastics and so instead of using a standard uh thermal set resin prepreg kind of thing they’re using um thermoplastics to bind to bind this all together and the benefit of thermoplastics is just they’re really just tough you know it’s just a toughened system uh they’re immune to most chemicals they just are just a real durable system the thing about thermoplastics though is that they’re expensive and so you want to try to minimize waste in that situation which this sort of weaving process will do so you just have a lot less waste a lot less expense even though using a much more expensive material you’re trying to minimize the overall cost of a propeller so there’s some interesting technology here dan and i think this technology has been kind of used as sort of sock sleeve methods been used for some aircraft structures not a lot of them there’s not a lot of opportunity to do that but i think we’re going to see it more and more and the thermoplastic piece which is the interesting part uh not a lot of thermal plastics using airplanes today because the cost issue so we got to find a way to lower the cost to use thermoplastics because there’s such great materials and they are recyclable which is that other piece right so the recyclable piece drives a lot is going to be driving a lot of designs particularly in europe and eventually in the united states that thermoplastics have been sitting around for 30 years plus on the sidelines like hey we’re recyclable and everybody’s been well you’re more expensive so it doesn’t matter we’re going to go use the most inexpensive thermal set but those rules are changing and that world is evolving and thermoplastics are coming into their own so i expect to see more thermoplastics used and it’s good that ge aviation is actually participating in this because they can provide the funding some of the engineering resources to to bring it to reality which is good so you know as this as the different tapes are sort of braided around this mandrel in the center does that mean that the final the final propeller is hollow inside yeah yeah or they can or they could fill it um there there are different techniques to sort of make a shell and then uh put some structure inside of it too but again it adds labor so if you can make this thing stiff but light because it’s mostly hollow or is hollow even better right all right so let’s move on to our evtol segment today so a bunch of different designs to talk through number one uh alakai which is spelled a l a k a apostrophe i they have their sky hydrogen evtol which looks more like a bus shaped like it’s clearly meant for multiple passengers maybe like six or eight and uh but they’re looking for this to be a hydrogen powered aircraft so alan what are some of the differences before we talk about the actual design of it what are some of the differences pros and cons of using hydrogen for an evtol versus electricity well it’s weighted energy density and that’s that’s that’s it that hydrogen is essentially doesn’t have any mass you’re going to have some storage tanks to hold it but unlike lithium-ion batteries it’s just a lot less weight for the energy density so you have a lot more energy density you’re kind of approaching aviation fuel in a sense so the it that’s the advantageous part of this is that you had a couple of hydrogen tanks which you can do pretty inexpensively and lightweight because you make them out of carbon fiber and you can have a lot of energy storage on the aircraft which is the problem that electric battery-powered aircraft are having is like where do i stuff all these batteries to get to do my mission hydrogen will not have that problem and so i mean that seems like a pretty great pro so why don’t more companies want to tackle hydrogen right now it has to do with ability to refuel it mostly that uh if there’s electricity everywhere there’s not hydrogen everywhere now if you’re having dedicated sites where you’re mostly flying to then hydrogen will most likely be available at those airports or those landing spots but there’s electricity is everywhere and so you can in theory land almost anywhere in a battery powered electric aircraft and and uh refuel quote unquote refuel you really can’t do that with hydrogen today and that i think that’s a big concern on the automotive side and on the aircraft side is like where are these refueling stations and how is this going to work because technology wise hydrogen is well understood you have a hydrogen you have a fuel cell which basically takes a hydrogen and starts making electricity in the aircraft which is then is used to spin a bunch of motors which provide the lift conceptually that’s it it’s not particularly complicated not a lot of moving parts here it’s just where do i refuel it that’s that’s that’s the problem today and so it looks like they’re looking for funding um they need more investment uh which obviously every aircraft company does um i mean our investor is going to be reticent to take something like this on or i mean they’re pretty comfortable with the electric sector obviously like you know a lot of companies have gone public uh with their electric evtol models um i mean what would be the investor hang up here i think the hydrogen is is the one right now because there’s so much momentum on uh all the specs around like joby and archer on these electric aircraft that have wings and sky doesn’t have wings it’s more like a drone so it looks like a basically an suv with a couple propellers on top that provide lift so it it’s a much smaller thing so from the investment standpoint if you’re looking to do those uber type runs or those lift type runs where you’re getting from my driveway to the local pizza shop you can’t do that in a joby it’s just a much bigger aircraft because it has wings and those wings are big it’s providing lift right that’s you have to do that with a battery-powered aircraft the hydrogen-powered aircraft you have a lot of extra energy storage so you can actually make like a helicopter-ish aircraft so i could then with sky go from my driveway to the pizza place in a sense because i have just a much smaller footprint and i can i can land in a lot tighter places which makes a lot more sense to me so if i’m uber or a company like lyft and i want to get in the aircraft market i want to be able to land in places that are not airports all the time and the size of the vehicle is going to have something to do with the number of landing spots they have so there’s a really odd dynamic that’s happening right now and i i’m not sure why sky’s not getting a lot more looky uh people just looking in the windows checking them out kicking the tires a little bit because i think they’re going to be able to serve in metropolitan areas like boston new york uh philadelphia baltimore washington dc up and down the northeast corridor i think they’ll be able to serve a lot more places with the vehicle they’ve designed than an archer would gotcha well we’ll keep an eye on them but yeah it seems interesting they’re doing something that’s definitely outside the typical box at the moment um so yeah we’ll see what continues to come of that uh honda which i know you’re a champion of honda jet you know they’re pretty um they’re sharp looking and they’re very fuel efficient honda’s on great work with their jet side uh looks like they’re now revealing new plans uh for an evtol sort of throw their hat in the ring which again them and airbus have done this recently so on september 30th they announced that the honda evt well uh which will be a hybrid week a gas turbine um hybrid powered unit but what do you think of this design it’s got some ducted i guess are those more rudders on the back then or is that propeller i mean what what do you what do you see here at the design i think it’s still prototype design it’s still in that conceptual stage from what i can tell now i haven’t talked to the to the people i know down at honda uh because i’m sure this is super top top secret they wouldn’t tell me anyway but the engineers at honda are really smart and aerodynamically they know what they’re talking about uh i i think what honda is doing and some of these others are doing is they’re looking at what the real usage of the aircraft will be because when they announced this they had a honda had a little video that popped out uh describing the typical day of this ev tall which was i’m in boston and i have a a meeting in manhattan and so i i get up i have breakfast i hop in this shuttle and i make that i think it’s about 200 mile-ish kind of flight uh i fly down to new york i have my meeting and i’m back home by supper that’s totally different than sort of the joby uber archer pickum uh approach at the moment which are a lot of 30 40 flights short flights a day within a metropolitan area so honda’s thinking more of a vehicle that’s like an entry vehicle to their jets right so the jets can go several hundred several thousand miles on a tank of fuel uh this aircraft is is much more sort of city to city jumps major metropolitan area to metropolitan area houston probably to dallas uh miami to tampa kind of thing there’s a really interesting nation there and i would be hard to say that honda doesn’t mess around like they someone has thought about what those journeys look like and what how we design a vehicle to fit into that mode and and meanwhile and dan have you looked at the airbus design which is sort of a competing design to the to the honda have you seen how airbus is also talking about sort of shorter flights and a simpler aircraft than some of these others that are much more complicated it’s there’s just so many engineering things going on here right now that are all competing you kind of wonder spec wise investment wise where the money is uh because it feels like we got a billion dollars or a couple couple billion dollars investment money sitting in california at the moment and yet uh california hasn’t been a real boon for aircraft in 30 40 years it’s just odd now uh don’t you feel it like honda’s in uh oh airbus is in uh-oh bell’s gonna be in uh oh what are you gonna do uh you’re competing against companies that just have the wherewithal to do it yeah and like we’ve mentioned that that seems like a it seems like entering the game a little bit later must probably probably pay it off because let other people kind of duke it out and see what’s going on see what markets others because at this point you figured out what what market other competitors are probably going after and then you could say hey there’s a hole there’s a there’s a niche here that we could fill can we design something that will hit this market and let them they can do their thing we’ll just do this other thing um yeah i feel like that makes sense from a business case standpoint for sure yeah i think someone’s got to do the non-uber part of this where is it and i think airbus and honda are stepping into that mode already which is really fascinating because the next three or four years are going to be a lot of aircraft development well like you said you know the the lighter aircraft are more dangerous like right they crash um pilot error and so if someone’s got the money and wants to sort of puddle jump and get to work or go here go there go see the the grandkids or whatever um you know they could have their million dollar electric vertical takeoff landing vehicle that’s probably gonna be a lot safer a lot more obviously high-tech and like you said you could lose a propeller and still be fine and uh yeah mm-hmm so it might make might make sense where yeah the husband or husband or wife you know you know whoever whoever doesn’t want it they might be more okay with it you know not just the wife anymore oh the wife will let me get this but like yeah the husband or the wife they don’t care they don’t think i’m going to die in this new high-tech thing so i can get it i can get a evtol but i can’t get a you know a light sport or something like that so that could be like i said could be could be a different market for it than some of the other uses so speaking of which uh ehang they’re longer range and they have a couple they’ve two models their longer range VT-30 um is has been unveiled yeah so ehang had some tough press earlier in the year being accused sort of of not really having much going sort of falsifying some documents and some information but they still seem to have been they’re chugging along and they’ve announced more about this vt30 which definitely has a a unique design allen what do you think of their their longer range passenger vehicle here well i i guess it may be feeling an another niche in china i don’t see this aircraft leaving china for a while multiple years unless you know the like in japan they decide they’re just going to let it in uh without having all the certification things we would typically do for any sort of aircraft nihing seems to be creating aircraft without necessarily meeting all the international standards on a lot of different areas i think so there’s a there’s a growing concern about it um you know from an investment standpoint i think there’s still questions about where they’re going and can they generate the kind of revenue i think it all depends on what the government allows them to do honestly if the government in china decides to look the other way and let these aircraft be traded and sold and they can start selling flights on them and not have them go through the hundreds of millions of dollars it takes to quote unquote certify an aircraft in the united states or europe yeah they can make some money if they get stuck into doing the same sort of rigorous flight testing and all the safety evaluation and all the other things that come along with aircraft development it’s hard dan there’s a lot of aircraft companies start up and most of them fail because the cost and the complexities are so high to get anything real and to make money on it um it’s a huge impediment and that’s and that’s why you see companies like joby and archer and the rest of them are not necessarily aircraft companies they are ride share companies because i think the aircraft sales by themselves won’t do it but somehow eaning thinks they’re going to be able to to make money on sales and see well and so last week we talked about airbus and you expressed you know we both expressed that we weren’t exactly sure what their target was and what their goal was and um what so and so what their design was sort of built around but they’ve um kind of explained a little bit more this this week so alan what did you learn about about airbus and and some of what they’re going for with their their new city airbus design well dan it looks like they’re just trying to keep it simple and that’s essentially it don’t try to push too hard which then puts the safety of the aircraft at risk control how far it would normally fly i think a lot of european cities are closer to one another than in the united states that makes a little bit easier and then they probably looked at what the roots would be how long they would be flying and and where the sweet spot is so they’re not pushing the envelope so to speak and their airbus does have designed airplanes that that’s not obvious already and they’ve been doing a lot of they obviously have airbus helicopters they know how to do helicopters uh i i think they’ve been working on a number of designs over the years and they’ve flown some of them and they put out pressure leases but they really haven’t gone anywhere so it seems like now airbus is basically saying hey let’s keep this thing simple let’s don’t make it overly expensive let’s just make it super reliable and do one sort of task extremely well and that’s a great product i think do what you do the best you can in the world and no one else can it’s going to be really to compete with that i think particularly if they slap on the airbus name on the side of it it has a lot of weight in terms of sales because dan it’s just like buying a new car i know there’s a couple of electric vehicle manufacturers are starting up the united states uh what’s there’s a couple in ohio one in ohio one in illinois uh Rivian is that is that one of them Rivian. Rivian’s one of them have you have you heard of that rivian yeah yeah so if i’m it’s a cool kind of suv electric suv sort of thing something that tesla doesn’t make my concern with those is that they could be a great vehicle same thing uh with uh you know a non-brand name like a like an archer sort of thing that doesn’t have any doesn’t have any infrastructure there there’s no service centers there’s no there’s nobody there to support it right so even though there may be a cool automobile out there or a cool aircraft if i can’t get it fixed or get parts for it it’s pretty much doesn’t matter to me i’m not gonna purchase it airbus carries that weight because they have all that infrastructure already pre-built so there’s a huge advantage for airbus to enter that marketplace and be an immediate dominant leader just because they have the service dealers they have the infrastructure they have all the people in place to answer the phone and some of the other aircraft companies don’t right yet so that that’s what i think dana you you kind of see that too that airbus really can carry some weight in the marketplace yeah i mean i think if you’re especially you know if you’re one of these airlines that might like buy from them or partner with them i think you’re pretty comfortable partnering with airbus it’s a big name you know you’re gonna have like you said a lot of support and if something goes wrong all that stuff that they’re going to be there so yeah i i i agree i get that so they’re going to have some clout for sure as all as these bigger players enter the market yeah and one of which could be it’s interesting concept um so there’s an interesting uh video this is from general aviation news um of a person swapping out batteries of a like a more like a like a vespa and uh and so you know you see this person pull over and pull this pretty large battery out of you know these two large batteries that are underneath the seat and they put them in this big bank that has probably 40 of them right there just push these big batteries which are kind of like the size of a maybe like a two quart milk container and you know push a couple of buttons and then it sort of says hey you can take these two pulls them out puts them in the thing and then goes which is really cool they don’t have those in the us the scooter market like the smaller like actual like the kick scooter kind um they are now all switching to swappable batteries so people aren’t rounding up electric scooters anymore in their pickup truck or their box truck at night taking them home to charge them then putting them back out on the market or on the streets which is what that’s what the model was up all up until now a couple companies now have swappable batteries so now people just come around yank the batteries put in a fresh one and they’re on their way which makes so much more sense logistically and it just allows the scooters to stay out there so uh is this something the big question here is is this something that could come to the evtl market in the future or is this the size and the complexity of these batteries the way they’re engineered into the aircraft is that going to be a limitation where it’s maybe not going to be realistic well that’s a really good question dan because i you have seen this in other industries like when chevrolet started with the volt and some of the predecessors to it there was always talk about dropping out the battery pack on a car and putting a new battery pack in it as a refueling station which is a battery swap out and that that hasn’t come to fruition because tesla’s never needed it i guess that because they can charge the battery so fast to get you back on the road on an airplane though it’s going to use a lot more energy right there’s a there’s a lot more energy usage i think even though they talk about it takes less energy than driving a tesla um uh there’s a there’s a lot bigger there’s a pretty good sized battery pack in there and airplanes tend to want to have short turnaround times they kind of need to uh i think pipistrel’s design has a removable battery stack in the front of it so you can actually pull some batteries out puts them in uh by aerospace is designed out in colorado i think that’s more of a quick charge situation you can charge the batteries fast enough but i think beta’s design up in vermont up here i think the way they design that battery pack in a sense it’s like all one place sort of towards the middle of the aircraft where you could in theory pull some batteries out put some new batteries in which may be advantageous for the customer ups like if if you need a quick turnaround you just you could probably swap batteries it may be a thing to go do so i think the concept is there is whether you could really implement it or not like where do you have all these batteries stack drawn all over the place well if i’m ups maybe i do maybe that’s what i do it’s because i’m ups and i can manage that whereas if i was just a regular owner and i landed in you know sort of nowhere massachusetts the chances of me having another battery pack to swap is essentially zero right so i think i think the technology makes sense though don’t you i think it all depends on where we’re going right as a country as as a country or as a world on are we going to go electric or not and if we are is that part of the mix it’s this battery swap out thing and what what standard do we make it to think of it this way dan you know the big the big controversy in europe well one of the controversies in europe because there’s multiple at the same time as like the iphone charger plug right that that they actually have i’ve seen commercials in the i think it’s from the uk or european union at least that are fighting for a common standard so that they don’t have to replace any of the charges they’ve they passed it yeah just recently which makes sense because there’s yeah we’re charging them all the same way like they’re all getting charged why do we have four different connectors and then this is the thing with laptops too they all still have proprietary mostly proprietary connectors apple has usb c charging a couple other smaller notebooks have usbc charging but they’re still like i have a lenovo and that’s got its own weird plug and it’s like i’ve got to buy you know it just adds waste when they’re you know there’s so many of these but yeah you’re right and that’s the question with this so the company that’s doing this battery swap in the video is called goguro and that’s in taiwan um but i think part of it is like you said if you’re if this is in a city and you can swap a new battery multiple different places that makes sense because it makes less sense when you then wonder say this is for an aircraft that you own and you’re in you know massachusetts you fly to kansas you stop over grab a new battery and then you fly somewhere else and then you realize that one battery was maybe a little faulty or like it wasn’t very good there’s a quality issue with it like is that your battery now like how do you get rid of that battery like you don’t want to be stuck with something in that scenario whereas if you’re constantly running around a city just oh you can just swap it in another place and like it doesn’t really matter which bat you know if you get a defective one once in a while okay you just go grab another one down the street but um but i think you’re right with if it’s the the rideshare model where ups has its own stations for their back and forth of their package delivery uh aircraft yeah they just have they own 100 batteries and they’ll just swap with a forklift if they’re that heavy you know whatever it is they have their own little thing where it’s just like yeah they’re going to be obviously really really heavy so it’s going to have to be some sort of system where you know forklift comes out pulls it out whatever puts in the new one and they’re good to go and if it’s the ride sharing thing where they’re landing on a you know a heliport or whatever it is that like you know volcopters port idea yeah they just have a bunch of batteries and swap them out and they own all the batteries they own all the aircraft that makes sense but you’re right if it’s this nationwide flying around thing it’s probably a lot more complicated to do that absolutely yes but it’s definitely an interesting idea because this is where batteries have gone like i said with the scooters it makes total sense um with these uh vespas makes total sense um but like you said it’s got to be a sort of universal standard if you have one brand of vespa or one brand of scooter and it doesn’t take the other brand like if we got to that point where everyone uses the same sort of brick brick battery that would cut down a lot of waste it would drive costs down it would make you know there’d be other manufacturers just like with cam cameras camera batteries you can buy like i’m filming on a sony camera i can buy an off-brand battery or i can buy a sony battery if i want to spend more i can buy the sony one which i don’t so i buy the cheaper one because they’re probably all made in the same place with mostly the same quality of cells so you know probably good for the industry in general to get to a universal standard like you mentioned it will be it’s just a question where they’re going to do it yeah for sure well that’s going to do it for this week’s episode of the struck aerospace engineering podcast thank you so much for listening be sure to leave us a review subscribe wherever you listen on itunes spotify stitcher youtube and we will see you here next week on struck striketape weather lightning tech’s proprietary lightning protection for radomes provides unmatched durability for years to come if you need help with your radon lightning protection reach out to us at weatherguardarrow.com that’s weatherguardaero.com

