Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Charlie Burgoyne: I jokingly say I'm like the Forrest Gump of science because I've had these experiences to be all over the scientific community.
Started my career in the government, working in different spaces, national labs, research labs, and then work in defense.
Did work researching at NASA, been at DARPA for multiple projects.
[00:00:22] Intro: Welcome to Hangar X Studios, where former fighter pilot and host John Ramstead takes us on a journey across aerospace.
[00:00:29] Charlie Burgoyne: Hannah.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: 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] John Ramstead: Today's episode is brought to you by our platinum sponsor, XTI Aerospace. They are powering the vertical economy, building a long range VTOL. And you can find more at xtierospace.com now please remember to like, comment and share on this channel and enjoy today's podcast.
All right, hey, welcome to the Hangar X podcast. And you know, this is the place you need to come to get the information before the rest of the world has it. And on that today, I could not be more thrilled to have Charlie Burgoyne on. Charlie, first of all, welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:27] Charlie Burgoyne: Thank you. Appreciate it.
[00:01:28] John Ramstead: All right, so since you haven't heard of Charlie before, I'm going to let you introduce yourself here a little bit. But you founded Valkyrie before that. You have this deep experience in the industry.
You're one of the smartest guys, honestly, I've ever met.
Some of the things Valkyrie's done and you did things for that like Optimize F1 Racing. You guys put a data center on the moon. I gotta ask you some questions about that. You do some defense work.
You've done some incredibly advanced work in materials, material science, around graphene. We're going to talk about that, but I got to start with this question, Charlie, and feel free to weave in your backstory as we go. But when you look at the moon now, you now see it differently. Tell us the story of how you took a giant data center, miniaturized it down to a piece of chewing gum and put it on the moon.
[00:02:16] Charlie Burgoyne: Yeah, absolutely. It's a very surreal experience to take a look at the moon now for us.
So the brilliant mind behind this is a man named Chris Stott. He's been a good friend of mine for several years. He started a company called Lone Star Lunar and they build basically data centers, hardware designed to land on the moon. Couldn't be bigger advocate for Chris and the incredible work they've done.
But Chris and I met about four or five, four Years ago, probably on a zero G flight we were doing with a bunch of NASA folks.
He is very deeply part of the community.
[00:02:48] John Ramstead: The Vomit Comet.
[00:02:49] Charlie Burgoyne: The Vomit Comet. We were on the Vomit Comet.
[00:02:50] John Ramstead: How did you feel afterwards?
[00:02:51] Charlie Burgoyne: I felt great. We did 15 descents. And I can't say the same for Chris was not Chris's deal. Chris is a man of many talents. Riding the Vomit Comet's not his. Not his strong suit. But I sat in the back, I saw this guy, I said, hey, love to learn more about what you're up to. And anyway, started a great friendship. And Lone Star Lunar is building these incredible bits of hardware, these capabilities that can land on the moon. And I said, well, what technology are you putting on these landers?
Well, we're not sure yet. I said, well, let's take a stab. So we started building out basically the most advanced AI, machine learning, and really a knowledge graph, which is a special form of data storage. We built it specifically for their device. And so the very first time their device left the planet was on February 26th of this year. And it was, you know, collaboration a lot of folks. It was a NASA mission. The Athena mission. Yep, it was. The booster was SpaceX. The module was Intuitive Machines. Number two, IM2, the lander, the. The machine was built by Lone Star Lunar. And then the hardware, the software on board was. Was Valkyrie designed. And so, yeah, now I look at the moon and I realize there's a bit of. There's a bit of code we designed, built and deployed.
[00:04:11] John Ramstead: So the machine that, you know, the hardware that your code is in is the size of what, a cigarette pack?
[00:04:16] Charlie Burgoyne: It's super small. Yeah. Or smaller.
[00:04:18] John Ramstead: Altoid scan. Now, what would that have normally been before you said, hey, we got to miniaturize this. Like if it was in my office.
[00:04:23] Charlie Burgoyne: Yeah.
So really, the way we build out those systems, it would be at least a 1,2u server. So something about the size of a pizza box. Yeah, about the same.
[00:04:35] John Ramstead: And you shrunk it down to an Altoid scan?
[00:04:36] Charlie Burgoyne: Basically, yeah.
