Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Thibault Baldivia: There was no Uber Elevate. There was no oliv tall companies. And we were really like trailblazing the whole thing and trailblazing the whole thing. We understood that electric brings a lot of benefits, but also comes with some drawbacks that are still very hard to overcome, like battery weight, like charging times, like you absolutely need a charging station, you know, on your infrastructure.
[00:00:27] John Ramstead: Welcome to Hangar X Studios where former fighter pilot and host John Ramstead takes us on a journey across aerospace as it enters an historic period of innovation and transformation.
Our guests include aviation experts, pilots, financiers, military leaders and innovators of all types.
Buckle up for another episode of Hangar X.
[00:00:52] Thibault Baldivia: Foreign.
[00:00:57] John Ramstead: Welcome to the Hangar X Studios podcast. We are live at verticon and this is where disruptors and innovators and investors and those that are just leading us into the future of aerospace come and gather and have conversations and we get to learn what the rest of the people aren't going to learn for at least weeks to come. So it helps us make better decision. And today I'm really excited to have Thibaut Beldiva on Thibaut. Welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:22] Thibault Baldivia: Thank you very much for having me.
[00:01:24] John Ramstead: Now you are the co founder and one of the brains behind a new company called Ascendance, or Ascendance.
[00:01:31] Thibault Baldivia: Yeah, that's correct.
[00:01:32] John Ramstead: Which is a hybrid electric VTOL that I went and looked at everything about your company, did some research and the specs and what you're doing I think is really smart because it's out past what the air taxis are doing.
It's going to be a much more, I think, realistic mission set. So tell me a little bit about, tell me a little bit about yourself and your background that led you all the way up to the point of founding Ascendance.
[00:02:00] Thibault Baldivia: Well, thank you very much for asking and once again, thank you for having me here. I'm super pleased to be here.
So before founding Essendance, my three co founders and I were part of Airbus and we used to work on one of the very first all electric air aircraft in the world, which was called the E Fan. It was a small, two seater full electric aircraft that was the first all electric aircraft to cross the English channel back in 2015.
And it's actually the main, the first.
[00:02:28] John Ramstead: Ones that actually ever flew. I mean it was like a proof of concept.
[00:02:32] Thibault Baldivia: It was, it was one of the very first. And it was more than a decade ago.
You know, at this time we were just. There was no Uber Elevate, there was no oliv tall companies and we Were really like trailblazing the whole thing.
And trailblazing the whole thing. We understood that electric brings a lot of benefits, but also comes with some drawbacks that are still very hard to overcome, like battery weight, like charging times. Like you absolutely need a charging station, you know, on your infrastructure. And we thought, yeah, but if you really want to do like efficient operations, doing your business, flying your missions, then you need something which is more modern. And this is why we went with hybrid electric, which is a combination of battery. So you have the electrical part, but you have conventional fuel as well, or sustainable aviation fuel to bring you farther and faster than what electric can do.
[00:03:24] John Ramstead: Yeah. So hybrid electric, the way I understand it is you basically have a very small, powerful turbine engine, so it's burning just not a lot of gas. So it's very environmentally friendly.
[00:03:36] Thibault Baldivia: It is.
[00:03:36] John Ramstead: That's driving a very powerful generator that's then providing the power to all the different propulsory units.
But you need a much smaller battery pack. Right, Because I'm not relying on the battery pack. Is this.
[00:03:49] Thibault Baldivia: No, that is absolutely correct.
[00:03:51] John Ramstead: That's my understanding. Because the big benefit is I only might need 20% of a battery pack. Because you just want to have that emergency backup to go and land. I don't need it for a whole mission. Am I thinking about it correctly?
[00:04:01] Thibault Baldivia: Absolutely. And I'm going to take you with me on our technical meeting because my engineering team is not here and you'll do wonders. Okay, that's exactly that. So if you take an aircraft, and it's even truer for a helicopter, you need a lot more power to take off than when you need for cruise flight.
[00:04:19] John Ramstead: Especially for vertical takeoff, you need four times more thrust. If people don't know this, to take off vertically for the same weight as a conventional takeoff.