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Email us! this episode is brought to you by Weather Guard lightning tech at weatherguard we support design engineers and make lightning protection easy you’re listening to the struck podcast i’m Dan Blewett i’m Allen hall and here on struck we talk about everything aviation aerospace engineering and lightning protection Transcript: Northrup Grumman Model 437 & Boeing 737 Max 10 Wheel Engineering Alright welcome back to the struck aerospace engineering podcast i’m your co-host dan blewett on today’s episode a lot of policy news coming out of the u.s so the biden administration has put a bunch of awards out there are there’s clean air and cleaner fuel there’s a big push for improving some of that efficiency and reducing carbon emissions you know getting sustainable airline fuel developed all these sort of things so the byte administration is pushing a lot of money out to the faa and other agencies to end to some large aerospace companies themselves to help to develop some of these technologies so we’ll talk through a bunch of the implications there uh in our engineering segment we’re going to talk about northrop grumman’s new uh model of an autonomous aircraft that’s got some serious speed um possibly used for future drone missions uh the boeing 737 max’s extending wheels which are really unique and interesting and we’ll talk a little bit about a 2 megawatt electric motor from right so let’s start allen with the faa so biden has you know the administration has earmarked some money to the faa and as part of their clean program they’re doling a lot of this out to general electric aviation honeywell pratt whitney boeing roar delta techops gk and aerospace mds coding and america’s phoenix they’re all working on different projects to meet some of these standards for co2 emissions you know hoping to reduce that to by about 20 percent uh nox uh emissions by 70 and noise as well also particular particulate matter so give me some of your perspective on this obviously you know reducing emissions is difficult um and you’ve talked a bunch at length in the past about how maybe the airlines should be not quite in the same boat as you know transport other other forms of transportation yeah so the by the administration essentially handing out checks to some larger aerospace companies is kind of unique uh and they can do it under the veil of a lot of different uh projects at the moment and the obvious one for them is uh clean air right so they i think this is sort of indicative of a larger problem that’s going on that the airline industry in general has been has been in a financial hurt and they’ve been asking congress for some relief for at least a year maybe a little bit longer now and they’re starting to get in the in different forms uh so there’s been several hundred million dollars over a half a billion dollars doled out so far and i think more is yet to come now you know you kind of wonder if ge and honeywell weren’t already on some of these tasks uh particularly ge you know gets been pushing cleaner skies for a long time and and they’ve been doing a lot of work internally forever so this is not unusual for them but i think it’s just a a a unique way of trying to get funding to these companies and i i think the bigger scope is at what point will the abide administration start to realize that they need to get the airline industry going and pumping cash into it isn’t a long-term fix it’s a short-term bandage don’t you see that dan like we got to get people flying again and it seems like for some policy reasons we we’re avoiding and in fact i think it was again this week where dr fauci was talking about restricting people’s access to travel on airlines and trains and buses and everything else if they didn’t have a vaccine card which is just makes friction right friction reduces travel yeah and i mean that’s that’s true yeah i i guess i’m not sure how all the the pieces fit together because some of this money is going to you know like you said these aerospace companies who are developing technologies for the future obviously that’s good for his agenda because hey we’re doing thing we’re active right trying to fight against carbon emissions for climate change um so for that you know liberal base who’s you know really concerned about that of course there’s obviously moderates and conservatives who care about the environment as well um you know that seems like an important part of it now 100 million dollars to those bunch of companies doesn’t seem like that much money um especially considering you know engineers are well paid and and hard to find people um so i don’t know i don’t know how far that money goes on on the one hand of course there’s a lot of different layers to this so they’re also um besides the aerospace companies they’re giving 482 million in pandemic relief to the greater you know aviation industry so some of the airliners trying to keep jobs and trying to keep those companies from cutting jobs and then of course there’s all these other standards that he’s implementing you know they’re trying to get to a greenhouse gas emissions decline of 20 percent by the end of the decade so um trying to get that down by 2030. um i mean do you feel like that’s a realistic goal that i mean 20 cut seems pretty big at this point especially considering like you said how hard aviation’s companies are trying to reduce fuel consumption anyway right you know another even another 10 i think is going to be difficult at this point just because of the advances the industry has made over the last 30 40 years there’s not a lot of uh extra room to screen out squeeze out efficiencies you’re you’re kind of there right feels like kind of like the olympics like sprinters are so fast now they’re not gonna you know they’re not gonna jump from 9.7 to 9.4 like the human capacity is getting pretty close right um is it kind of the same way on aircraft or not not so much that’s a really good point do you remember a couple years ago the discussion and the research done about jesse owens and saying if you had put jesse owens in today’s footwear and on today’s athletic tracks that he’d be running just as fast as like a usain bolt like they’d be really close he would be competitive in that arrangement even though that was 1936 or somewhere in there where he competed right so uh it sort of has the same feel to it like yeah we have this existing technologies there’s only so much you can squeeze out of it so you’re just basically changing the the track shoes so to speak that the core of it is still pretty much the same there’s only some so many things you can do there yeah he was incredible he i mean he like obliterated people back then like he was so much faster than the other the common man of his day but yeah and of course usain bolt is a great example because he seems like the perfect specimen of a human being to run as fast i mean long levers credibly explosive i mean like he’s built to sprint as much as any humans ever been um and so like improving on usain bolt seems really hard right i mean like he’s fastest human in the world it’s like how do you get better than that right um because training is pretty modernized i mean there’s you know there’s a lot it seems like there’s a lot of parallels between the two worlds but i mean are any of these fuels going to make that big of a difference i mean i don’t know the we’ve talked a little bit about some of the sustainable fuels but um are they really going to be able to put the performance in the same category or and you’ve talked about safety like you don’t want to just like throw some new fuel through a system because in a car you know if the ethanol mix or something for example doesn’t work the car rolls to a stop right but planes can’t can’t glide down to a stop obviously right well i think it comes down to energy density and the fuels right and some of the sustainable fuels have less energy density means we got to carry more of them which seems overall that become can become less efficient so is it really worth the development extra cost for something that’s less efficient you just stick with what you have right now and try to make it more efficient that’s that’s a really good question because i think with the advent of the electric motor you know at what point did we just say all right we’ve we’ve honed the jet a fuel market as best as we’re ever going to get it or really close to it maybe we can squeak out another 2-3 let’s just say that and then do we then whatever aircraft we can transition over to electric we transition it to to overall the whole industry is a mission profile that may be the way that it’s accomplished but i don’t like the way that this is going in the in the sense of it’s like an edict from on high and engineers are just supposed to salute to this uh bureaucracy that’s creating an emissions standard out of whole cloth that doesn’t feel right and as you can see as a result of that the aircraft industry as a whole is really suffering and has not been able to get off its feet and it needs to because there’s a lot of it’s almost like the automotive industry there are a lot of jobs signed up at up in aviation right now yeah yeah and of course um you know the reporting from the ap news explains that only 2.4 million gallons we talked about this in the past as well only 2.4 million gallons of sustainable aviation fuel were consumed or were produced as of 2019 and that’s in comparison to the airlines burning 21.5 billion gallons so 2.4 million into 21.5 billion is 0.01 percent of the supply so to get that up to the point where it’s you know significantly higher seems like a really big step in like you said that nine year period because who’s going to build the infrastructure and the and the plants to produce that amount of fuel and like you said is it going to be up to par and like you said is it going to be more economical in the grand scheme because you start thinking of carbon the total carbon cost of and that was like like we’ve discussed that was part of the problem with ethanol was like people like well okay so we’re using corn this from corn but we’re also having to truck this and do more like we have to process more there’s like there’s so many more things involved where it didn’t seem and i don’t know that what’s ultimately happened with ethanol but it seems like it never it just like sort of quietly lost favor and i know i know it’s still used in the midwest but you don’t see it very much yeah right right yeah and i think this is i think i feel like it’s really complicated because i didn’t know a lot of this and and i think when you start to think of the emissions that apply you just think that okay well a mission standard should blankly apply well if blanket leaves a word but i’m using it as a word it should apply in a blanket state stay in a blanket manner to all forms of transportation like why should aircraft get a pass over trains or cars you know etc but to your point being an engineer who knows the the industry you know very intimately there’s just a lot more context to that like you said like they’ve been trying to reduce submissions forever because it’s good for business and that’s probably the best push to any of them is like hey this is good for business we want this just as much as anyone else does and then just say hey well you have to do this like like the cars do that’s just like where i feel like people they miss the miss the greater point and like you said the energy density thing is a really interesting not public you know the public are not privy to that they don’t understand quite that yeah you might have to burn 20 more fuel to get the same output and is that is that better yeah it’s it’s really complicated which i i i wonder if they dive into that enough trying to explain like this is why we’re doing this when they’re trying to push some of this legislation even if it’s just suggested sort of targets right i think the aviation community itself sort of knows these things but where as we see it on our renewable energy podcast when we talk about things like energy density and the overall cost of energy creation uh on the aviation side that never gets discussed discussed in public which is weird so i think we’re going to get to that point eventually get to that point when push comes to shove and and the administration the bureaucracy starts to push the the aviation aerospace industry is really going to push back and say hey look this is not going to be a long-term solution maybe a temporary solution but it’s not going to be a long-term solution well let’s talk a little bit more about the the funding that’s been earmarked for um aviation aircraft companies so it’s not just like commercial airliners but for example the largest recipient of some of this government funding is speared error systems which makes fuselages and other parts for boeing their big supplier and they’re in kansas uh you know your hometown so they’re going to get 75 and a half million which the government says will protect 3 000 plus jobs um so is that a good move or is this like you said a myopic move i mean what do you think this is gonna what’s what do you think the long-term and short-term implications will be yeah that there’s a there’s just an announcement out today talking about this uh there’s about a hundred million dollars going to the state of kansas and different uh aerospace associated affiliated companies uh 75 million is going to spirit aerosystems which is in wichita another 15 million is going to learjet so there’s there’s 90 million out of the 100 the remaining 10 kind of gets dispersed around to different smaller aviation related businesses the the emphasis there is on jobs and retaining jobs so i think there’s around 4 000 5 000 jobs or say they’re going to be able to keep employed which is a big deal right 5 000 jobs essentially in wichita kansas is a big deal i guess the question is how long is this going to go on how much longer can we sort of tie this over which is pouring cash into these companies because either boeing is going to get up to production and spirit’s going to be making money or or they’re not allergic it’s in a little bit of a different mode because they essentially shut down all aircraft aircraft production uh the last layer jet i think comes out in the next couple of weeks i think so they’re they’re in a little bit of a different struggle but all the the the smaller aviation companies are relying upon the avian asian industry as a whole to be flying in and modifying and upgrading and doing all the things that happen there and it’s just not happening at the rate that they need it to so it feels like sort of an inside job a little bit kansas has a very strong delegation when it comes to aviation and pushing the faa or the commerce department to kick out funding towards their particular their state if you look at the way that it’s described in some of the articles it says the the commerce department is the commerce department um reached out to the companies that could be helped by this funding and made sure that they applied so you see this sort of like this little inside chain like ah the phone’s ringing hey we’re going to give you 50 000 would you like it yeah we’re struggling sure we’ll sure we’ll take 50 grand right that’s the kind of thing that’s happened there and that just is plays into the larger frame of hey when are we going to get off our backsides and get life moving again and as of yet i haven’t seen good markers on that it seems like over the last week or so the the coveted response and the biden administration’s push to mandate vaccinations is not going to help that situation any uh particularly most these corporations that we’re talking about in kansas have over 100 employees yeah so that that’s going to be a fight well of course on the other side of it i mean i know employers are really struggling to get employees at this time right so you know uh was was it spirit that was struggling that had to start canceling flights i think a couple airlines had to cancel some flights or trim back because of staffing shortages and i think that’s some of the some of the fears behind unvaccinated employees where they don’t want to have another like they can’t afford any more losses so i so i get it from that end but you’re right anytime you make more friction um it’s gonna make it more difficult for people to travel and then bottleneck to some degree but it’s hard to say how much um yeah i mean and i guess we’ll we’ll see what covet holds in store for the winner um but a lot of the stuff we’re just not gonna know the results of until we kind of get through it unfortunately probably just a lot of hindsight will be the best that we’ll have but right yeah i agree yeah so those are but i mean are you optimistic by the amount of money that’s been doled out i mean what what’s your overall i mean considering all these different uh financial awards is this a was this a net positive or sort of neutral or you give it a thumbs down i think it’s at best a neutral at this point what you would like to see is uh the competitive nature of the aviation marketplace start to kick in again where spirit is competing with the gkn and you know all those big honeywell is competing with collins and you’re having those big colossal battles for market share we’re not having those at the moment we’re just like everybody’s just letting orders come in everybody’s stable we’re not trying to do too much we’re not trying to spend too much effort on any particular project and let’s let’s reduce our cash burn let’s not do much in terms of advertising let’s just kind of lay low for a while and that that has a similar feel to what i remember from the late 70s into parts of the 90s uh into the early to the 2000s again which is the nba industry knows how to to to conserve cash and to try to survive and it feels like we’re in that mode right now and they’ll stay there for a while and the the op the flip side of this which is uh not really thought about when this happens is those aviation companies aren’t really hiring gonna hire too many new engineers and so it creates this little lull in the employment base so you have these uh wide spans of engineering age groups and employee age groups in terms of line workers and that sort of thing where they’re in these discrete modes of there’s a group of people roughly the same age that were during the last upturn and then there’s a 10-year delay and there’s another group of people that are all hired at the same time so you don’t have this continuity and i think that in itself hurts aviation more than the economy does because it just you just have these really unique um internal uh machinations that happen because of the the span in engineering time and things aren’t handled down i don’t think things are handed down like they would be in a sort of continually growing increasing business cycle all right moving on we’ve got a couple things to talk about on the engineering side today first let’s start with northrop grumman they’ve unveiled art for their model 401 and model 437 aircraft which will be autonomous that they hope could be the air force’s next big generation of drones you know and accompany manned planes into battle this is that sort of hybrid human and ai potential you know force in the skies that seems like it makes a lot of sense so the model uh 437 will have a 3 000 mile range which is crazy um and it’s also going to be extremely fast i think getting as high as uh mach 0.85 um al what what features strike uh you know strike you here it looks a lot like any other almost supersonic jet that sort of really stealthy design a lot like the predator um but what sticks out to you here as far as the engineering well i think the range does and the ability to be stealthy which is automatic at this point no not even discussions about that it just is you can tell by the shape of the aircraft that it’s going to be has some stealthy features just by the shape alone and what when you take the human out of the aircraft you also rip out a number of aircraft systems that have to be there flight instrument displays an oxygen system pressurization system and just all the feedback stuff that a pilot requires you can just rip all that stuff out there by reducing the weight making the aircraft more aerodynamic and therefore increasing its range in times time in in service so that changes everything right if you can get the pallet out of the loop it’s not so much a reaction time thing as much as it is just an efficiency piece of of the aircraft performance and so north grumman’s been doing this since you know pre-global hawk right so global hawk is a massive aircraft it just is and they’ve flown that thing at 70 000 feet plus halfway around the world autonomously so they have the technology to do this i think what’s this is a really weird spot right now i think for the air force don’t you don’t you see this too damn like that like not having a pilot there feels weird and so they still want to have a pilot in control of the of the autonomous aircraft it’s a that’s a weird setup because she wouldn’t really need the pilot out there anymore you wouldn’t think are you talking about the pilot like an accompanying jet near it or are you talking about an actual pilot manning the controls back at the base well well they may need somebody on the ground i think that is still likely to occur the question is do you need somebody like in an f-35 out there and con you’re right do you need this person out there administering all this activity that you’re your other autonomous aircraft that are flying in formation behind you do you need do you need that f-35 out there i think right now the argument is yes but i’m not sure that’s going to last very long yeah because it i mean if this was like a helicopter strike or something for example there’s a lot more you can visually see like you can assess the situation um you know there’s a human element that could be involved um whereas at that height i mean you can’t imagine like what decision can a human make that’s not going to be based on radar or any other sort of instrumentation that it doesn’t really need an interpretation from the cockpit itself like you could interpret any of those pieces of you know instrumentation from a thousand thousand miles away in in your base so yeah i guess it is it is unclear because it’s not like he’s gonna be like come on guys no it’s fine they’re like no we need to pull back it’s you’re tens and tens of thousands of feet up in the air yeah i mean that the computer is going to do pretty much most of the seeing at that point i would i would assume right is there a top gun situation at all are we are we quote unquote dog fighting aircraft anymore i think the answer is no i think the the key right now is that we we uh defend ourselves and and attack from miles and miles away uh which you know we can you can argue about the the ethics of all that but that’s what’s happening right now so you’re not having those in quote unquote engagements where you’re shooting machine guns at one another that doesn’t happen uh maybe air to ground that’ll occur but air to air really hasn’t happened a long time so you know how many more pilots are we going to need in in flying f-35 is a really good question because it’s autonomy is happening so fast in the air and on on the ground in automobiles that you kind of wonder how much longer it’s going to be and even little tiny evital companies uh you know they’re not lockheeds right they’re not boeings these these small evita companies have been flying these electric aircraft autonomously for years at this point relatively safely so it just makes you wonder you know how long the pilot’s going to be in this thing yeah of course we’ve talked about darpa and their work and and their they’ve had these ai dog fight simulations where they’ve done well um when dog fighting against a real pilot in simulators but you’re right it seems like that day is is pretty far gone so we’ll have to keep keep an eye on this and see how it tends to evolve so another interesting piece of engineering is the boeing 737 max 10 uh their wheel system so the max 10 is 1.6 meters longer than the max 9 and apparently this little little boost in fuselage length is important because now it’s going to change the geometry of when the plane comes down to land and boeing was worried about potentially smacking the tail on the on the runway so the landing gear has a really interesting mechanism where it’ll actually extend to make the plane effectively stand taller to give it a little extra clearance ellen it seems like there’s a lot of like you said there’s a lot of engineering that even goes into the bathroom door latch what are some of the features in this incredibly important mechanism that helps these extend out um while being just as durable obviously like i think atlanta gears is incredible that you think of this huge heavy plane with such forces that these wheels and these little extensions can handle all that and never snap off because they can never snap off even one time and they don’t so take us through some of the engineering here well it’s interesting because the max 10 has gotten so long that on takeoff on some of those longer airplanes like the 757 some of this and the stretch dc-9s md md80s are so long on takeoff when they pull pull back on the stick that actually the tail can strike the runway you don’t want to do that in fact some airplanes have like skid plates back there and they have these tail strike sensors it looks like a little whisker off the back end it’s a biscuit switch that says hey you’ve hit the asphalt on the runway don’t do that and we need to look inspect the aircraft because you can you can bend a fuselage you hit the runway hard enough with the tail so what boeing has done is that they’ve essentially extended the length of the landing gear by about 10 inches but it’s a it’s like it expands and grows and i need to look at the mechanism a little bit more it seemed like on takeoff as the aircraft lifted off it would this extension would kind of pop out and help prevent the tail from striking the runway and but the problem is obviously is when you extend the landing gear you got to pull the landing or up into the fuselage somehow and they wanted to keep the same volume that the previous 737s in the same landing gear area and not have to change wing spars and all the structure so that the mechanism actually collapses that the knight or tenon just collapses back so the landing kit can still fit in the same hole in the wing so to speak that makes a lot of sense now it’s it’s funny that you know there’s when you think about the max 10 and some of these longer 737s you don’t think about stuff like that all the little engineering changes and i’ve seen some of the other max 10 changes and and some of the max changes and you wouldn’t think that boeing would hit some of these areas mostly it looks like some of them for weight savings and maybe some manufacturing savings like they’ve retouched a lot of the airplane that as a consumer still looks like a 737 you know still seems to fly like a 737 but there is a lot of engineering that goes into these these model uh improvements i’ll say and that you just don’t get to see so it is i think it is interesting that boeing actually created a little video for this and that’s helpful right i think as one of the things that boeing’s going to get killed on here recently is saying all the engineers aren’t doing the job properly well they need to they need to make some puff pieces that say hey yeah we’re doing some cool stuff and we are working really hard at it and it helps i think that kind of public operations message helps them because they they could use all the help they could get right now don’t you think so yeah i mean yeah if you’re only taking flack and you’re never getting any pats on the back your job becomes a grind for sure and they do do some pretty amazing work and yet like i said i don’t people there’s so many things on the on an airplane that we all take for granted and the landing gear is really like these tiny little wheels hold up this entire gigantic plane landing at hundreds of miles per hour um well i guess they’re probably one in the single like 150 what’s what’s what’s touchdown yeah speed 100 ish miles per hour run 100 miles an hour yeah yeah i mean it’s like such crazy force and this little mechanism keeps the whole thing from from from going down so yeah hats off to the boeing engineer is pretty pretty neat um and definitely check out the youtube video we’ll link to it in the description below so last on the docket today is right which is a startup w-r-i-g-h-t they say they have a a two megawatt electric uh engine that they’re hoping can really change and be a big part of the uh the switch to electric power and aircraft now they’re definitely going to start smaller they’ve said um they’re not trying to you know immediately power 737s and you know even that’s a small commercial airliner but this is a two megawatt motor that they say produces about 2700 horsepower equivalent and it’s the the most powerful motor designed by a factor of two of course it’s designed it’s not you know out there yet and they also say it’s going to be very very light so it’s in lab testing so it does exist um and they’re just working on testing alan how how does this design strike you and and where do we feel like the future of electric aviation stands here well the interesting thing about this right design and some other electric motor designs that are more recent is that they’re going roughly down the same pathway which are in a motor sense their permanent magnet motors and they’re trying to get the electronics to drive them as hard as they can now there’s some trade-offs here that have to be made in terms of the operating voltage you want to run the system at and how you can control that but the the key is here you’re dumping massive amounts of energy in a very small space like these motors if 2300 horsepower is what you said 23 2700 horsepower now think of what that would be in terms of an internal combustion engine that’s a big engine right that’s like something used on a on like two race cars jammed together it would be 20 that kind of that kind of horsepower but yet it’s probably the size it’s less than the size of one racing engine right it’s roughly that size so the energy density is really high and that means there’s a lot of heat that you have to bleed off of these engines so the the the issue is not so much that can you generate that kind of of thrust and horsepower the question is can you cool it fast enough that the thing doesn’t melt down that’s a bigger problem right now and there’s a lot of work on the thermodynamics of these motors making sure they have extreme amount of airflow through them making sure that they’re monitoring the temperature of the motors so that they don’t over basically cook themselves because you can’t do that on with some of these high power electric motors you can you can definitely do that so if you look at the right design it looks like a big thermodynamics problem they have a lot of metal surfaces a lot of cooling holes they must be forcing air into the motor they may have motors that actually cool the bigger motor just to try to drive air through it because what do you do on the ground and this is i think this is the bigger issue with these what do you do on the ground when you’re taxing around and you don’t have a lot of airflow through the motor like your flight can you cool can you cool it off what happens on takeoff do you over temp edges rolling down the runway and you’re at max thrust but you don’t have max air flow can you tolerate that kind of stuff so the the the kicker here is we’re going to see a lot of these height powered permanent magnet motors start popping out but the industry is going to help develop around it are the thermodynamics engineers that are going to be solving a lot of these airflow cooling problems liquid cooling it will be in play in a lot of these motors and air air flow uh will be in place so it’s it’s a lot of engineering challenges ahead well two things number one that makes me think of this time when i was coming back uh mostly across the country with a car that’s radiator was i didn’t know what was wrong with it but it was not working so if i was in a residential area going slow or stopped i just watched my temperature go up to the red line i was like so i had to stay at speed so when i was on the highway it could cool itself and but when i slowed down or i stopped or i was at a red light i was just like come on change come on change gotta change gotta change got a good green so i can cool this car off again um and then eventually got it replaced but um yeah so i feel your i feel your pain on the runway there um but number two i mean with the i mean the fact that they won’t have to carry so much fuel on board that weight savings i mean can they use that for like a really serious huge fish tank like air like water cooling system and you even you see some computers that have and lots of servers have water cooled not water cooled but liquid cooling um i mean is that something that can support this was like hey we saved x amount of pounds on fuel weight so we’re gonna we have a really insane cooling system um i mean is that the trade-off gonna happen or is that maybe a little too ambitious yeah no there’s a lot of trade-offs going on right now on particularly the larger electric aircraft designs which is you know how much horsepower can i generate how much cooling system can i tolerate in terms of the weight right and it’s going to be a liquid cooling system a lot of them and then how much how much energy can my batteries maximally deliver for this motor can i even drive it hard enough with the batteries that i have can i deliver enough current and do i need to be operating at a higher voltage to reduce the losses and cables and there’s a lot of weird uh engineering analysis that are going on that haven’t been done before because you’re right dan i mean the thing about batteries is you have this sort of fixed pack and the weight never changes versus fuel as you burn it off the aircraft gets lighter and that’s it advantageous so you actually get more efficient as you burn off fuel so you kind of after like half a flight or you cooked off half the batteries energy you got this dead weight right and you have to carry that day weight around so there the dynamics change a lot versus a traditional internal combustion engine or jet airframe what what do you do with this weight and how do you manage this weight and are the batter on the batteries carrying enough energy density the answer is always no right you always like to double the energy density if you could because they’re if you you you’re going to have a fixed amount of weight you can tolerate i think that’s what’s happening on the batteries and then everything else is sort of designed downhill from that but it’s going to lead to a lot of different aircraft designs and i think like i’m saying the thermodynamic designs are going to get really uh intricate they’re going to be little tiny design details they’re going to make these these electric motors work or not work and we’re going to see a lot of development in those areas so making electricity go down wires and turn motors it’s relatively simple cooling all that is complicated well i know we’re going to end today’s episode of the struck aerospace engineering podcast thanks so much for listening be sure to subscribe whether you listen on itunes spotify stitcher or if you watch us on youtube and if you have the moment 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The Gulfstream G700 broke a transatlantic speed record, reaching Mach 0.88 – can they break the sound barrier in the near future? The FAA is investigating Virgin Galactic, asking why they departed from their flight path; they’ll be grounded until the answer is satisfactory. And, Archer Aviation just received their G-1 certification, but the ISS nonetheless has issued a warning to investors to decline the intended SPAC merger deal. Will it go through? Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! EP69 Transcript this episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech at Weather Guard we support design engineers and make lightning protection easy you’re listening to the struck podcast i’m Dan Blewett i’m Allen Hall and here on struck we talk about everything aviation aerospace engineering and lightning protection welcome back to the struck aerospace engineering podcast i’m your co-host dan blewett on today’s episode we’re gonna talk about golf stream setting a new transatlantic speed record at 0.88 mach from savannah to katar uh we’ll talk about faa and virgin galactic some of their woes ryanair also with boeing and talks to get some 737 max 10s out the door but it looks like those talks might have collapsed in our evt well segments say we’ve got a bunch about archer the faa has approved a g1 uh certification for them and the iss on the other hand is advising against the arger spac merger so we’ll talk about that some big stock news there and lastly uh interesting uh article from the vertical flight society uh explaining that they’ve taken a directory of what now includes 500 evtol concepts a which is up from 200 from last summer so we’ll talk about some of that and what we can expect if maybe all 500 designs will come to fruition um i’m sure Allen has a lot of thoughts on that so first let’s talk about golf stream so Allen this is a g700 that reached 675 miles per hour or mach 0.88 on the flight across the atlantic from savannah georgia here in the u.s to qatar and then they also hopped over to paris uh reaching mach 0.90 which is 690 and a half miles per hour so this is pretty fast but i mean how fast is this it’s pretty good for a business jet yeah for especially as large as it is i think the cessna citation 10 which was the fastest at the time was like 0.9192 maybe on mach yeah so it it’s it’s really moving aerodynamically the gulfstream’s earthcraft have gotten better and better as it gotten bigger and bigger obviously it takes bigger engines yeah yeah i mean i mean if you’re going to have a top-end business aircraft gulfstream is definitely leading the pack at the moment it’s beautiful airplane so obviously supersonic flight is a big one um is that just breaking mach 1 like or is it are we really looking like mach 1.5 like companies like the now defunct arion and now boom who are looking in the supersonic jet realm i mean is this not is this not close enough or i mean what’s the big difference here well it just takes a lot more fuel to go faster uh and a different kind of aircraft to break this sonic sound barrier gulfstream has pushed the envelope pretty well in terms of subsonic flight the aircraft is very clean and as they as they develop and continue to develop they have better computational models better aerodynamic cfd models for the aircraft so the aircraft keeps getting cleaner and cleaner if you look at a g3 to the g700 it’s it’s almost a different aircraft in terms of its aerodynamics and its performance i always think it’s really interesting when they do these sort of like speech trials or world records on speed because they used to happen the united states quite a bit they would go from the airplanes would go from like new york to los angeles or new york to miami places where the business flyer would frequent right and where the marketplace was and so you try to set a a flight record there so now the flight records are not in the united states the flight records are over in europe and the middle east where their future customers are so you did it to to do those uh speed records where your customer base was so you can always get an indication of where the aircraft’s going to be sold because that’s where they’re doing the speed record trials got it got it so i mean do you see golf streams breaking the sound barrier or would they have to do a whole whole overhaul to get there well gulfstream i think has dabbled in supersonic over the last 10 years there’s just been a lot of rumors of that they’ve looked at it but they’ve never pulled the trigger on it and i think it as it’s a real combination of technology versus the expense and the in the process of getting something certified and gulfstream’s not going to waste money they’ve never been a company to spend money frivolously they’re focused on producing a really great product and keeping their customers engaged and and unless there’s a great big demand for a supersonic aircraft gulfstream is not even going to pursue it and i i kind of wonder if they have already tapped the potential marketplace for that and realized the number of aircraft they could theoretically sell versus the the amount of money they would generate it’s it’s just a wash right now or negative and so they haven’t pursued it all right moving on um so the faa said the rocket ship carrying uh richard branson and his virgin galactic um space crew essentially or their employees left their air traffic control clearance area as they descended back on their flight on july 11th and so now the faa is saying you know why did this happen and they’re looking for answers and banning virgin galactic flights until then so alan what’s your take on the situation well isn’t it a very weird article and i hadn’t seen this article in the united states i think we picked this article up overseas which makes you wonder what is the real behind-the-scenes story but what they’re indicating is that as the virgin galactic craft came back down to earth on its glide path back down the earth that the went outside of some enveloped area that the faa has designated for them to fly in but i remember watching that flight and i didn’t see anything abnormal about the way that the aircraft came back down to earth and it maybe there was some winds there that forced the aircraft to deviate a little bit based on which way the winds were blowing but maybe they it sounds like they come out of some faa pre-designed box for a minute or two but dan they’re out in the middle of desert there’s no one else around out there does it really make all that much difference yeah i don’t i don’t know i mean i know the faa is obviously really strict and they want to make sure there’s control i mean is this really just a an incident where they’re just concerned about just the lack like more about the plane itself like why would this possibly deviated or i don’t know i mean why why would they be making a probe into this if there wasn’t something potentially bigger yeah i don’t know yeah and as if you’re the pilot in command you get to make those decisions right if you’re if the safety of the aircraft comes first the faa boundaries come second so it’s a little weird that they’re not going to let them fly anymore until they get the envelope increased the box increased whatever but it is odd because you would think that the faa would say hey virgin what’s going on and virgin would say hey the wind was blowing at 50 knots at 30 000 feet whatever it was and it blew us off course a little bit we corrected we’re back in not a big deal can we work out negotiate a bigger box because this is supposed to be a spaceport this is why they’re in new mexico because it’s a spaceport and there’s no one around and while the fa hasn’t agreed to that is is odd so there’s there may be more behind the story maybe this is just one piece of a bigger bigger problem that they had with that flight it’s going to be hard to tell and rarely going to see these things discussed in public until they’re settled so i have to keep our eye on this one yeah i mean inversion galactica says it was well you said it was a high altitude wind and that the pilots did what they were supposed to do so yeah it seems like they’re they seem like they’re taking it seriously but it’s kind of like well you know what else what else should we do there like yeah i mean that unexpected things happen in flights um but yeah obviously maybe this is just a different magnitude since it’s space and and all that but yeah you’re right it’s something that we’ll probably know more as that story progresses but boeing in in the news cycle here was in talks with ryanair who’s obviously one of the bigger low-cost airlines based in ireland and ryanair said that uh they’re just too far away from this potential 737 max 10 order and of course ryanair has a has a known reputation for swooping in and looking for discounts on planes obviously last year was a great time to get some of those and they they put in a big uh 737 max order but when they were looking for some of the newer max 10s uh looks like they’re just too far away so why is this newsworthy i guess i mean this this seems just like an ordinary like oh yeah i was going to buy a couch and i didn’t have the one i want or it was too expensive and so i didn’t like why is this really that newsworthy well just because it affects boeing and ryanair stock that’s why i mean ryanair has been such a large purchaser of 737s and that’s the model that’s selling right now and boeing needs to sell a lot of those aircraft it’s going to affect the stock price and ryanair is knowledgeable that fact they know if they walk away from the table that boeing stock price could be hurt and may drive them back to the table that’s probably one of the reasons why they walked away because in those big players like a southwest airlines or a ryanair boering responds to them when they have a problem they’ll they will respond to those still airline customers because of the quantities and what financially it does to the company though and i i guess when i saw this article was yeah okay this is just one interim piece to a longer set of discussions and ryan ryanair is is using the leverage as much as they can but you got to wonder if boeing kind of gets tired of that you know because boeing can’t respond right so boeing just loses some stock price because of it and has to swallow that that doesn’t go over well so you know what what what’s the what do you what do you do if you’re boeing i don’t know if you can do anything besides just wait it out or raise the price when they come back yeah that’s a good point it’s not like boeing would release a press release saying yeah we were gonna sell planes this people and then they just pulled out or they couldn’t afford them like it’s not like they would ever do that you’re right it is kind of a one-sided or you wonder if there’s just uh some sort of manipulation where they’re trying to get you know like you said put pressure on them because stock price that’s possible i’ve no idea but you’re right um boeing stock is down 1.2 percent um obviously not a big hit but something so yeah anytime i guess people are learning of a fall through you know sales falling through it’s not a not obviously a good thing for a stock price but right but the marketplace kind of realizes that the way you don’t see huge fluctuations but if ryanair says we are not buying 737s we are going to buy airbus or something else yeah it would have it would have a negative impact on boeing stock well like you said with a lot of fleets want like a southwest for example i mean they’re all 737 so they’re pretty locked in and you know as far as like their service and their training of their technicians and part part interchangeability stuff like that um and ryan already has a lot of 737 so you think that you know a little hey we’re not there on price right now probably doesn’t have long-term implications especially considering all their previous purchases of 737 max’s last year so it’s not like they’re going to like overhaul the fleet and go to airbus like that’s certainly not going to happen but at least right now the the tens aren’t a good fit well if you think about it from ryanair’s position you’re still not up to max number of travelers you had sort of 2019-ish you’re still not there yet and so you’re trying to cook a deal right now because you probably can leverage boeing but in boeing’s case they’re just saying they’re going to need them at some point so why don’t we just wait if we just wait a year the price isn’t going to change and we’re going to get our money that’s more likely what’s going to happen if ryanair can’t secure that deal now they’re going to secure it in a year from now all right so in our ev2l segment today a bunch of archer news so let’s start with their g1 uh certifications this is a g1 issue paper alan what is an issue paper and why does archer need it the issue paper comes into play uh in when you have your unique configuration of an aircraft because the regular regulations weren’t specifically designed for that particular style of aircraft and a lot of the electric aircraft obviously they don’t have a fuel system they have batteries which is not necessarily envisioned uh and the the way the motors move and the and the the flight dynamics of the aircraft are different than others like a cessna 172. it’s totally different so what the faa is doing is they’re taking the existing regulations some from part 23 which is a small aircraft and some from part 27 from the small helicopter and they’re creating a master list of here are the regulations you need to show compliance with and that kind of gets shoved one way which goes from the faa to the applicant and the applicant gets a chance to respond to them and say yeah no maybe we’d think this regulation may be a better fit whatever so but the first thing you want to do in terms of getting to type certification is to get the certification basis defined which is getting the g1 issue paper there’s been a couple i’ve seen g1 issue papers in electric aircraft a couple of them floating around so it isn’t like archer has done something out of whole cloth here this is something that was already sort of pre-cooked into the faa system the next issue paper that will come out is the g2 if they go down this road which is the means of compliance so they can define how they they’re going to show compliance and aerodynamics and some and a bunch of other stuff noise whatever else so you know it’s a step the biggest obviously with archer the biggest issue is they’re not flying anything at least they’re not telling anybody they’re flying thing their aircraft is still a model and uh you know having issue paper is great having a flying aircraft is a lot better so they got a ways to go well and speaking of archer um interesting story out of techcrunch so iss which is the um institutional shareholder services incorporated is a basically an advisory sort of a group recommended last week that atlas crest investment corp which is the spac that would merge with archer aviation they have advised people should vote against this merger with archer so now iss has done this with the joby aviation and reinvent technology partners back which went through went public so essentially people said we don’t care uh that you’ve you know issued this uh warning we’re gonna go whole go ahead and you know seal the votes to approve the deal so iss sort of has a history of doing this of you know giving their thumbs down to these spac mergers in the evtol sector but with this latest one giving the thumbs down to the archer the archer merger they’re pointing out that this battle with whisk really puts the company at risk um allen do you agree with that where do you fall on this um this kind of like i don’t know it’s a sticky warning out here from this uh this this advisor i think that it is going to be a difficult path for archer to go down uh not only do they have the engineering challenges that they don’t even know about yet as they get the aircraft into some sort of flight test so it’s not even the full aircraft yet get something in a flight test then there got this legal battle thing going on which doesn’t raise investor confidence and the and their valuation has been fluctuating so much you see almost 3 billion down to below 2 billion like the fluctuations are ridiculous in terms of the amount of money if you even in terms of the percentages it’s just widely fluctuating it adds a lot of stress onto a company uh that it doesn’t really need when it’s trying to develop some engineering um article which is what an aircraft is it’s all engineering right and you just don’t have time to devote resources away from that because you’re spending so much money on making a factory getting tooling getting drawings getting the faa happy getting to some flight test hopefully you don’t crash the thing and all those other pieces that you’re just juggling so many balls and archer is adding more balls to juggle simultaneously not sure that’s a great idea and i think the whis thing still is hanging out there uh wisc has released a video last week and which shows them flying their one of their early prototypes in 2017 so whisk has been at this for a while doing the flight test and it was a piloted flight test it wasn’t autumn it wasn’t uh you know remote control it was a pilot in the aircraft which would in 2017 would have been pretty interesting to do uh so whisk has is bringing the goods so to speak saying hey we’ve been at this a long time archer doesn’t even have an airplane what’s the deal and do you have to convince a judge or a jury of that that one that one’s going to get interesting because you can convince a jury about anything if you bring the goods whether they you know took it legally or designed an aircraft in their own backyard in archer’s own backyard who knows nobody knows yet but it does lead to a lot of downside risk so i mean if you had to make a prediction and obviously you know just a prediction do you think the merger goes through like with joby or is joby going to kind of remain the only one no i think the merger goes through i think these specs have to happen they’re they’re the alternative is to collapse the company so they need that financing there’s no way you can proceed without it realistically now the question dan i i don’t understand the details of what drives all these companies to spec because maybe just the simplicity of it but if you’re if you’re a joby or a an archer and you have an existing company and you need a fun and need to raise money what you would normally do is you just become a public company you just go public and announce you go in public and you go through the sec uh paperwork and filings and all the things you got to go do does this which would make transparency one of the keys right that’s why they have that process is it this very transparent does this back somehow hide the transparency part of this because it’s starting to feel like the investors are saying we can’t tell what’s going on inside when you go from because the spec envelopes the company i can’t i can’t penetrate this back to look around inside so i don’t really know what the value is does that is that what happens i’m not sure exactly there’s just a lot less steps involved i mean that’s why the whole spec thing is was a craze this past year it just makes there’s it’s a much faster i’m not sure if it’s less transparent or not that’s a good question i’m not an expert on it but obviously when there’s such a shortened path from private company to public company you assume there’s going to be less of a deep dive into finances but again um don’t quote me on it yeah it just seems like the the the spac creates the the marketplace and becomes public right and so uh the sec is evaluating the spec and whatever they purchase is something separate right so it does seem like a way to shorten the process and you’re right i think shortening process maybe eliminates a lot of visibility that we’d otherwise get to see well last up on the docket today the vertical flight society released a press release um recently a little bit last month that basically explained that there’s been 500 different evtol designs that their company has uh sort of cataloged into a directory um including 200 new ones since last july and just 101 100 so far this year between january um now and september so 500 designs um and that includes up to 288 different companies or developers now is this is this normal for this or is this just a crazy free-for-all of everyone i mean we’ve reported on a lot of these and there’s been some silly ones for sure there’s been some that seem like that well this is never going to happen this is just you just made a website and a prototype and a drawing does this surprise you is that i mean that 500 is a lot it does because the aircraft industry never has had that quantity of participants particularly participants that may not have a lot of aircraft experience in their company uh proposing airplanes you’ve always seen the popul what i would term the popular mechanics kind of aircraft oh there’s a new aircraft company they got this unique design feature yeah yeah yeah it’s cool but most likely they’re probably not going to make very many of them if they make any at all in this particular case you just see the flooding of the market which gets back to our i think to our discussion about the spax is it just a free-for-all right now that uh if a spec can grab hold of a theoretical design does that then allow them to create an airplane company you know do you just have enough credentials if brute if bert rutan were out there and he’s not but if bert rutan you know the great aircraft designer we’re out there uh pitching at evtol i guarantee you he could have a deal and you know those those days are sort of long gone so what you’re seeing and sort of the retain areas are long gone so what you’re seeing is uh just a lot of different design groups and maybe a small aircraft manufacturer dabbled in some home built aircraft talking about building you know a literally a billion-dollar company so the question in my mind is and this relates to the archer uh again because the archer had a youtube open house video pre-canned video they released last week i wish there were only 400 people watching and i was i was one of the 400 watching what was going on there and i was a little shocked because you know if you’re if you’re having so many people enter the marketplace that would make you think or feel like there’s a lot of demand for this product it’d be like saying uh we have this ipod or you know a thousand thousand uh songs in your pocket right which is the apple thing and so which which would automatically create quite a real sense of demand there’s a lot of demand for something like that when an aircraft company supposedly has huge demand and when they make an announcement no one’s paying attention it makes you wonder like what is the real marketplace here is it as big because i think archer was talking about doing uh 30 to 40 flights a day that’s a lot of demand so these two things don’t seem to jive right now in terms of the number of aircraft companies the variety of aircraft and the the the money available to them and what the existing marketplace the total addressable market the tam looks like like what is the tam because you hear numbers thrown about you go yeah how many taxi rides are given in a day i don’t know how many people would be willing to do it i haven’t seen it maybe you have seen it but i haven’t seen anybody throw real hard numbers at it but just like just saying we can do 30 flights a day between doing 30 flights and selling 30 flights that that’s the difference so we have a lot we’re going to have a lot to see over the next year i think yeah there’s a lot to prove out here right there’s going to be quite a narrowing of the field as there already has but you’re right there’s still a lot of a lot of unanswered questions well that’s going to do it for this week’s episode of the struck aerospace engineering podcast thanks so much for listening wherever you are on spotify itunes stitcher youtube thanks thanks again for being here and be sure to subscribe share the show with a friend and we will see you here next week on struck strike tape weatherguard lightning tech’s proprietary lightning protection for radomes provides unmatched durability for years to come if you need help with your radome lightning protection reach out to us at weatherguardarrow.com that’s weatherguardaero.com

Raytheon has announced that it will acquire FlightAware, as part of its Collins Aerospace branch – will this pay off? Boeing is under scrutiny by the FAA, again about pressuring engineers – is this valid? And, Archer Aviation is partnering with Reef, a parking garage company, to transform garage roofs into vertiports for their EVTOLs…will it work? Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Dufour has entered the EVTOL arena, with a tiltwing design – can it work? Plus, we discuss Archer going public, cell phone fires, Viasat radome problems on 737s, and more. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Joby Aviation is now public through their space acquisition deal – what will they now do with the money? Plus. JetBlue is going transatlantic – is this a big deal for the company as they choose Airbus 321LRs for their JFK – Heathrow flights? We also discuss a new folding transwing design EVTOL, continued Boeing Starliner problems and more. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

In this episode we discuss the recent issues between NASA and Boeing, as the Atlas Rocket and Starliner capsule have had their launch yet again delayed. Boeing has been in the news consistently for quality control issues – is the company simply not what it once was? Airbus and Qatar Airways are in a new spat, this time with Qatar Air unhappy about fuselage issues on some A350 aircraft. And, the FAA approved Heads-Up Displays last month, but will they catch on, and what benefits do they provide? Lastly, Lilium and Eviation made big EVTOL news, and the Scorpion Hoverbike crash left a test pilot unharmed, but how lucky was he? Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Volocopter recently recorded a fully crewed 4 minute flight, whereas Joby performed an unmanned 77 minute flight. The two flights were very different; what do they say about each company’s distance to flying commercially? Plus, we discuss how shape-memory allow can help reduce airplane noise at landing, Airbus and Textron news, and more. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Jeff Bezos blasted off with Blue Origin, successfully reaching space and returning to Earth safely. What’s next for the billionaire? Archer has continued to press for dismissal of the Wisk patent lawsuit–will they be successful? And, might Tesla enter the EVTOL market in the future, given their battery technology, engineering sophistication and manufacturing capabilities? Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Transcript: EP63 – Bezos Reaches Space; Archer vs Wisk Continues; Might Tesla Enter the EVTOL Space?

Heart Aerospace gets a 200 plane order from United and Mesa Airlines, a regional partner. Richard Branson reaches space with Virgin Galactic–what’s the significance of this milestone? Reliable Robotics is working on automating Cessna flight–will we have automated, remote cargo flight sooner than later? Plus, FAA fines, EVTOL news and more. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Transcript of EP62 – Heart Aerospace Order with United; Richard Branson Takes Flight; Reliable Robotics work with Cessnas

