[00:00:00] Graham Warwick: They have produced viable vehicles with the batteries that are available for a 15, 15, 25, 30 mile to and from trip. Batteries can do it, right? Yeah. You know, the issue becomes it doesn't go far enough. Right. So we've seen this movement towards hybrid, but it is a, it is a trade. You know, you've got to say if you want range, you're going to have to not have something else. 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. [00:00:59] 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 [email protected] now please remember to like, comment and share on this channel and enjoy today's podcast. Hey, welcome to the Hangrick Studios podcast. And this is where innovators and accelerators come to hear what's happening in aerospace and vertical lift and new technologies that's shaping the future and things that are happening right now today that are breakthroughs and new business cases. And with that, I'm so excited to have Graham Warwick on the podcast to join us today. This is a big day for me. Graham, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. [00:01:46] Graham Warwick: Thank you for inviting me. [00:01:47] John Ramstead: And if you're not familiar with Graham, which you all should be, is the executive editor for technology at Aviation Week. And Graham, you have covered every shift that's happening in aerospace, from propulsion to advanced air mobility. And what me and our entire team here@ hangar AX loves about the way you write is you just cut through the noise and you get to what's real. And we all love following you. So having you on the podcast today for me is a huge treat. So I really appreciate it. Thank you. [00:02:17] Graham Warwick: Thank you. [00:02:18] John Ramstead: And today we're going to really talk about, I think, this whole category of powered lift and advanced air mobility, regional air mobility, what's propelling it, what's real, what are the constraints and what are the things that we need to be aware of. Here's a question for you as I was thinking about this. In the past, through aerospace, we've had some big trends, things where people were really excited about, from supersonic travel to very light jets. And there's been a lot of news about, you know, Evtols and air taxis, advanced air mobility. And now there's longer range VTOLs that are coming out. And I would just love your opinion on Is this something that's a bubble that's come about and it's just really exciting and new, or is this something long lasting and transformational? [00:03:05] Graham Warwick: It's a bit of both, I think. [00:03:07] John Ramstead: I guess both can be true, right? [00:03:09] Graham Warwick: Both can be true. You know, you can have multiple bubbles that sort of like collect together and then maybe you lose one of the bubbles or two of the bubbles, but there's still a bubble left, you know, Know. So we, that's what we're kind of hoping that when, when this is over, there's still a bubble left. Right. So like most things in aerospace, this is a confluence of an enabler, which is the technology and a perceived demand. Right. Something you can do, although that that technology unlocks. So, so the enabler is electric propulsion, or more specifically distributed electric propulsion. Propulsion, which is the ability to, you know, not have to have a single engine mechanically linked to a single propulsive device, a rotor or a propeller or a tilt rotor or whatever, but to have a power source that can be, that can drive multiple thrust producing devices and that you can arrange in whatever way you want to do whatever you want. [00:04:08] John Ramstead: Which also opens up as an aeronautical engineer, a lot of design possibilities that were, were not possible five, ten years ago. [00:04:14] Graham Warwick: No, no. And a lot of what you see is people revis ideas that were tried 50, 40 years ago but were mechanically too complex. There have been some very successful airplanes, technically successful airplanes out there that just never transitioned to production because, because mechanically they were so complex to enable the capability, they just were never going to be operationally practical. Electric propulsion at its heart is fundamentally very simple. You have an energy source converts into electrons. Those electrons don't care where they come from, they don't care where they go. They just power electric motors. And however you range those to do whatever you do. And we see across this evtol loads of different ways of doing it. So that's the enabler and there's a few others. Composites fly by wired, et cetera, et cetera. But the main one is distributed electric propulsion. And that sort of came in about 10 years ago, started to look like that might be possible. The second piece is the perceived demand piece. It's folks looking and saying if I had this technology, what could I do that we can't do today? And that's this market for short range air transport. The moment it's roads, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's Cars, buses, trains, trucks for goods and things like that. And obviously we know the issues with that, the issues with that are gridlock, emissions, other things like that. So, so the folks looked at the technology of electric, which is clean, quiet, simple, easy to maintain, and then they looked at this possibility that could we bring aviation closer to the user of aviation at the moment, if you want to use aviation, you've got to go somewhere to use it. You've got to get in the car and drive to an airport to get on an airplane to go somewhere and then get in a car to drive to where you want to