Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: I just hope everybody is excited about general aviation again. I hope that what we're doing is just enticing people back into wanting to fly and wanting to own a helicopter and thinking about all of the amazing things that you can do when you've got access to a private aircraft.
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.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: All right, this is John Ramsead, and welcome to Hangerx Studios, where we explore innovation and everything cutting edge in aerospace. Vertical takeoff. And today we are going to be talking helicopters with Dr. Jason Hill from Hill Helicopters, who has an incredible, bold vision for the future of not only flying a helicopter, owning a helicopter, but general aviation. And they have done some incredible engineering and breakthroughs and created something that is completely unique, and not only unique, but needed today to take general aviation and helicopters to a completely new level, a level that we all want and are demanding. And they're filling the gap. So this is going to be a great conversation with Dr. Hill. Jase, welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: Thanks, Sean. It's great to be here.
[00:01:43] Speaker B: There's a vision that you've had to transform even just the world of helicopters. Flying helicopters, owning a helicopter, the accessibility to helicopters that led to even forming this company. Could you kind of start from where that dream was in your teens and bring us through?
[00:02:00] Speaker A: So I can't remember a time when I didn't want to make a helicopter. You know, I've. I've always been totally fascinated by tech and engineering and aircraft in particular, and. And in particular, helicopters. And all I've ever really wanted to do was to. To make the helicopter that I've always wanted. And I. Jace, what was it about.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: Helicopters that just draw your. Draw your focus, your interest so keenly?
[00:02:31] Speaker A: So there's two things for me. The idea of just being able to pick yourself up out of anywhere, out of your own back garden and fly off to the most inaccessible places, whether that's off somewhere in the wilderness, landing on an iceberg, whether it's flying down into the center of London and landing at Battersea, all from your back garden, step out of your house, into your helicopter, and away you go. There is. There is just nothing like that. You know, it's. It's the. The most fabulous experience. It's the most fabulous way to. To move around.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: Just a pure sense of Freedom?
[00:03:08] Speaker A: Yeah, it's, it's, it's complete freedom in three dimensions and time, isn't it?
There's nothing better than flying somewhere and seeing all the traffic gridlocked below you and things like that. It just, it's just an otherworldly way to, to travel. And you get an incredible perspective of the world from a helicopter as well. Where we're not so high that you can't see anything, but you're high enough to see everything. And it's just the most magnificent way to, to travel. I've been doing it now for, for 25 years and I still get excited every time I fly and I still can't think of anything that I'd rather do than fly a helicopter or be in a helicopter. It's, it's just captivated me for my entire life. So, so I, I just absolutely love helicopters. I love flying, I love what, what general aviation stands for and I love the potential of what the, the general aviation lifestyle can provide for people. Fusing flying into your day to day life, for moving yourself around for business, moving your family around for recreation and everything in between. I think it's just an amazing thing to be able to do.
[00:04:22] Speaker B: It really is. I'll never forget I was a Navy fighter pilot and I had the chance early in my career though to sit in the right seat of a Huey. And I'll never forget we took off and then immediately dropped down into a valley, which was very unnerving at first. But then we're flying right along treetop level along this, this river. It was one of the most incredible flying experiences I've ever had and I've had a lot of experiences and I've been a fan of helicopters ever since that first flight.
[00:04:51] Speaker A: Yeah, once you've bitten, that's it, you're in for life. I'm afraid there's nothing else that quite recreates the way you feel in a helicopter when you're low and connected with the landscape and in and out of the landscape and literally being able to take yourself absolutely anywhere you want to go.
And it's, yeah, it's just always totally captivated me. So that's really where it all started.
So I, I got this burning ambition to, to develop a helicopter and as a young man started to equip myself to, to do it. So I, I went through university, got a mechanical engineering degree. I worked for Leonardo for a while to get some experience. Then I did a PhD in computational helicopter aerodynamics sponsored by Leonardo.
And while I was doing all of that I went and got my, my pilot's license in helicopters, came over to the US and let's fly at Long Beach. Oh, you did okay, California. Yeah. I couldn't afford to learn to fly in the uk so I came over to the US and learned over there and then, then came back home and re qualified over here and that was in the law 22s and then went on to fly R44s, bits of Jet Ranger stuff, then the r66 and various other bits and pieces over the, over the years.