Eviation prepares for test flights, and the Leonardo AW609 is back in the news–will it finally achieve certification and commercial success? Plus if a plane emergency lands in water or has its parachute deploy (in the case of Cirrus aircraft’s CAPS system) is the plane capable of returning to service? And, we discuss United making a big jet order and big push toward the top of commercial aviation. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! [TRANSCRIPT] EP61 – United’s Big Move; Flying a Waterlogged Plane? Plus, Eviation & Leonardo Tilt Rotor Aircraft 0:00This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech at Weather Guard. We support design engineers and make lightning protection easy. 0:14You’re listening to the struck podcast. I’m Dan Blewett. I’m Allen Hall. And here on strike, we talk about everything aviation, aerospace engineering and lightning protection. 0:30Alright, welcome back to the struck podcast. This is Episode 61. On today’s show, we’re going to chat about United Airlines making a pretty big push. 0:39Obviously, they’ve been a big player in commercial aviation for a long time. But maybe they’re really doubling down with a big order from Boeing and some other endeavors. We’re talking about a pretty interesting space balloon that challenges what this sort of edge of the earth travel could look like. We’ll talk about planes whether they’re flyable, again after a water landing, or even the cap system deploying on a Cirrus aircraft, if there’s any chance that are ever a chance that they could be flyable. Again, lastly, on our EBT wall segment, we’ll talk about aviation Volocopter. And this tilt rotor from Leonardo, the AWS 609, which is not an EBT. Well, exactly, but really interesting and might be coming to fruition soon with certification. So, Alan, how are you sir? What’s the deal with United? Are they trying to be the I feel like they’ve always been a tertiary commercial airliner, but it seems like they’re, they’re they’re done with that image? I mean, is that how you sort of 1:38look at them? Well, I think at the moment, there may be taking the advantage of the market conditions where airline May, while the airlines got infused with some government cash in the United States, even though the travel industry is still down the opportunity to buy your planes at a lower price, if you’re thinking about inflationary pressure, and not, particularly in United States and Europe, it may be a good time to buy an airplane and because Boeing is looking for some cash right now, and Airbus also, you may be they may have negotiated a really good deal for themselves, because you never see the published sale prices that is University published prices and sales, right? So yeah, you always see what the list price is. And they always have a disclaimer, any article you read, well, they probably paid a lot less than what the market says the value of the aircraft is, which is fascinating. Every airplane sells at a different price. It’s it’s kind of like cars, but worse. I think, really, that’s that sounds really surprising. You wouldn’t think that as a consumer, you’d think that this was very, because of just how how many costs are involved and just how much I mean God to build an airplane, it’s such a such a process and so much engineering, you think it’d be much more fixed and original, then then some Yahoo slinging cars on a used use lot, you know? Yeah, well, you got to remember that they have part sales and support sales on the backside. So that they may have signed long term contracts in terms of parts and engineering support going forward. So there may be some cash and that side of it, obviously, to clear up airplanes off your books right now is a good idea. And to get that, that cash inflow, so you may be able to negotiate that a little bit. Now, there’s a lot of market forces that play in here, and the business aircraft market has been that way for a long time. 3:37The prices tend to fluctuate a good bit based on quantity buys, and which is what united is doing right and is not united as buying roughly 200 Boeing airplanes and about 70 Airbus airplanes. Yeah, that’s a pretty good size order. So you can you can throw your weight around a little bit in terms of negotiating prices and deals and as particularly want long term deals. Yeah. And 100 150 of the 737 Max 10s, which are, they’re a little bit bigger than the max eight, is that correct? Yeah. Yeah. No more like a 321 neo. 4:11But you know, the 10 is not done yet. Right? So yeah, a little while ago, right. So if you’re Boeing, and you’ve, you’re securing orders for that, that’s a good positive feeling for the rest of the industry. You know, your your biggest problem not so much on the 737, but on most airplane models is getting those initial buys to show that the market will support it. And if a big airline like united decides to tap into that aircraft production, and that just opens it up for a lot of small, small airlines to think, okay, there’s stability there. If united is buying, I’m just stability on that on that product line. I’m not going to make 100 of these and stop soft the production line. I’m going to be stuck with this little bit of an albatross 4:56all by it too, right. So that’s that. So it’s a lot of 5:00have unique market forces and marketing that goes on on every aircraft model. And united is looking to take advantage of that right now. Well, and so as of 2020, United Airlines was fourth in market share, below American, Southwest and delta. Right. But does buying fancy new planes really give you a leg up on the competition? Do people care? I mean, I’m not gonna book a ticket, because it’s on a 737 Max 10. Right. I mean, how does this play out? I think that this drives United’s marketplace, in a sense, and I’ve always thought of the united as more of a business persons airline, they do tend to have nicer cabins. Obviously, 5:47United just meant making a lot of runs to Florida. So unlike Southwest, right, so if you get on a Southwest airline, usually it’s you feel like you’re going to Orlando or Vegas, at some point, that airplane is going there 6:00on this route on this daily route. So you kind of get crowded in and southwest. And if you’re not ready to deal with that, you really can’t get any work done on a Southwest airplane, in my opinion. 6:13Particularly unless you’re sitting in an exit row seat, you just can’t move around enough to do any real work. We’re on a united airplane, particularly in the business class section, or first class section, you could totally get some work done in there. And the cabins are nice, and it’s clean. It’s new. And it has also all those touchy feely things. So 6:31there is a big there has been a bigger market for United. I think the problem with United Is this the base in Chicago, and a lot of the US business community keeps moving further and further south away from them. Right when more towards Delta. What because the weather? Yes, I guess that makes sense. Yeah. And they’re definitely I mean, they have a big Chicago hub, obviously at O’Hare. Yeah. And, yeah, okay. Well, I mean, you know, I hadn’t really thought about it, cuz I think a lot of travelers, you know, I’m into my 30s now, but in my younger days, you know, you never thought about niceness as a reason you travel when you’re, you know, not doing it for business so much, you just think of what’s the cheapest ticket within reason. 7:14And that’s your only concern. But obviously, as you get older, and your comfort matters more, and business travel matters more than I think you’re right, the jet, you’re like, Man, that united jet was awesome. And yeah, Southwest feels a little mad By comparison, maybe I’ll spend the extra 50 bucks on a ticket or whatever it is, for comfort, I do feel that way about American because I had flown only Southwest for a while. And then I was on an American flight. And it was just a nicer cabin. Clearly, newer seats had an outlet. And just like, right, there are another little perks where it made a difference. And I was like, Oh, this is nice. Maybe if I, if I have a choice, and it’s close, like, I’ll choose American instead of Southwest. So 7:55if you’re doing sales, and you’re traveling a lot, you don’t tend to fly Southwest, you don’t see those, those kind of sales people flying Southwest a lot, you tend to see them on an American Delta united, just because as a creature conference, and you can be, quote unquote, productive while you’re on their plane. So you know, there’s a lot of press in the news about Jeff Bezos going into the space Richard Branson going to space people, you know, regular folks who want to pony up a quarter million dollars to go up into space on a rocket, but there’s this new company called space for site space, per sec perspective. This is an interesting article from Robert port, that this is basically a balloon and they’re not going to go out actually in the space, they’re going to go about 100,000 feet up. But then you just sort of like, hang around, like you’re like a lounge in like a cocktail lounge in the stratosphere. And you see, you’re actually be, you know, be able to survey the the entire planet from 100,000 feet up for a couple of hours. Which That, to me seems like a really sensible, cool solution. Because, you know, the obvious thing is, well, you pay a quarter million dollars to be up and up and back really, really fast, right? You’re just flying through space, and maybe that’s part of the ride, but to be able to survey and have a camera with you and just sort of like have a couple hours up at the stratosphere seems pretty awesome. How do you feel about this idea? I don’t know if it would work in a general public sense. Just because of the length of time it takes to get up and down and I’m not sure how they’re getting down. I understand the up part is possible balloon there’s there’s two guys, that’s how much does it right. Yeah. 9:38So this got to have some sort of up down mechanism to it. 9:42But, you know, like the Felix Bumgardner when he jumped out of that little capsule that was at 100 logical Yes. Such a cool video. I mean, what the 70s was it? No, no, no, no, that was that was in the Felix Baumgartner was a was back in 2015 right? 10:00Right, he was doing that Red Bull thing they were trying to break the wall on freefall out of a with the original one. Okay, different guy. It was a lot a lot older than that, right? Yes, yes, it had been a guy in I think in the 60s or 70s on it, something like that. So this was a higher attempt. Every time I think about being in a balloon that high. Think about 10:22that little red bull 10:24advertising thing they did where they Felix jumped out of the out of the capsule. And I think he broke Mach one on the way back down. Oh, yeah. And I think he also almost passed out on the way back down. But, you know, if you’re in a if you’re in a confined space for 12 hours, that gets rough, so it means people get claustrophobic, you know, people, what do you do? Once you left off the ground, you’re not coming back down, right? You freak out, you get a ride or airplane, just give slap everyone gets in line to slap that woman. Right? Classic me, calm down. Next person. 11:02It would be like it would be like that. And I would hate to be stuck with someone who didn’t want to be there for 12 hours. That would, that would not be good. 11:10And, and I also think it’s not truly space, right? It’s kind of on the edge of space. There’s a difference between what qualifies as space and what doesn’t, but it’s a cool idea. But the price tag also seem really high was more than $100,000 for a ticket on this thing, which would also be very prohibited. Just because I think the what’s the virgen 11:35effort to launch into space was Richard Branson. that one that one may not be super expensive to write on either. And you’re kind of getting that on the edge of space sort of thing from Branson’s company. Yeah, it a lot of these things are interesting. But I think the business model is where you struggle, right? I think Branson has struggled with is virgin Virgin Galactic with Virgin Galactic, they’re gonna charge a quarter million and this it says resective perspective wants to charge 150k for a ticket. So they might be able to take 12 people up there, something like that. So yeah, but yeah, the slowness of it is definitely a factor. You can even make a couple trips each day. I mean, depending on how many aircraft that you could have. How many balloons? Yeah, yeah. 12:20So the Virgin Galactic, I thought you were talking about two flights a day when they really got rolling, which would be profitable for them. 12:28You know, there’s a lot of support staff on the Virgin Galactic setup. And it’s also virgin has been doing some other things in space, we’ve been launching some, some satellites up in there. So economics is going to drive all of this. 12:48So in our engineering segments today, interesting article from arrow time on the web, 12:55and just asking the question, can you fix an aircraft that has been landed in the water? So obviously, these are expensive planes? I know, the question at first just seems like, Well, no. But Alan, I mean, you start to talk about, you know, we can take a cell phone and put it in some rice, can we just put a plane in some rice? Can we just dock it in Arizona, or rice for a while? And but I mean, on a more serious note, if there’s not major damage, I mean, are there any, like skeletal things that you start to look back at, like, you know, California cars, for example, you know, you get a 1960s car from the east coast, it’s rusted everywhere, right? But you get a car from California, Arizona, a dry climate from the 50s 60s it’s gonna have pretty good bones where if you want to restore that, it might even have pretty good sheet metal still because of lack of corrosion. And so you could take sort of the skeleton of that car and obviously rebuild it, you know, people do that all the time. So sure, I mean, is there any chance that parts of a plant can be salvaged? 13:57You know, even if it’s got a little bit of water damage, or whatever, I mean, are there any parts that are gonna be more impervious than others? It depends on the value of the part and and how much it’s going to take to recover it and restore it. A lot of times, like they used aircraft market in the sort of the scrapped aircraft market aircraft get put in boneyards because of the longer useful to their air line that’s running them. And then that the the the boneyard will sell pits and pieces right now, and we’ve I’ve been involved in some of that because we used we’ve gone to the boneyard a couple of times to get parts of aircraft for lightning testing, which worked out great. You know, they don’t have to know not flying again so we can get them at a reduced cost. There’s a separate little marketplace where 14:43aircraft parts get refurbished and put back into the on an active aircraft. aircraft that have hit the water or have had some sort of major structural damage and a crash don’t tend to get back that way. And the reason is because if you think about electronic box 15:00As was maybe your most valuable component, so say you’ve got a flight display, which is a pretty expensive piece or some kind of flight computer, which can be expensive. 15:08Once there’s involved in the crash, it probably exceeded its qualification, like g forces and things like that. So you’d have to take that box and then basically kind of quasi go through it and make sure everything was up to snuff and maybe retest it to put it back into a usable market. And the FAA is cognizant of that too, right? So the FAA is, is on top of aircraft that a crash, we’re heading to those parts and they try to stop a lot of that from happening Unless, you know, like an aircraft just ages out, and then there’s still useful parts off of it, that’s a that’s a valuable thing. But aircraft hitting the water typically doesn’t go anywhere, the surance company or write it off, and then crush it, so it doesn’t get back into service or destroy it. Kinda like a car. You know, like you’ve you’ve seen cars that have a Carfax you really get a Carfax for a car in United State Yeah. And see if a car has been flooded. Like, like, when we had the floods down in Louisiana, in New Orleans, there was a lot of cars that were coming North that had been flooded, as you’re trying to resell, right? Because you can buy for 50 bucks, take them to up north Massachusetts, and try to resell them as a southern car with no rust thing was under six feet of water. Right? Yeah. So there’s, you had the same thing as on the airplane side, we don’t want to resell airplane parts have been submerged. But isn’t that a good example of a situation where like, the bones would be intact? I mean, conceivably, it’s been in a flood or you know, the, the frame is going to be okay, you know, the maybe obviously, like the axles will probably have water inside. So the oil is going to be sludge, right? And a lot of parts, like bearings are going to be ruined, probably. Right. But like some of it might be okay. But that’s it just doesn’t seem like it’s worth it for an airplane just to get so many people to take out a structural piece that maybe didn’t have any electronics that could still be valuable. Well, yeah, I think the times I’ve seen this done as when they’ve had a historic aircraft or like a world war two type aircraft and and there’s just no production pieces around. So you you want to bring back that airframe, if you can use it or or give it a give it a go. Right, right. And I think that was years ago, there was a there’s a early Boeing airplane, like as a 237. I think that was a model number that had it was like one of the first Boeing airplanes and was 17:34sort of a flying museum sort of piece. And it crashed in the water off the coast of Washington. And they pulled it out of the water. And I think a bunch of volunteers went back at it to clean it up and to make it or where they believe that aircraft is now air worthy. So at times, it does make sense to do that. But it’s just these really unique 17:57one off kind of aircraft museum quality pieces that you would do that with one I guess you couldn’t have I mean, if you heard in the news, oh, you know, a jet crashes a commercial airliner crashes? And oh, yeah, by the way, there used to be some pieces that were from a aircraft that was flooded at one point, you’d be like, Oh, well, why did we do that? Then? What was the risk reward, you couldn’t have just bought a new one instead, you know, you lost lives. And, yeah, hindsight, it would be pretty cruel in that city a pretty cool judgment on reusing those parts. And there there was, you know, helicopter parts tend to be the most 18:35vulnerable, because helican there’s not a lot of helicopters around. So there’s not a huge aftermarket for old helicopters and getting those parts and so helicopters involved in crashes and helicopters and fallen in the water and that kind of stuff, those parts are being recall of quote unquote, put back into service without having the proper records or they’ve taken a military helicopter, it’s the same version of the civilian helicopter and trying to use the parts off the military helicopter, on a civilian helicopter, there’s been a lot of that going on. And the end user, the person that’s responsible for that existing aircraft has to be very careful about that. So if you get a part, if you get obviously, if you get a part in it, it’s got a show number, the spin up rate it off and a new store number written on it, that kind of stuff, you got to be very wary of right? So you got to you got to know what the value of those parts are. And if you’re not, you’re paying like a quarter of that price. You have to think to yourself, was this a real part? Or is this a part that’s air worthy? And then the FAA has done a lot in the last 20 years to address that. And so, you know, one of the other ones that’s salvageable is, well, that’s probably not the right term. But you know, Cirrus has the cap system, which is their parachute system, which has saved a number of lives. There’s one recently where there was a sort of a mid air crash, and I think Colorado, and metro areas you deployed and save the folks on board, which is pretty remarkable. But it sounds like even these parachute deployments after that the plane is 20:00Gonna be usable again or not toast, just because the way that Cirrus is built, the load straps that tie to the parachute are part of the structure, they’re built into the fiberglass structure. So when when the parachute pulls up, it actually rips off the sides of the fiberglass on the size of the fuselage and the straps pop out. So the fuselage kind of gets torched, when that happens, and then the landing gear is is there is sort of a crushable piece. So the Atlanta carrier kind of gets destroyed and shoved up into the into the frame and things get distorted. So I have not seen a Cirrus aircraft put back into service after that parachute has been deployed on I think that’s true of all those parachute systems. They’re not designed to, you know, 20:48put the aircraft back into service or they’re designed to save the occupants. And that’s it and let let let the aircraft become a crushable 20:59piece that have less than the loads on the occupants, just like in a car. It’s very similar to that. Yeah. So pick one your life or your life or the or the aircraft. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. So it’s, there’s a couple of things about it, right? So you could you could slow the aircraft down with having a larger parachute. That’s one thing you could do. But then if you have a larger parachute, this has more weight and more complexity, right. So you could make their parachute go down slower. 21:24So there’s a weight cost benefit trade off versus number of times, it’s us versus what is the real goal here. And so that there’s a trade off made and that liked in the size of the parachute, and knowing that the aircraft, if it lands, sort of landing gear down, you got this crushable thing and the occupants can mostly walk away. Alright, so in our EBT, well, segments today, let’s first talk about Volocopter. So they’ve gotten yassa production approval, but obviously, that’s not a certification. So Ellen, what is a production approval? And why is this matter? This is this is interesting. So they have partnered up or purchase a company that has a production certificate array to make aircraft parts. 22:04And so there’s been some sort of joint partnership that’s happened between Volocopter and this other basic composite shop. Yeah, I won’t say their name. It’s dg flux zu Ba, I think, German company. So I did my best. And I think I did a good job anyway. Yeah, that’s pretty good. Yep. So the production certificate is basically an allowance by yassa. And the FAA has a similar system, where you can handle the production, quality management, so the parts and the flows and that kind of thing. 22:42Internally, it’s like having an LDA on the engineering side. So on the engineering side, the FAA can say you have set up a system internally for doing handling engineering and approving all the data needed to show compliance. So you have this internal organization, the FAA just audits, it. Same thing happens on the production side, where we have an organization and a bunch of people in the system to monitor the quality of the parts that go out the door. And the FAA is saying, Okay, you guys can handle that. Internally, we’re going to audit you and check on your books, or we’re not going to have the stamp on every stamp off on every part that goes down a production line. So like, I’ll give you an example. So on a on a on a new aircraft. 23:24Say it’s a Lear jet. And since they’re just no longer around, so so he Lear jet wanted to make a Lear 100, whatever that would be, they can get all their engineering work and show that certified. But that wouldn’t necessarily mean they could produce it without having out without having the FAA on top of it and stamping off FAA people stamping off on every part of the process, as the aircraft moved down the production line that just adds a layer of bureaucracy to it that if you can create us a system, a quality system, you can eliminate that sort of top of a bureaucracy and all the stamps and paperwork, stuff that has to happen. And you can deliver aircraft in your own production system. That’s what it means. It just means that you’re taking on the responsibility of the Certification Authority, but the Certification Authority still auditing you and making sure you’re doing what you say you’re doing. So you’re not not relieved of any requirements. You’re just saying that you got a system in place that meets the iasa or FAA requirements. That’s it. Okay, so kind of like you’re in the US, if you need FDA, 24:29approval for like, you know, slaughtering your cattle, right or whatever. Yep. You could build your own FDA approved facility, which would be costly and expensive. You have to do it all yourself. Or you could just take your cattle to the local processing plant that’s already FDA approved, and then they could just get it done. You know, it’s gonna be done. Right, but Right, right, right. Because there’s a lot of intricacies in building parts and the quality system to build parts. It’s not you can be 25:00By the design is great. But then if you build your parts like trash 25:05that worked very well, yeah, exactly. There’s an execution part matters a lot, obviously, right? execution matters a lot. And you’d be surprised at the level of rigor that goes into that. And I always am because I’m around it. But if you look at how a car is produced, versus how an airplane is produced, or how a spacecraft is produced, which is amazing and higher oversight, they’re just levels of gradation, their work, a car doesn’t have a lot oversight, they employees that are putting the parts on, kind of put parts on and it moves down the line. There’s quality in the system, but there’s a lot more oversight, and I’m building an airplane, and there’s a lot more paperwork involved with it to track parts. So if you had I’ll give you a good example. So if you had a, a bad lot of parts, so they got some metal parts got heat treated wrong. 25:53Do you know what those parts are? Well, in an airplane, you do mean you go back look a little records find out well, that stuff is in golf, replace all those improperly heat treated parts on a car, it gets a little more murky, because they don’t necessarily track it like that all the time. But on an airplane they do. So there’s just a lot more of knowing what the configuration of every aircraft is, like every aircraft that comes on the line is slightly different. I know that’s hard to think about. Because cars don’t tend to be that way. But every aircraft coming down the production line has in particular in the interiors has some uniqueness to it, even it’s just in the paint job, it’s going to be unique, the options you’ve chosen, there’s a lot of things you can choose on an airplane. So if you’re a production facility in every airplane is different, you got a lot of work to do to make sure that that airplane actually meet what’s actually engineering drawings that would meets the meets the FAA regulations in terms of production, quality parts, it’s it does take a lot of experience people and to do that, and when you run across someone has done it for a while you I’m always impressed because it’s such a wide breadth of knowledge you have to have to be in that production system. 27:08So moving on here, aviation has revealed their all electric production model of the Alice there, you know, pretty interesting aircraft that’s gonna have potentially nine passengers, no carbon emissions, you know, really low noise. Alan, why is this significant? Because we know we’ve known about the aviation Alice for a while we talked about it no number of months ago. Yeah, but this is a production version. So what’s the difference between this and their their initial prototype? Well, if you remember the prototype, the motors electric motors were out on the ends of the wingtips and the propellers rotten on the wingtips. That’s where thrust was right. And what they’ve done now is they move them into a pylon position on the fuselage much more like a jet like a typical, yeah, business jet kind of situation. But they’re propellers instead of jets, right. So it’s a much more normal configuration for aircraft. The couple pieces about aviation’s approach is one, it’s carrying nine passengers or nine people that’s a lot right compared to Joby Archer or some of the other ones which are going for like a 234 or five kind of number in terms of passengers, also that they’re not relying upon improved battery technology to to get the range that they want. So it’s what the press is saying now is that all the range numbers and all the carrying the passengers and load capability are all built in it today. I don’t have to wait five years, and they are going to improve every single year. They’ve got a baseline design that does essentially kind of what a king here does now not in terms of range, but in terms of performance is sort of there. And it kind of reminds you of a king or type aircraft, which is the same thing that by aerospace is going after with their eight passenger airplane as unique marketplace which would be in this king Arish business aircraft market which has low operating costs. You’re not going for a five hour flight you’re going for like a two hour flight. You’re going from Kansas City to Chicago sort of thing to conduct business and come back that night. That’s sort of the marketplace for that aircraft. Yeah, the computer. Yep. Right. But I think the point is that the operating costs are a lot lower. Even though a King Air has a PT six turbo proper engine on it, and which is one of the most 29:48durable, longest production run engine and has just millions of hours of great service with it. It does mean it’s dope. 29:59Just 30:00jet type engine so that it does have parts that, you know, were out and that are expensive to replace data, data data versus electric motor, which is a lot simpler. So I think that’s when it gets on to sort of the day to day operational costs, that electric may be the way to go now, how you gotta wonder, Dan, how soon they gonna be able to do this? And that’s the key is how fast can you create and certify something? Well, I mean, it looks a lot more like you said, it looks like it’s sort of conformed to typical design, like you said, it just looks like a sort of interesting looking, typical kind of business jet, which Yeah, I mean, as you’ve mentioned, many times, that’s gonna get it closer, where there’s just less fewer unknowns, right to certification. So I see it’s still electric. There’s still a lot that’s new about it. But it seems like this is a pretty reasonable endeavor that they’re undertaking to get this like pretty reasonable plane to market, right as compared to some wacky and of course, this is not a VTOL. But these wacky designs, that seemed like a little, yeah, good luck with that, this seems like okay, well, you know, you 31:07could just take any time, but it could get there. That’s right. And if can imagine, one of your largest expense says to certification is working with the FAA and getting through all the regulations. And so if you can knock the number of, quote unquote, controversial or difficult regulations down based on your aircraft design, it’s just going to get you to making money faster. That’s a good thing. Right? So you’re going to see these compromises, there are some unique things about this Alice aircraft, no doubt, right. But, but for the most part, a lot of the checking a lot of boxes on compliance based on way this, this aircraft is constructed in its layout, that gets them to selling aircraft faster, which gets into, you know, paying off the loans and the investment money thing, because there’s a business behind this and everything else, technology is cool, but there is a business behind it, people expect to get paid. So last on the docket today is the A w 609, which is a tilt rotor, from Leonardo, which the concepts been around for quite a while now. But there’s some recent buzz about this, that it’s expected to start flying soon, and that it might actually make it to certification. You know, not in a month or two, but in the relative near future. 32:20Elon, what’s, what’s the story with ace AWS? 609? Why is it taken so long? And this tiltrotor design, which seems pretty cool. Why is it been so hard to get out into commercial service? Well, there’s a couple of things about the aircraft, it’s sort of a business size derivative of the V 22. Right. So it kind of started off as a bell project and is bounced around a little bit over time. 32:44But the the marketplace for it is really on offshore oil rigs, oil and gas, right? Because right now they’re using helicopters to go from onshore to the, to the 32:58oil rigs out in the Gulf of Mexico, North Sea, wherever. And that helicopter 33:08is not the fastest way to get back and forth, then there’s just a lot of this a lot of stuff about a helicopter, which is not as advantageous as having a tilt rotor. And 33:20the six or nine is got a lot of cool features in it. But it’s also a complex thing. Because it has basically two, two engines, one on each wingtip and the whole, the cell kind of moves up and down to go from vertical flight to Ford Ford flight. 33:39But from a operational side, if it loses one engine, then the other engine has to take over and drive both propellers, right. So it’s got this transmission that runs through the middle of it, that same thing as a V 22. 33:54So there’s complexity to it. And the flight controls are unique because it has different flight control properties, you going forward flight, you got things propellers moving, tilting up and down whole thing. There’s just complexity to it. And it costs a lot of money to develop an aircraft and the marketplace is although solid because you’re dealing with customers that are in the oil and gas business, which have cash and can buy them. But at the same time, there’s not they’re going to sell 1000s of these things, and then in a year. 34:26So economically, you kind of have to balance off what the potential marketplaces versus the cash burn you’re in and balance it out, which is I think we’re on the reasons why it’s sort of taken so long, is that it’s sort of a it’s a is a complicated unique for the FAA. It’s an unique aircraft, but also the economics sort of forced them into this sort of longer term, be careful approach 34:53with the aircraft, so hopefully it gets done because it’s gonna be manufactured down to Philadelphia. That’s awesome. 35:01And I think there is a definite marketplace for it. And then there is a need for and you’re gonna see customers start to line up for it The closer and closer they get to certification, which is what your Nardo wants. So it just gonna take a little bit time in my in my opinion is this this project is going to happen. It’s just a matter of when and well will it run into the Evie tall market that’s that’s ramping up at the same time because ideally, the 609 gets done 234 years ahead of the real Evie tall market. And they’ve they created a market space for themselves, which is great. Well, they are looking at 20 to 30 million per plane. 35:40Is that pretty standard for a business jet? Is that outside that realm? Obviously, I think the VTOL markets going to try to come in a lot cheaper than that. But I mean, it’s 20 to 30 million cost prohibitive for this sort of computer, you know, not CEO lift off take off kind of thing. I don’t I don’t think this CEO is going to be buying this thing so much depends on the specifics of what the business needs. But in terms of getting people back and forth to oil rigs and making those difficult flights and and flying faster and higher altitude, I think also 36:21more probably more reliable, right? That there is a benefit to it. Right? So and that’s why I’m saying that the marketplace really drives this. So the cost is a lot more than buying like a Cessna Citation. Just it’s right and and but the marketplace can support it. And if they want that operational capability not to pay for it. That’s just the way that it is right. So it is a very unique aircraft are a very small segment of the aerospace marketplace. But there is money to be had there. There. Definitely Yes. 36:59All right. Well, that’ll do it for today’s episode of struck. If you’re new to the show. Thank you so much for listening and please leave a review and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. Check out the Weather Guard Lightning Tech YouTube channel for video episodes, full interviews and short clips from the show. And follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Our handle is at W g lightning. Tune in next Tuesday for another great episode on aviation, aerospace engineering and lightning protection. 37:35StrikeTape Weather Guard Lightning Tech proprietary lightning protection for Radome provides unmatched durability for years to come. If you need help with your radon lightning protection. Reach out to us at Weather Guard aerones.com that’s Weather Guard a e r o.com

Can the GE & Safran collaboration produce a viable open-rotor turbine engine, allowing for a greater swept area and increased efficiency? Gogo has successfully tested ground-to-air 5G, recently installed new antennas on ground towers, whereas Starlink’s Elon Musk has announced it may take 30 billion USD in investment to keep the company afloat. Archer and Wisk continue their patent battles in court, this time with the tables turning. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Will Jetoptera’s fluidic propulsion system work, and reach new applications of aircraft? SpaceX wants their satellite wifi on planes–can they make the technology work with existing radomes? And, can a 3-winged jumbo jet really deliver on fuel efficiency and lift projections? Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Transcript: EP59 – Jetoptera, 3-Wing Jumbo Jets, SpaceX WiFi & More 0:27Alright, welcome back to the struck aerospace engineering podcast. I’m your co host, Dan Blewett. On today’s show, we’ve got a lot of prototypes to talk through. So my co host, Allen Hall here is gonna kind of pick apart a bunch of these different designs, talk about some of the good things and the bad things. And but we’ll start with some news, Airbus, talking about hydrogen starlink, internet, potentially providing fast Wi Fi to planes or something pretty interesting that I hadn’t thought about. And then we’ll get into some different concepts of trialing jumbo jet, and electric sea plane. And a really interesting what’s called a fluidic propulsion system on a flying car concept, as well as one that has the wings, detach and fly home. So again, this would be kind of fun. But let’s start with news. Allen. So Airbus has said that the, you know, hydrogen is probably not going to be widely used in planes before 2050. So 30 years off, Does that sound right to you? Well, they’re talking about larger aircraft, like in a 328 350 kind of aircraft not being able to switch over to hydrogen, I think that’s right. The shorter kilometer type aircraft, maybe propeller driven aircraft will be an easier conversion. And it makes a lot of sense, because there’s a lot of short routes in Europe and also in the United States, that could handle a hydrogen aircraft, but it’s gonna have to be specifically designed. And that’s why Airbus is pushing the back a little bit. I think, early on, there was an impression like we’re going to make an Airbus A 350. with hydrogen. That’s not where Airbus it. I don’t think that’s where their intent was. I think eventually, yes. I mean, that’s that they did put up some PR about that, right. I mean, we saw the promotional things. 2:10But that that didn’t have a timeline, if they’re talking about hydrogen aircraft. Yeah, I think they can totally 2:18like an ATR 72, or the dash eight q 400 turboprop aircraft, aircraft would be relatively modifiable into a hydrogen configuration. But after that, when you talk about changing a turbo fan engine to hydrogen, and all the infrastructure involved in aircraft to for the fuel system, that’s just going to take a long time, because there’s so many, so many pieces to it. Hydrogen is a very small molecule, it leaks everywhere. 2:49Whereas liquid fuel doesn’t do the same thing. So all that is all the design elements change, and pressures, and temperatures are all different. Just starting over. It’s what’s what’s what Airbus is saying is like, Look, guys want to start over? 3:05We can’t do that overnight. We can’t even do it in 10 years. Yeah, so it’s definitely they’re gonna more all these current planes that use turbo fans to just run their course, essentially. And then, like I said, just start from scratch, like a different designer. I mean, do you see it being like a really wacky, very different looking like futuristic looking? Or is it just gonna be an A 320? That’s still pretty normal looking that runs on Hydra? Like, is there a reason that it has to be strange looking to be futuristic and use a different system? Because like, all these renderings You see, like, yeah, so Oh, they always seem very science. fictiony. Right, but right, because it has to be that way, or it might look the same. And 2050, I think the aircraft, essentially, it’s gonna look the same, except that the fuselage may get longer because the initial concepts involve putting hydrogen storage tanks of some sort. In the fuselage, the storage is a big one, right, so that the few stores may get longer, which means the wingspan may get a little bit longer also, to keep every aircraft sort of unbalanced. But that’s it because the wings will have no fuel in them liquid fuel on them. So you’ll completely redesign the way the wings would be, because there’s need to maintain their own structure don’t have any fuel sloshing around them. So the structural change there too. Yeah, it’s gonna it’s gonna be a basic fundamental kind of Airbus 350 kind of look, I think, but just what the longer fuselage section and tail so moving on starlink, which is obviously Ilan Musk’s company with SpaceX is talking about putting starlink internet into airplanes in the upcoming future, with potentially 100 megabyte per second download, and 20 megabyte per second upload, which would be much faster than I mean, Alan, you’re a much more frequent more inflight internet user than I am. What do you guess that it is? 4:57It’s not great. It’s it’s not as bad 5:00It used to be it’s certainly gotten better, right? But yeah, what do you think they’re competing with, as far as upload download speed today, the consensus is they’re competing with what is in people’s homes. So that’s what that’s the expectation levels. When you get an aircraft, you have the same speed internet as what you have at the house or at work. And it hasn’t been that way. I fly Southwest a lot. And global eagle is the service provider there. And the internet speeds aren’t super fast, like you can’t stream anything, you can’t have huge downloads, you can’t stream a YouTube video or watch Netflix live. But you can do pretty much everything else. You can send email, you can download some files, it’s it’s not. It’s not like being at work, or it’s not like being at at your house. This is not they’re not there. But for most situations, it’s reasonably good. It’s not even really annoying. Honestly, I I’ve never tried to do massive internet file sharing while on an airplane. But maybe somebody has. And I know if the if YouTube were offered, or live video streams were offered, people would take it and would use it was just not there yet. But you know, Dan, the the issue with the with, like starlink. And there’s a couple others that are going on simultaneously is that you have this geometry problem. Right now, the way the way the situation is the spacecraft are geosynchronous that means they’re in a fixed position. 6:34With the earth, they’re always in the if you always look in the same spot in the sky, it’s always there. So from the aircraft perspective, when it’s flying, it kind of knows where it is, for the most part. And it knows generally where to look. And solar, it just takes one antenna to focus on one spacecraft, and just sort of lock in on that hold it. That’s relatively simple to do 6:56when you put a lot of low Earth orbit, spacecraft in there moving and spinning around the Earth, so if I look up in the sky, I can actually watch the spacecraft go over ahead of me. Okay, so now I got a moving aircraft and I got a moving spacecraft. And I got to connect data link those two together. Alright, that’s doable. So you have an antenna that knows generally what the schedule is of spacecraft, I would assume. Or it’s out there just searching for one, and it finds one that links into it. Okay, great. So you’re, you’re downloading your YouTube video with this one spacecraft as it’s moving relative to the airplane. Awesome. Well, at some point that that that spacecraft is going to go out of range gonna go over the horizon, you’ll lose it. So you got to get to the next spacecraft and connect with it. So in the interim, 7:49yet one of two choices, you stop with the first spacecraft, let it go, and look around and find the second spacecraft, which means your YouTube video will stop streaming in that time period, train a spacecraft one spacecraft to that kind of sucks, right? People don’t like Internet that’s kind of spotty, which it would be spotty like that. The other way to do it is have spacecraft one kind of get near its edge of coverage and the antenna be able to see spacecraft to and will link into it and connect with it before you lose spacecraft. One. That’s the engineering issue. How do you connect to the Orion you connect with spacecraft to before you disconnect? 8:32That’s the issue. Right? So in terms of, of existing hardware, today on that the antennas that sit on the airplanes, 8:41that hardware is not able to make what they call make before break, it can’t make before break. If yet, you have to add either more antennas. So you have two antennas looking in two different directions, which is doable, or you have to have an electronic antenna that can look at two different spacecraft or more simultaneously. There’s your dilemma right from the engineering side, it gets a lot more complicated to keep track of all this moving stuff in the sky. And walk into it when you’re just moving aircrafts going up, down, left, right all over the place and bounce into turbulence and try to keep all this organized. There’s a technical challenge. So can starlink provide better data streams? Yes. Does it require more complex hardware on the aircraft? Oh, yeah. And the big the big drawback has been so far on the electronically steered antennas, is that it takes a lot of power. To do this to do the electronic steering, and all the processing stuff that has to happen. The antennas get hot, like really hot, and particularly if you’re on the ground, it’s not so bad. If you’re flying where it’s like minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit out there and it’s in the sky. That’s awesome. It’s a big heatsink, it’s sucking all the heat out. But if I’m in Dubai, I’m on the ground and it’s 120 and I want to stream 10:00a YouTube video, that antenna is going to get really hot, it’s gonna get hot enough on a composite airplane like a 350, where it may damage aircraft skin, the fuselage. And you’re not going to do that, right, because you may trash an airplane doing that really damage it sufficiently. So there’s a technology problem, which is, we want to have higher data streams. And we want to do this low Earth orbit thing on spacecraft. 10:29But we got to deal with all the heat. So either we have a heat issue, and nicely smooth antennas or you have two antennas look in different directions. That’s, that’s the choice. And right now, no one’s made that choice yet. 10:43SpaceX is 10:45has some I think there wasn’t Gulfstream airplanes out there with prototype antennas on the flying around to try to see how the system works. But ultimately, you got to certify it. And the heat issue is going to be a big problem. That’s such an interesting answer. I mean, I wouldn’t expect anything less from you, since you’ve worked with so many these companies like viasat, and gogo, you know, on radios and you know, your ins and outs here. But people think, Oh, yeah, let’s just upgrade the internet. And they never think that it’s so technical on that. There might be other issues of damaging the actual airplane like that. Just, it’s crazy how many of these aircraft issues are just way more complex than they seem right. And you’ve had a lot of they’ve had a couple of companies starting to stop on electronically steered antennas, there’s no moving parts there. And that that has not come to fruition, they’ve always had this heat problem, they can couldn’t get over Finn calm, which is the antennas for gogo, which looked like sort of pizza plates, 11:43that spin so that they are flat when they’re around. And they steer sort of but they also spin which is part of the steering thing. 11:53there they’ve been talking about being able to make before break and maybe having two sets of antennas, but they’re really low profile. And their and their efficiency is really good. And so that they find thing constantly found a sweet spot there. I’m not sure it’s the ultimate final answer. But it’s a pretty good answer for right now. And I I think you may see, like two sets of antennas, installed thin comm antennas that would do the make before break and do all the Leo stuff that may be the the least the interim solution, maybe the final solution if it works well. 12:32Alright, so in our engineering segment, Today, we’re gonna talk about this really fascinating prototype from SC aeronautics. That is a jumbo jet, the SC 200. So super efficient subsonic jet, they say can carry 264 plus passengers at Mach 0.9, with a range of 10,560 miles. And one of the key features here is that it has three wings. And that is going to give them some sort of aerodynamic boost. Allen, you know, there’s been a bunch of really interesting concepts that we’ll talk through here, many of which have come from Robert port Comm. So definitely check out their website. They seem to really enjoy all these, you know, futuristic prototypes, prototypes of planes, cars, buses, no boats, all of it. But what’s the advantage of having multiple wings? And why don’t we see planes with multiple wings? Because it doesn’t work very well. dynamically? Why are they touting it? Well, are they say, between sort of standardized flight, and then what actually happens in flight and all the weird configurations in aircraft can get into, and all the limitations and flight demonstrations that are put on an aircraft to show that it’s safe to fly, that it stalls safely, that the pilot can control it into stall and out of stall? 13:52And all the other odd flight performance things that have to happen there. That’s where you get back to these conventional designs because they have shown effective 14:05means of complying with the regulations bmfa or yassa, or Transport Canada, it doesn’t really make any difference, right? So you’re from from an aerodynamic standpoint, it may work. Doesn’t seem like it’s going to work, but it may work but there’s so many variables in certifying an aircraft that unique designs kind of get tossed to the wayside because can be so expensive to show that they work. It can imagine building a full scale prototype a full scale aircraft, and then going out to flight test it and go, Oh, man, we got a problem. We can’t get over. Yeah, because if if one, one wing or something, like can’t just chug away when I saw the good old days, I used to do that actually, when I worked at beach aircraft back in the 90s, I guess. There’s a really interesting discussions about how they made airplanes and how they modeled airplanes at night. So they fly during the daytime, and then they’d model at night and they would live 15:00Cut off parts of like tails and stick on another tail. Because a lot of times are made out of wood. So yeah, I mean that that day and time as has gone by where he could cut off and lop off and reattach different parts of the aircraft. That doesn’t happen very much anymore, particularly with composites. And aluminum. This doesn’t really happen all that much. Yeah. So you hate to be a half a billion dollars into it and realize you can’t certify it. That’s the wrong time to find that out. Well, and you’ve said that many, many times can’t certify it realize, you know, find out you can’t certify it. I mean, what does that mean is it just means that you’re getting a room and you realize that there’s just a hurdle that I mean, what does that actually look like? When they say we can’t, it doesn’t happen very often today. But if you have an aircraft, you have a set of regulations or performance regulations, a minimum performance, I always call them minimum performance standards, the FAA and he also create minimum performance standards, the aircraft can work better than that. But at a minimum, it’s going to do these things. And so what happens is, 16:07if you have like stall can be a big one or zero, GE pushovers or some of those 16:13swept wing aircraft can have a problem in certain flight configurations where they want to deep stall and roll over. There are certain aerodynamic features about an airplane that if not dealt with correctly, you can’t certify it. 16:30So that’s why you see, if you look at a new clean sheet, aircraft design, and maybe that first flying prototype aircraft, and look at the wing, look how clean it is, and then look at what’s certified at the end. Usually, those little bit of aerodynamic treatments, vortex generators, stall fences, 16:47trip boundary trip layer, things in the leading edge, where, where were they, where they couldn’t certify it without adding on pieces. And that’s what it means is that you couldn’t certify it. So they needed to add some adjustments until they aerodynamics, you see that a lot. From first prototype to the final design, if you choose a very unique design, which no has no proven data, you really didn’t know where to go. So if you got into a performance issue or a safety issue in terms of its flight performance, you’re in this weird aerodynamic space where you don’t have any history, and you don’t know what the little band aid just does our to fix it. Right. And so you’re into this big r&d effort. Late in a program. Now, a lot of aircraft, there’s been a number of aircraft have had issues structurally, 17:37that sunk them in terms of 17:41pressurization cycles, or sort of ultimate loads that they don’t handle. That can be very, very expensive to fix late in the program, we’ve been around a couple of those. And it when you have an aircraft structure fail at a low that’s less than what’s required. That’s a big deal. Because at that point, you probably have 10 aircraft on the line you’ve already manufactured. And you got to go back and fix the structure. That’s expensive, and it’s time delay. And that can pretty much sink a program if you’re if you don’t have the cash to withstand it. So it just sounds like it just is going to continue just to be little iterations on the designs you already have. And for something this big, I mean, it’s a jumbo jet. So like you said, the idea of this thing, being actually produced without having that real world data. Whether it’s not it’s going to be certifiable is, is pretty scary. It’s It’s scary, right? And that’s what drives investors away. But we’re seeing a lot of investment into Evie tall, they have very unique designs today. But again, 18:49there’s a big downside risk and you can’t certify it. And you could be literally a billion or 2 billion into an aircraft program, realize we got to make big adjustments to it. And 18:59Kwazii start over or at least go back to early stages and that it eats up so much cash that he just can’t, can’t make it through it. Alright, so moving on to our E VTOL. And really just electric segment today. There’s a bunch of other prototypes that are just interesting. Maybe the future maybe difficult to come to fruition. First on the docket. This also one we found on Robert port, an all electric seaplane, the Regency glider, and it’s gonna fly 180 miles per hour just above the water surface. I mean, it’s got looks like just like turbo props. 19:39But Alan, I mean, is there a huge market for sea planes and how how common is this the planes are hovering close to the water. Well, the Russians have done this or Soviets have done this for a long time going across some large bodies of water. Basically, you’re sort of like this ground effects situation where there’s a cushion of air real close to the surface. So 20:00You get the aircraft movingly a little bit, you can kind of get it where that you got some your basic compressing the air down into the water, and it creates this little cushion of air, it’s very similar to when you’re landing like in a 737 you get close to ground, you feel your crowd kind of float. That’s what they’re working on and work on that float process. 20:21I have felt that Okay, interesting, right. So it’s an aircraft that lives in that principle. So it’s only a few feet off the surface. But you can move fairly fast and it doesn’t, you’re not that far off the off the ground where there’s a huge risk me if you lost thrust, the airplane would just settle into the water again, 20:40be a gentle landing, just like you do anyway. So from a complexity standpoint, it’s not very complex, but you’re really limited where you going to fly this thing which is overwater. Right? So if you’re going across 20:52from Long Island to Connecticut, or something you could do you could do that. And if you’re going from I don’t know, Gulf of Mexico or from Texas to Florida or something, you could do that it’d be a slower mode of transportation, but are shorter routes I could be going across Lake Michigan, it’d be totally possible. Just think of it like a quasi very fast boat. I mean, it’s essentially yet it’s just riding on a cushion of air all the way across. So it’s it’s a neat concept. We haven’t seen it used in the United States and forever I know I think it was back in the 40s when the last time I remember 21:28there was some work like that but there are active aircraft which would be today’s Russia I believe that is still working on that principle that are kind of cargo aircraft that move things from place to place on that cushion of air. It’s really interesting technology but haven’t seen it much using United States in a long time. Well and one other feature of this sea glider is that it also can go through the water on foils very similar so it has these things that come down and yep so it acts as a you know, it’s like a like a water taxi a ferry so the company region’s got for under 65 million in provisional orders. So it sounds like there’s definitely some interest here which that was pretty cool. What wait a minute 465 million Is that what you just said 22:14wow, okay, that’s a lot of cash mercial airline and 22:20for that’s a half a billion dollars for my math at the fair market is alive and kicking. 22:28So Wow, yeah, I’ve never want to see plane so I want to see this come to effect I want to know I want to be in the seaplane No, I’m not. Yeah, talk about air sickness and seasickness. It’s both of those at the same time. So you better not have any sensitivity to motion sickness because you will have it in in that environment. Yeah. 22:49So our next prototype here is a it’s called the this flex craft and it basically allows the wings of this sort of flying car to then take off and fly back to the airport or your home or whatever. So the plane connects the car to the wings, flies where needs to go when you’re done, wings take off and go home. Happy, it sounds silly. But it also is like pretty interesting and fun. 23:20I mean, do you see the flex draft coming to fruition that also just seemed incredibly complex? It is complex there has been other efforts I think in the 1970s there was a very similar concept with the wing would attach and then you’d fly with it and you could take the wing off then propulsion system off and then drive a like car chair or fuchsia in the Boston area was the latest one where they had a it’s like a little car but it had wings that would pop out or expand into place and you can fly this aircraft and then retract them and then drive it like a car that’s been the latest effort so much of that but they had trouble financially I think they ended the company and it being sold to a conglomerate in China if I remember correctly so there’s been a lot of attempts at this No one’s really made it happen but it’d be interesting if 24:13you know Tesla would get involved in something like that right? Talk about taking the existing car battery electric propulsion and be able to slap on some wings and go fly that sounds like something Ilan musk could be interested in doing and then different flex mode work and go down to his boring tunnel so you can collect a toll right there as well right? Yeah, he can kick a toy you in the arrows everywhere and then just comes into a seat turns into a seaplane too but part of the vision is that you’d have like this neighborhood drive through where you know you like drive your your pot your pods over there and then go over and like hook up to the to the wings, which is no surely interesting idea but 24:58a lot of the cash Yeah. 25:01After the A VTOL thing? 25:03Yes, I don’t know, it seems, seems even harder than the EB VTOL thing that everyone’s trying to do. That’s very popular these days easy VTOL. And then this really interesting concept the Gil op Tara j 2000. VTOL uses bladeless Dyson style fans. So they call this like a fluidic propulsion system. Alan, have you heard this in an air of this in an aircraft? No. So I looked up these Dyson fans a while ago, because I was just curious of how they work. It’s just like, it looks like a big, you know, ring. But it has lots of little tiny jets around the edge, and it shoots air through those. And if you shoot a bigger ring of air, it’ll pull the other air in the center of it through with it. And apparently that is the concept here as well. Where if you have thrust on a ring, it’s going to suck the air into the center of it as well. 26:00That seems really neat. But again, the seams the ramp that same alley of being difficult to certify, and I don’t know, how do you find redundancy for all this and Right, right. I mean, the reliability of it has to be outstanding, particularly if they’re, in this particular case, you have a couple of these different fluidic propulsion systems, if one of them dies, what happens? So the reliability is super key here and the efficiency of it if it’s not as efficient as some of these electric propeller systems, and why mess with it, and the electric propeller systems can be pretty darn efficient. 26:38So it’s gonna be hard to beat that. And if adding complexity to it makes it less reliable, then it’s just not gonna go. And it has to us, it has to have either fewer moving parts. And it’s hard to beat an electric motor with a propeller on in terms of moving parts, because there’s just not a lot of moving pieces there. 26:54And the efficiency is very high. So it doesn’t seem like it’s a reality, I guess, in a sense that you would eliminate the rotating chopping blades situation that exists on the Beatles right now. So it would be more approachable, if that’s the proper term for it. You know, humans are afraid of dying all the time, and they don’t like walking into rotating blades and they want to stay away from it as much as possible, even when flying, I still don’t like flying in line with the propellers on 100 propeller driven aircraft and want to be either in front of them or behind them. Because if they ever let loose, bad stuffs gonna happen by moodpoint. It’s the planes going down. But yeah, I get it. I bet if it I mean, a lot of times they well. 27:38On a twin engine turboprop if you lost one propeller, you could get home and it has happened. 27:45Okay, yeah, you should be the port. You just don’t want the poor soul who’s sitting next to that propeller. That that’s not good. 27:53Yeah, be rough. Yeah, Jeloptera has received and a contract from the US Air Force. So they got one of or they got two small business technology transfer contracts to characterize the noise of their fluid propulsion system. So there’s some interest in what it does. Could it be quieter alternative stuff still? So maybe, maybe there’s a maybe there’s a, a application for it somewhere? I mean, it seems like the Air Force is always kind of gobbling up and just giving some money to these companies that have pretty outside the box. things and I don’t know, maybe the Air Force has an idea for it, like something. I mean, especially with drones, like maybe something like this would be easily applied to drones, right and be really quiet or something like that, you know, they could have a whole different idea rather than a flying car or air taxi concept. But 28:43I’m all for I mean, the Dyson thing is super cool. I don’t own one I want to run but I think part of the allure of fans is that they make the noise, right? It’s not just about cooling you off. Sometimes it’s about the white noise, right? That’s sweet white noise. That’s true. I don’t have the Dyson. I know they’re pretty quiet. So they’re also super expensive relative to the generic electric box fan, right? Yeah, it’s hard to justify unless you say, well, it’s kind of like art, you know, to pay 250 for a fan that you can buy a fan for $15 that does the same job. You know, right when I buy it needs to have a place in your home. That’s like, there it is. And it cools me. 29:23So you can kind of justify like, if you’re gonna put some other piece of art in that same spot that was gonna cost you money anyway, then maybe it makes sense. You could take down the Picasso and put up a Dyson fan. 29:35Exactly. Like I spend $40 on a water. Wait, I’m buying What do you call the water your plants with teapot? It’s not a teapot, teapot, obviously. A water jug of water. What do they call those things? I don’t know. a watering can I’m an idiot a watering okay. But I bought a sort of artsy looking watering cans. I can leave it out all day in plain sight. 30:00It doesn’t look just like a cheap crappy plastic one. You know, that’s the same principle here with a Dyson fan. Yeah. 30:07You can leave it out is that it? You can leave it out not have to worry about it. Well, if it’s got an artistic quality, you can leave it in your space and it can hide in plain sight kind of Dyson’s going for rather than just like having an ugly, cheap fan in your big space. Yeah. Anyway. So jalopy era. That looks pretty cool. Who knows if it ever comes to fruition? 30:26But it’s an interesting concept. Definitely one of the outside very outside the box ones amongst a very outside the box kind of sector with a VTOL since there’s also different Oh, yeah, and yet have had a lot of similarity. This is the first one only one we’ve seen with that fluidic propulsion system, so we’ll keep an eye on it. Alright, well, that’ll do it for today’s episode of struck. If you’re new to the show. Thank you so much for listening. And please leave a review and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Check out the Weather Guard Lightning Tech YouTube channel for video episodes, full interviews and short clips from the show. And follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Our handle is @WGlightning. Tune in next Tuesday for another great episode on aviation, aerospace engineering and lightning protection. 31:19StrikeTape Weather Guard Lightning Tech proprietary lightning protection for Radome provides unmatched durability for years to come. If you need help with your Radome lightning protection, reach out to us at WeatherGuardaero.com that’s Weather Guard a e r o.com.