go to your destination or to get something delivered. It's got to go by truck, by plane, by truck, by whatever to get from A to B. So they thought if you could take these clean, quiet, small short range vehicles, we could actually start flying things from closer to where you want to start, to closer to where you want to end. And it would be a shorter journey overall, a more efficient journey, a more accessible journey. Now, it's not an aviation market, so, you know, one of the issues that. [00:06:31] John Ramstead: We have when you say it's not an aviation market, what do you mean by that? [00:06:35] Graham Warwick: Fundamentally, at the moment when EVTOL got its start, the original air taxi kind of bubble. The original bubble, which is around 2021, when they did all of their going public mergers, things like that, it was this short range urban air transportation. That was the sort of the driving message. Well, that doesn't exist, right. That's not an aviation market today. That's a, that's a surface transportation mission today. So you're trying to get people who use the roads to use the air to do something. Now it's, since then, it's kind of got a bit blurred because we're also talking about longer range missions, we're talking about regional air mobility, which is, which is not quite. It's, it's not like Love Field to Mississippi. It's, it's, it's a small airport that today has either just got an FBO or a general aviation airport or something from a, from a small airport close to where you are to another small airport close to where you want to go in a small airplane. That's how we used to fly in the U.S. you know, back after the Second World War, that was what you would do to get around. But, but through the years, as, as, as aviation has matured, we went to, from turboprops, little turboprops, nine seats, 19 seats. We went to 50 seat jets, to 70 seat jets. And we've Got to the point where they priced themselves out of the market. If you're going to go what we call regional aviation day, it's basically hub feeding. It's going from a fairly big airport to a really big airport and as a result of which a lot of cities have lost air service. Right. So people look at both this urban market, which doesn't exist as an aviation market, and this regional market which has kind of atrophied over the years. Right. And they think that if we had the right vehicles using electric published propulsion, we could grab that non existent aviation market of urban mobility and rekindle that once existing market of regional mobility. The technology is the same, it's just kind of the scale we're talking about. [00:08:44] John Ramstead: Yeah. And if you, well, if you think about, you know, the original business case of, you know, this urban air taxi, and then you look at what Archer did, you know, they worked with the airlines to say, hey, how do we bring people in to the airports and create a service around servicing our customer? And those are all short range. If I look at their what's practical, it's probably more like 30 to 60 miles regional. I'd love how you define it, but I'm thinking maybe 50 to 300 miles. There's some longer ranges that are either traditionally powered or some hybrid electric and there's VTOLs and there's also some short takeoff and landing. So in that spectrum, Graham, from what you've seen, where do you see the most credible business case emerging? [00:09:28] Graham Warwick: Well, this is where the bubbly bit thing comes in. The market got started on the buzz, the hype, the promise, whatever word you want to use of this urban air mobility. So the city center to the suburbs, the city center to the airport, that was where the all of the focus was originally. It was within the capability of a fully electric, battery powered vehicle. Because as you say, it's 15 miles, it's 25 miles, it's an Uber ride, basically. It's not that far. And you know, even with a battery powered airplane, you could do in the rush hour, you could go back and forward on those sort of routes, take a few minutes to top up the charge in between each flight and you could do, you know, four, five, six flights in the morning. Four, five, six flights. Now, you know, originally they were talking about, you know, huge numbers of these things and they were talking about getting cars off the road. That's not what this is about. This, I mean that's decades away of ever making any dent on traffic congestion. But if you're an Airline. [00:10:32] John Ramstead: The infrastructure that's needed to even make that, I mean, realistic. [00:10:37] Graham Warwick: Yeah, I mean, you know, it's just that you need huge numbers of aircraft to remove any traffic off the road. You need to be carrying thousands of people, which means thousands of airplanes, which means thousands of places to take off and land. As you rightly point out, there is no infrastructure. Right. Or there is just the infrastructure we have today, which is heliports and airports. So, but if you're an airline like Delta with Joby or United with, with Archer, and you have a premium passenger, you know, somebody who's a frequent flyer or, you know, always flies first class or flies millions of miles, if you can take custody of that customer close to where they live and keep custody of that customer all the way to close to where they want to go to, you can deliver the Delta service, United service, to that customer throughout the entire journey. They don't have to get in a car, drive to the airport, go through security like everybody else. They could fly directly to the terminal, be handled specially. Go. That's what the airlines have in