Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: So I'm an aerospace engineer. I worked on military programs, began working on the Joint Strike fighter program, the F35 now. So I worked on that for six or seven years. Came to work for DARPA, was working on innovative technologies and autonomy.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Welcome to Hangar X Studios, where former.
[00:00:22] Speaker A: Fighter pilot and host John Ramstead takes us on a journey across aerospace as.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: It enters an historic period of innovation and transformation.
Our guests include aviation experts, pilots, financiers, military leaders, and innovators of all types.
[00:00:40] Speaker A: Buckle up for another episode of Hangar X.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: Welcome to the Hangar X podcast, where we explore everything around aviation, innovation in aerospace, and everything vtol. And today we have Mike Hershberg on the podcast. Mike, welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: Thank you very much. So great to be here.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Yeah, great to have you. You are the Director of Strategy for. The Vertical Flight Society is an incredible organization, and the contributions you and the entire team have made have influenced the entire industry in such a positive way, created innovations and collaborations, and helped everybody who's in this industry solve some really hard problems and have some breakthroughs. So we're going to be talking about a number of things today around some of the innovations that are enabling some incredible advancements, some of the big challenges that still need to be overcome, and also how this is playing out around the world. There's been some big players in advanced air mobility, especially in China, and there's some really interesting things to talk about. But with that, Michael, I'd love for you to share a little bit about your background and how you came to VFS and what VFS is for somebody not from with it.
[00:01:55] Speaker A: Sure. Well, thanks so much again for having me. It's a subject, obviously, that I love to talk about, so just some deep history.
The Vertical Flight Society was founded in 1943 during World War II as the American Helicopter Society. But from the very beginning, it was international. We had allied forces involved. We're a professional membership society, a technical charitable society. So we have members from industry, academia, and government agencies around the world that are working towards advancing vertical flight. And even though we've been. We had been going by AHS American Helicopter Society for many decades, we really were always focused on that advancement of technology for vertical flight. So in the 70s, we started going by AHS International.
We went with the tilt rotor and the invention of rotorcraft, which are not helicopters, but are based on the same principles. We looked at changing our name, and we wanted to. We looked at being the International Rotorcraft Society, but we figured if we were the irs, nobody wouldn't have anything to do with this.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: So yeah, those letters would get thrown away when you send out your new email.
[00:03:08] Speaker A: I know. Exactly, exactly. So we did officially change the name to the Vertical Flight Society, really in recognition of the different types of vertical flight. So in addition to helicopters and drones and advanced rotorcraft like tilt rotors, there's also things like the Harrier, the Joint strike fighter, the F35, and now in the last decade or so, electric vertical takeoff and landing or evtol aircraft.
And one of the things that was really different was a helicopter is very different in so many ways from a fixed wing airplane. Whether it's a, you know, Boeing 777 or Cessna or whatever, Helicopters are very different from airplanes. But when you get to distributed electric propulsion, or distributed propulsion, which is when you have batteries or an engine or something that's driving multiple propulsors. So whether they're fans or ducted fans or propellers or rotors or whatever, you have this distributed propulsion. And you can come up with these really compelling, really interesting and innovative airplanes that can take off and land vertically. So that includes electric propulsion and battery, electric, hybrid, electric, hydrogen, electric, as well as, you know, more shaft driven propulsion systems. So anyway, there's this huge revolution in the last 10, 15 years, really from the incubation stage maybe more than 10 years ago, and then really in the last half decade or so where things have really come to, I won't say quite fruition yet, but the cusp of fruition where there's multiple companies who are building and testing and flying large aircraft or the, you know, for the testing and the rigorous certification requirements.
So I'll tell you a little bit about my background. So I'm an aerospace engineer. I worked on military programs. In the 90s, I began working on the joint strike fighter program, the F35. Now the F35B is the Marine.
They call it vertical, sorry, short takeoff and vertical landing, or stovall version.
[00:05:34] Speaker B: Yeah, I got friends of mine flying that now. Do you know it has eight takeoff and landing modes.
One of their biggest training challenges they have with military pilots is what's called modal confusion with just the complexity of that cockpit. But some fascinating things I've been learning about the F35B.
[00:05:51] Speaker A: Yeah, so I was there in the early 90s, 1995 timeframe, came into the program office and trying to look at all the technologies and the lift fans, the nozzles and different things to try and make what is a 70,000 pound or whatever airplane, you know, fighter jet, take off and land with vertical capabilities.