And having spent about sort of, well, 25 years now in and around the light helicopter scene, self fly hire scene, private owners flying schools, light commercial helicopters, you really get to know what these machines can and can't do and, and what people want from them, how people use them, all the things that they didn't do, all the things that they wanted. I, I've really by, by very slow osmosis developed an extremely, a detailed knowledge of what the market really wanted. And so our, our vision is really formed. It's like forged from rock over two decades into a very crystallized understanding of what was wrong with what's out there, what people wanted.
And that really explains why what's happened to general aviation has happened. You know, the products in the market just, the products stayed the same and the market expectations growing and became increasingly less well satisfied until the point that we find ourselves in now where we've just got dwindling uptake and interest. And it's going to take a total reboot to be able to get people excited about flying again, excited about owning their own aircraft again. And that's really where Hill Helicopters steps in. That's our, that's our complete objective and Focus. It's GA 2.0. It's a reboot of what general aviation can be, what private flying can be, with products that are of 20, 25, completely up to date, high performance and tailored specifically for the needs of the private owner operator, which in all honesty is where about 80% of all helicopters go.
[00:08:12] Speaker B: Right. You know, you were talking about kind of the, it's just been steady state with all these helicopters that we're familiar with, but the needs were, you know, growing and expanding. What could you describe what that gap is and how what you're doing is closing that gap?
[00:08:29] Speaker A: Yeah. So conventional light helicopters, and it doesn't really matter which one you think about whether they're piston or turbine below the biggest stuff which has continued to develop, you're really talking about machines that have minimal electronics in them. So Minimal smart control systems, very basic user interfaces, very, very crude structural design, very little refinements in terms of their acoustics, in terms of their vibration, very little improvement in performance or capability.
The general customer experience within the helicopter, the interior, the aesthetic is completely out of date with. We're still back in 60s, 70s and 80s territory with all of these machines. And you wouldn't buy a 60s, 70s or 80s car today, would you? You know, as your everyday runner. You might buy one as a classic.
[00:09:28] Speaker B: Yeah, the classic to put my garage and show my friends.
[00:09:31] Speaker A: Exactly. But you would be able to live with it. So in a, in a world that expects iPads, we're still dealing in abacus. And so what we've done really is to step in and bring the helicopter right up to date. So our machine was designed to have sort of, we call it supercar looks. It's not a supercar, it's a. It's an aerial grand tourer. So it's like your equivalent to an Aston Martin of the skies. Sophisticated, refined, beautiful. If you park one of our helicopters or a car on the lawn outside the, the hotel that you're staying in and say to your wife which ones you want to go in, you'd want her to choose the helicopter. Whereas if you did that today with any of the contemporary machines, there's a pretty good chance you take the Aston.
And so you've missed, right, because busy guys and girls that can afford helicopters have busy businesses, they have families, they. You've got to get buy in from the key people around you to be able to use it enough for it to add value to your life. So it's really got to appeal to everybody. So we, we developed the, we developed the machine to make you want to fly. So it was, it was designed to be stunningly beautiful. The interior was designed to be on a par with the best of modern premium or automotive products, so that it's a nice place to be. The seats are comfortable, they're at the right angle, so you can sit in it for hours on end without getting uncomfortable. The digital cockpit is meant to make flying as simple and easy as possible, totally minimizing the workload, so navigation and communication become easy. Autopilot comes as standard, so the, the inherent workload of flying an unstable aircraft is taken away. So it allows recreational pilots to perform much better and much more predictably when they're using the aircraft because the workload's reduced. We then designed the machine from the ground up to take account, as best as is possible of the limitations of Typical private pilots, they're not military guys, they're not commercially trained and highly current guys. They're people that fly for fun at the weekends or a couple of days a week. So we needed to make the machine as benign as possible. Now, for a helicopter, what that means is the first thing you've got to get right is power. Power makes everything easy in a helicopter. An underpowered helicopter is really, really significantly more difficult to fly and to manage. So you've got to have enough power to do everything that you'd want to do. You've got to get the size of the helicopter right. There's no point designing a helicopter that's going to be right on the limits of its performance all the time, and then giving it to an inexperienced pilot to fly because it's just asking for trouble. So we designed a machine that could carry 595 kilo passengers, carry three and a half hours of fuel, put some bags in the boots, and still take off at 10,000ft on an ISA 15 day vertically. And with that level of performance, with any normal combination of loading and operating parameters, you've literally got carefree handling from a power