[00:04:40] John Ramstead: Talk a little bit about your background because we're going to get into some really deep aerospace concepts here too. But talk about some of your background in software, software development, AI. And what do you think is relevant that's really happening today because you're on the inside track of all this.
[00:04:52] Charlie Burgoyne: Yeah, I would say. I jokingly say I'm like the Forrest Gump of science, because I've had these experiences to be all over the scientific community.
Started my career in the government working in different spaces, national labs Research labs and then work in defense.
Did work researching at NASA, Been at DARPA for multiple projects.
[00:05:13] John Ramstead: And Valkyrie's really like a private darpa. Would that be a good characterization?
[00:05:19] Charlie Burgoyne: Great way to think about it.
So I was actually with DARPA for a period of time. Research labs out of the military, Los Alamos, spent some time working with Los Alamos. And fast forward. We started Valkyrie in 2017, celebrating eight full years in a couple weeks.
And yeah, the charter was very simple.
To take the best scientists we could, predominantly mathematicians and physicists, and present them with the most complicated industrial problems we could find, and to do so in a way where we were able to advance American values through American science and then use that American science to advance American values. Just this virtuous circle of perpetually advancing these incredible things through our value system.
[00:06:01] John Ramstead: Yeah, and say a little bit too, Charlie, because this is really inspirational because I've also met some members of your team.
You do all that. So that. And a big part of that was how you care about your team. Could you talk a little bit about some of your values and what just comes out in everything you guys do?
[00:06:17] Charlie Burgoyne: Yeah, totally. I mean, we take it really seriously. Our five values are grit and honor, love, curiosity and hope. And those really get inculcated across everything we do.
So, you know, culture is integral. When you have a team of scientists, a lot of people don't know how to manage scientists. They're hard, they're persnickety. But having been one for a long time, I kind of understand their mentality.
[00:06:39] John Ramstead: They tend to be a bit transactional versus relational.
[00:06:42] Charlie Burgoyne: Well, it's interesting.
[00:06:43] John Ramstead: Don't want to overgeneralize.
[00:06:44] Charlie Burgoyne: But they're also very existentially tied to their work, so it has to have really deep meaning for them. And so for us to dedicate a lot of cycles and energy and time thinking about values and how those can be manifested in all the things that we do, it's really critical.
We have some of the lowest attrition rates in the whole industry because we do such an effective job of creating a culture of execution and excellence.
So values are integral, not only just in the bespoke R and D operation, but the group we call intelligence, but in our investment operations and our product operations and some of the latest things in material sciences and aerospace, we're excited about.
[00:07:24] John Ramstead: Yeah, so talk about some of the advances in material science that you guys have been working on and what you're really excited about.
[00:07:30] Charlie Burgoyne: Yeah, sure. So for the last several years, I've been tracking the development of New battery technology.
And there's really a. We're right on the precipice of a pretty big revolution.
Sodium based battery technology, the material, the research that's coming out of academia right now indicates that the densities can be up to 80 times the densities that we have from traditional lithium ion. So said another way, for the same amount of weight, it's not really one to one for volume, but let's say for weight, for weight, you know, you could have a car that you would charge instead of charging your Tesla every other day, you'd be charging it, you know, every, you know, twice a year potentially. Now that's kind of a, that's really an idealized paradigm. There's a lot of issues.
[00:08:15] John Ramstead: But now think about an aircraft application. I could take a thousand pound battery pack and pull it back to £100, free up £900 of for other mission critical idea and still have probably farther range.
[00:08:28] Charlie Burgoyne: Totally. So there's, there's kind of.
[00:08:29] John Ramstead: So there's huge implications in aerospace. Gigantic in hybridization or electrification.
[00:08:36] Charlie Burgoyne: Well, and I think that's really why there's kind of a perfect storm in aerospace right now. Not only is this battery tech, especially sodium based battery tech, going gangbusters, it's absolutely transformational. Some of the research institutes, to name a few, Berkeley, Harvey Mudd, Clemson, Carnegie Mellon, these guys are doing some incredible things in space.
But at the same time, we have these amazing advances in graphene. For example, there's a group that we've been working with a little bit more recently that's been really focused on graphene.
[00:09:03] John Ramstead: And, and you have the app describe what graphene is.
[00:09:05] Charlie Burgoyne: Yeah, it's a, it's a very interesting way of basically combining different carbon atoms in the right configuration to allow for lots of different applications. So.