So I worked on that for six or seven years, came to work for darpa, was working on innovative technologies and autonomy uncrewed aircraft systems, as they're called today. Also advanced rotorcraft, advanced vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. And then in 2011, I became the executive director of the Vertical Flight Society, then American Helicopter Society, and really we worked a lot of the advanced technologies for future vertical lift, which is the Army's long range vertical takeoff and landing rotorcraft. And then in the 2013 timeframe started looking at this crazy thing which people were talking about, this electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. And we've been having conferences every year since 2014. So in a few weeks we'll be having our 12th annual electric VTOL symposium, which is part of an overall arching conference which we call the Transformative Vertical Flight meeting that encompasses all types of vertical takeoff and landing and autonomy types of aircraft.
[00:07:24] Speaker B: Now in your role as director of strategy, what are some of your primary focuses going into this year?
[00:07:31] Speaker A: Yeah, so the VTOL industry in particular, you know, the non helicopter manned aircraft and larger aircraft have now have all the framework for the FAA and easa. They have the regulations set out for how they should certify the aircraft. And now they have to make the changes to the aircraft development plans to prove out to the FAA and to the certifying authorities that their aircraft can meet all these requirements. So this is sort of the, maybe the long boring process of dotting all the I's and crossing the T's and making sure that all the flight tests that they're doing go to prove that these aircraft are safe. And that's really the ultimate objective of every everybody developing aircraft, that these are going to be safe and effective or benign maybe in the air traffic management system. So you're looking for the safe and efficient integration of the national airspace or the global airspace.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, if anybody flies a Boeing or an Airbus today, you're like, I'm flying in a safe airplane. And that level of trust absolutely is absolutely going to have to parlay into these new aircraft.
[00:08:54] Speaker A: So yeah, that's actually an interesting topic. So in 2016, when Uber came out with their Elevate white paper and this initiative, it got a little bit too much hype. And people were thinking, you know, is this a get rich quick scheme? Like, I've got a drone, I can make it fly. Can I, you know, make billions of dollars too? And it got a little bit, maybe like I said, a little bit too much hype. And so people were hoping that eventually there might be tens of thousands of aircraft flying and that there'd be large numbers of the public flying with these small aircraft. Well, normally small aircraft don't have to have the same level of safety as an airliner. Airliners are the safest means of transportation ever devised by humankind. They, you know, almost nobody is ever killed in a, you know, US or European airline accident anymore. So trying to get these small aircraft to that same level of safety or approaching that same level of safety is, is hundreds of times or thousands of times safer than what you would normally require for a five passenger or four passenger aircraft. So definitely they're going to be much more safer. Sorry, much safer. The system safety design is like I said, orders of magnitude higher than what would be for a comparable sized airplane or helicopter.
Because the hope is that there will be safe enough that members of the public can fly just like you do in an airliner and you don't have to worry about there being any accident or that you're not going to reach your, your destination safely. So it's definitely first time in history that a brand new type of aircraft has been designed and being designed to have these incredible, incredibly high levels of safety.
[00:10:49] Speaker B: Yeah. So, you know, developing toward having this safe project that we can certify, you know, commercially certified aircraft for use for somebody who's going to operate it for profit.
There are so many business cases around that.
That's definitely one. And I'd love for you to expand on that as you're looking across the industry. What are some of the biggest challenges? Technically different innovations. Propulsion batteries, battery infrastructure. There's so many that probably come to mind for me. But I'd love to know what are the top biggest challenges that you guys are seeing that people are really trying to solve? They're working hard to solve them right now.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I mean, I used to say there's a thousand reasons why evtol aircraft won't work. But we're trying to find solutions to all of them and I think we're getting pretty close. I mean, there's still a lot of naysayers out there who really just doubt the fundamentals of electric VTOL and electric propulsion and distributor propulsion and VTOL in general. There's some people who just feel that the helicopter is, you know, better in every single way. But you know, some of these innovations are looking at, as I mentioned, safer, faster, potentially much quieter.
So, you know, if you can transition from vertical flight to wingborne flight, you can have much more efficiencies from that and just, you know, Introduction of a brand new level of autonomy or system safety in the cockpit. So helicopters have been well known. You know, it takes, you know, one, it takes one and a half people to fly a helicopter. You know, you've got to have, you know, your hands and feet all moving at the same time. There have been many improvements in helicopters and also airplanes as far as autonomy. You mentioned at the, at the beginning about the F35B where there's different modes. A lot of those are all computer controlled so that the pilot isn't actually controlling all the things. They even have an auto land feature. You just press the button and it'll come to a hover and then come to a land. So with autonomy, there's lots more levels of safety and efficiency through the air system so that advanced aircraft can be more efficient than aircraft that were designed decades ago.
[00:13:08] Speaker B: And so what are some of the challenges there in that? Is it the flight control system, the flight laws to provide the autonomy, to provide, you know, I'm a commercial pilot. You know, me and Salim, who you both know, he's got a lot more hours than me, but I have 6,000 hours. But let's say I take a 500 hour commercial pilot and I want to put him in an EV toll or something even longer range. Like what, you know, what XTI is building, you need to be able to have a transition. And the FAA came out with the SFARS talking about that transition in pilot training. But what are some of the, I guess, challenges or maybe some of the big, you know, bright spots in the software, the flight control systems that you're, that the industry is really focused on right now.