their mind is this, how to handle these. So it's not a consumer product initially. Right. And that's like, it's the same with any new technology. You know, I remember at university that, you know, we had a student who had the first proper scientific calculate, you know, handheld calculator. It cost thousands. Right. Within three years it cost hundreds. Within another three years, it cost, you know, a few tens of dollars. But that's how these technologies work. You know, it will be the premium passengers, the, the. And it will be the airlines that use it for these airport shuttles initially. The hope is that you can then get enough sort of like word of mouth or whatever it takes to get other people interested. And then you start to branch out from that and grow and then you start to get scale. Then you can start to talk about does this actually replace the car or not? But we're talking decades away from that. Yeah. [00:12:29] John Ramstead: So you see this really short term, this is going to be more of a premium service luxury for probably high net worth people. Charter, I think it's a little bit. [00:12:41] Graham Warwick: It's not really high net worth, although there's a piece of that. Right. I mean, that's why the, that's why the FBOs are interested. The fixed base operators are interested because an extension of what they do, they handle the high net worth customer anyway. So their terminals are set up to do that. So it is a piece of it. It's really this premium passenger that the airlines have. And they're not necessarily high net worth. They could be people who travel a lot for work. It's not them paying, it's the company that's paying. But they could be people that are traveling all the time and to the airline are very valuable because they're playing business fairs every time they fly or they're paying first class every time they fly. And they're, I mean they're really high on the loyalty scale. So the airlines can extend their brand. You know, they're offering to those high net worth who are, who are a large part of their profit base and, and, and sort of be appeal this differentiation. You may not be able to differentiate 1777 from another 777 but if you can tell your customer you're going to fly to the airport rather than Uber to the differentiated your service. So that's, so it's not necessarily that that high net worth. It's the, it's the valuable passenger. It's the sort of that initial market. Yeah. [00:13:51] John Ramstead: How critical is to have the technology in these platforms to fly IFR to even make that work? What are your thoughts on that? [00:13:58] Graham Warwick: Okay, this is a, this is a. You know we see different approaches in the industry. By and large these airplanes are going to be vfr. Yep. When, when they fly and when they enter service. And, and, and that's because it's harder to certify an IFR single pilot IFR aircraft and they're all single pilot. Secondly, they are beginning by flying what helicopters fly today. So I mean they're going to go into New York and do exactly what Blade is doing today with a Bell 407 or something like that or a Airbus something rather. Those are VFR flights. Right. So they're going to do exactly what a helicopter does today, but they'll do it cleaner, quieter and hopefully cheaper. But vfr. So there is this issue about schedule reliability which they've got to get through. They're going to have to manage this. There are one or two beta technologies as an example that is going for IFR out of the box. But they're not starting with an evtol. They're starting with a conventional takeoff and landing aircraft that they will then evolve into a vtol. So all the work they do to certify the conventional aircraft to fly in into known icing and IFR they can port over to the EVTOL when it comes along. If you're a joby or an archer, you have to certify the vehicle and then that IFR is a second step. But the pressure will be on as soon as you start offering these services. The customer, if they start to like it, are going to say, well, why isn't it flying today? It's not flying today because it's a yucky day, you know, or something. [00:15:35] John Ramstead: Yeah. We're actually looking at the weather in la, you think sunny California, but with smog and smoke and clouds. 70% of the days are IFR. [00:15:43] Graham Warwick: Yeah, yeah. No, and I mean, you know, this is going to be something interesting because Joby has just bought Blade in New York. Yeah. [00:15:51] John Ramstead: What did you think of that? That was in. That was a, well, big development. [00:15:55] Graham Warwick: Yeah. It's kind of one of two things. It's one, it's an amazing leg up. I mean, because they have an existing business that they can just port their EV tools into. But if you actually look at Blade's numbers, you know, their, their airport shuttle business is not huge. And also it's, you know, if you look at it, they're affected by weather. They're affected by the crash that happened earlier this year in New York, which was actually not a, not an airport shuttle crash. It was a, I think a sightseeing crash. But, but it was a helicopter crash and they. And the demand dropped. Right. So. So Joby's got some lessons to learn about what the public or the traveling public really expect from an air taxi service. You know, we still don't have any real clarity about how they handle bags. If they're talking about business travelers, they're traveling light anyway. You know, if you've got carry on, you're probably all right. But I mean, when, when Airbus did this test, so they did a test service in Sao Paulo called with helicopters, they had