[00:09:16] John Ramstead: And when you apply graphene though, it's literally one. One layer of carbon. Right. We're talking kingstrums. Right. Nanometers. How do you measure that? It's small.
[00:09:24] Charlie Burgoyne: It can be, yeah. It can be single layer with extremely tight, you know, tight tensile strength.
And also it's kind of considered a singular atom the way that, the way that a diamond is considered to be a singular atom. Sorry, a singular, singular molecule rather.
And so graphene is showing incredible promise. Things like building new transistors out of graphene, something that looks like it's going to be tenable.
New conductors, which seems to be tenable capacitors. It seems to be tenable. So just along the lines of how do you actually.
[00:09:57] John Ramstead: So it can be both A capacitor and a resistor.
[00:10:01] Charlie Burgoyne: In some ways. Yeah. And configurations. Yeah. Depending on how you orient the lattice structure.
You can also use it for getting rid of waste material. Seems to be very effective. You run a current through graphene and throw waste on top of it. Accelerates the biodegradation process. Something research has come out of Rice recently around. That's really fascinating.
So, you know, you look at an aircraft and the advances that you have from a capacitor standpoint and the tensile strength that you have of this material at scale and the ability for it to act as a transistor. You know, you could have a wing that's made out of graphene and you could have the battery that's made out of graphene and you could have. All of the onboard avionics are all powered by graphene transistors, all with one of the most abundant resources on the planet, which is carbon. So.
[00:10:46] John Ramstead: And doesn't also.
I read a research paper that graphene on the outside of a body can also help with aerodynamics, reduce drag and also radar cross signature. Is that accurate?
[00:11:00] Charlie Burgoyne: That's my understanding. Now it's been tested in limited environments, but the same phenomenon where you get St. Elmo's fire on the nose of a plane, that plasma makes you basically impervious to be able to have any radar detection. Right. So Soviets spent a long time trying to create, you know, aircraft that had St. Elmo's fires around as much.
[00:11:18] John Ramstead: First time that ever happened to me, I was kind of freaking out, I gotta be honest.
[00:11:21] Charlie Burgoyne: Sure.
[00:11:21] John Ramstead: Like I'm sure I didn't know what it was.
[00:11:23] Charlie Burgoyne: It's on my bucket list to experience St. Elmo's fire. If you're listening, you don't know what we're talking about. It's a very strange phenomenon that happens with the right humidity conditions, the right pressure conditions, and a plasma literally forms around the nose of the fuse. Well, you're a pilot. I don't know why I'm explaining.
[00:11:37] John Ramstead: Well, people might not know. It's great. Yeah.
[00:11:39] Charlie Burgoyne: Well, from.
[00:11:40] John Ramstead: Because you know the science behind it. I just know it scared me and it was pretty.
[00:11:44] Charlie Burgoyne: It's gorgeous, right? It's like the northern lights are forming on your nose. Yep.
It's a. It's a low temperature plasma.
But what happens with plasma? So think of it as. So technically fire is a plasma. But think of it as like a cold fire that's going on your nose.
It can actually be really dangerous because it can have implications for your electronic equipment.
But plasmas absorb ionizing radiation all the way down to like long wave radio waves. They absorb it. It just creates energy and it turns into a photon.
Which means that if you're sending radar and trying to identify a plane and it's got, and you happen to try and ping it right where there's sudden, almost fire occurring, absorbs it and can't detect the airplane. So the Soviets spent, you know, a good chunk of the 80s trying to figure out the planes that would encourage the most synomial fire possible, try to try and totally remove their radar signature.
Not sure that's all been declassified yet, but I know that they worked on it because I got really down deep in the.
[00:12:45] John Ramstead: It'd be fun to get that research paper.
Anybody listening?
[00:12:48] Charlie Burgoyne: Totally.
[00:12:50] John Ramstead: What was the breakthrough that you think could allow this sodium battery technology?
Because it sounds like such a leap forward. Because, you know, what I've been hearing is lithium ion. We're looking at 3 to 4% increase over years. And this is kind of the path we're on. And I think a lot of people, what I'm hearing in the industry, a lot of people here have been on the podcast, have actually been using that as kind of their guideline for future performance for electrified or even hybrid electric vehicles. So if you know the science behind it, I'm curious.