point of view. If you then work your way further up and think about the big fan on the top, then you really want the aircraft to be benign in all realistic weather conditions that you're likely to come up against. So it's no good having such twitchy flight dynamics that the moment the wind blows in the slightest, it becomes a handful or it becomes unsettling to fly. So we've gone for a high inertia rotor system. We've got a conventional articulated rotor, so we've got a modest flapping hinge offset, which means the machine just feels planted, even when you've got fairly blustery winds. So the flight dynamics, the handling qualities, are much better suited to an experienced pilot than some of the traditional helicopters that are out there. On top of that, we've then gone for a modern composite airframe that gives much greater crash protection. All the seats are stroking, energy absorbing seats. The structural monolage itself is extremely robust and resilient to all of the impact loads that the modern certification standards require. And then on top of that, as we've said internally, sorry, one other thing, with the tail rotor, we've got a tail rotor that has enough authority to be able to maintain Directional control at 10,000, at max gross weight, 10,000ft, ISA plus 15, wind 35 knots in any direction. So with that palette, with that palette of fundamental characteristics, you've got a machine that's about as easy to fly as you can possibly make it. And that then means that our pilots can operate the machine with a realistic level of capability.
And then, as I've mentioned, in terms of the aircraft operating system, if you like, we've made a very, very simple user interface. We allow the computers, the microcontrollers, to do as much of the monitoring tasks as you possibly can. So you're not, for example, having to monitor four separate gauges to make sure you don't blow your engine up when you pull the lever up. You've just got a first limit indicator. We've got haptic feedback on the cyclic and collective. So if you stray towards the edge of the envelope, it's going to give you a nudge and tell you.
And then we've got haptic power feedback. So if you pull up towards your maximum continuous power, the collective will go stiff in your hands. So when you're coming into a confined area, you can be looking outside and not having to be looking inside when you should be looking for trees and obstructions and other problems. So we've tried to engineer a machine that squarely aims at the mission of general aviation for private owner operators. And then on top of that, the fact that the whole operating system is digital means that the digital cockpit, we've got a flight video recorder, a flight data recorder, and all of that stuff streams via our Hill app up to the cloud. So we can monitor and gamify pilot performance, monitor the aircraft performance and health, and actively intervene if a pattern of behavior is starting to develop that would suggest somebody's heading towards an accident. So we can monitor how people are using the machine and provide active safety support for them without having to wait for the incident or the mishap to happen. So those really are the palette of fundamentals in terms of the aircraft itself that we've, we've brought together to make not only something that people want, but something that can really deliver for the next generation private pilot, private owner.
[00:16:34] Speaker B: Yeah, you're really getting ahead of, like, really anticipating what is really going to make this usable for the average pilot. And, and I know you guys have a couple different models, HX50 and the HC50. Could you talk about some of the differences between the models that you guys are developing?
[00:16:51] Speaker A: Yeah, the difference is there's no difference. They're basically identical helicopters. The main difference is the way they're brought to market. So both aircraft are designed to the latest amendment of Part 27 for the aircraft and the latest amendments of Part E or Part 33 over there in the US for the engines. So they're designed to meet the very latest standards with the HX model. We take that to market via a fusion of the certification standards and the amateur build regulations. So you will come to the factory and participate in a two week build school and work alongside our engineers and a close supervision and support to build 51% of the, the whole aircraft, but using everything that a modern aircraft factory has to enable that to be done just like a production aircraft. So that course is intended basically to give people from all walks of life the insight, the knowledge, the understanding of what goes into a helicopter and how a helicopter works to make them much safer owner operators. They'll have a level of knowledge about how the machine really works that you just wouldn't get if you just went and bought a machine off the apron and flew it away. So this again is about, about building people that are properly qualified and equipped to be independent owner operators. You see in the, in the commercial world you have line pilots, line pilots checked out periodically to make sure that they're fit and competent to do what they do. As a private owner operator, your helicopter's in your back garden. You don't see an instructor from one year to the next, you know, and that's the only safety intervention that you get, you know. So in that period you could develop all sorts of bad habits. You might have very limited understanding of the machine itself and that's not really an ideal situation. So our approach was to basically equip the pilot with all the knowledge and experience that he or she needs to operate safely, as well as giving them a machine that is most appropriate for their skill level. So that's the X model.