people turn up, you know, with complete like bags and bags and bags. They had to send a second helicopter with the bags in. And that's not economic, you know, so there's going to be a huge. So I think it's great for Joby to have a business that they can go directly into. It's going to be a great learning experience. But I think it also shows how much work they've got to do to make it a reliable, repeatable, usable service. Yeah. [00:17:22] John Ramstead: And what's fueling this and you talked about before is distributed electric. And there's some limitations with battery technology. And now you're seeing all the OEMs and everybody developing airplane. They're adopting hybrid electric. And I'm just curious from your perspective and your reporting and research, how realistic is that in the short term a hybrid electric replacement to what they've been trying to do with batteries. [00:17:47] Graham Warwick: Yeah, so. So the reason they went all electric, you have to go back to kind of this industry got started with, with Uber Elevate, which was a white, which was a, which was an operation started within Uber to look at, at aerial ride sharing in cities. They wrote this white paper I think around about 2016. Absolutely seminal white paper. I mean it laid out everything you'd need to do to make this work. And one of the tenets of it was it had to be all electric and the reason was to do with emissions and other. But the other one was that if you have a fuel driven aircraft and you want to operate from the top of a skyscraper, there are all sorts of firefighting requirements for fighting a kerosene fire on the top of a building. Right. You've got to have all that sort of foam and all that sort of stuff up there, which adds to the weight on top of the building, which is something which some buildings can't. So they said it's got to be all electric because we don't want kerosene on top of buildings. [00:18:52] John Ramstead: And then we were watching like the Tesla truck in Vegas that went on fire and burned for three days and we had Rex on, he said, you know what, an insurance company is never going to insure a charging station elevated on their building because just too much of a risk. [00:19:10] Graham Warwick: So there was this sort of like buy in at the beginning that it had to be. And also there was a kind of belief that batteries had had a, was going to improve more than they have. But and I'm have to make this absolutely clear, they have produced viable vehicles with the batteries that are available. Joby, Archer, Beta and Vertical are all using commercially available battery packs, battery cells in packs. And they can get the performance they need to at least have a minimum viable product in the market. That was doubted for a long time that you could even make this happen. But for a 15, 25, 30 mile to and from trip, batteries can do it. Right. The issue becomes all of these startups have said, okay, that was our original business plan. But reality is reality. We've got to address as wider market as we can, which means we've got to be able to go further than just that 25, 35, 40 miles or something like that. Also the military's come along and the military's taking a good look at Evtol said, yeah, I like it. It doesn't go far enough. All right, so what you've seen Is this sort of like, nice and it's not a retreat. [00:20:23] John Ramstead: And you. And you can't charge it in the field. So I need to be able to fuel the airplane in the field, land. [00:20:28] Graham Warwick: With a fully charged battery, take off with a fully biocharged battery and not need to recharge. Also, to be honest, you need something to land in the field somewhere that can recharge the soldier's batteries. They're all, you know, they're carrying pounds and pounds and pounds of batteries that they need to recharge. So you can drop an airplane in the field somewhere that can become a charging station. So what we've seen is mainly driven by the military, but also by this recognition that you have to have a wider market than just that urban thing. We've seen this movement towards hybrid. It's easier for some folks than for others because these vehicles are not very big. And, you know, if you put a. If you. Even if you can take batteries out, if you put a turbo generator in and a fuel tank in, you're going to take something out, you're going to take payload out, or you can take space out, you know, so. So we're going through that process at the moment. Beta is definitely going to have a turbo hybrid. Hybrid, turbo electric for the military vertical is going to follow it very quickly. It's battery powered with a turbo battery. Now it's got a big airplane. They think, they say they can get it in there and not remove passengers. A. It is a trade. You know, you've got to say if you want range, you're going to have to not have something else. And also, the hybrid is driven by this regional thing because to be honest, batteries can't go beyond that. 50 to whatever miles you want to say is your. Your sort of your core market. So if you're going to do that 300 miles, which is, you're right, is about where they're aiming for. You have to have hybrid. So, you know, so you see that the. So whether it's a short takeoff and landing or conventional takeoff and landing, they are tending towards the. Initially at least the, the hybrid. Now, where they go long term depends on what batteries do. If batteries don't really. If they don't go beyond their current sort of like 2 to 3% improvement rate, it could be hydrogen fuel cells. Joby's already proved that they can take their aircraft same, same motors, same