In this episode we discuss plane discounts – are used Airbus A330s a viable plane in today’s market? The Hermeus team is trying to get a Mach 5 plane to market within five years, and is working with the Air Force on a Mach 5 Air Force One – is this realistic? Plus, Vertical Aerospace is going public with a SPAC merger, and has taken on a significant number of orders lately – are they surging ahead in the EVTOL race, despite no flight demonstrations to date? Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! TRANSCRIPT EP58 – Hermeus Mach 5 a Reality? Vertical Aerospace Orders Surge and Are Used Planes a Thing? 0:00This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech at Weather Guard. We support design engineers and make lightning protection easy. You’re listening to the stroke podcast. I’m Dan Blewett. 0:18I’m Allen Hall. 0:19And here on struck we talk about everything aviation, aerospace engineering and lightning protection. Alright, welcome back to the struck aerospace engineering podcast. I’m your co host, Dan Blewett. On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about used planes, how long do they last? And what’s the market like for older Airbus and Boeing aircraft? And is this going to hurt their sales of new aircraft, and our engineering segment we’ll talk about Hermeus. They are looking to create a Mach 5 aircraft and they are working in conjunction with the Air Force to develop the next Air Force One Mach addition. So we’ll talk about some of the engineering challenges that will come out of them. And then there are a VTOL segment lots on Vertical Aerospace today, which they’ve been in the news quite a bit. 2 billion worth of orders from Avalon, which entails quite a bit of quite a lot that gets 500 plane orders. American Airlines has also put an order for 250 planes, Virgin Atlantic 150. So there’s a lot going on here. And it looks like they’re gonna go public with SPAC merger. So lots in the in the news about Vertical Aerospace, and they admittedly have a beautiful looking prototype. I’m into it. But we’ll see what Alan has to say. So first, Alan, let’s chat about USD plane. So especially popular right now is the Airbus a 330, with smaller airlines who want to save money or startups, and they can be reduced, sometimes up to close to 50% of their sticker price. What are like what’s the deal with the a 330? And why is it so it’s such an attractive use plane and what what kind of routes can the a 330 fly? 2:07Well, it’s a bigger airplane. So it’s a twin aisle airplane. So it’s it’s made for longer haul routes. Similar to what like a triple seven would do. And the but that airplane is much older in terms of when it was developed. The problem with anything as twin owl right now is that there’s not a lot of long route flights going on anywhere in the world. Forget about you know, United States, Europe is really hard you still now so there’s there’s just a depressed market. There’s a lot of airplanes, twin, all airplanes that are parked right now. And obviously, the newest ones are going to retain most of their value, but the older ones are gonna have a hard time especially older designs are gonna have a hard time maintaining their value through this just because they’re older designs, you can buy a new one for also a discounted or newer one for a discounted price. Why wouldn’t I do that? You totally what. And I think a lot of times in these down situations and COVID has been one big downer for the airline industry, airplane models just disappear for the most part or they are they shift where their main focus is they get because they’re just less expensive to operate, they can be operated by a lot of airlines that couldn’t otherwise afford them. And so you’ll you’ll see, older airplanes show up in different parts of the world where it just they need something it’s a little less expensive to operate and to own. This would be a good buying opportunity. opportunity if you had cash to go out and do it. You know Airbus makes good airplanes buying makes good airplane. So pretty much if you buy one with a good service history on it, and good maintenance records on it. You know what you’re getting for the most part. And so, you know, if you have cash and you’re an airline may be a good buying opportunity. It just whether the government’s will open up enough where you can actually fly those airplanes without all your passengers being inconvenienced with still have making people do COVID tests and all the other things that happen. 4:05Well, if you get a bigger plane like an A 330, cheap enough, does it make sense to fly it at less than capacity? Like could you fly domestic routes and a 330 and never be full? Or does that not make sense? 4:16It doesn’t make sense based on fuel prices. Now even though fuel prices have been relatively stable, the expectations the fuel prices are going to start bumping back up again as global traffic starts to increase. And once that does, once that happens, then part of your benefit goes away because fuel prices are so much a driver in profitability. Obviously, passenger load is one part of it and then fuel costs on the other and labor costs on the other. That’s going to be the downside. And that’s why you see a lot of the airlines more expansive, like a Delta or united or this airport, all kinds of at that level of airlines at that level. really pushing like fuel economy, right. That’s why the the NEOs are playing a big, have a big market and great airplane, obviously 737 Max is the same trying to fill that same niche, which is lower fuel costs and still carry the same amount of passengers. So if you can get really burned if you’re not careful about fuel prices, so you have to pay attention to that, and the age of the airplane, how much maintenance you’re expected to put down on it. But if, if the price is right, yeah, you could do things in the in a different way than we had done them two years ago. First, for sure. For sure, 5:35well, and you wonder what the pandemic will, will hold for all these companies as they’re trying to save money and reorganize, or startups are trying to wiggle their way into more roots I was just listening to on Guy razzes how I built this podcast, the story of how JetBlue was founded their founders, and that shows really interesting. But you don’t think of like just I’m going to start an airplane or an airline airline. That seems like a huge thing that put airlines do come and go. I mean, they get started by someone with experience in the industry finds a bunch of investors buy some planes get certified, blah, blah, blah, and they’re off on their way. It was actually, it seemed way more accessible the way he talked about it. Because after he left JetBlue he started another airline called a zoo in Brazil, which is like, oh, to start other airlines, like, that just seems again, starting an airline seems so big, like it just utility scale. Right? And so, right. But it is it’s a it’s a real thing, especially probably more so in other countries where maybe the barrier to entry is a little bit less. If you’re not in the US, it seems like the barrier for airport space in the US is really, really high. But then again, I don’t know the the intricacies of world airliner economics, but yeah, but 6:52you’re paying gate fees, I mean, the ability, there’s only so many gates, that’s the big airports, you need to find a way to get into them. And small airlines are pretty much kicked out that’s why you don’t see them. A lot of times accepted smaller, more unique airports just for that reason so it’s not it’s not easy to start an airline it’s it’s easy to lose money in an airline had that we’ve seen that time and time again but to make money in an airline is really really hard you have to pay attention to everything and where the money is going and be very careful about it but what and even though the you know that this some of the smallest thing small smaller expenses so to speak, can ended up biting you like if you cut cut maintenance too tight and you have an accident, man, your airlines in big trouble, real big trouble. So you know you It takes a lot of people with experience in an industry even broach it in people with experience still struggle in that industry. It’s not easy. It’s a very difficult marketplace 7:50and airplanes. They age more so by pressurization cycles. And flight hours. I mean, what is it takeoff and landing screen will tell me a little bit about the pressurization stuff. I mean, the fuselage gets stressed the wings get stressed when it takes pressure. Sure. It but these planes are obviously super well built like they’re overbuilt. Right? So, I mean, about what you talked about the maintenance records and all that stuff. I mean, where where would if you were looking through a plane’s maintenance record, where would you be like, you know, this one’s not for us. This one might be give us trouble, or this one? We’re a little uncertain about I mean, where does it go wrong in the maintenance cycle? 8:31Well, if if the airline or the operator hasn’t maintained it to the OEM requirements, like it hasn’t had regular, it hasn’t met its mandated inspections, for example, or it’s missed one or it’s late for one, or they haven’t dealt with some of the service bulletins that may not be met there might not be immediate. So that’s sort of Bolton’s, or the advisory says you have a year to fix this thing and he hasn’t fixed it, those kind of alarm bells start going off like okay, that’s that’s just adding costs onto me to go off and do all that stuff. So I’m going to ask for a lower price for the aircraft. You know, aircraft are relatively well built. If you’re buying an aircraft in certain parts of the world where you know, maintenance is not going to be all superduper and may not be done as well as it may be in done in Europe, you’re going to be a little more cautious and they’re gonna do a lot of looking on the aircraft before you decide to purchase it. So there’s just a lot of small details. It’s like buying a used vehicle, right? If you’re buying a used vehicle from somebody, you know, you got a pretty good chance that’s gonna be a good car. If you’re buying it from some random person off the street that has abused the car. It’s gonna be like that. It’s going to be something I put a lot of money into. So airplanes are not much different. 9:51Alright, so in our engineering segment, today we’re going to talk about Hermeus and their goal of creating a Mach 5 jet and changing commercial air travel. And of course, one of the partnerships they have with the Air Force to help develop this supersonic Air Force One way off in the future. So, Alan, I know it seems like Hermeus has been kind of, you know, under the radar a bit. I guess that’s upon right. That’s a fun. Yeah, radar planes radar. But yeah, I mean, they’re working on Air Force One. I mean, does that seem? I have a couple questions for you. Number one, what is a realistic timeline here, because we’ve seen aireon fail, boom is now at the forefront, you know, with United doing an order of them recently. This is obviously a tough problem to solve. And we also talked about whether or not we need supersonic flight. But what are some of the hurdles that are maybe a little bit lesser known? We were talking off camera about just simple things like the toilet. How does the toilet function add Mach 5 versus typical commercial airliners speed? I mean, all those things are actually a pretty big consideration. 11:03Right? You’re putting people as soon as you put people inside of this tube, you have a lot of considerations. How do you keep the pressurization right and that can have many cycles can a handle on pressurization is it’s flying high altitude, so there’s a lot of stresses on the on the airframe. How’d it what are the seats look like? What does the crash look like? What are the seats look like? Is there an entertainment system on this airplane? as are all the is it heated? Can you keep your feet warm while you’re sitting in this thing, all those little system things which get overlooked at times because the airplane is so cool looking to go so fast, are really important to the person is going to use it. If it’s 30 below in the in the cabin, no one’s gonna fly it. And that’s just the kicker is that there’s so many problems to solve simultaneously. And all these systems have to work together seamlessly for 1000s and 1000s of hours, it becomes an overwhelming engineering project. And when you attach going past Mach one, just even leave it there. Forget about Mach 5 for a minute. When you go past Mach one, those difficulties get much bigger as we have seen with the Concorde. Even though the Concorde is a 1970s 6070s design, it’s still super complicated. And I don’t see that going away. And this the, from a business standpoint, the amount of cash burn to create the engine and something that’s reliable, the fuel system to how it was a fuel system look like how’s it handles extreme colds and extreme temperatures? What’s the structure look like? There’s just so many problems to solve. And in a limited pile of money you can use to solve them on that’s that that’s that’s the problem. I think that’s that’s the bigger issue is how do you solve all those problems simultaneously? Any don’t have anything to work off of? There’s no cheat sheet to this, right? No one’s really done this before. So everything’s new. Everything’s new, and everything. Everything is $10 million to solve, right? But you have 1000 of those problems. And that’s what it is what it is it just what it is. 13:17Well, and, you know, it’s shows that they raised a $16 million series, a round of funding back in October of 2020. And $16 million is like a, like a Kleenex and duct industry I mentioned. Yes, nothing, nothing. So I mean, this is something that’s going to take multiple billion dollars out, assume to sure get to fruition. And sure, I mean, it is decades away. I mean, what are we looking at here, 13:43depending on what the end goal is, or what’s the thing you’re going to plant, plant your flag on and say we’ve done it, I don’t know what that looks like. If it’s a business aircraft or a corporate aircraft that goes past Mach one, that’s not something to hang your hat on. That’s not easy to do. Not many companies have even really broached it, really. So that would be something worthwhile. I think that to say we’ve accomplished it. I just don’t, then I don’t I it’s just it’s an overwhelming thing. I don’t know how you get to this get to an answer without having large amounts of government funding, or large amounts of investment funding. I mean, billions, billions to get there. I just don’t see how it happens. It’s like going to the moon, right. About that same scale. It really is. 14:37Yeah. And plus was a lot of these test rockets. Like there’s no people on them right. So they can test seems like you can test a rocket out a little easier than a plane and that might be completely wrong. I don’t know. I but like you said there’s different challenges. There’s different different challenges, 14:52but it’s, I don’t like using analogies, but just to lay out the engineering complexities to it even during the Apollo. missions. You know, they had the fire on Apollo one. And that’s something they necessarily expected they did after it happened. They accident with Apollo 13, which was related to some heaters and a stir. And I, in one small part of this huge, massive spacecraft went wrong and had an explosion. Those are just part of the complexity with dealing some dealing with people in upper atmosphere and going very fast. It’s just part of the deal. Everything has to work flawlessly. And we’re not quite there yet on. On the aircraft side on the spacecraft side, we’re getting a lot closer. Right, Tesla has done a lot of good things, or SpaceX has done a lot of good things in terms of making reusable rockets. But we haven’t necessarily translate that back into the aircraft side. just haven’t yet. 15:56Well, that’s what jumps out to me. It’s like why this challenge seems so big. Why is it being tackled by a, you know, a startup company in the dozens of employees rather than someone like Airbus or Boeing or just like a gigantic company that could, you know, maybe, like, this is a billion dollar failure. That’s not the end of Boeing, right? That’s not the end of Airbus, it’s not that much money to them, it’s still a lot of money, 16:21a lot of money. Now, I think if they’re, if they’re going to develop a new engine, and they’ve got some unique technology to develop Mach 5 engine, that’s a goal. I mean, that’s a goal we’re shooting for. Because you’ve simplified the number of problems, you’re going to go off and solve. And you’re going to focus on this one area. And you’re going to bring in expertise about propulsion to go do this massive engine project. That’s accomplished an accomplishment in the airforce, yes, its air force would be really interested in that as say, there’s new engine technology, they obviously in my opinion, what they would do is they start shopping that engine technology around and hook them up with someone like a GE or Pratt and Whitney that makes high thrust engines have done it for a long time successfully. And say, you’re going to partner with Pratt and Whitney, you’re here you go. We love the technology. Now let’s implement it in Pratt and Whitney has the capability to do that. I think that’s where it goes. The aircraft side just seems too much for everybody to take on right now. 17:27Yeah. And their goal is to get to a demonstrator in about five years. That’s, that’s what their plans are. And they have been testing an engine that they move really fast to get to that, from design to prototype to testing. So they’ve they’ve done good work, it seems like thus far, yeah. But still a lot, a lot to do. Alright, so in our final segment, today, we’re at about Vertical Aerospace. They’ve just had a splash of headlines recently. A lot of orders. And of course, the news that they’re going to go public, potentially in a SPAC merger. So as mentioned, American Airlines and Virgin Atlantic, both have invested and put in orders. So American Airlines, 250 aircrafts, Virgin Atlantic 150 aircraft, and Americans also put some money 25 million into a fund just in an investment money. And then there are some other sailor orders as well. Avalon has put a $2.2 billion order in. So a lot of money going to Vertical Aerospace, and they seem to have been one that I’m sorry, 2 billion from from Avalon. But it seems like they’ve been a little under the radar. As far as you know, like news, just in the news like Joby has been sort of a darling Archer has been in the news a lot recently. Just Everyone seems like they’re just jockeying for position. But they have over 1000 aircraft, pre orders. And Vertical Aerospace seems set to go public. So I mean, Alan, I mean, where do you fall? I like their design. It looks super sleek. I haven’t seen a test flight. It looks like they’re still in development. But it seems like people really believe in their concepts they 19:18do. I mean, obviously for the amount of money they’re talking about. Somebody believes in it. And that’s a really good start. We haven’t seen aircraft yet in terms of prototype flying. Maybe there is one. I haven’t seen it. That doesn’t mean that it’s not going on. I just haven’t seen it yet. The the marketplace is just weird right now, in terms of I can what what is the American Airlines doing? And why like what what is what is the potential upside cash flow from American Airlines working in the five passenger aircraft electric market what what is that? What we’re where is the economic proposition in this and the SPAC money is just explosive, that’s the only way to describe it is the explosion of cash. And why what is been proven to this point that you’re going to be able to cover that recover that investment in a relatively short amount of time. If you’re an angel investor, or kind of venture capitalists, group, investment group, and you’re hoping to take that initial investment and flip it 10 times, so you put in a million dollars, you’re going to get 10 million out in ideally, five years, some some short timeframe like that in it, or 10 times your money, or at least three or four times your money, right. There’s been no airplane project in my lifetime that I can remember that it’s ever done that. But you know, obviously airplanes are not something that you and I use every day, and what they’re talking about is making an airplane that come to us every day. There’s just so much risk in the Senate. It just seems like there’s an imbalance in the marketplace, isn’t it? Isn’t it weird to say like, there’s like the housing market in 2007. And eight, there’s an imbalance going on? It feels like there’s this weird imbalance on the electric vehicle market. Like there’s so much cash, but there’s so little delivered yet that that has to even out at some point. Right? markets correct at some point. What that looks like is kind of scary. Yeah. And there would be consolidation. Or maybe 21:39that’s the play. There’s going to be some winners writers, right? 21:42Are you hoping that Airbus buys you more Embraer buys you or Mitsubishi purchases? You are Toyota purchases? You are Honda somebody? Maybe Maybe that’s the play is maybe that they figure, it’s like some of the SAS software companies that, you know, they’ve got a million dollar business or a $5 million business, they want to sell it for $200 million. Maybe that’s the play, maybe they maybe they can get somebody to pay that pay that money. But airplanes This doesn’t aircraft market aerospace market hasn’t historically done that. Just hasn’t. What not without special technology or a special sort of cash generating machine. And in theory, I guess electric vertical takeoff or landing market, what is it would be like an Uber ish cash generating machine. But even Uber is not a cash generating machine yet, Dan, is it? I mean? Am I missing something about Uber? Yeah, no. So 22:34I don’t know where they are, if they’re profitable yet, but they’ve haven’t been profitable for for their history, at least as of 2020. I think they’re getting closer and doing better exhibiting right raising failures. And I think some of their acquisitions end up being pretty good for them. But I mean, they were just a loser for for a long time. And that was just the American growth, you know, the the American way, like, just grow at all costs, and, you know, to make money, we’ll just keep getting more investment and go public than all investors get a huge windfall, and everyone’s happy, except the company doesn’t actually make money. 23:04So the Amazon way, right? That’s the Amazon model. But that model doesn’t apply to most businesses. It 23:10doesn’t. And of course, Amazon did it properly. Well, I mean, they, they they kind of fluctuate when they just say, Hey, we want to spend more and we’re going to start reinvesting to the future. But yeah, I mean, they’ve they are a little bit of an outlier where they’ve actually been profitable despite that gigantic growth and a lot of investment in the future. Yeah. All right. Well, that’ll do it for today’s episode of struck. If you’re new to the show. Thank you so much for listening. And please leave a review and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Check out the Weather Guard Lightning Tech YouTube channel for video episodes, full interviews and short clips from the show. And follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Our handle is @WGlightning. StrikeTape Weather Guard Lightning Tech proprietary lightning protection for Radome provides unmatched durability for years to come. If you need help with your Radome lightning protection, reach out to us at WeatherGuardaero.com that’s Weather Guard a e r o.com.