[00:13:21] Charlie Burgoyne: Yeah, the sodium based battery technologies are the reason the scale is going to be an issue and productization is an issue, is because when you, you're basically trying to form these gigantic crystals and within those crystals there are these potential energy wells that can then be populated and stored.
So it operates. It's almost like your cathode, your anode, are sandwiched together within the same small confined space.
Doing that at scale and growing those crystals in a way that's reproducible, dependable, and without having the risk of having a narrow window where that well can collapse, also known as a discharge of the battery, it's really hard, it's super hard to figure out how to do that. And so some of the technologies that have recently been coming out, in fact some of the research that combines graphene, which we were talking about, and sodium is actually really promising around new battery technology.
[00:14:09] John Ramstead: So it's the combination of these two that could create a process to allow this to be done consistently.
[00:14:13] Charlie Burgoyne: Yeah, totally.
They're already getting in lab conditions. I mean, battery the size of a paperclip, really incredible yield. But that's where most of those atoms are ostensibly hand curated. So we're a little ways off. But, but you know, science, this is always the challenge, you know, the real innovators in the planet, in my opinion, they see, you know, the Moore's law adoption or 3 to 4% increase in like lithium ion, and they, they basically just identify the right way to break it, you know, because these technologies really are very rarely linear. Yeah, indefinitely. Usually there's some seismic or catalytic innovation that really disrupts that whole like life cycle.
And so if we can proactively identify where those things are headed, own that bit of technology and then deploy it really rapidly, we were very quickly in a position where we can own an entire sector. Who domain Aerospace is a great example of that.
Hardly any part of a, any part of an aircraft couldn't be supported by new sodium developments or graphene developments.
[00:15:13] John Ramstead: So, you know, this makes me think. So I'm curious. So Charlie, from early age you just had this unique way of seeing the world and thinking that brought you early on into helping the military, the government solve big commercial problems. So when somebody comes and confronts you or you're thinking of like, this is a big problem we have to solve, what is the process that you go through that allows that problem to get solved? And then also in a way that is pretty much unique and transformative because I've seen you do that a number of times.
[00:15:47] Charlie Burgoyne: Candidly. I like telling me, I like when people tell me you can't do something, I'm stubborn. I'm super stubborn.
And I find that my most innovative moments or the moments where my team is most innovative really, because I'm not really the innovator anymore. I wish I were. But we hire better people than me to do most of the stuff.
Those moments come from when a mission critical problem is currently insurmountable and it has really talented, hard working people super stumped on what to do.
That's the hill I like to take Monday through Saturday.
[00:16:21] John Ramstead: And where do you start? Let's say I came and I gave you. What's an example of maybe one of those in the aerospace realm? I know you work on a lot of things in the last year that you've had to tackle.
[00:16:31] Charlie Burgoyne: Yeah, I mean, probably the moon landing was a big one.
When we were told the limitations of the hardware, it was a genuinely perplexing challenge for us. And there's some really great folks on our team, Corey and Isaac, who call him Ike, who looked at that problem and they adopted kind of that like stubborn, like hell, we're not going to get this done approach.
[00:16:54] John Ramstead: So the only way to get Valkyrie software on this moon data center was to help with the miniaturization of turning a pizza box into an Altoid box. Is that fair?
[00:17:02] Charlie Burgoyne: Basically.
[00:17:03] John Ramstead: So you're like, okay, we're going to solve this one.
[00:17:05] Charlie Burgoyne: Totally.
And the Altoid box was already designed, so you can't really impact the design of it at this point.
[00:17:10] John Ramstead: It's like Apollo 13. Here's what you have to work with. You gotta make it fit in here, and you're good to go. Right.
[00:17:15] Charlie Burgoyne: Our amazing chief science officer Betsy would shoot the moon to hear that. It's her favorite movie. She quotes it all the time. But, yeah, total Apollo 13 moment for us. And the net of it was not only were we able to get it done and to do some really innovative things, some of the technology that fed into that, super transformational for other things that we're up to, you know, So I tell the team, like, hey, I want you guys to fight a fail on at least one project, a quarter. And if you're not, then you're not. You're not taking products, projects that are hard enough. In fact, I've given this feedback before. I was like, guys, we went through a whole quarter. We didn't have anything fail.
We need to up the challenge yourself challenge. Yeah, we got to push it harder.
[00:17:57] John Ramstead: Yeah.