batteries. They drop in a hydrogen fuel cell, they can fly 10 times as far, you know, so. So it may not be, you know, in the long Term, it may be hybrid, but it may not be a hydrocarbon hybrid. It may be a hydrogen hybrid. In the long term, we don't know. Yeah. [00:22:46] John Ramstead: And a question, you know, we, we've had vertigo on and ascendance in France and we've talked to the folks at Sikorsky, you know, with their hex, their blown wing, because they're actually developing a hybrid power solution. Their goal is it'll be in 19 passenger aircraft. So we're talking, you know, 18, 20,000 pounds. So, yeah, you know, as you've looked at this, what two questions. What would you say both the technical challenges are to have this hybrid mature and also the certification challenges that might also be part of that. [00:23:18] Graham Warwick: The, in some ways, to be honest, it may, it may make its certification easier. And I'm not an expert in this, but one of the big issues in certification has always been the energy reserve. You know, if you're in a fuel powered aircraft, there's a fairly simple mathematics that goes into how much of an energy reserve you need in the aircraft. And that's because, yeah, I can calculate. [00:23:44] John Ramstead: Down to the, you know, the, the pound of a gallon, my 45 minutes reserves. Very easy. [00:23:49] Graham Warwick: Exactly right. Whereas with a battery, you have absolutely no, no idea how much energy is left in that battery. Depends on the time of day, depends on the day of the week, depends on how much power you're drawing. [00:24:01] John Ramstead: Temperature outside. [00:24:02] Graham Warwick: Exactly. So, so it's very hard. So they've come, they're coming up with, you know, basically the rule looks like it's going to be. The manufacturer will have to go and demonstrate, you know, an emergency sort of scenario and prove how much energy they need to have to do the. It won't be a strict time base or distance based. It'll be based on the performance of the vehicle itself and it'll be different for every vehicle. If you're a hybrid, you've still got. And in fact, there are several hybrids designed out there that only use the fuel for the reserve. They, they are, they're electric 99.999 of the time and they fly around with a, with a, with a, with a tank of fuel just in case they need. Right. So it's one way of doing it. So, so, so I think the, the problem with hybrids is the complexity. You know, the thing about electric is it's beautifully simple. You know, batteries to electrons, electrons to motors, motors to thrust, and that's it. Basically. You know, you've got multiple different flavors of hybrid, you've got parallel hybrids, serial hybrids, Independent hybrids which are kind of like two completely different propulsion systems flying alongside each other on the same airplane. You've got managing the energies, reserves between the, between the hydrocarbon engine and the battery. You've got the mixing the power, you know, I mean, you've got to have software that's able to basically take power from wherever it's available and deliver it to a propeller or propulsive that doesn't care and doesn't know what it's getting the power from. And it's, it's so, so in some ways it, it helps. In other ways it's, it's, it's more difficult. I think the key in the end is that if we just use the turbine, the engines that we have today, you don't get an optimized hybrid. The real key to a hybrid is coming up with a turbine engine that is designed from the ground up to run at a constant optimum operating point throughout the flight. So you basically get in the airplane, turn the hybrid on. It runs at that operating point from the minute you take off to the minute you land. And it doesn't matter what you do in the airplane. It just turns fuel into electrons in the most efficient way. [00:26:22] John Ramstead: So it's custom designed to power that power or to exactly power that power generation system and distribution system. [00:26:28] Graham Warwick: Yeah. And how you integrate it with the generation system and everything is, is a place we've never gone with turbine. With turbine, it's a, it's a whole design space that we haven't explored yet. And, and so there's folks that are doing that like Electro, which, doing it with its, with its airplane. The E9 really believes there's a whole area to be exploited in the design of the turbo generation piece of this. You could end up with an incredibly simple turbo machine. You know, it could be, literally could be additive manufactured from end to end, it could be ceramic from end to end, we don't know. But it's, it doesn't have any of the excursions, the transients, the, the corner cases that make turbines so hard to design and so challenging to operate. [00:27:12] John Ramstead: Well, and the designs have implications for certification too, because they're going to want to see a lot of hours. Yep. [00:27:20] Graham Warwick: You have to change the rules about, you know, so your standard endurance testing, for example, which is to run a flight, run a whole bunch of flight cycles, take off, you know, start up, takeoff, climb, cruise, descent, whatever. If you have a turbo generator that runs at one operating point, that's a very different test range. So, so it's not simple but, but I do think that hybrids have this Runway in front of them that we're not, it's not widely appreciated and, and, and it may be a, a more productive Runway than, than waiting for batteries to improve. You know, so it could be, the hybrids could be the flavor of the month for 10, 15 years until we do really see these