[00:19:05] Speaker B: It also sounds like you have an intelligent system. If I'm that guy not seeing an instructor and flying a couple times a month, you're going to be giving me feedback like, hey John, you're developing some bad habits here, here's some training you might need to do or you might want to go fly with an instructor because of this element of your flying. Is that fair?
[00:19:23] Speaker A: Absolutely. That's it. That's brilliant.
It will never be allowed to feel like a black box on your dashboard. I don't know if you have those over in the States, but the insurance companies over here put black boxes on the kids dashboards when they first learn to fly. And it's horrible for them and I don't ever want it to be like that. But we're not talking about costing the insurance company some money here. We're talking about life and death. Yourself, your passengers, your nearest and dearest, and I think having a level of support and oversight, almost think of it as a digital co pilot or a digital instructor. It's just there minding over you. And all it'll really do day to day is gamify and score the way you're flying the aircraft. And if those parameters start to slip out of acceptable margins, then we have the opportunity to offer you help and support to improve the way you fly or your understanding of how the machine needs to be operated safely. So it's really just bringing the kind of oversight that you've had in the commercial and military world forever into private owner operators for their benefit.
And with a digital platform, it makes it easier than ever to do that, that we're very cognizant that we're building a community. We're trying to build a community of general aviation aviators. And we feel we have a responsibility to look after them and help them get the best outcomes from helicopter ownership, both in terms of safety, but also in terms of the opportunities to do amazing things with their helicopters that a connected community in 80 countries can offer. So we can connect people with other owners. We do connect people through our app with owners all the way around the world. So if you want to go and fly over glaciers and volcanoes in Iceland, you can. We've got people in Iceland, you know, if you want to fly over Sydney Harbour Bridge, you can. We've got people in Australia and we've connected all of that to create this, this global community of passionate, enthusiastic helicopter owner operators around the world.
[00:21:35] Speaker B: I love that. I want to ask you about this too, Jase.
Just some of the biggest technical challenges you've overcome from the power, the size, flight dynamics, structure, flight controls, the digital ecosystem that you have created, what were some of those biggest challenges that your team overcame? You're like, wow, I'm really proud of these guys.
That one made a huge difference.
[00:22:02] Speaker A: So I don't necessarily think you could list any one of them as being spectacularly difficult.
The problem or the biggest challenge we have to overcome is the sheer number of challenges we have to overcome.
This package that sits behind me here doesn't work unless you do it all. And so things like having to develop your own gas turbine engine from scratch because nobody will sell you one at a reasonable price isn't difficult in terms of we're not breaking new ground, we're not trying to do some of the things that the pioneers of the industry did, but it's a lot of work to do it well and to do it to the standards that you need to. And it's a lot of work to develop every single manufacturing process that you need to, to be able to control the cost, the quality and the schedule to the extent that you need to. To pull something like this off. And then it's the. It's the same with the, with the structures. With the structure. So we'll start with the drivetrain. The drivetrain was a bigger deal. So helicopter drivetrains. There are established ways, proven ways of doing it that all the manufacturers turn to to make it work.
But to do that at a reasonable price, you've got to make gears. Making gears is very difficult to do it well. It's easy to make a bad gear. It's really difficult to make a really reliable gear that runs smoothly, quietly, with the right contact patch, with the right repeatability and tolerances, with the right material properties, with every little detail down. So you've got a predictable fatigue life. And then bearings, you know, because the aviation supply chain hasn't really served general aviation for decades, like four or five decades now, the price point is set up at what Airbus and Boeing and the defense companies will pay. So you try and buy a bearing for an aircraft, and they are outrageously expensive. There's 38 key bearings in that thing. So 38 times a big number. You're halfway towards your whole manufacturing cost just for bearings, if you try and buy them from supply chain. Wow. So we've had to develop the capability to build bearings. Nobody in their right mind would build bearings. Right.