Will the Boom Overture supersonic jet take off now that United Airlines has placed a future order? Can Boom succeed where Aerion recently failed? The Boeing MQ-25 drone recently refueled an F-18, a first in aviation. Plus, the Ehang 216 takes flight and Joby announces their new, simple flight controls: are they are a game-changer? Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Transcript – EP57 Boom Supersonic, Boeing MQ-25 Refueling Drone Plus Ehang & Joby EVTOL News 0:00This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech at Weather Guard. We support design engineers and make lightning protection easy. 0:14You’re listening to the struck podcast. I’m Dan Blewett. I’m Allen Hall. And here on strike we talk about everything aviation, aerospace engineering and lightning protection. 0:30Alright, welcome back to the struck podcast. I’m your co host, Dan Blewett. On today’s show, we’re going to talk about a new contract between bombard a Learjet and the US Air Force looks like it’s worth about almost half a billion dollars, so exciting for them. We’ll talk a little bit about more about supersonic jets. So obviously aireon collapse, we’ll talk a little bit more about that. There’s been some interesting news stories that have come out. And then we’ll also talk about boom, announcing a partnership with United united wants to buy a bunch of planes. So we’ll see if that comes to fruition. Obviously, that’s going to be quite a long game. In our engineering segment, we’ll talk about a Boeing mq 25 drone, refueling and FA t fa 18 in flight. So pretty exciting. First time a drone has refueled manned aircraft. And we’ll also talk a little bit about airships, and why one maker is betting that passengers will choose comfort over speed. Lastly, in our E VTOL segment, we’ll talk about ehang. And some interesting news about flight controls from Joby. So, let’s start with mrda. They’ve got a $464.8 million contract for bombarding a global 6000 aircraft with their Air Force. what’s notable about this aircraft, it’s just a thing of it as a midsize business jet, which makes the tube section 1:54decently sized. So you can put some humans in it and put equipment in it. So if you’re running a special missions aircraft, where you want to put a couple of control centers, in it, monitoring stations, those kind of things, you can, you can fit that all that infrastructure into the aircraft, you have room to do it, there’s places to mount all that hardware. And then typically what those aircraft will have is sensors mounted on the top of the aircraft on the fuselage and on the belly to look left or right, up and down and communicate satellite data back to whoever they want to send it to. So there’s a you just need a certain amount of size aircraft to do all that and the global 6000 is sort of is really a nice platform for that and that’s they’ve been doing a lot of work in Wichita Learjet, they’re on modding and doing military support aircraft for a long time. I mean, I think I can revert back into the early 2000s. They were doing some back then I worked on a couple of those. And I think the the bonus here is that Wichita as a city has been really getting hammered on terms of not having any really new projects going on. Textron has got a couple of derivative projects going on. But in terms of Lear, Jet Lear jets been shrinking and they shut down all production of Lear jet just recently so everybody is left at Lear jet on the west side of town there needs something to work on. And so it’s good they earn you know, 400 $500 million project gets some a couple years out in terms of support, and they have a great flight test. And they’ve always had a great Flight Test Center in Wichita. So all the Bombardier flight test programs, even though the aircraft may be built up in Canada, typically it gets shipped down to Kansas to do all the flight tests, the flight test pilots, all the people that support flight test, the technicians and mechanics, all the specialist engineers that are doing all the all the data monitoring and that sort of thing are all located in Wichita. So there is a like there’s little expertise center in Wichita and the military mods are done in Wichita too. So it has this certain niche of expertise and they’ve been a little bit struggling so this $500 million dollar contracts going to get them going again which is good for the city because it’s which was always the center of small aircraft forever and it seemed to lose its luster a lot of as we seen on some of the V tall stuff. It’s all these most went to California. 4:29So it’s moving out of Wichita, which is sad 4:34because which was a lot of good engineers, a lot of good mechanics and technicians are all there everybody’s there but these new programs are starting to do you think it’ll completely rebound as a as the hub mode that it once was or, you know, seen its best days but can maybe you still you know, recover and stay here’s what’s driving the California bit and also beta up in Vermont, not far from us is available. 5:00of cash, it has to do with the investors located there locating these companies where the investors are, and a case of beta, the investors are Vermont based or New Hampshire based. In some cases, there’s a couple of different investors there. In the case of like a Joby or an archer and those kinds of companies, this all the Silicon Valley, cash or Google cash investment groups that are there. So there are no moving aircraft companies. So where are the investors are and that didn’t used to be the case. It used to be 5:31investors would come to you because you had the infrastructure. That’s, that’s all gone away. It’s crazy. Think about Yeah, which which it makes sense. Like, you know, you hear stories, like if you want to be a writer, like find a place where there’s a strong community of writers, so you can bounce ideas off each other, you can be around each other, you can be pushed by one another. So I get that, it seems like you know, the world so connected, that it wouldn’t matter where your company is, but you know, when you’re down the street, and you can pitch an investor who’s really busy, and he says, Yeah, I got, I got 20 minutes, like, stop by this restaurant be here, you know, 140. And if you’re in town, you can do that. And if you’re in Wichita, and you’ve got to jump on a plane, you know, that’s not that’s not a direct flight. I mean, that makes sense, which ties in a weird spot is not a lot of direct flights. So which toy is going to go through Denver or Dallas to get there, so it’s not an easy city to get in and out of, and they’ve been working on that for forever to try to get more direct flights to Wichita, which would I think open it up but the other part of Wichita which is really strange right now, so you know, spirits spirits there. And they make a lot of parts for air Airbus and Boeing aircraft and their their big company, that kind of what was Boeing at one point kind of move to spirit? Not so much in people, but in terms of company format, what it does, yeah. But that they started a kind of a collaborative situation with Wichita State, who, you know, probably 20 years ago, called NIH, our National Institute of aviation research, if I remember the acronym correctly, which was supposed to be that incubator for aviation companies and and and to support the local aviation companies have given them an advantage, 7:09on a technical side, on a testing side on a technology side, and it hasn’t seemed to come to fruition, in the sense of all the great work that nyer has done is being sucked up by these companies that are not in Kansas. They’re all using that data that nyer provides for free. And then here is funded. Wait, are you saying? Are you saying they’re not in Kansas anymore? Yeah, I mean, sort of. So the data all the all the all the if you think about composites technology, and all the all the little bits and pieces, I don’t get too technical about composites. But there’s a lot of data you need to know about how composite and an epoxy system work together, hot, cold, wet performance data. Now, our does all that, and that data gets publicized in the FAA and the federal government and state of Kansas in some part fund that. And then companies anywhere in the country can use that data, which is awesome, because it stops sort of the repetitive testing, and all these small companies have to do, it’s a lot of overhead expense that you don’t have to pay for anymore, because you’ve got this commerce repository for that data. The problem is, is the common repository of data that no one has paid for. So I don’t have to be in Kansas to tap that. Tap that resource like me in California, or I can be in Vermont, which is what they’re doing or it can be in Minnesota, like Sarah says, or whoever dimond up in Canada, and it doesn’t drive those small airplane companies to be in state. So I wonder if they had a chance to rethink that whether they would do the same thing? I would say probably not. And the state of Kansas is probably very disappointed in not so much nyari I don’t think they’re disappointed necessarily in hierarchy. I think it’s a lot of good things. I think what they’re disappointed in that’s not driving the traffic and the businesses like they thought it would. That’s the that’s the that’s the pinch point. And I can’t imagine that hasn’t come up. I haven’t seen a lot. I haven’t seen a lot of articles about that yet. But that’s got to come up at some point. Because there’s billions of dollars being invested in Joby Archer, whisk beta, you name them it’s gotta be 9:16you start counting up there’s gonna be three $4 billion between everybody 9:20very little that’s in Kansas. 9:22Yeah. And that’s what they were looking to go do. 9:26That’s what that’s what that whole effort was set up for so kind of a disappointing situation. Hopefully it resolves itself and hopefully people realize that companies realize that there’s great technology in Kansas and take advantage of it because they should they should 9:46while moving on. So last, our last episode we talked about aireon shutting down and really good in a good article from Evie, Evie, a i n t.com, which is the executive and VIP aviation. 10:00International website. And it’s talking about what doomed aireon and it seems like a lot of a bunch of this was the fact that they got going in 2004, when a lot of this technology was more cutting edge than it is today, in reference to range like ranges much more significant, the speed was much more significant than it is today, you know, jet engines have improved in, you know, the quieter, the more efficient range is much better. So a lot of the things that the supersonic flight was boasting, you know, like twice the speed was then cut down to like, you know, 1.6 times the speed, you know, this and this, and it just started to start to the, the playing field started to get a little bit more level, obviously, supersonic is a lot faster, but it’s not, you’re not cutting a flight in half anymore. And it sounds like at a certain point, they ran out the engine that they were initially going to use, which was made by Pratt and Whitney, the JT eight D was taken out of service, and even then that might not be viable today because of noise 11:00and emissions standards. So it was this sort of part of this whole process that maybe a lot of their technology aged out and the concept like I said other, more commercial technologies sort of caught up was that part of this, this, I think was very on sort of two pieces to it. Yeah, I think technology, obviously, will, will go faster than the aircraft will. Once you lock it in aircraft design, you’re kind of stuck and technology keeps rolling on and it goes very fast today. And so once you put your put your stake in the ground, you got to hope you get it done really get the aircraft down really fast before technology is blown out of the water. That’s part of it. Yeah, we’ve talked about a bunch. Yeah, that’s why I don’t want to buy a car. I don’t want to buy a car today, because we’re gonna have amazing cars in three years. I’m just telling my dad this. I’m like, wait another wait another year or anything for Apple computers? to totally change everything. Wait, wait, wait until you get the new chips or I bought a laptop. There you go, by the way. 12:00But I did Wait, I did wait. So the second part of the aireon is? Well, I think there was a unite United Airlines had something to do with and there’s just too many coincidences, all the stuffs happening too fast were united, selected, boom, obviously Boone’s making a larger aircraft and 7080 passenger aircraft supersonic thing and Ariane was working on the business side of it. So there’s, there’s a little bit of difference between those two. But an airline picking a winner will drive investors away or can drive investors away. Can and I think but one of the things I think what’s NASA has been poking about, and I haven’t seen a lot of noise yet, except from NASA, which is majority of your time at any flight has to do with getting to and from the airport. And in the United States. If you look at all the airports there are it I think the quotation was like 90% of of Americans are within 15 minutes of an airport. You don’t really think of it that way. But you are I mean, you are really close to a lot of airports. I know I’m, yeah. 13:09You’re really close to an airport possible. There’s a lot of small airports. Yeah. So I’m I don’t know where. But I feel like a lot of people live in the suburbs. Wow. Okay. So anyway, the airport not at any airport. So I got that the subject was well, do I need a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft? Or do I need a short takeoff and landing aircraft? And can because there’s so many airports around? There’s one five minutes for me. And like I said, I live in the middle of nowhere, that 13:38the Do you? Is it? Is it the time save, getting to from the airport going checking your luggage, all that stuff? If you got rid of all that and could go to the local airport and fly where you wanted to go or get to a hub much quicker to shorten that time down? Does a supersonic have any play? And it may not. It may not. I mean, if you’re thinking about doorstep to doorstep, that little piece in the middle, which is supersonic does decrease the amount of time there but everything else is still the same. All the waiting in line driving to the airport. that’s a that’s a good point. That’s a good point. You don’t think about something like that being such a threat to this crazy technology. But you’re right if it’s if it continues to encroach on, on the overall speed, because like you said, it’s not just time in the air. It’s complete time if you’re like, Oh, I could take the supersonic flight, it’ll take me six hours. But if I take this conventional flight, because of the other things they’ve done, you know, it’s only six and a half hour right cheap, right? I think that’s that’s a significant part of where the electric vertical takeoff and landing market may interrupt the supersonic market, at least within the country and regional stuff for sure. But you know, I think it makes logical sense. that technology is not going to get any slower is going to expand such that it would be great if I could drive 15 minutes to the airport. Get on 15:00Flight or some sort of aircraft and go where I wanted to go in a reasonable price. Regardless if there’s 50 passengers on it, 20 passengers on it, or 200 passengers on it, can I do that, because that’s a huge event, I’d be willing to pay more not to drive an hour and a half or two hours to an airport to do all the stuff. 15:18That would be a price point I would pay, I would pay in dollars for that flight easily because it’s worth it. And then I think, well, as we get going further and further down this road of, and more knowledge about the vertical takeoff and getting in and getting into smaller and smaller airports, much more quietly, one an electric aircraft that explodes that possibility, and America is designed to use that. And that’s what NASA is trying to say is like, we have the infrastructure to handle this today. We don’t need to build airports anywhere, we got plenty of airports, we just need the aircraft to be able to come in and out of them. That’s what NASA is saying. And I think that’s a very interesting point, because it does twist the technology knob a little bit away from vertical to short takeoff and landing, which is a lot easier to make, by the way. Yeah, writing nearly as much energy to fly and does it just does it right. Have you ever get up off the ground? It’s an interesting concept. It’s something that I think the industry needs to be started wrapping his head around now that we’re coming, at least in the United States coming out of COVID. I think there’s a lot more engineers getting back to the desk starting to scratch your head and say, yeah, and NASA is starting NASA and the FAA, they’re gonna start pushing a little bit on, what are we doing, or you know, we’re not going to, I can tell you that all the time, no one’s flying to the local pizza shop, that not likely to happen in my lifetime, just because of the safety risk. But they will fly to the airport, that’s 15 minutes down the road, that will happen. And I think that’s where we got to go, well, let’s let’s dovetail that into into boom, so big news from boom, the remaining supersonic flight startup, they’re partnering with United united wants to buy a number of their Overture aircraft, and I had to have a chuckle because I watched they’re really well done, you know, like, you know, video of showing the partnership between the two companies. And is it coming? 2029 that’s like, right, oh, my God, that’s so far away. And it’s just funny that you can have a video laughs like that, that’s like, 17:22eight years, people it’s common. It’s like, I can’t even imagine what I’ll be doing it at age 43. You know, and eight years from now. 17:32And it just seems like there’s a lot of fuss about something that’s really far away. And this this article from EPA mentioned that there isn’t a clear winner as far as supersonic engines right now, like a clean quiet Mach two engine. 17:47So that needs to be developed. There’s a lot there’s, I mean, so boom, has, you know, a demonstrator the XP one, I don’t understand the United aspect of it very much. I know united was wasn’t an also united, hooking up with one electric vehicle companies recently. But because that doesn’t make any sense to me either. You know, United has a tough time flying what they own right now. I don’t see the supersonic thing making much sense to them. Besides positioning themselves as a company has been the technology company we have the better cabins we have the better atmosphere, we’re pushing the pushing the boundaries. Delta has not played that. And delta is the largest aircraft or largest airline in the United States. And it’s weird to see united in that marketplace. But, you know, from a united standpoint, it seems like you’re doing a lot of advertising about that boom connection, like the Wall Street Journal had a full page article, United had a full page article on Wall Street Journal, talking about the the 18:48procuring aircraft, supersonic aircraft. What why now, Dan, like I said, like it in 2029, we may be flying these things. 19:00That full page ad has nothing to do with the person is going to fly that airplane. It has to do with investors, right? It’s got to be some sort of investor play in terms of pushing up the stock price, 19:12gaining cash into the company to support it. Something is going on there which doesn’t make any sense yet. And then we’re going to probably find out this summer but it doesn’t exist it the whole thing seems odd. Like airlines don’t make a big hubbub about buying an airplane until like the airplanes in service. Yeah, that’s that’s my point, too. It’s like, are we revisit this when I’m 40 to 19:3535 a day. I just it’s you know, and it’s so like the here’s some stats about it. You know, the they’re gonna be 200 million a plane is what it says the supersonic Overture jet 35 plane deal at about 3 billion. 19:52They’ll fly at about 60,000 feet, twice as fast as two as today’s subsonic jets. 20:00So good again. 2029. I mean, like you said, so much could change in that time, where the world even on the investment side, Dan, and I think the CEO is gonna be there three years from now? 20:10I don’t? I don’t? That’s a good question. Well, that’s, that’s a really interesting point when I mean, job turnover today is so fast. I mean, the average worker in any industry is what, like four or five years where they’re changing jobs. So any engineer that’s on the project today, and next year, and next year is probably unlikely to still be with the company by time their planes launching. Now that might change if they’re obviously with, you know, they want to see the project through I’m sure. So that could be a very big outlier and not not the case. But But yeah, you’re right. I mean, you can have a lot of turnover between that between. Alright, so let’s talk engineering today. So Boeing, and, you know, their new drone refueling aircraft, the mq 25, successfully transferred fuel to an F 18, f 18. I slur this right together the FA 18 Super Hornet. And that’s pretty cool. I mean, to think that, you know, you need fuel out there in the stratosphere, hey, send up the side of the drone. It takes people out of this the safety risk situation, right, you can you can insert 21:24basically a drone unmanned vehicle out there, and tanker up. Right, right. In a combat situation, you not worry so much about risking a, you know, the 767 type aircraft, or an old seven or seven type aircraft as a refueling aircraft, which is very vulnerable, clearly, very rollable. In terms of being detected by radar being shot at all those kinds of things. Make it very runnable. Whereas the mq 25, it looks somewhat stealthy the way it’s designed, right, there’s not a lot of reflective surfaces on it. So I’m sure there’s some stealth technology. And so you can get this refilling option in quasi at least quasi stuffily in to refuel your fighter attack aircraft. 22:08At the in the front lines, which is something that’s never really been conceived before. If you remember, 22:16during the Iranian hostage situation, I don’t know if you’re born Dan, back in the 79, or 80? I don’t think I’m not sure I definitely was not more than 70. Well, yeah, we do. A lot of a lot of age talk today. I think that 30 1985 best year hostages out of Iran at the time of terrain at a time, I think the one of the issues they had was the refueling and refueling the helicopters to get people in. And then obviously, they ran into a dust storm and gotten serious accident. But you know, the refueling can limit a lot of your options in terms of where and when you can 22:52put force on a situation. And if you can refuel pretty much anywhere, anytime, and a much more efficient vehicle to haul fuel, that’s for sure. To get it in the hot spot, you need to get it to boil it makes a lot a lot of sense. But you can imagine though, how much that the Navy and the Air Force eventually, and all the services, Marines will be able to use this thing to well have to go through a lot of flight testing to make sure there’s no weird 23:25aerodynamic inefficiencies between the two. It’s going to cause turbulence and disconnects and all the stuff that happens. It’s not an easy thing to dock up to two moving objects moving at speed 23:38to meet up and hold themselves together long enough to pump a bunch of fuel and that’s 23:43that’s not an easy thing to go do and to automate. It can’t be simple. So there’s probably a lot more work to go do but it is it is fascinating to see it done for the first time like to watch it go. It’s just really cool. Yeah, and then another interesting story this from AI n online is that hybrid air vehicles says there airlander 10 airship is on track to be ready to carry 100 passengers in 2025, which is also away but I’m into this I want to I’m a big fan of solo travel. I love taking long long distance trains on other trip there’s my future. So I would for sure go for this where you’d be on this big blimp, 24:27the Hindenburg, Hindenburg, 8.0 whatever. And 24:33yeah, just like huge windows just I mean for certain people like myself who don’t mind like I just like to think and I can write I don’t care like it’s part of the trip just getting there like that’s why I like the you know, 30 hour train ride. That’s part of it for me. I’m not in a rush to get to the point B but like there’s there’s a subset of the market that would do this. Like I’m an example you know, pending how much this thing costs, but I mean what what are your thoughts? Obviously, there’s 25:00A lot more than just some demand. It’s got to be financially viable. It’s there’s a lot of hurdles. I mean, what are the FAA come in as far as airships? Well, there’s there’s already existing regulation on airships. And I’ve done some internship work on the 25:16newest Goodyear, airships, which are not blimps anymore. They’re sort of rigid dirigibles. Much like zipline In fact, I think they they’re actually I think from remember correctly. It’s been a couple of years. I think they are disciplines. But the infrastructure to and what’s the actual difference? I don’t know. Like the original Goodyear Blimp is like a like a balloon. It’s inflated like bloom, there is no general superstructure inside of it. And the Zeppelin’s like, if you think about the Hindenburg, it’s a nose. 25:45It has nothing to do with it today’s design, but that’s that people can think about it and know what that is. It had if you think about it has an internal at the time aluminum superstructure and inside so it is rigid. It is a rigid body, okay then has containers inside of it that store. 26:03Nana Berg’s case hydrogen or helium, there’s a little bit different method of building, that’s all. 26:12But the key is, I think on terms of going slow. I’m not sure I’m not sure in the United States that’s going to click I don’t think much in the United States moves slowly. Pretty much if you let people drive as fast as they possibly could, you wouldn’t, you would have interstates running out of 100 and 105 all the time. 26:32And that just seems to be built into the system built into the system. I think you learned that in when you go to kindergarten, you know, go fast, that’s 26:42you got another 13 years of education in it, it seems like 26:47a lot of the slower modes of transportation are losing losing favor, even though they may be gleep, quote, unquote greener are, don’t emit a much carbon. You’re not seeing huge shifts in moving away from cars, yet to trains or slow modes of transportation, you still really haven’t seen anything except in big cities and people, at least right now. And later states are moving out of big cities into the country. So it’s going to be I always think if you’re betting on a slower, 27:21people choosing to do something slower, that’s probably not going to be a good investment. I wonder how the investors are thinking about that company, and whether they can get enough investors to make to actually start start building hardware and making it a reality? Well, I think it depends on how it’s framed. I mean, imagine this way. So imagine you’re leaving from DC to New York City for a weekend, you could take the train and get there. And you know, I don’t know what is what it is like two and a half hours. Or say there was a slower train those five hours, but it was really more like a party bus. So you’re gonna have like, drinks and food with your friends. Yeah, that’s a pretty attractive option. If you’re going up there with you know, having a couple’s weekend, or going out with a bunch of bunch of friends or whatever your family, like, hey, let’s do this, you know, we’re gonna be together anyway. Like, the whole weekend is about being together. So instead of having three, you know, not super comfortable, but faster hours, let’s do five hours. And you know, we get a good food. And you know, we can we can drink, we can do whatever. It’s just like, you can walk around, it’s kind of like a lounge atmosphere. I think there’s I think there’s some some market for that if and only if it’s really marketed well, where it’s like, Look, don’t think of this don’t think of this as taking the train to, to here think of this as taking a party bus to or a limo or being at the bar with your friends. But you’re in transit. That’s I think, I think the selling point because again, you can’t if that’s not the selling point that I don’t know what is right. It’s like, this is a luxury. Because Because the the air Yeah, the their ship idea of is like, hey, let’s go to LA from San Francisco for the weekend. Let’s take the airship it’s three, three hours or four hours. And we can look at the skyline you get to see the sunset, you have drinks, you have some food, whatever like that. That makes a lot of sense. To me. That’s a cool little thing that you could say, Yeah, right. Well, you’re right. And I think maybe you only get a couple celebrities to tweet out that they’re on this airship. And they’re just enjoying their four hour stay on it just like they’d beat the bar for four hours like whatever, then I think that could could have its place but like I said, it’s got to be it people have to know that this is not just slow stupid transportation. It’s, it’s an experience and it’s you’re going somewhere but you’re doing it obviously for the experience. So that is interesting, you know, pops to mind obviously is New York City to Atlantic City, Los Angeles slash San Diego slash maybe in Phoenix going to Vegas. Those things like routes that are possible, but that’s about for aircraft. To make more than for needed you need to you need to sell about 50 to get your investment back on. 30:00Many of these projects, they gotta find another. 30:03Another couple of routes somewhere to make it possible. It makes no sense to build. Well, those routes you just mentioned. Good. make some sense. I mean, like you said, I don’t know if LA to Vegas is that yeah, it was a highway between the two. Might be Yeah, that would be great. I think that’s exactly their, like demographic like he the whole group. It’s it’s the same thing. Francisco and Lake Tahoe. I like Zuckerberg has a house on Lake Tahoe. So they’re all there’s a big contingency between between northern California Silicon Valley. And going to Tahoe on the weekends, if you look at the airport is no taho. It’s just full of these really expensive fancy airplanes. So there is there is a marketplace for that. There totally is this just how many how many airplanes can you sell? I think from the business business side, that’s what you have to look at. 30:56Alright, so in our Evie tall segment, let’s first talk about ehang. So their shares are up recently, because they’ve just 31:07published a video that shows their larger aircraft ehang 216 has made its sort of maiden voyage without passengers in it. And yeah, I mean, they’re often flying again, again, demonstrating one of the things he has done well is demonstrate their vehicles and flight now most of the time, there’s no one on it. 31:28But they’re, you know, you’ve talked about this a number of times, you’re like, hey, company, if you say you’ve got the technology, you say you’ve got the batteries, they’ve got the range, let’s see it fly, right. And whether he hang is doing that with or without passengers, they are there they are putting their vehicles up in the up in the air. So yeah, Alan, what are your takes on on the 216 here and he hangs latest news? Well, they’re trying to demonstrate capability, right in trying to show they’re a market leader and the first to market can plant the flag in a sense of, hey, we’re first therefore we own this marketplace. Everybody else is up and comer. That’s the PR behind it. The the push on the sort of safety certification side is yet to be finished. And I think there’s a lot of work there still, particularly if it’s autonomous. And I don’t know how you’re going to get over that hurdle. Maybe in inside China. It sounds like that’s doable, but I’m not sure Japan’s going to sign up for that. I doubt it. 32:29Because Japan has a are standing up a Certification Authority. And whether they would agree to something as controvert could be potentially controversial as an autonomous aircraft would be a big debate item, I’m sure. And, you know, it’s interesting that they’re even taking into Japan. In a sense, it is a marketplace for them clearly, but you would think China would be the such a massive marketplace that you would not need to go anywhere else. I mean, to me, there’s a couple of obvious marketplaces, Japan would be Japan would be one of them. But also it would be in California, right? I mean, running around Silicon Valley would be another one that would make a lot of sense to people or even Chicago or Houston. But maybe there’s just staying a little bit closer to home, see how things are going but we’ll have to keep an eye on I’m going to I I’m just still a little curious to see how the structure of this company comes together and whether they could deliver what they think they’re going to deliver. As soon as you put a pilot any of these your your expenses go up, your profitability goes down. There’s a lot more stuff you got to go do. Not sure that’s where they want to go. And I’m not sure anybody wants to go there quite honestly, all the all the electric vertical takeoff and landing companies in the United States are all talking about autonomous right now. And that’s why they don’t want to pay for a pilot. Yeah, well, I mean, these these trial flights that are this trough light that just happened in Japan. I mean, it still seems like they have similar design on the 216 compared to their their smaller one. It’s 34:04you know, and so does that design you to evolve still like I know you’re still skeptical of the rotor blades. Yeah, I don’t like the rotor bottom or they’re, they’re essentially Shin level. 34:16Potentially scary. Yeah. always worried about propeller coming loose and going somewhere and they’re just not at 34:24just from a if you’re trying to sell this to somebody to the common person doesn’t fly a lot. That’s the first thing that sticks out is you got these rotating blades that moving at several 1000 RPM that are right by your ankles, and doesn’t feel right. And that’s how a passenger feels inside the vehicle has a lot to do with whether they’re going to accept it or not. It’s like most automobiles today, right? If it fit looks unsafe or feels unsafe, people won’t buy it. They just won’t. And I think that’s one of the hurdles you have to overcome and if you look a lot of the other 34:58Eb tall designs 35:00The rotors are a pie. And I think they’re all coming to the same conclusions like a helicopter. Yeah, I mean, above head height, right? Because why wouldn’t they be I guess, right. But there’s a there’s a cost, there’s a cost and a weight implication to doing it above above your head. Whereas there’s just less infrastructure weight on the on the aircraft to do it, where they’re doing it down low, it just is. But it does lead to other issues of Prop strike in the ground, coming in little sideways, there could be a pole or something sticking up a fire hydrant or something, you hit that with the propeller, and that’s going to be an interesting day. 35:38And that’s, that’s where when you start to get into the certification of the aircraft, a lot of those design details start to flesh out where they if you’re just designing it, because it’s something you like, you think it’s going to work. And it’s simple, it’s simple to assemble, you don’t necessarily take into consideration all the variables you would normally see in a sort of a helicopter situation. Yep. All right, moving on. Our last topic of today is with Joby aviation, so they’ve just released a video demonstrating their flight controls in the simulator environment, just showing how incredibly easy they are to use. They’ve taken some of the complexity out of it, it seems like 36:14Alan, what’s your what’s your take on their flight controls? It seems out of the box, it’s clear, they’re trying to make it user friendly. Are they trying to replace pilots? Are they trying to, like why does it need to be as obviously simplicity is always better, right? We get that. But does this does this strike you in any sort of way being so very simple, it does in the sense that there aren’t any rudder pedals. And I think pilots are going to get into it are going to have a really strange feeling of not being able to go to kick the rudder to do things, because it’s all automated via the control stick, it’s, it’s 36:53a lot less to do than a standard helicopter, where you got to sicherlich and everything else. I mean, there’s just if you get into a helicopter, you realize all the stuff that the pilots are doing, there’s a lot going on. And there’s a lot of buttons and knobs and a lot to pay attention to helicopter pilots. I don’t I don’t even know how they do it, it’s way beyond my level of comprehension of being able to coordinate my body in that fashion, but that they can do it. And so obviously, the problem with the veto is trying to simplify it down where 37:21quite a relatively low time pilot can operate the vehicle safely. So how you do that you start taking away some of the complexity to it, and you simplify the controls and make them more Gameboy ish, then 37:36Cessna ish, I’ll call it so that plays into how you set up the systems to work together also all the electrical systems and the distribution systems, all the actuators that exists on the aircraft are not really connected to the pilot at all except via wire. So it’s it is a fly by wire ish system. Some parts may be there’s there’s debates about that. But I think for the most part, it’s it’s a fly by wire system or fly by light system so that as you move the stick a computer reads, here’s your movement of the stick, and then interprets that in a certain way based on the flight conditions you’re in, and then does the appropriate thing, in this case, most likely with the propellers and flaps and whatever else. So it takes some of the logic of the coordination between the human and the aircraft, it’s sort of disconnection a little bit. And the benefit of that is that the aircraft can protect itself. So you can try to force it to do things that it shouldn’t do, and they won’t let you do them. Their buses kind of got a system set up that way in their aircraft where it’s pilot, pilots only can do so much. Whereas like the Boeing 737 pilots can do a lot, right so pilots can get them in situations they should not be in. Because Boeing’s philosophy has been the pilot isn’t the pilot in command that the pilot should be controlling what the aircraft does and have command on the aircraft. Airbus has pulled some of that away from the pilots and isn’t putting in basically flight control computers to do some interpretation to keep the aircraft safe. So I think 39:11watching the Joby approach, I think all the other aircraft companies, I think beta is going the same way. And whisk and Archer everybody’s everybody sounds like they’re all doing the same thing, which is rethinking how a human interfaces with an aircraft 39:29and to simplify it such that 39:33we get safer there we get safer and requires less pilot training time. So there’s a lot of work to do there. You just can’t say we’ve got this new system and it’s going to work and look how great it is. That’s not what happens. The FAA says prove it right. If you’re going to move away and if you’re going to be away from a system in which we’re training pilots, and the FAA is essentially helping to train pilots in the sense of here’s the riders here’s a stick. These are the things you do to avoid stall. This is what 40:00Doing a stall, all that may get thrown out the window 40:04and start over again. Well, it’s not only you as a company, making the aircraft, it’s all the training stuff you have to do. Getting all the pilots figured out, getting the FAA to agree to it, getting all the 40:17basically a whole industry to switch mode of thinking, which is never easy. When you ever whenever you try to take a whole industry and reorient it in a different way, particularly since it’s it’s evolving in a way that relies less on human interaction. That’s hard to do. 40:36It’d be like Dan, getting rid of the steering wheel on your car and putting on a joystick. I think that we very hard for a lot of people to do. I really do. Yeah, right. Sort of intuitive. I’d crashed. Yeah. But why wouldn’t a joystick work in your car? Totally what it what the inputs are all there, for sure. But I think if and then somebody has to have done studies on this years ago, because it’s a lot less stuff in a car to have a joystick and a steering wheel, it’s probably safer for that matter, because that’s one of the issues a student will hit in the chest and an accident that would go away. But we haven’t gotten there yet. And I think one of the reasons we haven’t gotten there was just the connection and mental connection, the physical connection between you and the thing that you’re operating. There’s certain things that humans like to do and to feel comfortable with and other things they don’t feel comfortable with. And I wonder if we’re going to bump up against that wall a little bit as we get to these electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. 41:29All right, well, that’ll do it for today’s episode of struck. 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Bye Aerospace lost their battery supplier, as Oxis Energy went into bankruptcy–what does this mean for Bye? We discuss the Alpha Electro, a trainer from Pipstrel, and the use of electric motors in light sport aircraft. Plus, more new EVTOL designs continue to pour out, including a 40-seat design. But are these prototype renderings just a pipe dream? Or will they ever actually fly? Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Transcript EP56 – Pipistrel Alpha Electro; Battery Woes for Bye Aerospace; Is a 40-Passenger EVTOL Just Science Fiction? 0:00This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech at Weather Guard. We support design engineers and make lightning protection easy. You’re listening to the struck podcast. I’m Dan Blewett. 0:18I’m Allen Hall. 0:19And here on strike we talk about everything aviation, aerospace engineering and lightning protection. Alright, welcome back to the struck aerospace engineering podcast. I’m your co host, Dan Blewett. On today’s show, lots to cover a lot of interesting news in the cycle this week. Number one, and we’ll chat about Southwest. There’s just way too many flight attendants getting getting punched in the face. So we got a we got a chat about it. EVTOL. Startup Archer is seeking to dismiss the trade secrets lawsuit filed by whisk but that doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere. That seems like it’s getting only increasingly messy. We’ll talk about mighty fly, which has been cleared to start autonomous cargo drone service. They’ve gotten some some clearance from the FAA, which will be cool. And then in our engineering Simon was about pipistrel. They’ve a light sport aircraft, they got an electric motor and about an hour of flight time with an hour charge time. So pretty cool. Some rough news for by aerospace, their battery supplier oxes energy is facing bankruptcy. So we’ll talk about the implications there. And then our EVTOL. Segment lots of interesting stuff going on there. We’ll talk about some certification issues, which we’ve talked a bunch about in the past ehang is unveiling a longer range design, and Kel akona has thrown out a 40 passenger concept, which seems straight out of science fiction at this point. And we’ll talk a little bit about that as well as some price controls. So start with Southwest isn’t really sad Southwest is calling off plans. Well, the plans to sell alcohol in the plains does not make me sad I I’m neutral to it. But there’s just been a lot of incidences with unruly passengers. And more recently, Southwest flight attendant was punched in the face loss of teeth. And I mean, things are getting are getting rough. What do you attribute this to? 2:18Alcohol, alcohol, people being upset about masks, reconnecting with the rest of society after being disconnected for a year, all those all those things are playing into it. I recently flew to Las Vegas and I was I kind of like flying to Las Vegas, because it’s just it’s different places a little more activity. Most airports, the only place I guess there’s more places with slot machines. There’s a couple places with slot machines in the country. But that has to have the most. And the amount of alcohol there is says hi right You mean that people can leave in the casino gonna go home? For the most part and I think you see it in places where people have been partying in Florida had a rash of it. Some of the islands had a rash of it. I think that’s that’s just a big problem with alcohol. People being upset about mass people being overly sensitive about stuff and flight attendants worried about their well being which they have every right to it for a two hour flight. You’re going to get to a fistfight and punch somebody punch a flight attendant, which is a federal offense By the way, you’re not going to the county jail, you’re going to the your big old one of the big house under federal prison if they convict you and that’s not worth it. There’s no airline flight that’s worth that. Does that. Does that make any sense to me? Like, does anybody realize the consequences of that? Maybe they maybe they don’t maybe there’s just an Avery did enough. They don’t realize it. 3:53I mean, he we haven’t heard that many physical like, this is a rare one the physical like this woman getting punched in the face. But I don’t know. I guess idiots can be idiots anywhere, including in the sky. People are just like less filtered about Yeah, what they’re not just not thinking. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s well, 4:10yep. He finds. Yeah, I think so. And the FAA has 4:14taken a much more aggressive, really expensive fines like $50,000 I saw 4:18for some passengers $10,000 here, $10,000 there and like a $10,000 fine from the FAA. They’re not kidding, right? When the feds do that and impose it and lock it in via some sort of court, finding your they’ll take it out of your paycheck forever, like that’s a debt that’s never going away. They will get that money or you’re going to jail and then that’s that’s what will happen in that in that outcome. And I it’s just not worth it. I know on some recent Southwest flights that I’ve taken, they’ve been trying to lower the temperature down a little bit and some of the initial everyone’s It’s cold. Yeah, yeah, that’s 4:58true. Let’s fight. When there’s when they’re shooting when they’re shivering. It’s real hot in there. And that’s a very real thing. I mean, you wonder if this summer, the first summer back from COVID, where there’s still it’s still if you have masked here in DC, like some businesses allow them if your vaccines are allowed to mask if you’re vaccinated, many are still not many people are still wearing their masks despite being vaccinated and in a business that allows them to not wear one, which is baffling. But if it’s like 95 degrees, and people are angry about masks, and are just I don’t know, this summer could be like the summer of fistfights. Well, originally, 5:32I hope not. Yeah. 5:33Well, it doesn’t make you wonder because wasn’t the department transportation over the weekend, said they wanted people to wear masks on airplanes, just because it’s the right thing to do. Like, that’s not the reason why you wear a mask on an airplane, you’re wearing masks on an airplane because there is some health implications. Just like when we started it, there were some health indications want to make sure that wasn’t some sort of outbreak that was due to aircraft from people moving around. Awesome. But that is essentially over. At some point, you’re going to have to release that. Otherwise, you’re going to continue to have flight attendants assaulted. I mean, that’s the that is the reality of the situation, you will have flight attendants assaulted and it it the the penalty for it is not connecting to some random person who doesn’t read the FAA website about the fines and maybe has a drink before they get on the airplane whammo. those situations can escalate so fast that you just feel bad for the flight attendants who are stuck in the middle. I mean, they got to employers telling them one thing, they got the FAA it’s telling them you got to do these certain things and you got passengers that are tired of it to inevitable. 6:42We were all tired of it. But be nice to your flight attendants everyone. Yeah, come on. So mighty fly has gotten FAA approval to start doing some tests test flights with its hybrid electric autonomous cargo e VTOL. Aircraft quite a mouthful. Good reporting from future flights out arrow. But they’re going to be seeing if they can deliver these these reasonable payloads, you know, maybe 100 pounds here, they’re up to 600 miles. Alan, what what what is what is what’s unique about this little special airworthiness certificate? 7:21Well, it’s it’s part of a program that FAA started a couple of years ago, to apply what they call part 135. Regulations was calling conditions of operating a pay for to pay pay for flight like a air carrier kind of thing. Which has never been envisioned, in a sense in the regulations of the pilotless aircraft. It’s not necessarily pilotless as there’s not somebody on the ground controlling it, but there’s not somebody in the craft and the aircraft. That’s the difference. Now, when I looked at when you, when I looked at the pictures online, you’re like, this is not your average drone. Like this is the size of a small car. It’s it’s decent size, anything less 100 pounds and go 600 miles is going to be big. And I understand the rationale why we want to do this, but I don’t understand the rationale why we want to do this like what what Can’t we carry right now? airport to airport? on an aircraft? I mean, even if it was even if it’s a pile unpiloted drone thing? Is it. attempt. This is what I was reading through this is the attempt to basically drop cargo in some random place as needed. And not actually go to an airport and land the thing that bothers me. That part bothers me because the most critical part of any flight is landing, or in some case, deploying cargo. And when something goes wrong there, I’m not sure what, how great that’s going to be in terms of people on the ground and property on the ground and what it looks like. Because Can you imagine Daniel order some 99 pound Amazon product, and it comes delivered to your front door? I don’t know how that works. I don’t know how that 9:22works. 200 297 boxes of macaroni and cheese was a discount from Amazon. delivered to my door looks like. Yeah. 9:31What’s the economics of that? I don’t think that makes any sense economically to do that when they have the postal trucks going by your place every day anyway. I don’t know that makes a lot of sense. And the downside risk is as this craft falls out of the sky or hit something or runs into something in pool, 9:51well, I feel like it kind of goes back to your point there. I feel like it kind of goes back to the idea of whole truckload versus the small shipments right like If you can ship a whole truckload of something becomes way more economical than shipping one off, right? There’s a apps it was something was I reading something about a carpet manufacturer, they were trying to become more eco friendly. And they were trying to recycle their carpet, but like taking someone like tearing carpet out of a commercial building, and shipping it back to their factory was just super duper expensive. So they started to create caches, where like, you could have a local warehouse until it got to a full truckload of this used old carpet. Oh, then they could pick up a whole truckload and then it made economic sense. Sure. Oh, you know, that kind of just was in my head, as you’re just talking now about the economics of these little a very high tech small shipments. Like you said, if you can throw all these packages on one UPS truck, how is that not more economical? I don’t know. Probably not as fast depending on, you know, whatever. But yeah, 10:56I get the one though. There’s was one drone services operating in North Carolina in some mining conditions where they wanted to move equipment, like across a mountaintop, to get from one mind site to the other mind site. That totally makes sense to me, right? I mean, that that that’s not it’s in a rural area, you got equipment, that’s very difficult to get from A to B, because there’s a mountain in the way and you can just basically jump over the mountain with the drone. Okay, but delivering macaroni cheese makes no sense. No one’s gonna. It’s just, I just don’t see it. 11:29That’s what I want. Okay. 11:35Well, whatever Jeff Bezos can deliver. It will be you know, authorized, I guess we’ll see. 11:48So moving on to our engineering segment, let’s talk about conventional takeoff airplanes, we, there’s just so much news about the new VTOL sector, it’s just everywhere. But today, let’s talk about the alpha electro, which is a light sport aircraft from Pipistrel. It’s got an hour about an hour flight time, and it only takes about an hour to charge, which is pretty cool. And so this is another one of those, you know, new technologies, using electric motors, you know, pretty well, pretty efficiently. And that seems reasonable that if you’re training a new pilot, even being on the ground for an hour to recharge doesn’t seem like a big deal, as you’re probably getting ready for the next next student, and, you know, going through some checks and all that stuff. And of course, obviously, the battery technology will increase and increase that flight time over time. But I mean, Alan, you Where do you fall on this use for light sport aircraft? Because I know you have some concerns about weight, as they’re already really light. And I mean, hence the name. But heaviness and the weight has something to do with the the safety of the aircraft, doesn’t it? 12:52Yeah, the accident rate for light sport aircraft is not very good. And and the thought was that taking some of the more restrictive regulations weighing simplifying, the the approval process for light sport aircraft, would open up a whole new marketplace, for less expensive aircraft, that hasn’t happened in the way they envisioned it. aircraft are still expensive. And when I say expensive, like the price of a house is expensive. So an aircraft just expensive to make, period. Let’s get that on the table. The other part about light sport aircraft, from a safety standpoint is that they’re light and they get tossed around a good bit. And I think that has something to do with the accident rate that they’ve seen, because you still have a lot of mass there. But I think the concept is right, I think the electric concept, the battery concept. And the recharge capability is right, the operating costs are way lower because of the electric motor and the battery just for simplicity standpoint, it’s just a lot less take care of. So if you if you have a training facility, and you want to keep your operating costs low, that’s how you do it. You start putting electric aircraft in there, because you’re not going very far. Yeah. And it’s functionally training. Ron, you’re just not. And that’s, that’s sort of the perfect marketplace. I brought that discussion. from a marketing standpoint, you want to niche down and find that sweet spot where your product works, and you can be the expert in that one thing. Well, Pipistrel is kind of starting to own that space a little bit. Because of the technology they’re bringing forth and the electric aspects and lowering your operating costs and doing all these other things. I think it’s a cool airplane. I think they’re gonna be successful with it. They already are successful with it, because you see it being shown in multiple different countries, you see a lot of interest in it. It’s gonna stick around for a little while. It looks like 14:41yeah, and what I thought was cool as I watched a YouTube video about it is that you know, because it’s electric, like the torque curve is so fast that it’s getting up to speed and take off like really, really fast. Yeah, which is the same thing with like Tesla automobiles. I mean, they’re so fast because you put the guy you put the accelerator pedal down, not the gas pedal, and it’s just like All the all the engines power is there immediately. So instantaneous scoring? Yeah, infinite torque. Yeah, that’s 15:06the beautiful thing about electric motors. Yeah, no, but I think it’s also gonna take some time for pilots to get used to you to that effect. A lot of a lot of engines take time to spool up, they’re not instantaneous. And an electric aircraft, you can get away with a lot more. No, there’s other things that you want to worry about is like carburetor icing, and all the all the associated problem, failure modes that occur with a piston engine, go away with electric and if you you will, at some point in the goal is to transition up to a larger aircraft for most pilots is to move up to a larger single into a twin. You have to learn those other skill sets because electric aircraft is really simple to operate, which makes it great for a trainer, but not necessarily great for moving into like the twin world yet. 15:54Yeah, well, speaking of twin engine oxus energy, which was the battery supplier of lithium sulfur batteries for all different applications is facing bankruptcy, which is unfortunate for the buyer space, ie flyer 800, which is the eight seat electric, dual prop plane that buyer space is developing. I mean, do you feel like this is gonna be a quick, you know, just grab another supplier? I mean, I think the one positive for buyers that there’s a lot of battery power needs in the world at the moment. So I’m sure there’s someone else out there, right? Maybe? Or is this going to be a problem for them, 16:33the software part of that battery was the trick. And I think that was going to increase the energy density by roughly a factor of two. So that was the whole value to that battery system. And why that was chosen is it’s all about energy density and weight, right. So you can get more energy packed in that same amount of volume, then it works great for airplanes. And if you’re, if you’re trying to make a twin engine aircraft, like a King Air, you’re going to need a lot of energy to make it go far. So the pairing up of buy and oxus made a lot of sense at the time. But it’s starting to feel a little bit like access knew this was coming. So the most the most valuable time when most of the time to extract the most value for your company, in an aircraft environment is to get an aircraft design wrapped around you then say you’re going to file bankruptcy, because the aircraft manufacturer feels like they’re getting stuck right there. No, they’re in a really bad position. And that maybe they’ll buy you and may overpay for you. Because the option which oxus is trying right now. And what you hear a lot of reports is is that they’re offering all their patents for sale. Now you haven’t heard anybody buying them, but they’re going to offer them for sale. And if you’re if you’re by you’re going to have to worry about that like well, maybe Textron buys all their patents, and I can’t, I don’t have my batteries for my airplanes anymore, which Textron could do, right been touched on could really, at this point, put a big dent, and eight seat twin that by wants to make. So there’s a lot of that business aspect. And as engineers, you don’t want to think about those avenues that happen. But it’s still within a day, it’s still business. And if oxus thinks they can get a big value for their Corporation, or get cash out of it, and cease operations. So if that’s the right financial thing to do, then maybe that’s the right thing to do for that company, but it does have ramifications much larger than their company. It does. And that’s how you see it in aerospace quite a bit, you get a supplier locked in, and then they you know, they they try to leverage it for for cash so they don’t go bankrupt. And it’s always been in that situation number of times over the years and it just turns ugly, there’s really no good outcome of that Boeing at times has taken over companies so to keep them out of bankruptcy and then continue making parts so that airplanes to run on production line. But you don’t want to be doing that if you’re if you’re a small Aircraft Company, you don’t have the people to do that. So it does it does hurt you know schedules on with buy on the twin it’s gonna it has to, it has to, which is a shame because I think there’s a lot of great things going on a buy right now. There really are the the trainer, the two seat and a four seat trainer make total sense. And I think those are planes are gonna be great airplanes once I get them out and delivered. 19:33Well, and one of the things that buyer was looking towards was that 550 watt hours per kilogram density that oxus was hoping to get to by 2023. And this was a good article about this on a VTOL calm. And so now I guess the you know, like you said they’ve got to re re steer the ship and figure out where they can maybe get that future energy density, because it doesn’t sound like that’s on the market. You know, the way that they’re trying to develop that then that’s I think the big challenges companies are trying to get ahead of that and say, okay, we want this target in the future, what companies are doing that, but if they’re startups, they’re just going to be subject to this riskier environment where? Yeah, they will have a lot of orders. They’re developing a lot of new technology, they’ve done a lot of research, they need a lot of investment money without a lot of orders coming in. And that’s that trembling. I don’t know that. It’s difficult. 20:24Yeah. And, Dan, it’s very similar to if you see, there’s been a lot of piston engines being built for smaller part 23 aircraft over a number of years, and how unsuccessful those programs have been on a just a standard internal combustion engine, where they just don’t make it right. And why would electric motors and batteries be really any different than the internal combustion engine, which we’ve known for 100 plus years, how to make work. All the time, new engine programs come to engine programs go and you just scratch your head, like I don’t know why they couldn’t get this motor to work. And I think the same thing exists here. The problem for an aircraft manufacturer is sort of twofold. Whoa, though, right now, before you got fuel liquid fuel, which you can buy any airport anywhere, so that that problem is solved on a typical internal combustion engine, it’s just the motor part, you got to go figure out electric you got to get the batteries and the power plant the electric motor, you got two big problems Seto just the motor problem. And that is sort it adds the level of complexity and difficult to the engineering staff is what it does. 21:38So let’s move on to our VTOL segment today. First, let’s talk about certification. So, Ellen, there’s a good article from aviation today.com just talking about where some of these companies are Joby aviation, is one of the first they got military airworthiness or air worthiness from the AF works agility prime program. That’s still a far shot from FAA certification. You know, we’ll spend a couple minutes here, but you know, what are the what are the big keys here? Because it you know, this article says that, you know, Archer, for example, will use a blend of current FAA part 20 320-733-3536 requirements. That sounds I don’t know what that means. But that sounds complicated. 22:24Yeah, impressive, right. Yeah. 22:25Yeah. So take us through some of the hurdles here. 22:28Oh. 22:30I mean, just all all the hurdles. Alan has Well, in this book, there’s, well, I 22:34think there’s, I think in the veto market, there are so many that it’s gets hard to even break it down into bite sized pieces. And I think, as engineers, one of the first things they teach in engineering school, want to do your homework and to is to break down problems into bite sized pieces. So you can solve each part without having to solve the whole thing at one time. And the problem right now, for a lot of evil AV tools is that they have 23 part 23 part 27 powerplant propellers so they are touching all these different areas that a typical Aircraft Company like Textron won’t touch, like Textron doesn’t make props or hasn’t made props in a long time. Textron doesn’t make motors, at least, like an assessment of the beach lines, they don’t they buy them, right. So there’s two of those off the table, they just buy a component. And now the Beatles got two more laughters, which is that it’s part helicopter part aircraft. And so you got two sets of regulations, one for aircraft, one for rotorcraft, that you have to meld together to make this set of regulations or requirements for this aircraft, which really no one has ever done before. So, so a lot of sometimes those those regulations don’t necessarily jive the way you think they would, there’s got to be some interpretation to them, there’s going to be some learning goes on, but it’s just a massive amount of complexity you’ve added to it because, in my opinion, because of the vertical part, the vertical part adds a lot of cost and complexity, weight costs, material costs, you name it, it’s adding a lot of complexity to the aircraft. Were like a bio space doesn’t have to do that buys gonna buy a propeller, I think seems like it and they’re clearly buying saffron motors. And that’s, that’s been announced multiple times. They’re just building an airframe. So by just building an airframe, a part 23 airplane, once you’ve been part building part 23 airplanes for years. So by has a much smaller bite size problem to work on. Versus Joby, which has multiple problems to work on. That’s the difference. And so from an engineering standpoint, you need to look at how many my opinion you need. Look how many people are on staff to solve those problems because everybody’s working on the bite sized chunk. That’s only so many people working in bite sized chunks need a lot of people tuned a lot of time. So the, the amount, the amount of overhead amount of people at Adobe ought to be two to three times as many people as it is it by has to be to make it go. Well, let’s 25:14stick with this this line here. So as far as engineering and trade secret SCO there’s a pretty contentious lawsuit right now between whisk and Archer course what lawsuit is not contentious, but this one is getting? It seems a little messier. The FBI is involved. Archer is saying which I feel like this word is used in every lawsuit which is baseless. There were just calls them Oh, this lawsuit against me is baseless. Well, some of them are but this one seems like it’s not going anywhere, any soon. or anywhere any anytime soon. It seems like it’s only heating up. Alan, what are some of the without getting into specifics? Because there isn’t that much known. There’s definitely some similarity, which is what Wes was claiming when some of their many of their engineers were hired to go work for Archer, you can definitely see some of the design potentially incorporated with with archers, aircraft. But what’s that? What’s the big Code of Conduct here for engineers? I mean, you’re an aerospace space engineer. What would you what would what warnings and what Code of Conduct would you share with a young engineer to not end up in a situation where they might be in trouble 26:27doing something like this, in today’s world, when you sign on to a company to work for them, as an engineer, there’s rarely a case in which you’re not signing a confidentiality nondisclosure agreement that lasts for years after you leave the company, if they’re smart, and they may may have to sign a non compete or non competes tended to be back in the 90s, not so much today, where you couldn’t work for a competitor for a year. So basically, you couldn’t eat for a year, or make or couldn’t work in a similar industry, because everybody’s a competitor in airplanes who’s not. So you’d have to go homeless for a year, while the clock ticks away. You as an engineer, I have to make really good decisions here. If you’re signing that nondisclosure, that means they’re gonna hold your feet to the fire. And there’s some corporate lawyer who’s who works for that corporate works for the company who’s going to come after your rear end, if you decide to, in theory, take things out, that belong to the company, they’re paying you not to do that. And that’s the that’s the company rationale is like, I’m paying you not to steal our stuff. Don’t steal our stuff. And as an engineering, like, Well, you know, there’s a fuzzy line between what’s yours and what’s my intellectual property, it’s my head, I own I own what’s inside my skull. You don’t own that. Right? And what was it? Well, everything you wrote down, everything is written down or on a computer somewhere, without any sort of public information you made and a meeting or whatever they own. So you have to know that and as you get older and more experienced, and you’re coming through the ranks of stuff, you have to realize there’s a point at which maybe the compensation you’re getting for the ideas you’re creating isn’t compatible with you anymore. So you have two choices. Swallow it, give them the give you a company that’s paying you a weekly salary, give them the idea and move on, let it go. Or if you think the idea is so grandiose and worth so much money, that you’re going to set the world on fire, then you better shut up, and not tell anybody about it. And leave, give it a couple of weeks, start your own company go work for somebody else who’s going to pay for what that idea is worth, those are your options, what your options are not is downloading a bunch of documents off of off of this company a and then going to work for Company B and loaded giving them all the information. Now Company B ought to be smart enough and have corporate attorneys to to say, you can’t do that we’re not looking at that stuff, and you’re fired. Get out now, like, you got to go right now. Because you’re gonna get sued, and rightly so you’re gonna you’re gonna get sued. But engineers get this weird place where their intellectual property, what’s in their head, what they consider intellectual property, because it’s me shouldn’t get abused. If I’m working for a company that doesn’t. Maybe the idea is not getting promoted or that the company does have the money to invest this properly and you feel like your ideas is withering on the vine. You have this gumption like well screw it, I’m going to the next company and take this great idea and I’m going to get paid for it. It’s too late. It’s just too late. You can’t use it. Just can’t do that because Company A is going to Company B, and you’re going to be the middle of it and amount of happiness a company or Company B, you’re going to be unemployed and not only going to be unemployed from Company A and Company B, pretty much companies C, D, E, and F and G are never going to hire you because you what you did there. So it’s a good lesson for anybody it is to not do that and to figure out, get an attorney, get honestly swear to swear to God, if you think you’re in that situation, get yourself an attorney, and talk it out with somebody who knows what they’re talking about, and what that corporate law is and what you’re allowed to do and what you’re not allowed to do. I did that early in my career, that was probably one of the best $200 ever spent. If you have a great idea, and you don’t think their company you’re working for is going to have any value in it. Don’t quit, quit, quit, don’t tell them about it quit, move on to someplace else. And I think that’s a much more valuable experience and knowledge to have somebody on the outside rather than you or your spouse or whoever your friends giving you advice. You better get an attorney, someone who knows what about corporate law and how you’re gonna get sued and get it figured out before you decide to walk out of a company? Because it’s that struggle. 31:16Yeah, well, we’ll see how this story progresses. You know, both sides are debating the facts. And we’ll see what comes comes down to the air. Yeah. So last on the docket today. We’ll go home. We won’t go into detail on the one but he hangs got a long range. It’s there, VT 30 A VTOL. Design. Still pretty preliminary, but they’re already looking at a longer, longer flight. Or just more more passengers in general. Right. more passengers. Yeah, this is still actually going to be pretty short. So maybe a 35 kilometer 2022 ish mile range. So yeah, I mean, they’re still building off the thing. They’re still I guess kicking after the, you know, the stock turmoil handful of months ago. They’re still plugging along. The other thing that’s I find is interesting here is this company called Kela. Kona is just sharing their prototype sketches of a 40 seater, a VTOL aircraft that looks like a flying manatee. With ducted ducted fans. I mean, it’s just that’s what it looks like. No, get around it. So while most VTOL companies are struggling to make this work with two seats, or four seats, this company is like, Hey, we’re gonna do 40 like, move on over everyone. I mean, Alan is this is his This is how outlandish as it sounds. 32:45Yes. It is. Really the image the images and like you’re in this can looks like a an airfoil with no tail on it. No, no empanadas on it at all. And a bunch of ducted fans is providing all the directional thrust. And I think that’s just not going to happen. I don’t know how to describe it. That’s not gonna happen. You’re not going to get 40 people to get inside this enclosure. I’ll call it, you’re not going to be able to certify it. It’s not going to everything about the physics of this says no. And also the human response to it and human emotion to it. It’s going to say no. So why are we pursuing this? And why are people I guess we got to fill space on the internet. There was a slot on the night available. For some crazy airplane, right? This is, this is the day is every Thursday, we got to put another crazier and that’s crazy, but like a maybe unrealizable airplane design out there and, and keep all the readers interested. This is another one and every it seems like now It used to be they were like nuclear powered aircraft that we’re gonna go Mach five, and then then it transitioned into super efficient big jet engines, and then we transitioned into electric and then it ceased to like fluctuate, and then the solar powered airplanes and the whole thing. So because of this, like gyration thing where it’s like the old Popular Mechanics of days gone by, which was, you know, they’d have stories that would just not, there’s no way this thing’s gonna come to fruition, but it sparked interest and keep creativity happen. I think when you see designs like this, it’s like, oh, well, you know, okay. I mean, there’s some Oh, that’s Yeah, right. Yeah. Right. And that you don’t say to yourself, man, I gotta call my stockbroker and invest in that airplane. Don’t do that. No, no, no, don’t do that. That’s exactly the opposite of what you want to do. You want to hold your cash and these situations, but I think from from an engineer standpoint, you’re like, Oh, come on, you know. Now No, no. And maybe they you know, prove me wrong. It’s like we’re talking about maybe we need to have a predictions part of this of the of the podcast for on the airplane side where you say yes or no. And we like put it into the envelope and a year for now we open it up and go, okay, Alan was right 62% 35:18of the time and yeah, time capsule. 35:22It feels like it because it’s so wild right now. That, you know, it’s just like, you know, Tesla five years ago, like, Oh, yeah, maybe they won’t make it worse, you know, all the starship stuff that Musk is doing, like, oh, there’s no way to pull it off. But I do feel like we’re in this weird prediction mode. And we we should do something like that. It’d be fun. 35:48Well, it’s just, uh, you know, again, seeing all the struggles that companies are having to put their aircraft in the air with just two seats, and then to see this 40 seater, and then to look at the company’s website and see no known faces on their about page. There’s no people listed there. There’s no head engineer. It’s unclear, like what this is, I mean, who are these people? I don’t know, how much money has any money been invested in this? Those are also unanswered questions. I couldn’t find any. 36:17That’s a really good point. Right? Very good point. Is it a SPAC play? 36:22it could just be a graphic designer made some renderings of a plane, and they made a website and said, we’re gonna do 40 seats. And that’s as far as they’ve gotten. We don’t we don’t know. I mean, I mean, good luck, and Godspeed. But there’s not a lot of information besides the renderings and what they hope to have happen. 36:40Well, you know, you know, over the pandemic time, I was reading a really interesting couple of articles talking about the evolution to spec and how that structure is set up, where it’s like going to Vegas. So there’s been a lot of specs it up. And but you know, they go live for a certain amount of time. And you’re never sure which one’s going to be the one that hooks up with a corporation as a possibility of making a big, big product. He kind of wonder if like, a lot of if you want to tap the spec environment right now, that would be the way to do it. Like, Oh, I got a spec to invest $100 million, which we’re never going to spend, but it can keep me in you know, nice lunches in an office for the next year or two. That’s that’s what it seems like. It doesn’t seem like there’s a financial keen financial sense that goes along with the engineering and some of these projects where they’re going to really come about and and make something of it. 37:46Yeah, we’ll see. But you’re right. It’s a it’s kind of wild west of designs and new things. And like you said, it’s probably good just to get the creativity flowing. But who knows if we’ll ever see the this this design come to fruition. So that’s it for this week’s episode of The struck aerospace engineering podcast. Thanks so much for listening. Be sure to subscribe on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you listen to podcasts, and share the show with a friend. leave us a review. We’d appreciate it. And we will see you here next week on the struck podcast. StrikeTape Weather Guard Lightning Tech proprietary lightning protection for Radome provides unmatched durability for years to come. If you need help with your radon lightning protection, reach out to us at weatherguardaero.com that’s Weather Guard a e r o.com.