[00:04:26] Thibault Baldivia: Exactly, exactly. And if you do that, what we're doing actually is we are resizing, optimizing the turbine for cruise flights. And the extra power that you need to take off, because of course you still need one, you still want to take off.
[00:04:40] John Ramstead: Right.
[00:04:41] Thibault Baldivia: We're providing that with an electrical boost. And that's basically what we're doing with hybrid electric. And it's super efficient. Can, you know, reduce by up to 50% the consumption on a fixed wing aircraft and on a VTOL compared to ruddercraft, it's even further than that because you can get up to minus 80% of fuel consumption.
[00:05:01] John Ramstead: 80% less.
[00:05:01] Thibault Baldivia: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:05:02] John Ramstead: For the same for as compared to conventional.
[00:05:05] Thibault Baldivia: Yeah. So if I take a tr, for example, which is a five seater aircraft, One pilot plus four passenger. If you compare to a conventional Rollercraft that would do the same kind of mission. You know, like let's take an H130.
[00:05:17] John Ramstead: Okay.
[00:05:18] Thibault Baldivia: You can get up to. Yeah. Between minus 50, up to minus 80% of fuel consumption less than what you would have with an H130.
[00:05:26] John Ramstead: And what's the, what's the. Now your, your aircraft, you have kind of two things that we all want to talk about is the ATIA that you just mentioned. What's its cruise, what are some of its specs?
[00:05:35] Thibault Baldivia: Yeah, sure. So as I said, that's a five seater aircraft, one pilot plus four passengers. You have a range of 400 kilometers, which is roughly 250 miles. Yep.
And at a speed of 200 kph, which is once again 110 knots. Roughly. Okay, so we really want to have specs that are closer to a helicopters because we think that it would be a perfect complement to a helicopter, a light helicopter fleet for our customers. And this is exactly the reason why we're here at Vertiga to meet, you know, helicopter operators and try to enter this market, which is an existing market, so we don't have to create new emissions. New operators and we can just, you know, take part in reducing carbon emissions from the helicopter emissions and improving operates business.
[00:06:22] John Ramstead: Yeah. And because of the Sterno, which is your propulsion system, I can go land in a remote spot.
[00:06:27] Thibault Baldivia: Yeah.
[00:06:27] John Ramstead: And I don't have to charge that.
[00:06:29] Thibault Baldivia: That is correct.
[00:06:29] John Ramstead: Which is a, which is a big deal. And I still get the benefits of electrification.
[00:06:33] Thibault Baldivia: That is absolutely correct. We, our hybrid system, we have a very specific feature which is what we call in flight charging. So you can recharge the battery while you're in flight. Which means that when you land you have batteries which is fully charged. You can take off and use the.
[00:06:47] John Ramstead: Battery as a boost on takeoff if I need it too. So it's, it's like I'm, I have big, basically two sources of power. That is exactly for takeoff. And then I'm going to recharge that, refill that as I'm flying. But still keep an emergency result.
[00:06:57] Thibault Baldivia: Exactly. Yes. Let's say, let's say that, you know, everyone says VTOL would be great for enter Highlands hopping or something like that.
[00:07:05] John Ramstead: Yeah.
[00:07:05] Thibault Baldivia: So if you land on an island, there's, you know, good chances that you won't have a Tesla supercharger on the, on the island.
[00:07:12] John Ramstead: Yeah. Pretty much certainty of that.
[00:07:14] Thibault Baldivia: Yeah.
[00:07:14] John Ramstead: Yeah.
[00:07:15] Thibault Baldivia: So you'll need a, a, a way to take off again. And our answer to that is hybrid electric, because then you don't need to invest heavily in new infrastructure and you can just, you know, roll out the whole thing smoother, I would say, than what you would have for.
[00:07:29] John Ramstead: Yeah.
[00:07:29] Thibault Baldivia: Electric.
[00:07:30] John Ramstead: Now, we are familiar with Vertigo, and we've had.
We've had them on the podcast. Can you share with me what are the differences between their hybrid electric solution, what Sterna is? Because I understand there's some. So it's. They kind of. They're in different parts of the.
[00:07:45] Thibault Baldivia: Yeah, that is correct. So Sterna is our hybrid electric propulsion system, but. Exactly. Our core technology in that is what we call the hybrid pack, which is the batteries with the control and the distribution that is needed when you have a hybrid electric system.