[00:17:58] Charlie Burgoyne: You know, we're going through a big, very exciting shift at Valkyrie. We have a lot of assets that are combining to one to make one giant Valkyrie, and that's expressly our charter. It's like, problems need to be harder. You guys need to tackle things that you're even more and more uncomfortable with.
But. But they love it. I love it. It's. It's. It's my dream job. I'm. I'm biased, but it's. It's been great.
[00:18:21] John Ramstead: Now, you've put a lot of thought into Valkyrie. What. What does Valkyrie mean to you personally?
[00:18:28] Charlie Burgoyne: Yeah, I would say I have at times. It's been an unhealthy relationship with the brand. I mean, truly. I mean, it's.
Until I had kids of my own, this was really my kid.
And I know that that's been internalized the same degree as, like, Liz, my co founder, and Jason, our chief strategy officer. It really.
When you. When you find yourself really immersed in Valkyrie, it's an intoxicating, existentially captivating brand. It stands for all the things you want it to stand for. And for us, Valkyrie is really this bastion of light that intentionally goes and seeks out darkness. So we go and find things that are broken in the world, and we fix them. And we don't just mean like broken. The machine's not working. We find parts of civilizations that are broken, that are hurting people. We do what we can to remediate that.
We identify how the ocean was being hurt by a major shipping company. And we fixed that. We take a lot of pride in the fact.
[00:19:34] John Ramstead: How do you fix it? Just curious.
[00:19:35] Charlie Burgoyne: It was a digital twin technology, really interesting project there led by a woman on our team named took point on quite a bit of it and she deserves a lot of credit for that being a success.
But basically this company frequently has issues with accidentally spilling gray water into the ocean. Devastating for a habitat. And we developed a technique to basically reverse engineer the whole process for cleaning that water and required quite a bit of digital twin based technology.
And we identified, you know, the outcome.
[00:20:04] John Ramstead: So you could simulate and iterate much faster than experimenting on an actual giant ship.
[00:20:09] Charlie Burgoyne: That's right. That's right. 115 some odd ships in their, their fleet.
And when we identified the corollaries, our corollaries don't always make sense logically, but in practice they're always really valuable. So we identified that this one part made by the Japanese team was effective. When it was made by the Italian team, it wasn't. And we needed to change the routine, the maintenance schedules based off of where this one part in this long chain of parts was made.
And that change alone prevented them from having any spills in the Ocean for SO 115 ships.
[00:20:43] John Ramstead: You come do your work, use all your modeling tools, AI and no more spills.
[00:20:49] Charlie Burgoyne: No more spills.
[00:20:50] John Ramstead: That's awesome. Now I want to ask you this too.
There's so many exciting things happening right now. Aerospace, so many innovations, breakthroughs, new categories of aircraft from small unmanned all the way up to giant possible vertical takeoff, jet like performance.
What is some of the breakthroughs or technology that are bubbling up right now that you say this is? We're going to look back three years from now and say those were the technologies that accelerated this transformation. What do you see?
[00:21:19] Charlie Burgoyne: Yeah, I think there are a couple that I'll call out. We talked a little bit about graphene, which has implications across all the materials. Obviously battery tech that's not just graphene dependent or big.
But the interesting thing from my perspective is that autonomous driving has been a promise from a lot of manufacturers for a while and yet it really hasn't delivered yet. Don't get me wrong, you sit in a car that's top of the line for autonomous driving, it'll do impressive things. But we're still.
[00:21:46] John Ramstead: I have a Tesla with the full self driving. So I've been able to experience it. I'm in the beta program.
I have certain friends that will not drive with me if I'm in auto drive.
[00:21:57] Charlie Burgoyne: Sure, sure, I get it. And you know, there's, there's a small subset of their customer base that's super engaged about it by that.
[00:22:04] John Ramstead: Well, I'm a total geek. Yeah, I was an electrical engineer. You can't spell geek without double E, right?
[00:22:08] Charlie Burgoyne: Totally, totally. That's great. I gotta remember that.
But yeah, so even in that paradigm there's still not 100% comfort and it's a sigmoid problem. So we're getting, we're not getting to the point where we reach absolute saturation.
[00:22:24] John Ramstead: What do you mean by sigmoid problem?