many, many different new battery chemistries become real. You know, so there are some great battery chemistries out there that do amazing things. We will get to a thousand watt hours per kilogram, which is four times what we're doing today. But it's to get to those sodium batteries. [00:28:18] John Ramstead: Ever get to commercialization that, that, that'll be a game changer. [00:28:22] Graham Warwick: Yeah, yeah. You know, so it's. So I think hybrid, hybrid has its own path. And, and, and if you can design an airplane that can take both or take hydrogen or hydrocarbon hybrid, then you've got these options going forward to address different markets with different, different variations on whatever you product the distributed propulsion piece of it, you know, and it's simplest doesn't have to change. [00:28:51] John Ramstead: So I had a question for you because we had Mike Whitaker on from the FAA and he mentioned that the FAA considers a hybrid engine, a dual. Dual engine. [00:29:00] Graham Warwick: Yeah. [00:29:00] John Ramstead: Which opens up a lot of possibilities in Europe and then, you know, certain areas, cities, firefighting. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think that's going to help drive things or is that just a side benefit? [00:29:12] Graham Warwick: It's a bit of a side benefit. I think at the moment a lot of people that I talk to are very, you know, they're pushing that because almost. Right. I mean almost every electric architecture that what we call the electric motor is two or more electric motors in the same package. So most electric motors are built with two side, you know, in essence they can, they can lose half of an electric motor and it still produces about two thirds of its power and then you stack two of them. So now you've got four motors. In essence, four motors drive. Now we've never had that level of redundancy. Right. I mean just think about what happens when you can start to do failure case analysis when you've got four deep redundancy on your propulsion system. But I think it takes what a time for the regulator to accept that, you know, we, we, you know, we know that there are, that, you know, there's at least viridian in, in, in Germany is, has got this dual electric motor with a, with a particular way of decoupling the two motors so that they are completely independent of each Other the problem is the common court, the common failure mode. Right? Yeah. In order to get that credit for two engines, you have to have a complete, completely independent set of failure, no failure mode. That can happen in both sides of the thing. And that's very hard to do because you get odd couplings. You know, you get, you have motor stacked together, you can get electromagnetic couplings between them and things like that, you can get, you can get, things happen and get driven back onto the electrical bus that cause problems or something. So I think we'll work through it, but I do think, I do think that we will sit five years from now or something like that and we will look at a single engine airplane as an, as an, as an odd idea. You know, why would we have, you know, a lot of people flying around in single engine airplanes, often not that experienced pilots, often not that great at making decisions. If we give them two engines instead of one and it's in the same space and it's the front of the airplane driving the same propeller, that's huge in the long term. [00:31:20] John Ramstead: Well, you know, it's also about, you know, you talked about before the helicopter crash and how it affected Blade. The people are watching. The level of trust that passengers and communities have to have these operating in the areas as an entire industry is something we're going to have to be very cognizant about. [00:31:38] Graham Warwick: So if you go back again to that seminal Uber Elevate, they did identify every single issue and community engagement, passenger acceptance was a big part of it. And of course what they recognized was that it's not just the passenger acceptance, it's the acceptance of the people on the ground. In the end, they can stop this in its tracks. If they decide they don't, they don't like it, don't want it, the public on the ground will stop this in its tracks because they control this or they influence the zoning of permitting all the things that you need to be able to operate these things. And, and, and just by the nature of how you, you know, with all of the. We're creating an entirely new class of airplane. We're creating an entirely new class of operation. It's towards the end of that process that we're really starting to do the, the engagement part of it, which is demonstrate to the public what, what does this sound like, what does this look like? And ultimately we're going to have the data, have to have the data to say how safe is this? And I think that's why, you know, this FAA pilot program that's coming along is going to be crucial because the FAA and everybody needs data. They need to know how quiet they are. They need to know how they fly. They need to know what sort of failure rates they have in operational service. We don't have any of that data at the moment because we have so few really across the industry. So few full size airplanes flying. You know, Joby's well ahead of anybody in terms of numbers of airplanes flying. But it's only still in, you know, six, seven, eight airplanes that are flying. We, we've got to get more airplanes flying in a. In opera operationally representative situations where the public can see them, the public can hear them and then the public can be educated about how well they