In this episode we discuss Airbus Corporate Helicopters (ACH) and their 70% marketshare of the yachting helicopter segment–is this sustainable, and recession-proof? Aerion, who was making headlines with their X2 supersonic corporate jet prototype, has shut down operations. What does this mean for the industry, and should other startups be nervous? And, Allen dives into sustainable aviation fuel (SAF)–will it catch on and prove viable with new legislation proposing tax incentives for airlines that adopt it? Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection services here. If you’re a radome design engineer, we can help. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Episode Transcript: Airbus Corporate Helicopters; Aerion Supersonic Shuts Down; Will Sustainable Aviation Fuel Actually Catch On? 0:00This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech at Weather Guard. We support design engineers and make lightning protection easy. You’re listening to the struck podcast. I’m Dan Blewett. 0:18I’m Allen Hall. 0:19And here on struck we talk about everything aviation, aerospace engineering and lightning protection. Alright, welcome back to the struck aerospace engineering podcast. I’m your co host, Dan Blewett. On today’s show, we’ve got a bunch of Boeing related news, some other news. So first, we’ll start with Emirates, sending a warning to Boeing that it might refuse their 777 x shipment. That doesn’t meet commitments. We’ll talk about Airbus and some other helicopter market and our engineering segment today we’ll talk a little bit more about the grounding issue the electrical issues that Boeing’s had. And how does the complex fastening riveting? Just the order of operations in manufacturing played a role in that. And we’ll also talk about sustainable jet fuels and a potential tax credit that’s coming out in potential legislation. Lastly, on our EBT well segment, like a little bit about john Air Mobility as they’re trying to get a will they have a partnership now with cae to accelerate design of a flight simulator. And we’ll talk about the implications for aireon shutting down. Of course, Ariane is not an EBT well, but a supersonic jet company, now defunct, but this will certainly send a ripples throughout a lot of these throughout the industry, as a lot of these other startup companies, which were well funded like aireon, maybe wonder if they’re next. So Alan, let’s start here with with Emirates. So they warned Boeing that they were refused 777 x jets, if they fall short of contractual performance commitments, is this a big deal, or is this pretty sort of normal par for the course, it’s normal if you’re inside company to company, but it’s unusual to see that get into the press. 2:06So somebody is getting upset, and those using the press as a leverage point. Because the aircraft manufacturer doesn’t want to be in the press about that stuff. And they don’t want it to spread that maybe their performance numbers are not being met. And on the triple seven, there’s been a lot of conjecture about the performance of the power plants, like what kind of thrust we got, what kind of fuel burn we have, because that’s critical to the operation of any airline or freighter company, for that matter of how much fuel we’re gonna burn with x kind of load in it, and what’s the range and all those kind of things. As you can imagine, if you’re the analyst at the airline company, and you’re trying to put that into your database and figure out what the cost of an airline ticket is, or what kind of profitability this airplane is going to be what routes you can fly it on, you have nothing to base that on, you just have no data without having that that’s like the most crucial piece of data of all of it is engine performance. So you can get a lot of back and forth between buyers and producers of aircraft in that performance category definition. Because it makes a big difference. So if you don’t have any numbers, and Boeing’s not going to give you the numbers, then what’s your What are you gonna do? You know, that’s right, you can make as well, I’m not gonna buy until you give me the numbers. That’s it. That’s it. But even worse is that I’ll go to the press and tell them that you’re not producing numbers, so that every airline across the world knows that you’re not producing numbers, which is bad, you know, no one wins in that situation. So that’s where they’re at right now. And I’m surprised that Boeing’s letting that go on without providing some they have to know, right? They have 3:59to know by now. Thanks. All right, 4:01which is what everybody’s saying is, well, you’ve flown the aircraft, you have to know You must be getting numbers on the engine performance, or is it? And why can’t we see it as it is? So you’re in any sort of, like, if you’re buying a car, and it doesn’t tell you I mean horsepower? It is what foot pounds of torque is not you kind of wonder like, Why are you hiding that? I mean, what’s wrong with this car? 4:25When you worry about that, and the only reason you hide numbers? Yeah, the only reason you don’t publish numbers if you’re afraid they don’t live up, right. 4:32So you got two options. You can lie about it or not, or withhold it and I guess Boeing deciding just to withhold it for now. Because it must not be what they expect it to be right. And Boeing on the honesty scale is being pressed to be honest about everything after the 737 issues on the map. So probably the best option is to say nothing as as coming. But you would think that there ought to be a lot of phone calls going back and forth between now airlines and And the triple seven staff to get that corrected. It’s weird. Weird combative situation. So early in a program. 5:09Yeah. Well, moving on. Let’s talk a little bit about Airbus. So Airbus corporate helicopters, they now have a 70% share, reporting from Ayane, online of the yachting market, which they talk about how this is a, it’s a challenging market, but one that’s been pretty resilient to the pandemic literature. Makes sense, right? So if you are wealthy enough to own a yacht, that you can land a helicopter on, you probably weren’t hurt too badly from the pandemic. And well, of course, you know, these may be business owners, they may have taken a large hit or maybe had to shutter business. But I think the idea is that with the stock market being what it was a lot of, you know, model wealthy people put money in when it was down and made a boatload of money thereafter. So only a boatload. Yeah. Well, and it’s it’s interesting, this article talks about, you know, ultra wealthy people wanting to sneak away to their yacht and quarantine and yeah, you know, be away from big crowds, even as life is resuming or starting to resume as normal. Exactly. But is does it strike you as a pretty resilient market? I mean, do you feel like the luxury market in general is, is relatively resilient to these kind of these kind of, well, disruptions? 6:21It is it tends to be what you only time you see real trouble is on economic collapse collapses, like the 2008 in the US or across the world, actually. were sort of large yacht sales just collapsed. And then the helicopter market went with that everything caught I went with that on the on the housing market side. So you can you can, I think on some level trace aircraft sales with other sort of luxury item sales. Yep, big boats been another one of those items. So big boat sales are doing well. Airplane sales tend to be doing well. And it’s it’s funny that Airbus called out like, Where are the yacht company where the yacht helicopter company, we went 77 out of 10. yacht aircraft? That’s us. So you’re the one to come. We’re the one that has the best aircraft to land on your yacht, which is a weird thing to think about. Because we were talking about the use of helicopters, like where are they being used right now? Well, where’s a great place to sell the helicopters with someone who has cash who has cast and somebody with a yacht has cash. So that’s a great place to sell a helicopter versus in a more competitive market, like on a training market or an oil rig market? those tend to be a little more cost conscientious, so to speak. So I’m sure I’m sure that the yacht helicopter market is a sweet profit margin market and you want to live in there if you can. But isn’t it just a just a little bit odd and the way that Airbus sort of constructed that argument like, it’s it’s the argument of, well, we’re the leader in that space, so everybody else doesn’t matter should always come to us. Which is a great sales argument, by the way, like, if you don’t know anything about helicopters. And you see that Yeah, well, I guess I call Airbus since they have 70% of the sales here. I’ll call Airbus because they know what they’re talking about. Yeah, it’s it’s a great marketing tool to pull that one off it but from a 8:27helicopter rich get richer? Well, 8:29it’s sort of, I mean, sort of, right. If someone buys a helicopter, there’s a lot of people making that helicopter. So you’re taking that money and putting a lot of people to work, which is super awesome. I think the question, and this ties into the Airbus kind of stepping away from the retail market for a while and saying it’s not ready yet. One of the easier time markets is going to be landing on your yacht. Come on, 8:55for sure. Right. Yeah. 8:56So Airbus is say saying that those aircraft are not ready for that yet. It’s not ready for that. It’s not ready for the for the big time. We’re going to be okay, making helicopters for the next couple of years, at least 9:08one last piece of news today. And of course, this is tied to the aireon collapse, GE Aviation is no longer working on the infinity. So obviously, they’re still going to be involved with the NASA x 59, which is the supersonic tech demonstrator. But they’re, you know, stopping plans here because the Infinity was the power plant for the as to business jet, right. Obviously, you know, all these systems go with it. But I mean, I think the bigger point here is that when a company, especially an Aircraft Company, which has lots and lots of vendors and you know, other companies helping to put the plane together, it’s it’s a big ripple effect, is it not? 9:49Yes, anytime in aircraft program shutters, you obviously lose all the aircraft manufacturing, but you also lose on the engine side. Everything tends to stop there too, because a lot of engines are directly manufactured for a particular model of aircraft. Don’t forget if it’s supersonic or not, doesn’t really make that much difference. Every aircraft has a slightly modded engine for his particular application. So it’s a huge downwards chain of businesses losing future revenue, right, so everybody loses in the situation. So aireon loses, obviously, all the employees lose all the suppliers lose, including GE, in this case, all the GE employees that would have been supporting that program, have to find something else to work on now, it just cascades and it’s almost immediate haven’t been involved in that a couple of times. My aviation career, when a stop order is put out for an airplane. They couldn’t it stop and today, that’s it, stop work, stop billing. We’re not going to pay any more bills associated with this program. It is over it is it like there’s a slow decline at some sort of bankruptcy sort of thing. It is like we don’t have any more cash, boom, stop. It’s not like that a little bit of businesses, but that in aviation it is. So you can literally take a 10,000 person 30,000 person organization and Toby go home, boom. That’s big on a local economy. It just is when you have those kind of numbers stopping work in any particular project. It has a big impact locally and nationally. 11:28Yeah, that’s just like you go to the grocery store and forget your purse. And it’s like, well, gotta leave it got to go home. Just leave. Leave it here. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Back home. Yeah, 11:39well, yeah. It’s like going to the grocery store. And yeah, I’ve been forgetting something going back in the doors closed, like is this like that, like, You’re not coming back in? That’s it, we’re done. It’s over. It is like that. And you don’t think of it that way. And if unless you’ve been in that situation, not really realized that’s how abrupt it is. It’s not like, I only have layoffs in Detroit, they tend to be longer, 60 day, 90 day kind of events. And they there’s all notices and all that kind of stuff. It doesn’t go that way in aviation typically. 12:16Alright, moving on to our engineering segment. First, let’s talk more about Boeing the 737 max incident with their electrical grounding problem. So interesting memo sent out well reported on by the Seattle Times. But basically Boeing has cautioned their engineers about changes to manufacturing steps just to make sure that they’re all aware of just little things that can make a big difference, which apparently was the the issue here. So Alan, it sounds like they used to rivet a hole. And the electrical connection created by the rivet fasteners was different structurally and electrically then the replacement fasteners they found a faster process and there was like a little cheaper, a little faster, and didn’t have as good of an electrical bond, or grounding as, as the rivets that seemed like that was kind of watch reporting and there weren’t warning their engineers to be, you know, mindful of that, 13:08Oh, sure. changes and faster types in particular, are faster diameters, which doesn’t seem like to be all that much difference, like slight changes 1000s or to changes in diameters of astronauts can have big effects on electrical connections being made. And the note from Boeing basically says, Be careful when, from the going from engineering drawing to manufacturing, actually on the line, that everybody’s trying to optimize everything about an aircraft in terms of how much it cost to make part. So if you can reduce the part count, if you reduce the amount of labor it takes to install it, or the time it takes to assemble a piece, you’re going to do it and then that translation, sometimes you forget the little detail, things like logical grounding and bonding, it gets, you’re still fasting things together. So you’re basically fasting two pieces of metal together, but how you fasten it and all the steps it takes to assemble those two things is critical to the outcome. And unless you are put some sort of pass fail criteria on electrical bonding everywhere and you’re measuring all that stuff, you won’t catch it. So there’s a lot of people involved from the design phase of creating a drawing, which defines what this installation look like to a person on the manufacturing floor, assembling it and installing in an airplane, there’s there’s just a whole breadth of people between those two things. So in there is where the details matter. And if you don’t translate the engineering drawing or the engine drawing us into sufficient detail, everybody else down the chain can get lost and meander off where the pathway that the engineer thought they were going to be on. And then you got a different product at the end. And so unless the engineer physically goes down to the line and checks once in a while, which is what I prefer To do this actually see if this thing’s actually installed the way that I intended to install it, because I know what it should look like, then then you can get a different result. And I and a large company like Boeing, it’s inevitable. I think it’s inevitable. It don’t want it. But it’s really hard to control that situation when you have so many people. It just is. We start with a max, and we’re gonna we start with this bonding issue. You see it? on air, all aircraft companies have that similar issue. It’s a constant battle of design intent, and what’s being built? And are they are they aligning with one another? 15:39Yeah, that makes sense. And like you said, so many people, so many complex processes, they get changed last minute, and doesn’t seem like it’s a big deal. No one really noticed this, and then suddenly, they find a problem later. So, 15:51right. Right, there’s a lot of assumptions that are made on an airplane, right, especially an aluminum airplane. Things comfort are taken for granted, because they usually limit airplane, in terms of my area of expertise was a lightning protection. Aluminum airplanes are easy, because once everything’s kind of connected together, inherently, structurally, that also usually means it’s inherently connected together, electrically. But because processes and corrosion protection, and everything is much better than it used to be. things we take for granted, in terms of, if I put a couple of rivets in this part, it should be fine, electrically isn’t. It’s not anymore, just for a variety of reasons, mostly because coding so much better. So I think putting out a memo is like the least you can do. And I think you have to put the memo out to say, Hey, everybody, take us take a deep breath, make sure your designs have been implemented properly. But it goes deeper than that, that you need to sometimes kick the engineers out of their seats and make them go down the line and take a look at what’s actually coming down the line. 17:00So moving on to our second here, second item here on the engineering segment. So there’s new legislation introduced by three Democrats, the sustainable skies Act, which is aimed at reducing you know, emissions. And it would establish $1.50 per gallon tax credit for sustainable airline fuels, aviation fuels, and then then additional penny for every percentage, above 50% reduction in emissions. And so then the initial dollar 50 tax credit is on the assumption that that’ll save 50% of the emissions for over typical jet fuel. But Alan, you’re skeptical of this, 17:39I think the difference between the cost of the alternative fuels is more than the buck 50, you’re going to save in a credit until the synthetic fuels can lower the cost down significantly, I think you’re gonna have big issues with it. So that that’s the big, that’s the big problem, right? anything you’re trying to create, to turn into a fuel takes a lot of energy to turn it into that fuel, which then makes it more expensive versus pumping it into the ground refining a little bit and sticking it in an airplane wing. There’s just a lot more steps a lot more energy, a lot more people involved and making synthetics just is that means the cost is going to be higher. So if you’re the aircraft Operator, do you really want that maybe, maybe that’ll pay off in terms of better PR or something. But the buck 50 doesn’t make sense economically right now, I think all the airlines will pass. There’s like, No, I don’t care. It’s not it’s not making it financially worthy to me. And don’t think that there’s not a group of accountants and every airline across the United States, and then basically across the world in the same thing, looking at the cost of fuel, that’s one of the main drivers into the profitability. They’re not going to double the fuel costs. No way, there’s not going to do it. Because their price, their pricing has got to increase by 20 30% versus their competitor. They’re just not going to do it. So I think there’s I think, as we’ve talked about many times before, the aircraft industry isn’t gonna really good job on reducing fuel and being much more efficient than they were 10 years ago, definitely more than 50 years ago for sure. Do we need this? I doubt it. I doubt it. It’s like a similar thing to happen to Massachusetts recently, where they had a legislation legislature had a bill that was going to charge $1,000 landing fee to every aircraft, private aircraft that landed in Massachusetts 1000 bucks. So if I have my Piper or whatever, Seneca or whatever, and I land at my local airport as 1000 bucks. Oh, it’s just no one’s gonna do that. No one’s gonna land in Massachusetts just won’t they’ll drive the land in New Hampshire or Vermont and drive over. That’s crazy. There’s an economic economics to it. That has to make sense and the point of the point of the tax was to punish people who are flying or elect quarterback punish people who are flying around in luxury aircraft. Why are using taxation to punish people? That doesn’t jive? That’s not what taxation is for. Right? So you kind of feel like the same thing like this little credit as a way to sort of punish people from flying on airplanes. And, as we’ve talked about many times before, aircraft are the most one of the most efficient and safest modes of transportation ever on the planet. Do we want to tinker with that? Not a lot, 20:33I don’t think yearly, it’s about 26 billion gallons of jet a fuel consumed by the airline industry and prices for you know, standard jet a somewhere between the mid threes per gallon to like the low fives right now. So you’re saying that it’s it’s finding exact pricing on these synthetic fuels is difficult, but somewhere double or more, or they’re blending on for decent synthetic fuel fuel. So then they’re blending, the cost is not going to be as effective. 21:02Right? Right. And the synthetic fuels don’t have much energy density. So for cubic, whatever, gallon or whatever, it’s less energy and contained in it. So you need more fuel to go further, which means more weight to go further. 21:16There’s a cost benefit could even just be a push. Yeah, yeah, that’s, it seems it does seem really problematic. And you wonder if the lawmakers knew this, when they released this legislation like, did I mean, you would assume that all these numbers kind of got run by them just words, like, hey, this probably isn’t gonna work very well, given the current prices. And the fact that if it’s not mandatory, 21:37if you haven’t ever meet a legislator, they got a lot on their plate already, because they’re dealing with a variety of issues. And if your legislators staffs in Congress, they’re not really experts in anything in particular, and they’re not dumped tend to be very old. So isn’t like they have a lot of experience in the aviation field either. So these things tend to be more promotional efforts than they are effective legislation in terms of driving a industry somewhere in aviation always tends to push back, because we have the data. United Airlines has the data on synthetic fuels. They do. And you know, delta does too, right. So they know, they know, you’re going to bring in front of Congress and talk about the alternatives. Awesome. But I don’t, that has, to my knowledge, that hasn’t happened, there’s been a lot of push inside the FAA and Europeans to look at alternative fuels. That’s awesome. But economics still isn’t there? 22:40Well, and maybe it’s some or you just start to introduce this now, assuming that it’s not going to go anywhere, just to start like that ball rolling, to get the airline industry thinking about it. And, and people, you know, other legislators signing off on it, and then maybe 10 years down the road, when prices are closer, it starts to matter. You know, it could just be like, hey, let’s just do this thing. Even that won’t do one effect must change, just so that maybe it starts to affect change in the future. Maybe, Nick, it could be something like that, you never know. Well, 23:10here’s the thing, Dan, I think the a lot of people who, whose job is it every day to look at how to make an airline much more efficient than it was a day before. There are 1000s of people doing that every single day. And I will rely upon their expertise more than someone in Congress. But I also think on a bigger picture scale, is the Ilan musk effort, which is going on now on carbon capture a better alternative than changing every airplane. Maybe, maybe, maybe that’s a better solution. And and maybe, maybe that’s ultimately the end solution is the carbon capture method, because we really haven’t examined that all too much. But it may be the way that all this sort of mitigates itself is that we don’t re engineer every industry, every piece of transportation to the world versus come up with ways to sort of mitigate it on a global scale. I don’t know, I don’t know there’s a good answer for that. But at least I’m at least glad that someone is looking at alternatives. And if that’s masking, some others great. I’m surprised that some of the European countries, even the United States haven’t looked at it from a national sense. 24:28It’s just going to take all these efforts. It’s so it’s so complex, as far as reducing overall like you get to Is it a short term smaller thing you’re aimed at reducing or is it a larger thing I was reading this book called upstream by chip Heath and an example he uses in the book is plastic grocery bags. So these really thin you know, the standard thing grocery bag you get for, you know, now you pay five cents for it here in the District of Columbia. But you know, these plastic bags Obviously ended up everywhere, right? They just wafer thin. And so if you think, Okay, let’s try to reduce the amount of plastic bags, which is in the billions us every year. What if we go to paper bags which are obviously more environmentally friendly? Well, they’re significantly heavier. You and they essentially ran the numbers on the thin typical grocery bags versus the paper bags versus like the thicker you know, reusable ones, they basically said you had to use a paper bag at least three times for it to break even while for the whole scope of like, carbon emissions. And like this whole balance, I can’t remember the exact measure they’re talking about. But for it to be actually better for the planet, you had to use a paper bag three times at least. And then a reusable bag 100 times. So really, now, okay, you now know using either one will certainly get less of the thin little paper bags out of the waterways, right? But it won’t reduce like co2 emissions over the entire planet. So really, the little plastic bags are probably better for the planet, unless you’re going to use this paper bag. So he times and your reusable 100 times. That’s what’s really interesting. So you could potentially solve one problem getting those little bags out of, you know, landfills and waterways. But you wouldn’t solve the bigger problem that actually make that problem worse. So by going to paper or going to only reusable if they’re not used enough, so 26:17isn’t that the system versus goal approach to that, right? We want to put a system in place that reduces overall, I don’t really care how we do it. But the thing is the goal approach to reduce it just to reduce, and on a number of different levels, right. So you got carbon dioxide emissions, you also have plastic waste issues, right? So if you’re trying to minimize all them, it you have to look at as a system. And that’s what you that’s what you just went through. Like it’s not just that we create this paper bag, but that we also it takes more to transport it in. Yep. Right. So all those little variables don’t get thrown into an in an ordinary individuals thought process. Because you’re doing think of it, I wouldn’t have thought about the weight of a bag versus a plastic bag when it crossed my mind. It matters. 27:07Yeah, hmm. Well, it’s funny, I was thinking about that a Trader Joe’s, most of the grocery stores, they go to your, like Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s have those nice handled paper bags. And I actually wonder that as I was waiting in line, I’m like, they’ve got to have just a gigantic pallet of these paper bags somewhere in this building. They they’re not. I mean, they’re thick. And they’re well made bags, versus those little reams of plastic bags that they you know, pull one off for the typical version, once you get fit 1000 of those in the same space that maybe you store 15 of these paper bags. I mean, it really is a big difference when they talk about that’s where the shipping costs come in. I mean, right. The big story today, we’ll get to in a minute. So first, let’s talk about CIA. So and this seems like a pretty cool step that john aircraft. They are, you know, john Air Mobility, they’re partnering with CAA to develop a flight simulator. So CAA is a well known, well regarded flight simulator company. And they’re, you know, moving forward to start this whole process of getting the john Air Mobility aircraft, hopefully certified by 2026. So, I mean, is this a typical like is, in 2021, is this seemed like the right timing for this step 28:29it is, but a lot of times it’s it’s handled internally, they will, an aircraft company won’t outsource the sort of the iron bird portion or the simulation portion of an aircraft design, they’ll try to keep it in house. But John’s making a couple of different moves simultaneously. One is that they’re moving from, like the New Jersey, Philadelphia area up to Canada. That’s the first move. And then the second move is, is they’re trying to connect with local Canadian companies. Probably I had some work with bombur Lombardi a aerospace, which is down on a slot right now. And so there’s probably a abundance of aerospace workers that have time to work on things. And so they’re trying to grab hold of that. And I think that makes a lot of sense for john. When you’re trying to create us a simulator or simulation tools for an aircraft design is really important. In terms of the final what the final aircraft looks like, because there’s so many interconnected pieces you don’t really think about an aircraft is like a living breathing organism, but it is very similar to that. And that first time you turn on this living, breathing organism on us simulated workbench or iron bird type simulated, simulated setup, it rarely works like you intended it to. There’s all the little all of the details start to matter, and that’s why you want to have something simulated there and trying to get it all the bugs worked out because it’s easier to do it on a on a on a plywood bench. versus a $3 million aircraft out in the hangar. So you try to get those systems things worked out early. And so this, this whole thing makes sense. It’s just, it’s just interesting how john is bumped up to Canada and is starting to utilize all those Canadian aerospace resources, which there’s, there’s a bunch of Canada has been a great resource for Aero space talent for a long time. So it’s a it’s a good feeding ground for your new Aircraft Company to go take advantage of. And that’s a pretty smart move by john. 30:35So lastly, and this is I think the big interesting story of the week is aireon, supersonic, shutting down. And of course, we’d mentioned them in multiple podcasts over the last 12 months, doing some cool stuff, they’ve got their cool prototypes. You know, net jets had a big order with them. And that’s obviously going to have to, I mean, not have to wait, but just on hiatus for forever, I guess until the next supersonic company wants to take on this challenge. But I mean, Alan, does it surprise you that a company like this is suddenly just defunct out of money stopping all processes like we’re done? 31:13Well, it has to do with investment more than it does technology, I think the Boeing was an investor in the company at some level. And I know there was a relationship between aireon. And Boeing was going to support on the engineering scale where they had engineers helping, helping aireon because Boeing builds supersonic aircraft on the on the fighter side. So they have a lot of knowledgeable people know how to do that. And in this particular case, once Boeing financially gotten a little bit of trouble, they can’t support things outside Boeing, or, you know, the Board of Directors is never going to allow that to go on. They need to remove those from the books and the liabilities from the books because Boeing’s got to continue as a company, so aireon takes the brunt of that. So once that relationship starts to break down, because financially, one of your partners is in trouble, there’s really not a lot to do there, you truly can’t do much. And I know that it was a couple of things about Ariane really stand out. And I always sticks in my head as little warning bells, at times, the amount of money that we’re spending to develop a whole new manufacturing site was really expensive. And the place they were doing it was in Florida was great weather and has all the advantages that plus you can fly off the coast and go break the sonic boom, off out in the ocean where you need to go do it. And that all makes sense. But the cost of some of those things is so enormous, that it was more than the cost of some aircraft programs, like I think they said it was gonna be $300 million plus on the manufacturing site, and just for the buildings and the infrastructure, with $300 million, we’ll build you an airplane. Those kind of details you can move, and he’s been leaner. And just like that, that whole business intuition kicks in and goes, Okay, we got to do those leaner, we got to find out, we got to find some existing hangars, we got to set up some office space, it’s gonna be lean for a while until we get the airplane kind of figured out. And we’re starting to manufacture stuff. And it’s just just just another one of those things that just didn’t feel right. And I don’t know how else to describe it. But it’s just like, you see big cash burns, and we don’t see a product coming out the you know, I don’t know how long you can sustain this, they can’t. And boom, here we go. So, you know, I don’t fault anybody here. I think we’re just sort of the, when you’re building a supersonic aircraft, there’s a certain things that have to go along with it. So you can attract people into it as investors and buyers of it. And so you’re playing at sort of this Lamborghini Ferrari kind of environment. But you need to be building Chevy kind of factories. That’s the difference. And it hurts. It really hurts. But I thought this was a was a time where the supersonic aircraft and a sort of a business commercial scale could come back. And then now the only real player it is boom, right? And boom is Airbus, essentially. So there’s, you know, it’s a huge risk. SuperSonics always a huge risk. I just don’t know if we’re going to see it in in again for another 20 years. That’s what it feels like. 34:29Well, the cost was going to be 120 million per plane. How does that stack up? versus like a 737? Max? 34:37Yeah, Max is nowhere near that cost. 34:41Yeah, that’s what seems obviously like the supersonic technology is expensive. Oh, yeah. But sure. That just Yeah, but that’s, that’s a hefty price, right. 34:50And I think if you’re an any sort of new startup, or even a continuous continuation of a company, you want to go that direction. You just got to be super lean on everything. And I know it sounds outrageous. Well, how can you be super lean and your business cool looking airplane, you have to because you can’t waste any time wasting money, but you don’t have any spare money to burn here. We need to we’ve got so much invested in the engine technology on the aircraft technology side, that you just got to be tight with funds. And, you know, Boeing didn’t think it was tight enough. That’s what appears to have happened, I think you’ll see where you’ll see a Seattle Times article about it, I think in the next month or so, which will delineate how this all went down. Because right now, there’s not a lot of information about it. But you should be seeing something in the next month or so. 35:48Well, and so here’s my last question for you is, is this going to spook a lot of these companies in the VTOL sector obviously a different market than Ariane was in but very similar feel like these are startup companies haven’t produced a plane yet? haven’t sold at owning? They’ve got some orders, right? But they haven’t been been paid for many of these. So are these companies going to be spooked? 36:12I think the human nature part of it would say no, because if you’ve already committed funds to it, you are already in your mind knowing that this is going to happen. You’ve already convinced yourself it’s going to happen. So it’s hard to back out. Very few investors will back out suck me They probably some of the most diligent ones that are really know how to play that. But a lot of times once they put even on deposits, for that matter, you put a deposit and you’re very reluctant to pull a deposit back and go put a deposit somewhere else that doesn’t happen that often you made a mental physical commitment to a thing a you don’t want that to stop because you’ve already given your your validation of it. That’s a child Dini principle, right? That’s a child Dini principle, but it’s true cost. Yeah, the sunk cost as as good economics professors will teach you sunk costs is gone baby in a coming back, right? 37:09There’s no way good poker players, 37:11two poker players, you 37:12start chasing chasing that money, that money is not yours. As soon as it’s in that pot, that money is 37:17gone, right? And you can’t get it back. And so you have to play your odds based on that money never coming back and look at what the next opportunity is. And do you want to continue invest more and everything’s restart, you need to relook at it all the time. And good investors in aerospace will do that. people that believe in passion, get sidetracked and lose perspective and end up losing a bunch of cash because an aerospace passion does not matter. It does not make any difference in where that airplane is going to be created or perform like it’s supposed to. has zero to do with it. Zero to do with it. And I think we get hung up on some things like that, like, Oh, this is the next cool thing. Yeah, I may be totally right. So he hang being one of those things, right. But it, it only matters if it comes to reality. It does what it says is gonna do. That’s the only thing that matters. And passion has nothing to do with it. It matters that all the details are in place. And it’s a it’s a good product and you can prove it. Until then, you gotta be careful with your money. You really, really do on the investment side and I and hopefully, a lot of Eb tall investors are really looking at their investments and saying, Yeah, there are some companies out there and there are that are headed in the right direction that are spending money wisely, and are efficient, like getting to an aircraft design. That’s what you want to see. 38:44All right. Well, that’s gonna do it for today’s episode of The struck aerospace engineering podcast. Thanks so much for listening. If you’re new here, be sure to subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again and we’ll see you here next week on the stroke podcast. StrikeTape Weather Guard Lightning Tech proprietary lightning protection for radios provides unmatched durability for years to come. If you need help with your radon lightning protection, reach out to us at WeatherGuardaero.com that’s Weather Guard a e r o.com