But in this application, if you don't, you'll never hit the price point. So it's things like that that have, that have made the job demanding. It's the fact that we've ended up having to do so much of it.
I'm delighted with where we've got to with the digital cockpit and the autopilot and that whole digital ecosystem. But I would have never have done that if we could have bought a digital environment off the shelf at a reasonable price. And you just. So it's more. The biggest challenge has been the scale, the scale of the technical development to design it in the first place. And then there's an even larger projects that nobody really seen sat behind that, which is the scale of the infrastructure that you have to build to, to be able to. To be able to build these things. I'm sat in our, our factory here at the moment, and we literally take raw materials in at the front door, not only for the parts you want to make, but even for the tools that make them, you know, we've, we've set up a foundry, we've set up a machine shop, we've set up a pattern shop, we've set up a wax shop, slurry shop, our own glazing, we do that here. That's fully capable machine shop, blade, fur trade, grinding, absolutely everything, wire harnesses, everything that goes into a helicopter gets done under this roof. And that in itself has been an absolutely enormous undertaking. So you know, people, people focus quite rightly on the product, but it isn't, it isn't just about the product. It's about the machine that makes the machine and then the infrastructure that serves the machine that makes the machine and, and then the people that you need to staff all of that to do it. So it's just become this huge undertaking to do what on the face of it is just another helicopter. Right. And when you have to do all of it, it's a big job.
[00:26:20] Speaker B: Well, you know, as CEO, what were some of the biggest business challenges that you've had to embrace in putting all of that together and also raise the capital and get the word out.
[00:26:32] Speaker A: And so the most difficult part of all of it was starting, right? Because nobody is going to give you the money to start a helicopter company. If you look at the market, on average for the last 40 years, the market leader in this segment has sold 300 helicopters a year. At peak years they've sold much more than that, but on average they sold about 300 helicopters a year. So if you then put pitch into an investor and say, I'm going to design a new five seat helicopter, I want to improve general aviation, they'll look at the evidence of what the market is and has been for the last 40 years and say there's no point, it never adds up to a big number. And then you can argue till you're blue in the face that it can be better than this, but they're never going to believe you. And so I had to, I had to find a way to not only develop a new helicopter and fund it, but do that in a way where we could get it far enough to prove the point before you needed to talk to anybody like that. And that's really been the story of the first half of my life. As an adult, I spent 15 years developing the technology and the core ideas behind HX15 within my own engineering company. Just diverting company profits a bit every month, a bit every year to funding that with work done by myself for my staff.
We then eventually got to the point where we could get a little government grant, peanuts compared to what gets thrown around in other related sectors at the moment. But we managed to get 1.4 million in terms of government grants, which then allowed me to put a handful of my staff on the project full time. We then managed to develop HX50, as it now is, to a level where it started to be interesting to people. And then probably the first stroke of luck that we've had in all of this. And I'll say it's luck, I'm not going to take credit for it.
The market that we were entering was so frustrated with what was out there. The these wonderful people were prepared to support a guy that said he could do something special, had never done it before, hadn't got a factory, hadn't finished designing it yet to design it, get the first prototype flying and see the whole project through. And what I think has been the key enabler for our company has been the fact that the helicopter business specifically, or the private flying helicopter market space is a wonderful filter for the great and good of society. So these people are all the brightest, most astute business people in the world, in their own right, in their own industries. And they knew that what they were being expected to fly wasn't good enough. They knew it could be done better. They knew that certification wasn't the reason why all these things were so expensive and why everything was so far behind.
And they got so frustrated with not being listened to and in some respects being exploited that they said, you know what? Or enough of them said, you know what? We're going to give this guy a go. And that really was the catalyst then for the hockey stickers of growth and development that we, we've experienced. Those early customers, those wonderful, wonderful people that wanted this every bit as much as I did, teamed up with us, they put deposits down, 100,000 pound non refundable deposits. Can you imagine what the first customer must, must have? Well, the circumstances. He was presented with the first customer that bought one of our helicopters, a wonderful man.
And those people were prepared to believe in me enough to get this whole.
[00:30:39] Speaker B: Thing started at that time. Jace, what was the time frame from that deposit to when you told that gentleman, this is when you'll probably have your aircraft?
[00:30:49] Speaker A: We were aiming for three years at that point.