fly or how safe they are. These airplanes are going to be fundamentally, you know, take away the vetol part piece of this. And in most of the cases when they're flying over your head, they're not vetols anymore. Right. They are fixed wing airplanes. In most cases they're fixed wing airplanes when they're flying over your head. They're, they're helicopters when they're taken off and landing from the vertical. But they had the fixed wing airplanes are flying over your head. The understanding of the safety implications of that are just working. Yeah. [00:34:03] John Ramstead: Well, we've talked a lot here about policy. Right. With the EIPP and then the SFAR on powered lift. And not only in the US but this is also in other outside the US Policymakers are starting to address this. Outside the US They've been able to even fly drones beyond visual line of sight. We just interviewed a company called Speedbird that's doing commercial drone operations. It was fascinating. Around the world, they can't do it here. So what role. How do I want to ask this? How does our industry partner with the government to make the changes? We need to get through certification faster but also maintaining that safety and build the trust. Because it feels like today we're not on the same page. [00:34:48] Graham Warwick: Yeah. And you know, we've had some unusual circumstances outside of this, in this piece of the industry that have made it more difficult. I mean there is no doubt that had the, the Boeing Max accidents not happened. [00:35:03] John Ramstead: Yeah. That, that definitely their mindset. They, they, they got very risk averse very quickly. [00:35:10] Graham Warwick: Yeah, yeah. And it's still. [00:35:11] John Ramstead: Then probably should have. [00:35:14] Graham Warwick: No. And absolutely. [00:35:15] John Ramstead: Graham, thank you for taking the time. This has been amazing and I know our audience is absolutely going to love this. And as we're looking out at the landscape and we're keeping track of things from AI and autonomy and air traffic modernization and automation for safety, advanced manufacturing. We talked about propulsion. As you cover technology in aerospace, what do you see as some of either the most exciting areas of opportunity or some breakthroughs that you think are going to accelerate this movement that we're seeing right now? Love your thoughts as we wrap up. [00:35:47] Graham Warwick: Yeah. So I would have to pick AI, and I'm not a fan of AI. I'm certainly not a fan of the term AI. Whenever I do an interview on AI, I have to say, what do you actually mean by AI? What type of AI do you mean? But I'm finding that it's touching everything. I mean, there is not a single part of aerospace that isn't being impacted by AI. From conceptual design to. To detail, you know, actually designing, you know, designing vehicles, optimizing vehicles to designing parts to, to doing all of the CFD and the, all the computational engineering. AI is being applied to all these, to how you manufacture. And we talked about additive manufacturing. Well, it's. Additive manufacturing is great, but it's all. It's been held back a bit with, with aviation because of the safety criticality. Makes it really hard. You know, you've got to do an awful lot of work to make sure that part is going to be. Is guaranteed to be. To be safe. AI is bringing in all sorts of ways of inspecting parts and finding defects. And so there isn't. There's not a single thing across aviation that isn't going to be affected by AI. And you know, and that includes, you know, automation on any level, all the way up to autonomy. I mean, we're going to see automation on the simplest thing on the cockpit. You know, just helping a pilot decide which switch to flick. If something happens to something more than that, it's going to be a journey. It's going to take time, but I think it will have the biggest, by far the biggest impact on aviation of any single technology for the next 20, 25 years. I'm still on the fence on hydrogen. I think we moved too fast this time when we did all the work that we did on hydrogen. It has potential, but we were still doing fundamental discovery at the same time as we were designing systems. And that's not how you do aerospace. You get rid of all the risk and then you go into product development. We had it all mixed up, doing everything one on top of the other. I think a bit of time, whether it's five years, 10 years, 15 years. As long as we continue to move, the move the technology, mature it. I think there's tremendous potential to, to do something with hydrogen and it. And it's additive to electric. I mean, I think electric. You know, we already know that the next Airbus Narrowbody is going to be a hybrid airplane. It's going to have a somewhat degree of mild hybridization in the propulsion system because it takes all those corner cases off the turbine engine, all of those transients you have to worry about. You can just clip the corners of the envelope and the engine just has an easier life and you can get, you can take advantage of that in many, many ways. So I do think electric has got a long Runway in front of it. I do think that hydrogen could have, in the longer term, a Runway in front of it. But absolutely no question AI is going to change aerospace. [00:38:45] John Ramstead: Well, hey Graham, thank you so much for being here and everybody remember to subscribe and like this podcast. Share this one with a friend. We thank you so much for being part of Hangar X. And man, go keep knocking them alive out there. [00:38:59] Graham Warwick: Thank you very much. I've enjoyed it very much.