[00:22:26] Charlie Burgoyne: Yeah, it's. If you look at the function for confidence based over development, it kind of looks like an S. Yep. Right. So no confidence and then all of a sudden it starts growing aggressively. But once you get to about 95%, that last 5% is a really, really long tail. And I think that's what's going on with autonomous driving. So we got a long ways to go before we're able to reach that full point of saturation. We don't actually need a driver in the car. Yeah. On the, on the flip side though.
[00:22:49] John Ramstead: But you've also been part of developing a lot of this type software. Some for some manufacturers other than Tesla. Correct.
[00:22:56] Charlie Burgoyne: Yeah, we worked actually there was a competition internationally put on by Mercedes Benz around autonomous. Really was a mesh intelligence for managing fleets.
[00:23:04] John Ramstead: And what is mesh intelligence?
[00:23:05] Charlie Burgoyne: Yeah, it's where you have individual actors. Okay. Within a fleet of vehicles.
[00:23:09] John Ramstead: That'd be my, like my car or me as a driver.
[00:23:11] Charlie Burgoyne: Could be your car. Good example. And they cross pollinate the information that they're getting to create better insights into what decisions should be made.
So a lot of people when they're talking about, you know, the autonomous driving paradigm, they, they bring up the paradox of, you know, what happens if you're in a Tesla and there's a school bus on your left and you hit the school bus, you'll kill kids but you'll keep the driver safe. And on the right there's a brick wall where only the driver will be hurt. You know, how do you, how do you programmatically ascertain how the car should navigate that situation? You know, it's kind of an age old AI problem that folks have, you know, thought experiment people have been talking about.
From our perspective, that decision should have been made actually quite a while ago. Because a little while ago there was a Tesla that drove by before your Tesla got there. And that Tesla identified that with the vectors of the school bus.
[00:23:58] John Ramstead: And where this situation is developing.
[00:24:01] Charlie Burgoyne: Precisely.
[00:24:01] John Ramstead: It could be a potential.
[00:24:02] Charlie Burgoyne: Precisely. So maybe you take a left hand turn at that stop sign instead of going straight, and so avoid the whole situation altogether. And so that type of ability is really empowered based off of master intelligence treating the.
[00:24:15] John Ramstead: So it's giving you a whole holistic view of your environment.
[00:24:17] Charlie Burgoyne: Precisely.
[00:24:18] John Ramstead: Is that fair?
[00:24:18] Charlie Burgoyne: Yep. Absolutely. That the individual operators are both instrumented for observation and also instrumented for intelligence. And then there's an intent, there's a hive mind of optimization for all these vehicles to be able to make a better decision across the whole traffic pattern.
[00:24:34] John Ramstead: Now, I would think the application, as you're looking at the flight controls, the control law systems from all the evtols, Joby and Archer all the way up through bigger ones.
There's got to be applications in here because I'm thinking there's gonna be a lot of people that want to fly these.
[00:24:50] Charlie Burgoyne: Yeah.
[00:24:50] John Ramstead: That might either not. Not have a lot of time, or maybe they're, you know, a commercial rated fixed wing pilot. But now they're flying with something with vertical capabilities. It's a whole different realm. They're gonna need a lot of help.
[00:25:03] Charlie Burgoyne: But they definitely will. Um, we also have interesting things that happen in air.
Um, for one, you know, let's, let's take a. So I live in Austin and there's a couple of major highways. My favorite's MoPac because I get to drive by Camp Mabry and see all these cool model planes and such.
But this is a four lane road going either direction.
And in every minute, let's say there's probably 200 cars that go past that particular space, but they're all channeled through a major thoroughfare.
And when you do the combinatorics on what the actual density would be, if everybody's flying as a crow flies in a straight line, it's actually amazing how sparsely populated traffic patterns become. Right.
[00:25:49] John Ramstead: So if I took out the constraints of the roadways and I actually went from my house to my off, like let's say from my house to land in the parking lot here.
Right. Is that what you're saying?
[00:25:58] Charlie Burgoyne: Exactly.
[00:25:59] John Ramstead: So if I actually deconstructed the traffic from. From origin to destination.
[00:26:05] Charlie Burgoyne: Yeah.
[00:26:05] John Ramstead: Now all of a sudden you're actually looking at something that's less dense than you expected to find.
[00:26:09] Charlie Burgoyne: Wildly less dense.
[00:26:11] John Ramstead: No kidding. I wouldn't have guessed that.