But what I should qualify that with is the scope of the project has grown an awful lot in that time. We've ended up having to do a lot more manufacturing in house than I ever intended to, to Keep the price point on, on track. So things like gears and bearings, I was never intending to make those myself, we've had to take that on. We've ended up having to do much more of the instrumentation and the digi cockpit ourselves than I ever wanted to, just to make sure that we can deliver what I, what I said we would. So, yeah, the time scale started at three years, and we're, we're four and a bit years in now. So we're, we're. It's taken a little bit longer than we intended it to, but we've ended up doing a lot more than we intended to. So that's true. And again, but, but these, these people, these people are incredibly savvy and incredibly supportive people. And the one thing that I think we, we do probably better than anybody that I'm aware of is communicate honestly and openly with these people. I do approximately weekly updates on our customer app to all of our customers, warts and all. I tell them the good stuff, the bad stuff, the successes, the failures, the problems. And they are intimately involved in the development journey. And so for many of them, the company's become a regular source of excitement and entertainment as much as it is a route to a new helicopter for them. So I think that's been one of the key things that we've done very well. And again, I don't really take credit for that. That was very much a product of the situation we found ourselves in.
A young engineer confronted with a customer base that all knew far more about business than he did. You really can't pull the wool over the eyes of those sorts of people. You just have to tell the truth. And do you know what? That's one of the best things I ever did because it just makes everything so simple.
[00:33:00] Speaker B: Well, that level of transparency must have been refreshing and probably created a lot of trust in what you were doing also.
[00:33:07] Speaker A: Yeah, because if you look at the videos and things we put out on YouTube, if you look at the social media posts that the marketing guys put out for us, if you look at our AMAs and our sort of roughly monthly updates that we, we do, then if you come and visit the factory, you'll see exactly the same thing. There's no secrets, there's no surprises. Everybody knows exactly where they stand.
And so that, that's developed a level of trust that I think is unparalleled, not just in aviation, but in any industry. And, you know, we've never claimed that what we're doing is easy. And many aspects of what we're doing are very unpredictable.
But if you just tell the truth and people can see that the progress you say you're making is what you're making, you can keep that community together and you can get the job done. And that's very much what we've learned and what we've proven over the course of the last few years.
[00:34:06] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you've used social media or you've used media in general absolutely brilliantly. That has been something we've admired as we've also watched your company in addition to what you're doing in developing the helicopter. How did that come about and become such an effective strategy that you've employed?
[00:34:26] Speaker A: I think the secret to success in any area is the having just the highest standards for your people. And we work with some brilliant, brilliant people in all areas of the business. Our sales team are absolutely world class, bar none. They've outperformed the rest of the helicopter light helicopter sales industry with just two guys and a laptop and all the right ideas, you know, and our marketing team that in the engine room behind them are also absolutely world class. So I, I was, as I said to you, I'm a helicopter nutcase, right? When I'm not at work designing helicopters, I'm thinking about helicopters or flying helicopters. And when there's Nothing on the TV at night or at the weekends, I'm watching YouTube videos about helicopters. And I'd started watching a guy called Pilot Yellow that was a flying instructor out in B.C. and I just loved the scenery that he flied around, flew around and trained people in. I kind of was longing to get out there and have a go out there myself. And one day posted a video about a guy that was clearly a sort of investor van, venture capitalist guy that was learning to fly out there with him.
And this was before we got the grant. And while I was exploring all sorts of different ways of getting the helicopter business to the, to the next stage. And so while Misha Reuben were doing their world tour in the 66, I'd arranged to go and meet them in Majorca and I went out to Majorca and I sort of pitched this HX50 idea to Reuben at the time, looking for some kind of seed capital to try and, try and get it moving.
And we went backwards and forwards for a couple of years and, and never really got to terms that would work for me.
But in the meantime we got the grants and made a load of progress and developed the helicopter. And another guy that's now a customer had said to me, do you know what people would buy this. You've got this far enough. The demand is there, people will buy this. And I still tell Nigel that it's all his fault.
And so I put this idea together called Friend. What's it called? The Founder's Edition. I called it the Founder's Edition. In the early version, it was a, it was a big discount off list price in return for a big non refundable deposit. And the idea was to try and place the first hundred machines which would get us through all of the experimental approvals. And at the time it was, it wasn't nearly as sophisticated as what you can see behind me at the moment.