Will the 4-seat Voloconnect EVTOL change everything for Volocopter, as they moving into longer range flight prototypes? Beta Technologies got a big investment round from Fidelity and Amazon-what does this mean for the company’s future? Plus, Allen talks electrical grounding; is Boeing in trouble with their latest 737 electrical problems? Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverter strips. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Transcript: EP54 – Voloconnect EVTOL, Beta Technologies Investment, Plus Boeing Grounding Issues 0:00This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech at Weather Guard. We support design engineers and make lightning protection easy. 0:14You’re listening to the struck podcast. I’m Dan Blewett. I’m Allen Hall. And here on struck we talk about everything aviation, aerospace engineering and lightning protection. 0:33Alright, welcome back to the struck podcast. I’m your co host, Dan Blewett. On today’s show, we’re gonna catch up a little bit talk about some good growth Coronavirus News with quarantine free flights, from American to Italy. We’ll talk a little bit about Airbus and Air France, standing, potentially standing trial over 2009 crash and a potential partnership between Rolls Royce and Boeing. In our engineering segment, we’ll talk about grounding today, as it kind of relates to some of the new Boeing 737 issues which that plane remains embattled. And then lastly, bunch of E VTOL. News to catch up with some really interesting stuff from Volocopter. We’ll talk battery tech a little bit re lilliam and Beta Technologies. So Alan, how you doing, sir? Hey, great, Dan, we’re almost out of COVID in the United States. I know. The mask mandates have been lifted recently and will be lifted at the end of the month. So that’s that’s a really good sign. I hope our friends, especially our friends in Europe, and in India and South America 1:40can get to this point relatively soon. I know there’s just a lot of a lot of Coronavirus going on around the world. And it’s really serious in certain parts. So from the aviation community standpoint, it’s a big problem. 1:54Travel is still going to be limited for the next several months easily. Yeah, well, and so, so much reporting on American Airlines, they’re offering customers flights, quarantine free from JFK to Milan, and and from JFK to Rome. So yeah, basically, customers will have to provide proof of a negative COVID test and then also get a COVID test when they arrive. But after that, they can pretty much go about their merry way, which seems like a you know, big sort of breaking of the seal. Because international travel has been a big No, no, right? It has been it. But it’s also really done a lot of damage to the economies that rely on vacation or some business travel. It’s just been slammed, totally slammed for more than a year now. And it’s it can’t go on much longer without really having lasting lasting 2:46consequences. And so it’s good that at least where we can do it. We should be starting to open up some of these routes. Obviously, having the COVID test makes infinite sense. Having been vaccinated, I had my second vaccination over the weekend. And that was an experience. But if we can do 3:07it little 16 hours of sickness. 3:09Oh, yeah, it was here. Now. It did. It really did. It really did. I felt like it felt like I was having the flu, every part of my body was achy, and tired. It was amazing how fast that reaction happened. But, hey, I wanted to go through that if I could travel again, or travel more, I’ve already traveled quite a bit. He already COVID times. But it’s it’s you know, always like super cautious about wherever you go. And rightly so me in the vaccine is not going to prevent you from catching it necessarily. But it’ll just knock the symptoms way down. And hopefully, as we get through the summertime, more of this type of travel will happen. Yeah, and interesting, as a Rena article earlier about the Yankees and how they had a little COVID outbreak recently. And it was kind of exploring that idea that well, the vaccines are pretty effective. But even when they’re not completely effective at preventing people from getting COVID because obviously, all the Yankees players were you know, vaccinated. Go, yeah, but nine, I guess nine got it. And seven were symptom free. So that seems like a pretty good result. Because I think that for a lot of us, the the day is just what everyone’s worrying about, like, would you be that one person that really has lingering effects and, and obviously a lot of people lost their lives. So that’s 4:29it, it’s just like a normal sickness and you know, not too too bad, where it’s going to really, you know, you could lose your life or be in the hospital or exactly long term effects. That’s the big thing. So Right, right. Yeah. And that’s where it gets back to normal life. If it really was just like a bout of the common cold or just something moderate, then, you know, that’s humans have been dealing with that forever. But obviously, it was not that for so long. It was pretty scary, especially when people are still still dying as we learn more about it. Yeah, and I had traveled over the last 5:00week or so across the country on some business travel. And I was shocked at the number of people that were traveling. It was midweek 5:10in different different stops along the way from West Coast east coast. And it was amazing the number of people that were traveling and it’s the level of of tension you could feel it at the gate was 5:24much, much, much less everywhere you were even in the restaurants and things are starting to open up again in the in the walkways and in the taxiways, all that stuff is open that was closed, for at least a year is starting to crack open again and which is a good sign. But I always feel he could feel the panic. Last summer when you’re traveling. It was very serious. It was really serious travelers and everybody who has might have their P’s and Q’s the whole time. In this last time it was people going on vacation clearly going on vacation. clearly going to like some people are going to Vegas have a good time. So you saw a lot more general activity. It wasn’t like a needed travel times. Things have changed the condition. The vaccines helped a lot. Alright, so moving on, we’ll get your opinion here a recent article about Airbus and Air France, they’re potentially going to be ordered to stand trial in a criminal sense over 2009 crash that 220 people lost their lives specifically related to freezing of was it pido tubes or Peto probes? Are they interchangeable? interchangeable? Pretty much today? Yeah. 6:35And so it sounds like they had icing issues. And it sounds like there were some service bulletins or mandates to swap those out. But yet, this issue still happened in the plane, I guess. What is it the nose got a little high during the during the flight and they stalled all in crashes? Yeah. fell out of those. Yeah. 6:57I guess the big question is why why a criminal complaint here rather than just a civil 7:04a civil one? Well, it’s a it’s it has to be related to specific French or European law. And in the United States, I think this would never get this far. There would be settlements and 7:17signing of documents to prevent future lawsuits. But in this particular case, I think because it was everything’s internal to France, right. So you got Airbus and you got Air France and then you have a lot of French families that the flight was coming from Brazil, to France. 7:35And it Peto probes, most likely I Stover based on the data from the crash and all the reconstruction that had happened, airplane stalled fell about 40,000 feet into the ocean. And no one can figure out for the for a while, like what had happened. It’s just so bizarre, but incidents have happened. 7:53The legal ramifications are odd in the sense that if you’re trying to prove negligence, it’s going to be hard to do that. Because the regulator’s I’ll allow the paedos to be changed over a period of time. You can’t unless there’s like something really, really severe happening. It’s rare that iasa FAA Transport Canada just grounds an airplane and says you got to fix us like FAA did with the 737. That those situations are very rare. Usually, there’s a timeframe if they have some sort of known issue, and it’s not catastrophic in nature, to let you make those changes over time because airplanes don’t need to be in service and all those kind of things. So there’s an out for Air France and Airbus, which is that the regulators allow them to do this. And I’m sure that what they’re going to point to now what happens in a French civil court Who the heck knows what’s going to happen there. But if you’re going to hold somebody culpable for that, then it’s good. Most likely, it’s going to be some engineer somewhere, unfortunately. 8:57And that’s just a bad situation. Because when you start going after engineers who are doing at least theory are doing the right thing is 9:09it miss you know, intended to kill somebody clearly. Then you’re citing intent to kill somebody or to kill a couple 100 people. 9:19That gets hard to prove in a courtroom realistically. But if they do find somebody guilty, every engineer that’s working on Airbus, or Air France is going to be totally tight about what they’re going to sign off on forever, because 9:35it isn’t like they’re making the decision in a vacuum. They’re making a decision with all kinds of people who knew about it. There are probably hundreds of people who knew about it from from the lowest mechanic to the highest people in the corporations knew about it. 9:49It’s an interesting concept, because back in the day, this was from a camera which book I was reading that if you built a bridge, you’d have to sleep under that bridge for a couple of days to essentially like house 10:00Get in the game. Yeah, I mean, and there’s and I think there’s some merit to that, you know, if you built a house and a collapse on the family that you built it for you, we’re going to be in serious trouble, like, either imprisoned or maybe even killed. I mean, obviously, there’s a long time ago, but there’s some merit to that, right? We’re not saying that you should kill it if, you know, by any stretch, but like, there is some merit to having skin in the game. And like you said, If you know, there’s serious consequences to not thinking through one of these solutions that could cause people lives, you’re going to think a lot harder about what’s going on. But like, like you said, This is such a, in today’s society, it seems like these are civil penalties, not criminal penalties for, you know, because like you said, if you’re an engineer, and you say, I have some concerns there, what else is like, Oh, no, it’s gonna be fine. We’ve all checked it, we agree. And then then it comes back to you. That seems really problematic, right? If it’s a whole team signing off, rather just one person, like if I just built you a house, myself, and it fell on your family? Yeah, like, this was this was on me, right. But if it’s a whole team, and all these big companies are really large with lots of checks and balances, then it just becomes a lot more difficult to point the finger at one person and assign criminal criminals, right. Well, I think in the, in this particular case, I think they noticed that the Peto probes didn’t have the corresponding more proper amount of heat in certain high altitude icing situations, and it’s all about how hot you can get those probes to keep ice off on and in the situation would be if if there’s always risk everywhere. If you saw that there was a situation would you raise it? Maybe, maybe not, you know, what the worst case situation is you bury it and all those airplanes were at risk instead of just the one. Moving on. Let’s talk about Rolls Royce and Boeing. So they’re potentially holding discussions to start new aircraft program. And it sounds like they want a range jet out. Alan, what is what do you what feels like mid range to us? They said somewhere between 737 in the 787? I mean, what what market does that hit? It hits a lot of US markets, South American markets, European markets, Asian markets. 12:10It’s a lot of different areas. I, the Curiosity is like what size? Is it going to be? How many passions are we talking about? Because that’s always been that weird spot like what is between a 737. And like even a 757, like a 757 has been gone for quite a while they’re still in some are still in service. But there was that triple 7747 on the big end 767. On the big end, you got the we used to have 727 717, one that was around for that brief moment. 737. So slightly larger 737 I guess the 787 doesn’t really fold some of these rolls, like they thought it was going to an airplane kind of gets a persona after a while and it gets slotted as to where it’s useful market is because the airlines figure it out pretty fast. So if there’s a marketplace in there slightly, is it a stretch 737? Is it a re engine 737? Is it a? Is it a max plus? Like what is this thing, and nobody knows yet. But the thing about Boeing and new aircraft programs that sometimes Boeing is doing things just to jerk the chain of Airbus, or to jerk the chain of Embraer and for whatever reason, there’s a lot of sabotage corporate sabotage going on all the time. And I wonder, you know, How real is this thing? Because, I mean, you haven’t heard much coming out of Boeing for quite a while and new designs, and you wouldn’t think they have a lot of cash flow to go off and do something new. So you kind of wonder How real is that? Is this is this is another play that make Airbus flinch and do something like make it 380? Or is it something real, who knows not to just keep your ear to the ground and see how it progresses here. 14:06Alright, so moving on in our engineering segment today, let’s talk about grounding. So Boeing has had some more issues with their 737 Max, that basically sort of uncovered a manufacturing issue where they weren’t getting full metal to metal contact, because of the way basically the manufacturing process of a hole being drilled. And it sounds like they had called initially for it to be 14:31like a layer of coating applied and then the holes drilled. And apparently that got reversed and impacted grounding. And now 60 of the aircraft out of the 200 1000s that have returned to service are now 14:45grounded for this issue. So Alan, let’s talk a little about grounding in general. I mean, this is obviously something that doesn’t it’s not a you know, like a sexy topic, but it’s a really important topic when it comes to airplane design. Sure, it is it’s I’ve heard 15:00differing reports. If you look at the different news sources, they say slightly different things. And I want to say this sort of lost in translation thing between engineers and reporters. But it sounds like at least in the one article that I read recently was as a coating on some fasteners. And I mean fasteners like rivets, things that attach structure to structure or boxes to structure. And in this particular case, it sounds like they changed the coating on some fasteners in the emergency power distribution box was grounded the way that it should have been? Well, that’s a problem from a system safety standpoint, because you need that thing to go fly. In something as small as some coating, it literally is less than 1007 inch. Most of this coatings. 15:44Something like a coating on a fastener or a coating on a piece of metal can degrade the performance of the system can lead to serious, it could lead to catastrophic results. In theory, that’s really, really serious. So if you’re in a manufacturing scenario, like Boeing is or any of the aircraft manufacturers, or Airbus has the same issue. When you’ve got 1000s of parts, hundreds of 1000s of parts, you’re talking about the finish on a couple of pieces of bracketry, or rivets being changed for for who knows what reason, bulk buys, 16:20engineer didn’t realize trying to save time, they put it as an alternate, oh, there’s 1000 reasons why you get into the situation. But those little small changes can have bigger system impacts. And 16:35you need to have a system in place that engineers who know how that system works electrically, mechanically, operationally need to be involved, and even some of the minor discussions and changes that happen on the manufacturing floor. So I think I got caught, most likely got caught because they’re doing body checks, and they had some come up bad. And then red flagged that and engineers start coming down on the floor and figuring out what was going on. And it’s not uncommon, because there’s so many moving pieces and so many things happening simultaneously on an airplane bill, it’s it’s an easy thing to occur. And Boeing took the took the reins on this basically away from the FAA. And a sense that they identified the issue. They identified the aircraft, they identified the repair. And they said, Well, this is what we’re doing. And the FAA just sort of said, Well, okay, that sounds good. So the FAA didn’t really have a lot of saying it, because Boeing had already developed their fix for it, which is a little bit unusual. Usually, there’s a little interplay between the FAA and like, here’s the situation, here’s what’s happening. Here’s the options we have. Here’s what we’d like to do. And there’s an agreement in this particular case, Boeing is like, we can’t afford to have any more screw ups. We’re gonna kill this problem right here right now. And FAA, are you on board? And the answer is yes. So way they go. But simple things like really simple things like coatings and paints. And those sort of things seem irrelevant, but they have a big effect on system performance. They just do. Yeah. And this article from the E times just highlights that Wall Street Journal had one reporting of what the issue was aviation, we got another like you said, another report of it. And the Seattle Times had a different report that just sort of forgot. They weren’t exactly sure, you know, which was the right one, but like you said, it’s a, it’s a huge thing. I mean, you and you do this all the time. Imagineers contact you about Radome design, and they’re asking you, it seems like a lot of nitpicky solutions, but they’re not right. They’re saying what size Steel’s this what what size, you know, strap or, you know, like, wire all those details. I mean, especially on like a rate on like a Radome. I mean, why does the size of a screw or a fastener that, you know, creates a, you know, the final electrode connection? Why does that matter so much? I mean, is it just current, especially when you’re dealing with like lightning strikes? Yeah, it’s how much energy a piece of metal can handle and the bigger it is, the more likely to be able to handle the certain amount of energy. And even coatings, will play into the lightning survivability of a particular kind of fastener. All those little details do play into it. And so you have to be very specific, we need to use this kind of fashion or with this kind of coating, and it needs to be connected to this kind of bracket with because if you don’t, it may come apart in flight. And you may start losing pieces off the radar, which never is good, especially if you suck them into an engine. So you really want to make sure that you’ve properly sized the pieces one and two, that the coatings are right and that you have the proper electrical connection. If you do all those things, right. You’ll pass lightning tests, no sweat, it’s just when you forget about a detail. And I’ve seen it happen many times we’re a company runs out of that particular fastener finish and they’re going to a test they grab another faster fish just shove it in there. It’s the same size faster. What’s the problem? Boom, you know, and lightly tested blows the thing apart? Well, things little tiny details do matter here. And that’s why a lot of 20:00A lot of companies and engineers reach out and say, Hey, to me and say, What do I need? What specifically do I need all the way down to faster finishes? And the size of the fasteners? And even sometimes the material? Is that stainless steel crests? Or is it regular steel, CAD plated? Whatever? What what works in this situation and usually have a list, but that is a common question. And all those little details matter. They always do, they always do. 20:31Alright, so in our E VTOL. Segment today, let’s start with Volocopter. Allen, they’ve done a lot of really cool things I have liked their designer, you’ve you’ve liked their design a little bit. Yeah, they have a brand new one called Voloconnect, which is a longer range, air taxi, potentially a four seater, very futuristic looking, I’ve always liked their I mean, they’re like, they seem to be like the apple, like a design color schemes and stuff like that of the AV GL market. But this looks like a big, big change, and obviously a different market, which, you know, I think we both expect that you’re going to continue to see different iterations, like everyone’s had the same sort of like, let’s just, you know, short range, but this one’s a significantly longer range. 21:16You know, bigger payload vehicle. So I mean, what sticks out to you about the Voloconnect. 21:23You know, aesthetics and aerodynamics and just the design of it in general. Well, the the need for vertical takeoff. And landing really drives a lot about the design. And if you if you go online and take a look at the the aircraft design, it has a couple of booms, essentially, that tie structure together. So there’s two long booms and there’s a bunch of motors and propellers on these booms that provide the vertical takeoff and landing aspect to it. So that from a design standpoint, I it seems functionally this will work, right, it’s very similar to the beta design. That’s, that’s happening. Now, those so those two aircraft are very similar in nature and the way they’re structured. The penalty for the vertical takeoff and landings, but seems to be huge, though, in a sense that you got these two structural, big structural pieces, which are heavy, and they’re full of extra motors that you don’t use for forward flight at all. So they’re only used in very short spurts in the beginning and ending a flight. It makes you wonder if that weight cost trade off is worth it is the vertical takeoff and landing that valuable that you want to eat that weight, cost complexity aspect, or is short takeoff and landing a better option. Because there’s a big discussion in the aviation community. Like, if I had 200 feet of runway is that enough, maybe that may be enough, and then the vertical, I don’t need the vertical. So I get rid of hundreds of pounds of weight and complexity. 22:55I just need a 200 foot stretch of grass or asphalt to take off and on off. Maybe, maybe it’s going to be a very, very interesting fight, I think coming up because some of the aircraft designs are eating that boom weight and motor weight. And some of their aircraft designs are basically incorporating a standard aircraft configuration without the extra structural components. So what they’re doing to get the vertical takeoff is basically tilting the motors down to provide vertical thrust. So there’s not extra structure there. And you got to think that that’s a much cleaner, simpler design it to basically tilt the motors and not add the boom wait. 23:40it to me and Dan, I know I’ve been watching a little more and paying a little more attention to what the the sale price of these aircraft are going to be. does seem to be hone honing in on the four to $5 million 23:55aircraft price per aircraft price was seems extraordinarily high to me right now that the competition in a lot of cases is probably a Cisco 206 or beach Bonanza kind of thing. 24:13Which are a lot less money. 24:15It’s just a lot less money. 24:18Yeah, what if and if you start getting to where they’re not EBT wells anymore, then you say well, what about one of these other companies like ampair that 24:27doesn’t or buy or buy aerospace? Right? It has a basic standard electric design and buys going after the king or market on the twin market. It was where they’re headed. But that’s a really good point. Like how much vertical do you need? And maybe spots of Europe? Totally, you know, London, I think Yeah, Los Angeles, New York. Probably Houston United States, maybe Chicago. Okay. But after that, almost most of the American cities are not that 24:59do 25:00It’s where you’re just not dozens of runways around them, particularly in the Midwest, there’s all kinds of runway also the place you actually open a chart and look at runways all over the place. 25:09So do you need that vertical aspect? And I, 25:12the market is going to determine that, but you’d hate to see hundreds of millions of dollars invested in something which doesn’t produce useful aircraft or, or sustainable company at the end? That’s, that’s the worry. 25:28Yeah, because I mean, the VTOL aspect of it, that vertical takeoff and landing, that seems to be the big thing that no other like ampair can’t do. But they can do a lot of other things. Well, just like with Tesla, they’re going to be suddenly competing with a lot of, of similar electric cars, or what’s what’s Tesla’s standout feature after that? Or is it just the fact that they’re first to market and they have some, you know, the, the premium veneer and brand awareness and brand user interface value? Yeah. So then if they’re going to be closer to, you know, someone’s gonna say, Well, why spend 75 grand on a Tesla, when I could spend 45 on a pretty nice looking Volkswagen platform or Chevy, right, they’re just going to get to that point. Whereas if you lose the VTOL thing here, now you’re competing with all the other like you said, like, by airspace and all these other ones. And now it’s a different ballgame where $5 million doesn’t work for anybody. But you know, yeah, yeah. So as a nice jet. Yeah. Hmm. So that was? 26:31It is it’s a very fascinating problem, because 26:35in any other marketplace, I don’t think this gets the funding that this is received right now. In the automotive world, I don’t think you’d see it, I don’t think you’d see it in many other types of sort of consumer product industries, I don’t think you would see the investment. I think COVID has held, there’s been a lot of money sidelined, and there’s been a lot of money that’s just been waiting to invest in something cool. And so here you go. A lot of the companies are based in Silicon Valley, because there’s a lot of cash hanging around there. And not a Wichita, which doesn’t seem to have or Dallas or wherever it doesn’t seem to have those kinds of investors sitting around willing to do that. So you got this really unique timeframe space. 27:18But the connection to the consumer market hasn’t quite jelled yet. So we have a little more fall out here. Still, I think another couple of months of trying to figure this out. Once speaking of investment, fidelity and Amazon have backed 27:33Beta Technologies, which they have a really other guy, I think their designs pretty cool. It’s pretty interesting. It kind of looks like a helicopter with a big wing. And I don’t know, what’s the what’s the technical? For those two? 27:47things on the top? I’m just calling them booms. Yeah. Okay, booms. Oh, I guess it propulsion booms of some sort, because that’s what they’re there for. They’re only there to provide platform structural platforms for the motors. That’s it. 28:01But beta is now a unicorn. So they’re valued at 1.4 billion with this new funding round. That makes Amazon 28:08Amazon? Well, if you have a lot of money in the bank account, you’re valued at at least that money. So they’ve got you are the cat Oh, yeah. But they always had that weird multiple to it, like I get it’s worth whatever the money you have in the bank is, but then where’s the multiple come from? And what’s the track record on the bank that multiple cars is the next round of investment? on that on that multiple? Ooh, now? It’s a good question. Well, yeah, well, I you know, the thing about beta, which is, well, I think all of them are all of these aircraft companies are a non standard aviation manufacturing centers, is that you got to build a lot of infrastructure. And so some of that 300 $400 million is going to go into buildings and infrastructure and tooling, and blah, blah, blah, all that boring stuff, that costs a lot of money, you’re going to be pouring some part of that in there. And I don’t know, if 350 $400 million is going to do it. 29:00It doesn’t feel like it. And a lot of aircraft programs have been a half a billion to a billion. And it seems like they’re a little short yet. Now, they may be taking a more cautious approach at beta, which does seem to be the case, by the way. They seem to have a well thought out plan. The question is, how fast is that cash burn? And can you get through certification without that level of funding? I don’t think so it’s going to be close. 29:26So it’s gonna, it’s gonna be really interesting to watch because there’s so much need for so much cash. Your investors are going to be really limited, I think, unless you start looking like a lot of companies looking overseas. And there’s been a lot of Chinese investment, specifically Chinese investment in American aviation companies for a number of years. That’s where they go when they sort of run out of caches or they’re desperate for cash. They turn up with Chinese owners. We’ll see. Well, and with beta, they’ve had, you know, we were poor. 30:00On this a couple weeks ago that they had the big order with ups, and they had they have a good order with 30:08United therapeutics to carry organs for transplant and US Air Force, agility prime program. So they’re one of the few who have a lot of potential, you know, buyers share plans, they have these orders. So yeah, it’s a big piece of it. Did you read the the, the story that came out of Vermont, talking about the different investors they have, and there’s a lot that the investors can do to drag in potential customers. It’s sort of a who, you know, network that’s unlimited. It’s like, on the yacht, and of boating, it’s sort of who, you know, you have to be in that circle of people who have the cash to fund these things. And I think they’re doing a good job of connecting dots between investors and operators, that they seem to be doing the right sort of social interactions, meet and greets, that must be part of their plan. And that seems to be paying off for him because they have they fully invested in that in that first real seed of funding. 31:13But boy, you know, you still got a long way to go. Yeah, well, and, you know, it’s funny how, just like in a Kentucky Derby, you know, until you’re really down the homestretch, you just don’t really know. I mean, it seemed like what Joby was the big player just a couple months ago, right? The darling and now, betas got three big orders and got a lot of good backers. It’s just interesting how like, they’re suddenly like really vaulting towards the front way. Oh, it’s nice. Yeah. The it’s changed a lot, even just in a handful of months. Half a year. So well. Oh, yeah. What? What happens? It will change it will change aviation for the next 20 years if they can sell some airplanes it totally to that. Well, that’s it for today’s episode of The struck aerospace engineering podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Be sure to subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you’re listening. And obviously, we’re on YouTube as well with video versions. We’ll see here next week on the struck podcast. 32:18StrikeTape Weather Guard Lightning Tech proprietary lightning protection for Radome provides unmatched durability for years to come. If you need help with your radon lightning protection, reach out to us at WeatherGuardaero.com that’s Weather Guard a e r o.com.

The Aska Drive n Fly EVTOL is being billed as an air SUV, something you can own (for just below $800,000) and fly to the city and back. Is this realistic? Boeing was outpaced by Airbus in the Q1 aircraft deliveries–will this trend continue? Plus, we assess some EVTOL market projections out to 2035…are these analysts just guessing? Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverter strips. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

In this episode we discuss Boeing’s new 737 MAX troubles – the FAA has grounded planes from 16 customers due to an electrical issue. We also dive into helicopter lightning protection and look into the safety records of rotocraft: just how safe are helicopters in 2021, and should we trust them in light of recent high profile crashes the likes of which took the life of Kobe Bryant and Olivier Dassault? Lastly, Wisk has released a white paper on the future of air taxis, using data from surveyed commuters. Does the autonomous air taxi really have a realistic chance of becoming reality? We discuss. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverter strips. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

In this episode we discussed the new Horizon Cavorite X5 EVTOL design, FAA regulations on evacuations and middle seats due to COVID, Heart Aerospace’s ES-19 electric turboprop plane, and SPAC news–are the EVTOL companies going public overvalued? Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverter strips. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Lilium, the EVTOL company now going public via SPAC Qell, has unveiled plans for a new 7-seat model of EVTOL aircraft. But, will this heavier model have a chance to fly when no company has demonstrated significant flight time with even a two-seat model? Plus, we discuss recent Boeing 737 MAX orders by Southwest (now confirmed), deliveries of 787s, the Rolls Royce UltraFan jet engine, and a unique EVTOL design called called Talyn that has an autonomous lifting craft separate from the main aircraft. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverter strips. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Struck Aerospace Engineering Podcast EP50 – Boeing Orders Surge; Rolls Royce UltraFan Plus 7-Seat Lilium EVTOL?