[00:26:13] Charlie Burgoyne: You might Think about, you might look at, on your, on your commute.
[00:26:17] John Ramstead: Yeah.
[00:26:18] Charlie Burgoyne: Right. Now you see hundreds and hundreds of thousands of cars commute. Yeah. You might see less than 10 different vehicles if we were all traveling by air. Right. For a couple of reasons.
Now you're a pilot, so you'll have a better eye than most. Right.
But even if you have a ceiling, let's say between, if you're, if your envelope is between a thousand feet and 3,000ft, how many pockets do you have space for. For an EV toll, a small two seater EV toll to be able to fly safely without creating risk for, you know, recirculation or you know, all the six.
[00:26:47] John Ramstead: My guess would be 200 foot buffer. So in that, you know, we could probably, what's that probably put seven corridors.
[00:26:54] Charlie Burgoyne: Fifteen. Really.
[00:26:55] John Ramstead: Right, yeah, well, yeah, it's true. Back and forth.
[00:26:57] Charlie Burgoyne: 15. Yeah, right.
[00:26:58] John Ramstead: And then you could also probably geofence that like northern and southern boundaries, you could actually probably go to 30.
[00:27:03] Charlie Burgoyne: Totally, totally.
[00:27:05] John Ramstead: And then if you had something that managed that so it was almost invisible to me as the user. It's almost like today you put in my destination, but now I'm doing it for the air.
[00:27:13] Charlie Burgoyne: Yep.
[00:27:14] John Ramstead: And then it files your flight plan with the faa, puts everything out, but it goes, you're gonna actually fly a little bit south. You're gonna do this, you're gonna hook up to get into my parking lot.
[00:27:22] Charlie Burgoyne: That's right. It's.
[00:27:23] John Ramstead: Is that kind of what you envision that's possible?
[00:27:25] Charlie Burgoyne: That's right. That's right.
[00:27:26] John Ramstead: That's pretty cool.
[00:27:27] Charlie Burgoyne: I mean, right. So your closest, the closest vehicle.
[00:27:30] John Ramstead: So it's going to mimic almost what I do in a car, but it's now going to be in the air.
[00:27:34] Charlie Burgoyne: It's a way easier problem. Autonomous flight is a way easier problem than autonomous driving. Especially if you, if you can own all the rules for the, you know, the.
[00:27:43] John Ramstead: I don't have to worry about the school bus, I just got to worry about the Airbus.
[00:27:47] Charlie Burgoyne: Yeah, totally, totally. Totally. Yeah. And it's not, you know, that's significant. You know, the, the wash from an Airbus is major, you know, and it's major for a while. So you have to, you know, there's a lot of things that have to go into that as well.
But if the closest vehicle is 200ft away and it's only going to be 200ft away for an instant as it just passage by, I mean truly there's, it's an absolute revolution in the way people could commute.
[00:28:15] John Ramstead: Have you ever heard of the company didalien, we interviewed them when we were at Verticon. So they have developed AI using this is one of their applications, but external sensors, LIDAR and EO to do traffic deconfliction. So you know, like the action just happened in D.C. with the helicopter and the airliner with that system that would have never happened because it would have proactively given first, you know, warnings, but then actually move the flight controls. But so they're actually developing AI that would actually fit into that system as a backup.
[00:28:44] Charlie Burgoyne: I think that's the right move. I mean there needs to be a, there needs to be a shared language around aeronautics and kinematics around those aeronautics.
Faa, I mean is the clear government authority for those kinds of things. But the fidelity that we're talking about is a wild reformation in the technology. Just to support that, we have to take it really seriously.
So creating a data structure where vehicles can be instrumented and sources of intelligence, decision making simultaneously doing that at scale and then creating rubrics against which these channels and these traffic patterns can be allowed for, that's a, that's actually not a super difficult challenge, but needs to be owned. And that's, that's really where that's one of the major things that needs to happen in the next five to 10 years as EVTOls start getting more and more adoption. Yeah, the other thing, candidly, I'm always like a glass glass half full game, almost to the frustration of my team.
But Covid was actually super great for EVTOLs because not only for the largest reason, it actually reset expectations for in person meetings. Now we're seeing a lot of people going back to nine to five in the lab or the office every day.