It was that. And, and I stayed in contact with Reuben over the years and I mentioned this idea to him. And at that point he felt that we'd got something that we could make work.
And so we came up with a deal for them to come and act as our sales, sort of single source sales and marketing representatives. And with the experience that Ruben and Rubin's team and Mitra as well bring, that really catapulted us from just another engineering company that could do clever stuff with helicopters to a company that could tell that story very well.
[00:38:00] Speaker B: And you met Ruben because you were watching pilot yellow on YouTube and you're like, wow, that's an interesting individual and I want to get to know him. And then you found a way to get to know him and then look what happened.
[00:38:11] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I think, I think the lesson for everybody is don't, don't think for five minutes that this was an overnight success.
This has taken the full attention, my full attention for 25 years. And if you can think of a way of getting a helicopter company off the ground, I've already done it. Right? I've done it and I've proven it doesn't work. And I've tried every flavor of it, everything you can imagine to try and make this thing viable as a business I've done and failed at. And we, we eventually knocked all the rough corners off what you've got to do to make it work commercially.
And at the same time we were continuously developing and developing and developing the product. So as the product was getting more mature, as the risk was being pushed out, the program, the financial proposition was getting better and better. And we eventually got to a point where that converged to the point where we could start taking deposits. But that took a superhuman effort for over two decades.
And so it was just really, really, really difficult for a very long time. And the other thing I would say is we had a really, really unique set of market conditions. So the level of frustration in the helicopter industry has been palpable for two decades and nothing has been done about it.
All of the incumbents have received all the same feedback that I was handed on a plate.
And so I wouldn't. I think, I don't think the approach we've taken would work in many other industries. We kind of stumbled into the Goldilocks zone and that was that. Plus the right product, plus the right people, plus an absolute dogmatic determination to get the job done is what's allowed us to get to where we are now. And now it really is just about the work. Finish the work and this whole thing will explode. We've just got to get our heads down and finish the work.
[00:40:15] Speaker B: So what I'm hearing is it took you 25 years to become an overnight success.
[00:40:20] Speaker A: Exactly. It's easy. Everybody should do.
[00:40:23] Speaker B: That's right. Well, you know what, as we're recording this, Jase, it's January of 2025 and I know your team is heads down.
You're not doing media events, you're not doing conferences, you have some big milestones. So if we were talking at the end of this year, what are some things that you're just really excited that are happening in 25 for you and the company and the team?
[00:40:48] Speaker A: So there's a lot of stuff happening. The two most important things and the things that will change our world and the general aviation world, as I see it, at least it is. GT50 will run for the first time. We will make a cost effective jet engine work that's entirely built under this roof in this factory that I'm sitting in. And we'll have that running and working within 2025. And then the very first HX50 will complete its first test flight within 2025 as well. As I stand here today, both of those things are on track and viable.
Enormously tight deadlines, huge amounts of work to get through to make that possible. But both of those things are possible as I sit here today. So we're in a fantastic position financially. You asked me how we funded it. We've essentially funded this organically with the exception of a small UK government grant.
This has all been funded through my original engineering company and then the revenues we've generated through the business. There are no external investors whatsoever and we're sat here with a significant cash stockpile that gives us the time and the breathing space to finish the job.
So really now, for us, the only thing that is important is finishing the engineering. Get the Engineering done, get the machine into the air. If you do that, there are literally thousands of people waiting in the sales pipeline to buy more of these things. And the next problem that we're going to have to worry about is how on earth we get through all of the approvals in all of the different countries fast enough and how we build them fast enough to satisfy the demand.
[00:42:37] Speaker B: So you're still taking pre orders for the HX50 then?
[00:42:41] Speaker A: Yeah, HX50 and HC50 were both still taking orders for them.
[00:42:45] Speaker B: We have somebody on our team that wants to put an order in for an HX50, so we're going to do that in person when we come out and visit you guys.