In this special episode, Allen and Dan discuss aerospace engineering and the skills that are more important, relevant and evolving in 2021. As aircraft become more and more complex, work shifts increasingly online and remote, and companies push their employees to be more productive, what does the the modern aerospace engineer look like? Watch this episode on YouTube here. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverter strips. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! EP49 Transcript – What Skills Do Aerospace Engineers Need in 2021? you’re listening to the struck podcast i’m Dan Blewett i’m Allen Hall and here on struck we talk about everything aviation aerospace engineering and lightning protection all right welcome back to the struck podcast on today’s episode we’re going to have a little bit of a different format kind of do a Q&A dialogue with Allen about the state of aerospace engineering and engineering in general talk about jobs and education and some of the different skills that are really important especially now in 2020 as you know the landscape is changing and communication digitally and in person rapidly changing and so we’ll kind of dive into that today so Allen let’s start um you know you have just recently hired a new engineer to the team so let’s start with some of the skills that you value today and then we’ll kind of double back um through you know your education and some of those skills that are maybe more valuable when you were younger and uh you know a young blood engineer but let’s let’s talk about your your new hire and some of the things that you are looking for in an employee it is unique in the aerospace world when you’re trying to bring somebody new on and we we are constantly looking for the best engineers we can find and so when we we come across one we tend to grab them and what do i mean by uh really good engineers what i mean by that is they have a couple of different skill sets uh what scott adams would call a talent stack so i want to steal that term but it’s a talent stack and that talent stack is uh things that are developed uh usually outside the office place uh and or the office environment uh from what i’ve seen um it’s a combination of one being able to work with others to play well on the playground right and that that you can relate to others that have uh you know have a little bit of fun but also be serious at the same time and uh negotiate right i think part of it’s just a negotiation in engineering is a lot of negotiation a lot of times and being able to do that and on top of actually having some engineering skills having the the book knowledge that you need to have an engineering degree and to do it well on top of having the ability to turn a wrench and to understand what it means to turn a wrench or have not be willing be willing to get your hands dirty if needed those those skill sets really combine into what i always feel is a very useful versatile engineering person let me run with one of those for a second so we’ve talked about boeing a lot on the show and in the past boeing did a lot more of their manufacturing in-house right they produced much more of the entire aircraft themselves now speared air systems those you know huge sections of the fuselage and and and with airbus also not just boeing you know you’re essentially getting huge pieces coming together to be assembled so i can imagine that if you’re uh an engineer for boeing and now you’ve got to work with engineers from spirit and everything’s got to be kosher everything’s got to fit snugly together with these incredible tolerances that’s where it seems like it you can’t just be the engineer because i know engineers have you know my dad’s an engineer they have the reputation sometimes of being you know just they’re at their desk and they’re really good at what they do but don’t talk to them right that’s sometimes the impression probably not fair certainly in many cases but um it seems like there’s probably more collaboration than ever with companies starting to outsource some of and use more vendors and suppliers is that true it is it it does force the the tier one companies the boeings air buses of the world to be in some cases almost seen as a spec writer you’re defining the operation of a system but the implementation of it happens down at a supplier and it it does sort of take you away from the hardware a little bit but it does put you closer to the certification work so it’s a different sort of skill set there it does it has changed it quite a bit i would say it’s changed quite a bit in the last 40-ish years maybe 50 years in terms of the engineers that were coming out of school um tend to get thrown on the assembly line for a while either or as a draftsman so they were doing a lot of drafting work and then that was translated into doing some assembly work working with the manufacturing floor to then once you get through this little apprentice stage then you were sort of brought up into the world of quote-unquote engineering where you’re doing some analysis work and design work those that there was a normal progression in that in fact when uh my wife and i both started work at general electric years ago that’s exactly how he designed it they designed a system where you would work in manufacturing for roughly six months you’re working in design for six months you’re working in program management for six months so you go through this sort of rotational program similar to what amazon is doing with their blue origin rocket ship program it’s got the same sort of program set up because you just don’t know you don’t know what all that stuff is you don’t know how how somebody manufactures anything until you actually do it and for some engineers they never have that opportunity they’re just immediately brought into analysis design spec writing and they’re not hardware people it’s a big divide it is a big divide if you don’t understand how the the parts are built or or what the what the constraints are in in a particular design to make determinant paper drawing or computer drawing into reality you’re missing a whole lot about the process and missing a fun part of the process so you’re definitely starting to see that dichotomy happen where you don’t necessarily get the experience on the manufacturing floor or drafting making drawings you just don’t have that it either is you’re in analysis or you’re a manufacturing engineer and never the two shall cross both are good you need both i mean you really do to be effective you just do well and obviously i’m not an engineer uh but when you’re drawing all these things and you’re making them in whether it’s computer automated design or whatever you know software system of course back in the day i’m sure there was a lot of paper um but you’re obviously drawing things that exist in real life so you’re putting in a spec sheet or in a drawing a bolt that exists in real life i mean how much do you have to have familiarity with that specific bolt like for you with your radome designs you’re constantly talking about it has to be a you know a quarter inch bolt it’s got to be a number number four it’s got to be this it’s got to be that i mean how how often do you have to hold those in your hands to really know what you’re drawing up i i think it helps a tremendous amount to know those things and oh the the engineers that have worked previously outside of aerospace can be really useful in that so if you’ve designed construction equipment or you’ve been in the automotive world or you’ve been in the tractor world or farm equipment world which is sort of the area of the world that i come from if you have those little skill sets you know what a quarter inch bolt is you know what a half inch bolt is you know what its yield is how much strength it has and there’s different qualities of bolts that you can buy those are really useful skills if you’re designing something in which the bolt matters right and cost matters also you can use a cheaper bolt in some cases right all those little nuances that come to engineering are big in terms of being a successful company if i buy the wrong bolt and the thing breaks i’m trouble if i buy a bolt that’s way too expensive and it costs too much to produce i’m in trouble right so you it’s hard to conceive of the all the little trade-offs that happen at such a micro level every day but they dramatically change the bottom line and i think watching it’s it’s going to be curious to watch here uh with the electric vertical takeoff and landing companies that are spooling up because they seem to be wanting to spool up people and are trying to hire people that are like senior people and at least at least that’s what they’re advertising right now so if you go on linkedin you see all these ads for the most senior person in the world that knows how to do this one particular thing that’s great and you you need those people but you also need those people that are very skilled but maybe not as have as much experience uh that are in that learning process a little bit still because they’re the ones that can really make or break you the the the people leading the the charge are are very important we got to go in this direction on this particular kind of design but the the implementation happens way down here at a much lower level and you can really make a breaker company at those lower level decisions because they accumulate over time and that’s what your final product is is the accumulation of these little decisions that are happening at such a micro level that the management never sees it you just don’t see it all they see is a dollar sign and a time to build at the end well those decisions were made months ago by someone who may or may not have their the adequate skill set to do it and that’s it so it’s just in this engineering discussion of there there are a lot of engineers who have those particular skill sets i don’t see them going for to work at these electrical electric vehicle companies which is odd uh because you need them you really desperately need them there are there are a lot of people that have those skill sets that you wouldn’t think of that will make a dramatic impact on the performance of a aircraft um that unless you have them in house you realize how valuable they are and unless you’ve done this before you don’t really realize it so i i you know from an engineering standpoint if i’m if i’m coming into a new place a new engineer say i’m coming into a new aircraft company i haven’t been in before what am i looking for to see if these this company is really going to get to the finish line i’m looking for bright smart people at the top is in terms of group leaders but i’m also looking for that that talent stack those those people that really understand some hardware have some experience since maybe another industry uh but have been in aerospace maybe maybe at least a year or two typically that that can quickly pick up a skill set and move with it that’s what you’re looking for because you’re going to get thrust in all kinds of different situations it’d be like um as a school teacher and that sort of the analogy is exact but in a schoolteacher situation you have to be able to teach math and gym yeah you have to do both of those in an engineering world you have to be able to design a piece of equipment and explain how it gets assembled to the person on the on the floor that skill set something gets overlooked like if you can’t explain to the person who’s actually similar part how it’s supposed to go together then i’m not sure what use you are to this company because the person is going to make us a dollar is the person on the floor assembling the part if they can’t do that then what are we doing and that’s that’s where yeah those little those little subtle skill skets like communication really play into it well i want to double back to that but i also want to go with something that i heard uh in a recent evtol podcast uh by aviation week where they’re talking about this whole space and how you know there’s a lot of companies that are not going to make it to the finish line and there’s a lot of companies that have designs that are just probably not going to come to fruition that are just maybe you know like hey this is what we’ve got but outsiders are like that’s not gonna work and the the comment that i like your take on was one of the uh the members in this in this episode said well you know when you’re paid well enough sometimes you’re essentially paid to be insulated from outside opinions to essentially look past the fact that this might not work that if you’re paid well enough you’ll say we’re going to keep going even though maybe this you know we need some descent in the team i mean is that a regular thing you’ve been on a lot of different aircraft projects and i’m sure outsiders could be like that project’s doomed it’s not going to work that design is not good but yet everyone on the team really smart people really good engineers are still chugging away and it’s like how do they not know that this might not work how do they not see these glaring problems can you be paid well enough to to essentially miss or overlook or look past problems like this is that a thing sure it is and i’ve always felt like the more that an engineer had kids and a spouse the more likely they’re they are to overlook it and keep you need to keep the bus running right you got to keep things moving forward you got to keep collecting paychecks to pay for the mortgage and the schools and everything else that’s going on and the the ones that seem to have the the least vested are the ones that tend to be the most critical and i always took that with a grain of salt because you get the the new person into an aircraft company that doesn’t have a spouse or kids and um has a maybe has a good set of skill sets and they can be super critical right it can be super critical like this is the dumbest way to assemble an aircraft what do you hear a lot and it probably maybe is not the best way to assemble an aircraft but it’s a way to assemble an aircraft that makes money and and we’re doing it so you know maybe you take that with a grain of salt everything’s difficult you can make a lot of tough decisions you may not make all the right decisions you may not may not be able to make the decision you want to make but um if the company’s profitable at the end of the day then they’re doing something right it’s a very very very difficult industry to be in to start off with as we’ve seen from the multiple affairs of aircraft companies it’s hard and i i i do think uh there are times i’ve seen in my career where you know clearly if you’re all sitting around the the water cooler and you’re really talking about are we going to be able to make this airplane a reality most engineers are right on point like this is going to be very difficult or there’s no chance or you know they have a pretty good sense of it they see it they see how fast it’s progressing they see the difficulties they had they’re they’re pretty observant but whether they can bring themselves to yeah you know to acknowledge that in front of management’s a different thing yeah it brings to mind an example that i have with this so i i met a person who was on like the content team for this upstart sports league which is still it still exists it’s like two years old now and you know me having a pro baseball background this league was like women’s softball and a couple other women’s sports and it was a really unique um business model where they were changing some of the rules it was kind of complicated to understand like why this league was different and uh we were talking about some other strategies and some of my skills where it overlapped and she was like well would you maybe be interested in consulting with us and none of this came to fruition but as i was thinking about like you playing it out of my head i’m like all right i go i go there and i give this presentation really what i thought was this is gonna be a huge failure i don’t believe in this at all like i i played ball long enough to know that i just don’t think this is a good idea and i don’t think it’s gonna work i don’t think the market’s there i think it’s a complicated idea basically and so my i was thinking to myself i’m like what if they paid me x amount of dollars do i go in and say hey here’s 11 reasons why this is a a ship destined to sink like no you don’t do that because they’re paying you not to do that but like what if that’s really really the opinion is it does anyone want to hear that um obviously that’s not what they’re paying for they’re paying for how to get there yeah to get it to get it going but in the back of my mind it’s like yeah i guess i guess they probably could have paid me enough where i could have just like given them my best effort while still knowing in the back of my mind that i don’t i don’t believe this is going to work at all which i still don’t i i don’t of course wish this company any ill will but i’ve seen a lot of sports leagues including teams that i’ve played for fold financially i know how hard it is just like you know how hard it is to make an airplane i know how hard it is to support a miner league baseball team and then we’re talking about other you know again so but neither here nor there but um but yeah so i have a little experience with it it is similar it’s very similar so so you have a lot of companies out there like that now um i mean does any of the management do they know that are they looking for people who are just bright and high and bushy-tailed and like hey let’s let’s give it our i mean do you have to have a certain personality to take on one of these aircraft like you were on the horizon project which ended up um or um you have a lot of familiarity with that project yeah and eclipse yeah eclipse and i’ve done a lot of different aircraft programs some that have been successful some not uh has there been a big differentiator between the two cash will change everything having enough money to to get over some of the technical hurdles is huge and also if you think about it and this is a hard thing for engineers to think about but the marketplace like who’s going to buy this thing what are they looking for engineers get pulled away from the customer stuff quite a bit in aerospace i say they’re much closer to it a lot of other industries haven’t worked in a lot of other industries but the customer is so far removed from the aerospace engineer typically that you have a hard time relating to what features they will pay for and what they’re not going to pay for yeah right it’s it’s hard to um put a value on that sometimes because you’re just like with the sports leagues right you have to you know the the the reason a sports league exists or doesn’t exist comes down to the customer what does the customer want yeah who’s watching it right are they willing to pay for it how much are they willing to pay for it and how often are they willing to pay for it that same thing exists in aerospace right how many airplanes are you possibly going to sell and are they going to buy a second one or a third one or is it or is it just a one-off purchase and they’re done forever who knows right and it does make a difference on the way you design the aircraft of how much emphasis you put in i’ll give you a good example how much emphasis do you put on the interior of an aircraft does it really sell an aircraft like do you have an upgraded interior does it make a sale i think in general the answer is yes it totally makes a sale whether the aircraft has a lavatory in it or not can make a sale uh stuff that if you’re designing the wing of the airplane you would wouldn’t even care less about but the person is buying the aircraft cares a lot about that and those things can get tossed the people that do the lavatories and airplanes are somewhat seen as second-class citizens in a sense in the engineering world because they’re not designing the aerodynamics of the airplane but i swear to go i swear to you more airplanes are sold on the interiors and the amenities on inside the aircraft than the then how far they fly and and yet that’s not where the emphasis lies yeah well in restaurants you see the same thing i mean how many people you know women especially who have to you know us men the only difference is we don’t have to sit down right a lot of times um bathroom cleanliness is a huge thing so if you go to a restaurant they have a disgusting bathroom do you does your wife want to go back there probably not right i mean that’s that’s a huge a huge thing and we’ve also talked about the solera 500l yeah and the blimp awkward shape of it and you know some youtube comments of the show or like who cares you know if it flies no one cares but to your point you think it does matter because ultimately it has to have to sell the aircraft um especially in contrast or in contrast with uh you know something like the honda jet which i know you think and i agree is a really beautiful looking jazz and also very efficient even if it’s not as efficient as the solera 500l it’s a it’s a handsome looking aircraft right that’s something that you’d be proud to hang your hat on no matter who you are right right right and and yet it seems to get pooh-poohed quite a bit in terms of aircraft sales er and i know there’s there’s always it’s just like in car sales right there’s always the person that’s looking for the most economical car and there’s also a person looking for the fastest car and there’s also a person looking for the most luxurious car what is your clientele who are these people and what are they likely to buy and what are those features that you need to have in there and it you can win or lose a sale on an aircraft for very small stuff especially on the secondary market it’s very hit and miss and as an engineer i think that we get removed from that a lot of times that and that’s a struggle and i always wonder if these retail companies are in tune with that in a sense of what does that customer experience look like and who’s driving that and how does that translate down to the engineering at all does it does it even does it even translate down i know a lot of aircraft companies i’ve been around it’s translated in the sense of this uh we got to have this it can’t be more than this amount of weight and it’s got to go this fast after that you’re pretty much left up to whatever you need to go do to certify it and and you’re like wow okay there is a lot more detail than that and it we’re always sort of left out of that conversation and i yeah and so and and i guess you know how that relates to uh being a new engineer and coming to the marketplace one the the difficulty right now if you’re coming out of school let’s just say you’re graduating in spring of 2021. bad timing but i think there’s there is some uh things you can do to increase your chances to to kind of get in those aerospace roles a little bit one and obviously have some communication skills too uh have some hands-on skills be able to turn a wrench in three have those sort of analytical skills and be smart be be able to grasp new skills and make those things happen the question is whether the aircraft companies and aerospace companies even value that because the way that the hiring is happening right now is hiring it’s sort of hiring by ai and that you send in a resume and it’s looking to scanning all these your resume and it’s looking for these keywords and then it sorts these into little buckets here’s my advice on that whole nonsense is i there’s a human resource group there for a purpose and they do serve a very valuable purpose in that there’s particularly now if i’m if i am tesla or amazon or one of these big cool hip companies right now i am probably getting flooded with hundreds probably hundreds of thousands of resumes right now how do i get around that how do i get through that hurdle of stuff contacts i mean person-to-person contact is a way to do that and there’s been many times that i if i find a project that i want to work on i’ll just go to the head of engineering and send them a note just do and say hey i’m interested in helping you guys out when do you need help and here’s my resume and here’s my resume right that kind of thing sort of skirts the hr issues and the automated scanning services that happen there knowing somebody that works at one of these aircraft companies or aerospace companies is usually huge and have a connection there is big and i think there’s so much um there’s so much talent today coming out of a lot of really good engineering schools that i don’t know if human resources in general knows what those skills are skill sets are that they need to pull into a new aircraft company so if i’m if i’m an hr person at one of these evtel companies and i haven’t built an aircraft before and i’m an hr person outside of the aerospace community do i know what talent set i’m looking for right now i don’t know would you i wouldn’t know like if i got thrown into the fashion industry and i said okay i need to go hire fashion industry experts to help us design some new um fashion line i would have no idea where to start right well why is that same thing not exist on the aerospace side where are you going who are you going to grab i mean what key places are you going to go focus on to find talent and i mean a real talent sort of like baseball right trying to find real talent is hard i’ll tell you how ge used to do it and i thought this was a really good way ge used to have a feedback system where they’d hire engineers from all over and then they look at how the performance ratings were internal to the company and they try to correlate performance ratings with schools and then they would rank those schools on a tier system so our best performers come out of let’s say it’s harvard i don’t know says purdue let’s just purdue because it’s engineering school so our best performers come out of purdue i’m going to hire purdue engineers as much as i can in fact i’m going to pay them a little bit more out of school but the engineers coming out of you know uh paducah state or something are really good but they’re not as good as purdue so i’m going to pay them at a slightly lower tier level to come into to come into ge so when you went to work for ge at the time this is back in the 90s you got paid on where you went to school not what your resume was you got paid where you went to school it was a very interesting way because you didn’t realize at the time when you were hired you didn’t realize that was happening to you first off that your salary was set before you even signed a contract they knew what they’re going to pay you and you could take it or leave it but you also over time you kind of figured out like where they were grabbing talent from because they they actually had a feedback loop on it and uh the the schools they were grabbing uh uh engineers from wouldn’t have been and necessarily in u.s news and world report in the top ten fascinating right yeah fascinating well that that also has parallels with the sports world and like in especially in based in baseball the major league baseball draft is a is a crap shoot right even of the the first round which these are all guys who are getting a million plus dollars as a signing bonus the best players in the country only 50 percent of them even spend one day in the major so you say okay how do we find players who are actually going to become major leaguers um you know and you start to see well okay this school has produced 20 major leaguers in the last 10 years and this school which wins more games plays in a better conference has only produced four what’s the divide and you start to realize well the culture there and the coaching staff and some of the things that they’re doing that maybe we don’t even know what they are are resulting that these guys can handle the minor leagues and ascend through the ranks and outcompete other players and you see that at some programs where like vanderbilt’s a good example and of course they are one of the top programs in the country but vanderbilt pumps out major league players not just draft picks but like guys make it to the top that fight fight through and so you’re like well what what’s the x factor that they learn at vanderbilt well mental toughness yeah you know whether you know stick-to-itiveness whatever it is there’s a there’s a cocktail of things that are probably largely intangible that are coming from only that that group that’s helping guys fight through the really challenging times in in the minor leagues and i’m sure that’s the same thing in engineering like you talk about how what a grind it is when you’re you know away from your family and you’re just you know burning the the candle at both ends and it’s unclear how you solve a problem that you’ve never saw before that’s that same kind of grind right and i think some schools are probably going to prepare you more for that than others yes oh i i think definitely so i i obviously i’ve been around a number of engineers from all across the world and you do find these pools of places that you wouldn’t normally expect um based on location or a variety of other factors that you think man i wouldn’t have expected that place to have such a very a very talent filled group of engineers that are coming out of there consistently it’s it’s it’s not what you expect i think a lot of times it’s not what you expect it’s not uh necessarily ivy league schools doesn’t tend to be i mean those obviously are very very very bright people go to ivy league schools i’m not one of them uh but i i think until you’ve sort of been in industry for a while you don’t really see that and see where the the talent comes from and it i think it’s some part uh what is taught in the classroom that’s a big part of it but i think it’s all those sort of intangibles like yeah are they getting with hit with hard problems in the classroom are they are they able to work on uh real world things are they able to assemble things are they getting their hands dirty a little bit are they able to go from computer to the real world are they are are the things they’re building competing against somebody else or another college just so they can see where they stack up at those little things do add up over time and they are the intangibles they are totally the intangibles and you’re right dan like if i’m on a minor league bus as a baseball player that’s that’s hard that’s hard that’s that’s just flat old hard living and unless you can tolerate that part of being in baseball or you can tolerate the fact that yeah yeah you don’t get the 10 million payday no you know you’re not eating well you’re not sleeping well right i mean those kind of come along with it uh it’s the same thing can kind of exist in engineering and there’s been many a nights where it’s been you know working all through the night and the weekends and all that kind of stuff and if you’re not willing to do at least a little bit of that you’re sort of missing out on the fun part of engineering but it’s also the all the things you you learn when that happens and it does take a certain kind of skill set to do that it does well so my last question for you is what makes a successful engineer so like we talk about you know a minor leaguer becoming a major leaguer but in the engineering world like engineers are very highly sought after they’re well paid um but what’s the if you’re not a good engineer or you’re a lesser engineer than someone else do you lose your job i mean are there starving engineers somewhere or do you just not get to work on the best projects i mean what does it look like climbing the scale of engineers because i i don’t know what that what that looks like i think there’s a wide variety of people and a wide variety of what uh engineers deem to be fun successful careers there’s a broad spectrum of what that even looks like uh i i i’m not i i would say i i would say probably the biggest skill set which is probably the most difficult skill set for a lot of engineers is the communication side you need to be able to write well and if you can’t communicate via writing and then you’re just gonna have a hard time getting anywhere because if someone can’t take your input read it quickly absorb it and move on to the next thing then you just lost them and that piece of communication is probably the hardest part probably one of the least hot things in engineering school even today is ability to write clearly and communicate technical concepts at a level that a manager who may not be an engineer could grasp uh that that’s a that’s a skill set but in terms of um you know how to sort of are there engineers that don’t that aren’t successful i i think that is probably the largest the largest piece over time is the not being able to adequately communicate the concepts and that i’m not talking about using flowerly language and engineering writing is totally different than reading the wall street journal right and it’s totally different than reading the new york times or the washington post or san francisco chronicle or any of those other things it is a totally very unique subset of communication that only engineers can understand and so you’re until you’re in it or done it it’s hard to explain but it’s probably the thing that sets back most engineers from from having uh very fruitful careers and then they may be technically geniuses but if they can’t explain it they’re stuck and that’s one of the things that happened to me early in in schooling i transferred schools halfway through my engineering career and i got hit in the back of the head as soon as with the club about writing and communication skills and this the second school i went to where i finished up at what made a huge emphasis on writing and be able to communicate and i came into it cold a little bit because i was essentially into my sophomore beginning my junior year coming in sort of as a transfer student and all the other students said i already had two years of it and i’m coming in and whammo your writing needs to get better it needs to get clear needs to be more direct it needs to have a certain flow to it it needs to be shorter it needs to have more common terms used and until you do that for a while you don’t realize that yeah everybody else’s stuff is everything else everybody else’s compositions or technical reports are way better than mine why and that’s really helped later on in life honestly is that you don’t really lose that skill set once you just hone it over time so when i’ve gone to i don’t know i pick a part of the world that i’ve been in um and i’ve talked to engineers though the one thing about finding about the engineers that seem to kind of get to those leadership roles is the ones that can explain themselves and can write if you can’t write you’re in trouble and and i think as an engineer coming out of school and if i’m if i’m hiring somebody i want to i want to know they can write a little bit i want to know they can communicate to me because it’s not always going to be a presentation form and i know we’re already dan you want along everything’s in this powerpoint youtube instagram format today but that doesn’t translate very well like that doesn’t go into an engineering file for a person a year later to pick up like i don’t make a youtube video on how i uh put this wing on an airplane right i have to have to create uh something that i can pick up a year from now and read and understand quickly and grasp the concepts and implement a year from now and until every everybody has that i’m just not sure you’re ever going to get to the point you want to get to in engineering it’s sad to say but it’s true and i’ve seen a lot of engineers from really really really good schools not be able to write it’s a shame because you know inside that head is a genius that they just can’t get it out yeah and as we wrap up it’s um it’s definitely something that is starting younger and younger where that’s that problem is being exhausted exacerbated because teachers don’t want to put red ink on a kid’s paper for self-esteem issues for other issues sometimes it’s policy they can’t use a red pen oh yeah and a lot of times kids and parents will complain that why did my son get a get a c why do my daughter get a b minus on this paper it should be graded for content not for grammar and for writing which i think is utter hogwash you know as a as a philosophy major yeah it’s true my papers got marked up a lot and i found it and there’s still this one moment from my high school career with a humanities professor who was very influential in my writing who i got a paperback i have no idea what the paper was about but it was like a you know a humanities class so and he was an english teacher as well so he was always a hard creator my paper was covered it was like covered in blood it was just covered in red pen but i got a b or something like a b plus and i’m like these two don’t seem to jive like you look at all this red and you’re like i got i got an f or an e which they don’t give f anymore um but no i got a good grade but he just corrected stuff he’s like this paper was good but like you’re a high school writer so this is you know agreement error agreement error agreement error like all these different things that were just mostly grammatical helping me be better and i was like oh okay i didn’t do poorly i just these are ways to improve my writing right and even in college they don’t mark up papers they just they don’t they don’t do it very often so yeah i think it’s i think it’s a growing problem i think it’s funny how the world comes back around because for people like me who have a useless degree i’ve heard it my whole life what were you going to do with philosophy i didn’t know but 10 years ago everyone’s saying oh the humanities are dead i think even barack obama was talking about how you know trades you know trade skills are the important way to make your living in the future which is still valid but there’s a lot of more emphasis on people that can join an organization and think critically and write well and communicate well which are some of those abstract you know humanities degrees or liberal arts degrees it seems like they’re coming back because again those skills aren’t taught so some and you know obviously i’m not going to film an engineer’s role but my skill set could be used here or there like you know all sorts of places where we just need someone who can communicate well yeah and we can teach them how to do the other stuff like you said you we can teach someone to learn software but please teach them to write in college please so we can teach them the engineering stuff but we need them to know that before they come here my my father um who recently passed away was one of the best writers that i’ve been around and he got his college degree he was the last person in my family to have a college degree so he learned i think how to write by reading and trying to pick up that skill set on learning how to write i mean that’s something that it can happen in college but it can obviously happen outside of college too and it’s it’s a skill set that can be learned over time it takes a little obviously it takes practice like everything does but in terms of uh putting together and what my father would describe as you have to tell a story and as an engineer you’re like huh like i’m just trying to explain how to put this bolt into this part right it’s not that complicated well if you tell it in a story format it makes it a lot easier for other people to read and understand and he was right he’s totally right on that uh and if if reading things that he put together and i would i would send um social stuff for the company to him all the time to review and to look at and it would come back all read and it’s like hey you know tell the story tell explain how what’s happening it’s not i know all this stuff is technical and you’re doing really cool stuff but you still have to explain it in terms of people can understand and you have to put in a format that people are used to seeing and this the story format for me was always the hardest thing to get through because you just want to get to the answer like hey i found this cool answer look how well this thing does yeah but no one gets that far because you’re not telling in a story format and i i’ve always felt like that was a huge advantage to know that up front like let’s explain things in a story form and as engineers that’s one of the skills that you just don’t have you know it doesn’t come naturally to you because it’s all about the cool thing it always is but the story is huge and as a skill set and one of the skill set that i think engineers need to acquire hopefully earlier rather than later is to be able to write and tell things in a story format well we hope you enjoyed this episode obviously a little bit different than our usual format but we want to kind of go off script talk a little bit about the uh the engineering world today so if you’re new here thanks for listening or watching be sure to subscribe to the show on youtube spotify itunes stitcher wherever you listen share it with a friend and we’ll catch you here next week on the struck podcast

Ehang is the target of a class action lawsuit, claiming the company has misled shareholders–what will this mean for the Chinese EVTOL company? Boeing reports a significant increase in orders, reaching positive order flow for the first time since 2019. Southwest is nearing an order of 300 737 MAX aircraft, which is more good news for commercial air travel, and Honeywell reveals their new turbogenerator, which could have huge implications for EVTOLs needing to rely on more than just battery power. And speaking of battery power, can Lithium-Sulfur batteries make good on significant energy density promises? Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverter strips. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Transcript: EP48 – Ehang Lawsuit; Boeing Orders Surge; Southwest Ready to Buy More 737 MAX Planes; Honeywell Turbogenerator you’re listening to the struck podcast i’m Dan Blewett i’m Allen Hall and here on struck we talk about everything aviation aerospace engineering and lightning protection all right welcome back to the struck podcast i’m your co-host Dan Blewett on today’s episode in our new segment we’ll talk about Boeing has a net positive on their orders for the first time since 2019 southwest is looking to order 300 737 maxes which obviously ties into both and the code recovery which is great in our engineering segment we’ll talk about honeywell they have a new turbo generator that can potentially power a lot of hybrid electric aircraft in the future which also runs on biofuel and then our evtol segment we’re going to talk about ehang a new lawsuit was filed today against them we’ll talk about the loyal wingman drone which is a boeing project out of australia and lastly we’ll talk about lithium sulfur batteries and the implications they might have on the electric aircraft market so alan let’s first talk about boeing this is good news they’ve got net positive orders since first time since 2019 and um it sounds like things are on the up and up yeah well at least in terms of 737 max sales they’re going to be uh because there’s just going to be a huge backlog of companies that were waiting for the aircraft to get quote unquote re-certified uh for use again so you’re gonna see that airplane explode and they had a couple hundred sitting on the tarmac waiting to be sold since 2019 to early 2020 so it’s it’s there’s going to be a huge surge of uh of sales that happen over the next year uh to to get that backlog into service which makes sense right i mean i don’t know how our airbus is ever going to keep up with that because you just had those contained contained inventory that had that had been sold that you couldn’t release and so now you can release it that’s not you can’t really compare boeing and airbus in that situation at all that’s not fair that’s fair yeah so it sounds like in february 2021 they booked 82 aircraft orders 27 kc-46s which was aircraft or air force order uh 14 747 maxes a 747-8 some 787 dreamliners 11 777 x’s which went are going to singapore airlines so so yeah all all in all it sounds like you know the recovery is starting to shape up and obviously in the stock market and let’s shift to south southwest here like southwest’s uh stock is doing very well they’re in the low 60s now um you know down i mean they were struggling in the summer right i mean that was a scary time warren buffett sold out a lot of his southwest stock so some pretty big recoveries and of course i’m not sure those are going to match like their revenues obviously but there’s a lot of optimism right and so uh and with southwest they’re just announced that they’re close to an order it’s not in the books yet for 300 737 maxes now do you feel like the public is going to understand this because the 737 max is still this embattled scary plane that people are probably rapidly forgetting about but still you know there’s that public image of this is an unsafe plan that’s a really good question because there’s been so much news about it and because the name sticks it’s just like uh you know if you say airbus a321 i don’t think that sticks but that max marketing logo stuck so even though it’s a dash 8-9 it’s it’s going to stick and i i i’m not sure how it’s going to play out in the public perception of it because you know southwest does a pretty good job of you know here they’re flying 737s you know that right every airplane on southwest is a 737. uh but you see a lot of dash 700s and 800s when the flight attendants get on the pa system and say hey we’re flying in a in a max what does that mean i’m not sure that’s how that’s going to play out yet and i haven’t seen any marketing on behalf of southwest that’s trying to explain that they may need to it’s they may need to do that yeah in this article by airlineratings.com um it says the southwest order whatever its size would be a massive boost for boeing and it comes as airlines report no negative feelings toward the max from passengers so it sounds like in in internal surveys or whatever people aren’t really aren’t really concerned about i’m a little shocked by that which does sound surprising right yeah it does sound surprising maybe because of the covet whenever no one’s traveling that it’s just falling off the radar screen in terms of news for a while there it seems like that’s the only thing you’re reading about the all the trouble that boeing was having in the boeing ceo leaving in the turmoil and going in front of congress and all that um maybe it’s been enough time and time’s gone on as society’s in another place they haven’t they’re not thinking about it that’s fascinating i would have thought they would have stuck a little bit longer but that’s good because the max is a is a very good airplane it obviously is it’s it’s it had now double scrutiny went through certification once and then i went through certification a second time so to speak so probably the most regulated aircraft in american history is the 737 max should be in pretty good shape you think yeah it’s kind of like if there’s a attack or there’s a shooting somewhere it’s pretty inundated with policemen the next day right there’s a lot of security there the next day so there’s that but i i think there’s also just you know you’re an aviation you know lifer how many people actually even heard much about the boeing 737 stuff are cared for even a second you know like in the news cycle there’s a lot of things that people it’s just like maybe it’s probably not as my point is it’s probably not as sticky or as concerning as you think obviously this was big news but how many people are really like concerned about what aircraft they fly in or really give it a second thought when they finally get to the airport i think business travelers do i i think that one particular class of of a passenger the business travelers that do a lot of airplane travel they know what airplane they’re on a lot of times and it’s surprising uh what decisions they make and what airplanes they like to fly on happens all the time i like flying the embraer 190 because of xyz you do see people and business class people and people buying those kinds of tickets do make selections like that and they’re a significant part of that revenue stream for an airline now it’s been shut down for the last year so maybe that’s why you’re not seeing it so much because people on vacation don’t really don’t seem to care that much what airplane they’re on they just know it’s going from you know someplace cold to some place warm like florida that’s what they know but the business traveler knows and that’s so that’s a segment that really hasn’t come back alive yet so i think they still got to play that one out as the business um flyers start to pick up in the next six months and they may have a little more work to do than they think yeah one it’s also not as prominent it’s not like uber where you call an uber and it’s like you’re getting picked up in a honda civic right it’s not it’s not like this big button it’s not like this really heavily touted thing when you book your like i booked a couple flights recently i don’t know what uh what plane i’m going on for anyway really i could certainly find this but it wasn’t it’s not like thrown in your face like congratulations you just booked an airbus a220 it’s like kind of i don’t know like i i really don’t know which ones i’m on for any of my three flights that i booked and every time i’ve booked a united flight i know what i’m on and i do i do select airplanes that i like to be on versus ones that i don’t like to be on well the info is there but i’m just saying it’s not it’s not prominent it’s not like a a main feature where i’m sure i can go back and figure it out in a second and i’m sure if i was thinking about it at the moment i would have seen it like when i was booking my seats i’m sure it’s like this is a 737-8 aircraft check out you know sign up for receipt but again i i obviously we do this podcast together so i have a pretty high awareness of you know commercial air travel and the 737 but even then it just like wasn’t a salient feature in my booking process it wasn’t you know obvious where you can’t miss it you know if you didn’t know this information if you weren’t seeking the information well guess what we’re going to slap you in the face with it it certainly wasn’t like that yeah i i agree with you but i do think there’s a certain segment of the population that does watch it i remember uh traveling back and forth to ireland or northern ireland and you should be able to either fly on a 757 single isle boeing airplane or you could fly on a triple seven well the flight you want to pick there’s a triple seven it’s a lot more comfortable than the 757 and a lot of people have made that decision and so it does like i said that business traveler is very cognizant that particularly on long longer flights all right so moving on to engineering today let’s talk about honeywell’s their new turbo generator so this is really interesting because you know we’ve talked about the power density issue with evtols how batteries are just maybe not quite there yet and so this seems like it could be a pretty viable solution albeit maybe a expensive one um but their newest turbo generator at 280 pounds uh it can generate a megawatt and this is gonna be able to provide some serious juice to electric engines alan you have a pretty good awareness of this um of this turbo generator run us through some of the specs and what this thing can do and what its applications are just keeping at a top level here at first is that i think one of the issues that the battery powered aircraft is going to have is one range and two what happens if right sort of that what does that backup system look like in terms of power storage and essentially what honeywell and a couple others are proposing is this um what a term is an auxiliary power unit uh it’s a generator system so it’s got an engine uh burns this one burns diesel and a couple other fuels aviation fuels and creates electricity so it’s it’s not particularly complicated and at 280 pounds it’s not bad on weight but uh you are paying for the all the engineering and the design and the manufacturing of such a thing so it’s not going to be cheap to do but i’m also wondering if it’s it’s not the initial thing to do uh to get the aircraft flying with all the all the bells and whistles do you have that backup system on board do you eat the 280 plus pounds let’s just say all in 500 pounds probably uh can you eat the 500 pounds to add more range to your aircraft it may be worth it and that’s where honeywell and rolls and a couple others are headed are like hey everybody if if you want to go 200 miles can you really do it with the battery technology today i don’t think so so here’s your solution bam here’s here’s an off-the-shelf solution and i think that offs off-the-shelf solution when you see like that little article we have seen if you once you see those articles you you have to know that the honeywell marketing people are out pushing that to all these ebto companies that they’re they’re trying to make connections and say hey are you willing to willing to bet a billion dollars on your battery technology or are you willing to take a safer route and add a generator it’s a lot safer if you’re betting a billion dollars maybe you do take that option and you start as a baseline design with that honeywell generator that that’s something that would be smart if you’re betting that much money on a program and honeywell knows that and they’re experts at that in that field so if you bring it on someone who’s knowledgeable and has a very reliable product i’m sure which is exactly what you need at this particular moment in aircraft design and could they so i have two questions number one you said maybe it’s 500 pounds all in so what where does that extra weight come in that’s just like the the bracket the bracketry and just getting this thing right where does that extra weight go from i wasn’t sure the 280 included the sort of the motor and the generator i sounded like they were going to couple it with the other other half of it to get but yeah you got all this hardware you got the wiring you got all the other stuff um support structure because when you’re putting two let’s just say you’re just putting 280 pounds you’re mounting 280 pounds you just don’t bolt it into the side of the airplane you got to have structure that goes around with it so it’s not just the weight of the component it’s all the other things that keep it mounted properly and all the uh there’s plumbing going to it right it’s got fuel going to it there’s wires coming in and out of it so yeah it’s going to add more than just the weight of that component the fuel itself yeah right exactly right right which you wouldn’t know wouldn’t have a fuel tank on these aircraft now you got to put a fuel tank in where do you put it right and is it crash worthy don’t know right it adds complexity i would say 500 pounds would be on the low end of what the total additional weight would be on an aircraft when you add the system but if it doubles your range do you do it probably yes you probably do do it because it doubles your range and it makes your aircraft sellable in a large larger share of the world market straight up that’s what it’ll do yeah well like we’ve talked about then it could maybe be used for a lot of other commercial purposes like flying offshore to an oil rig like right doing you know filling that helicopter you know segment where you might need a couple hundred miles right the ems segment right the ambulance air ambulance things uh forestry there’s a whole kind there’s all other marketplaces you can enter into now uh how profitable those are or yet to be determined but you won’t be able to enter them at all unless you can increase that range and durability in the life that basically the flight time you can’t do it and is this something that they could easily you know in five years or like hey battery technology is yes in good shape they can swap this out and just go all electric well yeah every every waking moment of that aircraft company if they decide to add a generator system onto it we’ll be trying to get it off right because you can take off 500 pounds essentially what you’re going to be able to do so as battery technology comes up the need for this goes way down and maybe certain groups that may need it like their ambulances may still want it and as an option you may probably keep it but for the uber-like flights do you need it maybe not and maybe you have enough knowledge at that point because now you know what those routes really look like because you’ve been running for two or three years that you say off off it goes i don’t need it anymore yes absolutely you do that dan it’s one of those things like every waking moment of an aircraft designer is how do i cut the weight of that airplane so i wake up in the morning i think i have our own existing airplane oh let me give you the i don’t want to give you a specific example but okay aircraft h aircraft h is out there that’s selling right now every waking moment is trying to reduce the weight right every waking moment if i don’t need that component because it doesn’t do anything on my airplane it’s off it’s gone i’m taking it off and i’m getting something lighter on there every moment is like that yeah that makes sense i mean and i think for consumers i know we have a lot of people who are in the aerospace industry listening to the podcast yeah but for people like myself who are outsiders to it you know we think about a car if you buy a car today you’re not you’re not swapping like this isn’t 1967 where you could swap in a 450 you know later no essentially what you bought it with is what’s going to be in it right and so it’s easy to think of the same mindset whereas that’s not true at all obviously like 747 750 they’ve been in service since 1980. you have a 40 year old aircraft that’s had new jet engines put on it multiple times and all these upgrades new cabin upgrades i mean everything’s changed so yeah i think just for the more service level consumers you know like myself it’s interesting to think about how swappable some of this stuff is and like you said if there’s a new better lavatory seat that weighs 87 less grams they’re gonna put that on in two years or whatever right yes they are any anything to save weight so yes so yeah that’s a it’s a it’s a good perspective to to keep in mind for all of us all of us laymen folk so well let’s transition here since we’ve been talking about electric let’s transition into evtol so first on our notice and this will be just a quick stop over ehang is officially getting sued so um it looks like a couple different law firms it’s a little unclear to me one’s definitely a class action there’s another it’s a call for those who have suffered losses above fifty thousand dollars uh to reach out to this another this other law firm um and uh the complaint has a couple different things i’ll read the the five main ones so um purported regulatory approvals in europe and north america for its eh216 were for use as a drone and not for carrying passengers um that ehang had a relationship with purported uh pri that their primary customer is a sham uh that they’ve only collected on a fraction of its reported sales um and that they’ve been uh their manufacturing facilities were practically empty and lacked evidence of advanced equipment and employees and as a result some of their public statements were material materially false and misleading to shareholders so this is obviously directly seems like tied to the wolfpack research stuff which we talked about before but now they’re moving forward with the lawsuit and so i don’t know this provides any more legitimacy because we still don’t know how legitimate the wolf pack research stuff is right we don’t know but are you know these law firms going to get um engaged in this if there’s no merit whatsoever i’m not sure you know i have no experience in law and i don’t know but this is certainly an interesting result because now ehang is going to have to defend itself in court there’s going to be the whole um you know exploratory period is that is that what it’s called yeah where to take depositions and they’re going to have to make good on their claims and yang is going to provide evidence of their position so some interesting stuff will come out of here and we’ll figure out what’s true and what’s not i suppose well i mean you may never ever figure out what’s true or not but i think what happens in financial disclosures is that in the at least in the united states you don’t want to make false disclosures or demonia seen as making things that may be interpreted as false right so you’re being very careful when you see financial disclosures made by any corporation in the united states are usually very direct and do not make extravagant claims without having a lot of data to back it up because this stuff happens right so you want to sort of downplay what you think your perspectives are going forward and if you if you ever read financial statements out of companies they’re very dry and bland for the most of them because they’re trying to make sure they can back up everything they say and this and they’ll say like hey this is for looking information and we’re not you know things change and we can’t guarantee none of this is guaranteed but if you’re if you’re making statements that um that become sort of indefensible you got to be really careful you better you back them up otherwise at least the united states you’re going to have this class action lawsuit thing pop-up which is you know it’s part of the system i guess it’s part of the checks and balances in america it’s a weird way of doing it dan don’t you think so like the only way to get a check and balance on a on a company is to sue them like huh okay not sure that’s the best way to do it yeah so we’ll see how that evolves it’s continuing just to be an interesting situation with ehang and just to figure out what’s true and what’s not because it’s certainly not the case that everything in the wolfpack research thing was was correct and there’s some context and i’m not over in china so i have no way of knowing and i think most people and i’ve read some more articles about you know from people that have a position in ehang and they’re defending him and there weren’t their claims their counter claims weren’t particularly strong they’re like just sort of saying no that’s not true no that’s not true that’s not true they didn’t there doesn’t seem to be a lot of direct evidence besides the videos but again the videos could be misleading in lots of different ways right so right anyway moving on uh in australia there’s a there was an interesting test flight with the loyal wingman drone which is a boeing project for the australian royal air force and this thing has a pretty significant range it’s got swappable noses which they can change depending on the mission um they’ve signed an agreement of 115 million to buy three more of them which will increase their total to six of these loyal wingmen and alan i mean you you have some some thoughts on the design of it and the aerodynamics of it that you think maybe it’s not going to have a tremendous range is that right well it seems like it’s got to be mostly gas tank and engine because it doesn’t have a lot of lifting surface to it so it’s got to go really fast to go very far so it’s it’s not going to loiter right it’s not like a global hawk we’re just going to sit at 70 000 feet for hours at a time and just circle around a a target or a piece of land and monitor it it seems more like a fighter aircraft than anything else based on this base based on its sort of layout and template and the renewable nose things makes makes you also think you can put different radar systems monitoring systems in the front of it which is the only reason you would change in those if you’re using different frequencies and different radar systems up front you would have to do that so why would you not change the nose but the the there’s sort of two interesting pieces about this one this is the first aircraft designed and manufactured in australia in quite some time which is surprising because australia is a very industrious place and they have a lot of really good engineers there and it just seems odd that they um haven’t built an aircraft down there in a long time but maybe this will help kick-start that industry because they’re more than capable of doing it and the second part is that the loyal wingman uh is intended to be you know at least on the top surface it’s supposed to be flying along something else right it’s supposed to be flying as a wing wingman yes a right so it’s going to fly adjacent to it but it’s also autonomous so i think my guess is that the autonomous part is probably more valuable to australia than the wingman aspect of it because why do you need a person up there anyway um you just don’t for most most missions you don’t need a human there unless it’s some sort of shooting incident where you do want to put a human out there and even in the case of united states a lot of shooting incidents today happen off of drones and missile strikes are off drones very similar to this laura wingman thing so it’s a very interesting concept because it is not a loitering thing it’s more of a fighter jet autonomous fighter jet which is fascinating yeah so last on the docket here today so lithium sulfur batteries and there’s a really good article from evtol.com and basically this new chemistry has a very significant impact on weight so with lithium-ion you’re looking at the top end maybe 265 watt hours per kilogram whereas this company oxus energy uh out of the uk they are developing a lithium sulfur battery that is achieving 470 watt hours per kilogram and they hope to reach 500 and then maybe 600 by 2025 but alan that’s a pretty big um that’s a pretty big weight savings per watt hour right and one of my questions is is is the volume still a concern here so even if you get weight down it’s still going to have to be physically large um how does that that trade-off work well you don’t want to increase the volume because you’re just increasing the size of the aircraft to contain it right which has increased the size of the aircraft you increase drag so it all goes negative so even if it is more energy dense and so to speak if the volume is not down then you know you’re sort of losing part of its advantage i mean you would like to get more energy density and you know have a smaller package more energy and a smaller package that’s ideally what you want um all these different sort of battery variants all have pluses and minuses right and the difficulty is going to be that for the any sort of new battery technology you’re going to need a whole new set of control systems to monitor it and to properly deliver power out of it so the battery is one piece it’s just like all the tesla work that goes on so a lot of tesla’s innovation obviously isn’t making the batteries but it’s also in the battery team monitoring system and power usage system to control the recharging and the discharging of the batteries to maximize the life span that’s going to exist on lithium sulfur batteries or any other kind of batteries it’s you know once you get the chemistry there you can get it in a package form it’s all the other software electronic monitoring systems you’re going to need to make it work properly particularly on an aircraft right because your worst your worst event on an airplane is fire so you don’t want to have a fire you want to have systems that prevent fires from battery overheating and and making sure you’re properly you know sectioning off batteries that may have problems and all that kind of stuff so there’s a lot of other things than just the battery chemistry i i’m just curious because you know we’ve you you’ve seen it you’ve been this weird pause and sort of battery technology so to speak i mean we’ve watched tesla make some improvements and the last elon musk’s discussion about batteries which was last summer i think was more about just sort of increasing the manufacturing throughput and getting the getting things more manufacturing be able to quickly manufacture them and make it a little bit denser just turn and be able to pack them together it wasn’t really a change in the structure of the battery and what the elements are in the battery is basically the design elements around it and then this lithium sulfur things popped up recently where there’s been discussion about using into cars but i think the other piece to it is is that it can be made almost anywhere because the ingredients are sort of in the soil anywhere so you could put a battery factory in since almost anywhere on the planet to make these things so why is not a elon musk sort of grabbing on to that right when is that going to happen yeah that’s a good question and to be uh to correct my own like i’m not saying that this is has a higher volume for the same i mean this is almost twice almost twice as energy dense for me just looking at different avenues um yeah i mean there’s no nothing in this article that says that it’s higher in volume that it’s just it’s just essentially twice as energy dense but it’s not just the batteries it’s very similar to the the auxiliary power units or generators like the honeywell generator it’s 280 pounds but it’s all the other stuff you need to make it work right it’s not the batteries themselves i mean that’s probably a significant part of the weight and problems that you have to deal with it’s all the other stuff you need to do to make it work right and that’s where the whole as a system is that work together as a system and what does that what does that look like as a system is it weight effective cost effective right can i manufacture it expensively relatively inexpensively is it aerospace quality what means does it last a long time all those little all those little bits and bobs need all those little boxes need to get checked and we’re not there yet right and that’s what that’s what the engineering people are doing right now and saying well the technology is great but what are the what are the downsides of this and can i live with the downsides don’t know yet still don’t know yet all right well that’ll do it for today’s episode of struck if you’re new to the show thank you so much for listening and please leave review and subscribe on itunes spotify or wherever you listen to 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Lots of big news recently, as a United Airlines flight from Denver on a Boeing 777 had an engine catch fire; what was to blame? In EVTOL news, Allen and Dan discuss infrastructure of the future EVTOL and ESTOL market. The report by investor and short position holder Wolfpack Research tore Ehang’s business apart, claiming lack of ability to produce the aircraft, lax security at their facility, improper revenue projections and more. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverter strips. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!