But enough companies have realized that giving flexibility for work from home is, is an imperative feature. It's a benefit for a lot of employees. And so why does that matter? Well, EVTOls are really effective methods of transportation for 75%, maybe 85% of the weather conditions. But I don't really want to go fly something that's not much bigger than this model. I don't really want to fly in a thunderstorm. I don't really want to fly in high winds. I don't really want to fly in sleet or snow or hail.
[00:30:28] John Ramstead: Right.
[00:30:29] Charlie Burgoyne: There's a lot of conditions and now workforces have the, have given permission to be able to say, hey, you know, I'm not going to come in on Thursday because of weather conditions. That's a way more permissible now than it was in February. Of 2020.
And so I think the people the target demographs for a lot of these evtol companies are going to have now additional permission.
[00:30:49] John Ramstead: So I want to be in the work. This gets me there three times faster. But if I need to skip it because I don't like the weather today. That's an option.
[00:30:56] Charlie Burgoyne: That's right.
[00:30:57] John Ramstead: So now I can actually pay to adopt it.
[00:30:59] Charlie Burgoyne: That's right. Yeah, that's right. And you're also. I mean, downtown Austin has a completely fully autonomous self driving Waymos now. So in fact, you don't even get the option. You get an Uber, Downtown Austin, a Waymo might show up.
[00:31:11] John Ramstead: What's a Waymo?
[00:31:11] Charlie Burgoyne: It's a completely autonomous car. Oh, for real?
[00:31:14] John Ramstead: Like no driver?
[00:31:15] Charlie Burgoyne: No driver.
[00:31:15] John Ramstead: Come on now.
[00:31:16] Charlie Burgoyne: It's based on a Jaguar I Pace or whatever the electric one is. I had my first one recently. Very, very strange.
But you get in, there's nobody else in it drives you where you're gonna go.
[00:31:27] John Ramstead: So question for you. Does the driver ever speak to you?
[00:31:33] Charlie Burgoyne: I could tell you that, but my psychiatrist advised me not to.
Yeah, no.
It's surreal, right? But you don't need many experiences where that goes. Totally fine. Before you start saying, actually I'd be on board for an autonomous flight experiment experience.
[00:31:48] John Ramstead: Well, let's do this. As we wrap up, think about over the next two years, what is one problem that you hope gets thrown at you that you would absolutely love to tackle, like throw all your intellectual firepower in that of your teammate?
Is there something that's waiting out there that there needs to be a couple enabling events for it to be ready to tackle or, you know, something like that?
[00:32:15] Charlie Burgoyne: I rather, if it's all right with you, I'd love to leave it as a cliffhanger and it's the.
[00:32:20] John Ramstead: No, it's not all right with me.
[00:32:24] Charlie Burgoyne: Okay.
[00:32:24] John Ramstead: You got to give a hint then. You got to.
[00:32:26] Charlie Burgoyne: That's the reason I'm in this office today.
[00:32:28] John Ramstead: Oh, okay.
[00:32:29] Charlie Burgoyne: I know what you're talking about. Yeah.
Whole reason the team's up here talking to y' alls is because of that gnarly, hard problem that I think we can solve.
[00:32:39] John Ramstead: Yeah. And so everybody out there listening. What we're talking about is, I think some changes coming to the industry that could accelerate this transformation. Because what's happening in aerospace, the change. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.
[00:32:56] Charlie Burgoyne: Absolutely.
[00:32:57] John Ramstead: And it's about taking that timeline. And that's what we've been talking about all morning, isn't it? How do we take that timeline and move it back?
So more on that to come.
All right, Charlie, thank you so much, man. This is awesome. I want to have you back. There's so many more things we could talk about, but I'd love to do some regular episodes with you. How's that sound?
[00:33:15] Charlie Burgoyne: Sounds great. Sounds really fun.
[00:33:17] John Ramstead: All right, thank you guys for tuning in. And listen, please, on YouTube, subscribe if you're on audio, also subscribe. Share this with a friend. Get the word out.
Thanks. Thank you, everybody, for being so engaged. We've done over. We've launched about six months ago, and we did 1.2 million downloads and views over the last 28 days. So that's all thanks to everybody out there who's participating, who's reaching out to us, who's connecting us with incredible grass people like Charlie. So we thank you so much, and we want to be your voice. So if there's anything you want us to cover, please let us know. All right, man. Keep knocking them alive.