So let's roll back a little bit. If you have a hybrid system, you have a turbine.
[00:08:06] John Ramstead: Yep.
[00:08:07] Thibault Baldivia: And a battery.
[00:08:08] John Ramstead: Yep.
[00:08:09] Thibault Baldivia: So you need to make those two work together.
So Vertigo, in my opinion, would be providing the turbine components.
[00:08:17] John Ramstead: So they're doing the turbo generator.
[00:08:18] Thibault Baldivia: Exactly.
[00:08:19] John Ramstead: And you're doing everything downstream from that.
[00:08:20] Thibault Baldivia: And we do the batteries and the connection and the control of that. So we would actually work together to bring hybrid electric to aviation. And if. If they can hear me. Yes. You know that the door's open. Yeah.
[00:08:33] John Ramstead: Well, they're friends of ours, so we can introduce you.
I have a question for you. Just as an electrical engineer background, the power controls and the conditioning of the output of that electricity to all these different motors and the frequencies in the interplay of kind of that whole electromagnetic spectrum. I'm guessing maybe you can simplify an answer, but I'm guessing that this is really important, because if I don't understand that really, really well, I'm not going to get the power that I have basically designed my aircraft to. Is that.
[00:09:05] Thibault Baldivia: That is absolutely correct.
[00:09:06] John Ramstead: Could you share a few thoughts on that without going into a PhD class? But I'm just.
[00:09:11] Thibault Baldivia: I'm just very curious, actually. It's a very good question. And on. On both sides. I mean, on the complex side. So you're absolutely right. When you have several electric motors, when you have. Also often you have several battery packs, because if you lose one, you don't want to lose your entire proportion.
[00:09:25] John Ramstead: Right.
[00:09:26] Thibault Baldivia: So how do you make all those together work?
There's one thing.
Battery packs.
The first thing you learn in Electrical Engineering, 101, is not to put battery packs together in parallel adjustments, I would say.
And this is what we're doing. So this is exactly why you need this very specific control stuff like that very engineering stuff to make it work. And also from a pilot side, we talked about engineering complexity, but the pilot. You don't want any complexity.
[00:09:55] John Ramstead: Right. They just want to.
[00:09:55] Thibault Baldivia: Yeah, just want to let.
[00:09:56] John Ramstead: It's green or red.
[00:09:58] Thibault Baldivia: Yeah, exactly.
[00:09:58] John Ramstead: Right.
[00:09:59] Thibault Baldivia: And how do you simplify its entire complexity? What are the information that you, you know, display in front of the pilot? This is exactly where the value of our system lies in you. You really have something which is simple to control. Just have a throttle or lever or whatever to control the whole thing. And then the computer does everything by itself, optimizing the flight, making sure that you are burning as less fuel as you can, and then that you are optimizing your direct operating costs as well.
[00:10:29] John Ramstead: Okay, fascinating.
My engineering brain is kind of spinning right now, but I promise I won't go down a rabbit hole. But, Thibaut, this is exciting. I'd love to stay in touch and as you guys have any breakthroughs or hit some milestones, reach out. We'd love to have you come back on the podcast and update us and let us know what's going on.
[00:10:46] Thibault Baldivia: We're currently building and assembling the very first prototype aircraft that will be piloted and fly by the end of the year, beginning of next year.
[00:10:53] John Ramstead: Okay.
[00:10:53] Thibault Baldivia: So I guess that as soon as we have, you know, the aircraft in the hangar ready to fly.
[00:10:58] John Ramstead: And where are you based out of?
[00:10:59] Thibault Baldivia: We're based in France, in Toulouse.
[00:11:00] John Ramstead: Okay, perfect. So I would love to come to Toulouse, and we'll be there, and we would love to come film that and put it and help you, you know, be part of the media, roll out of that.
[00:11:08] Thibault Baldivia: That's going to be great.
[00:11:08] John Ramstead: Okay. Plus, I've never been to Toulouse, so thank you. My pleasure. Thank you, Thibaut. Yes. Keep. Keep knocking them alive.
[00:11:14] Thibault Baldivia: Great.