[00:42:53] Speaker A: That's fantastic. Yeah, go for it. I think the two big watershed moments this year, it's very hard in, in a world where nobody's built a new jet engine since, if I'm being kind, the 1980s, if we're being real, the 60s and 70s, then a company that's never done it before can step in and make an engine that's as good as everybody else's, let alone do it at a price point that's as game changing as this. So that the moment that engine runs, everybody's perception of this project will, that's currently stood on the sidelines will change overnight. And then the same is true when we get the aircraft into the air. The next wave of them will come. And I think we've currently got about 4,000 properly qualified buyers sat in the sales pipeline that are just waiting for us to hit those margins. They're not the highly driven, passionate, highly risk savvy people that were able to come in really early, but they're equally passionate about helicopters and they're just waiting for us to prove and show we can really do it. And when we've really done it, they'll, they'll jump in. And so again, it gives us huge confidence in what we've, we've got a front in front of us and huge confidence that the product's right.
[00:44:19] Speaker B: Well, you know what I love about that, Jace, is if I understand it, the GT50, you knew it, the power you needed and you knew the price point that you needed to make this entire concept work. It wasn't available. So you didn't just think outside the box, you blew up the box and said, we're going to approach this the way nobody's ever thought about it before.
[00:44:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I had to build my own box to then put a load of other boxes in, to then put a lot of facilities in to build the GT50. So, yeah, we. The thing is, the way you start a helicopter design is with a really simple set of parametric calculations. You look at, you start with what you want it to do, how much payload you want it to carry, how far you want it to fly, how fast you want it to fly, and that all then distills down into how much power you need. And the other important engine parameters, the altitude, performance, fuel consumption. And then what typically happens in traditional helicopter companies is they'll go and look at the existing engines that are available and then start cutting corners off the product to suit what the engines that are available can actually do. And so you always end up with a compromise. And the beauty. We've talked a lot about the challenges of having to do all this stuff yourself. But the beauty of doing this yourself is when that parametric design exercise is done, it's done. That's the helicopter you're making. And it's going to do everything you wanted to do because you then set what the engine needs to do and design an engine to meet those requirements. So we've been able to design GT50 to deliver everything that HX50 needs to be able to be the helicopter that everybody wants. If I'd have tried to put a C250 in it, it doesn't have the power. Power. It doesn't have the fuel consumption, it doesn't have the life. If we tried to put some of the, the French engines in, they're much closer. They could have hit all of, well, most of the performance and the life requirements, but the customers can't afford them. You know, they're just way too expensive. So with, with our approach, yes, it's amounting to climb and development, but it means everybody gets what they want. And more important than that, it means longer term while we're supporting these machines, it gives me the ability to control the operating costs so I can keep the parts down. I can offer power by the hour, maintenance and support and warranties because I control all of the core costs of the bits you need to replace. So it just keeps the whole ecosystem healthy because it's all aimed at delivering a GA, a sustainable GA 2.0, where people can get. Continue to enjoy the helicopters indefinitely.
[00:47:01] Speaker B: Well, you know, as we come in to hover to land, Jase, what, what are just some final thoughts you've had or that you just like to leave with everybody out here who's been listening to this all over the world, I.
[00:47:14] Speaker A: I just hope everybody is excited about general aviation again. I hope I hope that what we're doing is, is just enticing people back into wanting to fly and wanting to own a helicopter and thinking about all of the amazing things that you can do when you've got access to a private aircraft. That's really the purpose of this whole venture, is to make general aviation cool again, make people want to learn to fly for fun. And that's very much what this whole, whole venture, this whole business is, is about. And that. That's what excites the customers that have been on this journey with us so far. That's their motivation. So I think we. We're trying to make a very positive contribution to the future of general aviation, like commercial aviation. And I think the helicopter's got an extremely bright future.
If you want to get up in the air and fly long distances, you go in an airplane, because that's the best sort of configuration for that. If you want to fly point to point, you go in a helicopter. And we're making a really cool one of those.
[00:48:27] Speaker B: Well, thank you. I love that. Make GA cool again. This has been awesome. Inspirational. Keep knocking them alive. I really. I'm looking forward to our next conversation and also meeting you in person over in the UK later this year. So, Jase, thank you for everything. This has been fantastic.
[00:48:42] Speaker A: Thanks a lot for inviting me on and we look forward to welcoming you to PC1 here in UK.
[00:48:47] Speaker B: Yes, we look forward to being there.