[00:13:53] Speaker A: So fly by wire is kind of a known thing that's been flying for 50 years in experimentation and also in airlines. I believe Airbus aircraft are generally all fly by wire, which just means that it's computer controlled. Just like when you're driving a car, you know, you've got general mechanical control of your steering wheel, but you've got computers that are in the loop that may help with your abs, your automatic braking, and then now with autonomous driving to help you stay in your lane and things like that.
So with these, with fly by wire, you know, it's a computer that's actually controlling it and you're telling it what to do so the computer can make sure that you don't do anything stupid, basically that you don't fly the aircraft into the ground or try to rip the wings off or things like that. So fly by wire is, like I said, it's known The FAA has been, I'll say, a bit slow or a bit conservative in approving fly by wire helicopters and aircraft or business aviation and the general public.
But it really is an enabler for these new configurations where you couldn't possibly, you know, if there's three different thrusters or six or eight or 12 different thrusters, you couldn't possibly control them all at the same time and, you know, be able to be able to do a, you know, have good control over it in these different modes. So the vertical takeoff, the horizontal takeoff, the transition, things like that. So computer control, fly by wire. And this automation will really provide huge dividends both in the efficiency and the comfort and the safety of aircraft.
There's something called simplified vehicle operations that people have been looking at for the last several years, which is again, taking away some of the stick and rudder, some of the really manual adjustments. And you are telling the aircraft computer what you wanted to do. We want to fly on this heading rather than you're actually controlling the flaps and the airlines and the throttle settings and things like that.
So I'll say the FAA is, you know, looking at all these things as well as complete autonomy. The companies like Boeing's WISC is looking at not having a pilot on board. So you'd have operator, remote operator on the ground and the, and the aircraft in the air would be flying itself.
So the, you know, there's, I think there's a groundswell of momentum for future, maybe complete autonomy in the air. So they're being controlled, operated, monitored from the ground, and there are steps towards that. I'd say that's, you know, some years still out there for these higher levels of autonomy, but certainly the computer controlled fly by wire systems is a key enabler for that.
[00:16:51] Speaker B: Yeah, in Bell helicopters, fly by wire is quite a milestone. Any other, like, big achievements that stand out to you, what you're seeing?
[00:17:00] Speaker A: Well, I would say the FAA has not yet approved a fly by wire vertical flight aircraft. So the Bell 525 Relentless will hopefully be certified this year. Also, the tilt rotor, which Bell had originally started and now is Leonardo, the AW609 civil tilt rotor is fly by wire. Hopefully that will also see certification this year.
But, you know, the FAA wants to be very conservative and prudent and make sure that all of their concerns are addressed.
[00:17:34] Speaker B: What I mean by milestone, they got the airplane, it's now ready to be certified, but they've put in the work, developed the systems, the flight control, the avionics to be able to do, and that was a big step forward for the industry.
[00:17:48] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:17:49] Speaker B: Anything else like that standing out, that's going to allow like some other breakthroughs where, hey, you know what, this could shorten my timeline to certification because of how, here's what I'm thinking is you take a Joby or an Archer or something that has multiple engines, and if I'm in vertical flight or even transitional flight, my normal flight controls don't work. So I'm going to have to maybe move my engines independently to attribute to roll or yaw or a gust or, you know, certain things like that. So the flight controls are going to have to operate very differently than we've seen in any other aircraft before.
[00:18:29] Speaker A: Yeah. And fly by wire enables that. So you don't have to worry so much about, you know, am I in vertical flight or am I in horizontal flight? As far as what the angle, the tilt angle, things like that are.
[00:18:41] Speaker B: So you're trying to make it seamless for the pilot. They just know I want to stay here and come in and land and in a very controlled fashion and settle down slowly. And you're telling the computer what to do and it's then using the flight controls and the engine positioning to accomplish that.
[00:18:56] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And it's not quite on topic, but I did fly in a V22 Osprey a dozen years ago or so. And you know, it's not a commercial aircraft, but they had a little window, you know, so you could see outside and you could see the tilt angle of the nacelle. So it's a fly by wire aircraft. And I couldn't really tell, like, what if we were horizontal or vertical. Like, I mean, I sort of tell it, but it wasn't like, oh my God, we're transitioning now. Right. It was very smooth. And if I didn't know that I was in any particular special aircraft, I wouldn't have been able to tell. And, you know, I don't, you know, that's. That's 1980s technology basically. And so I don't know how germane that is to today's vertical flight aircraft. But yeah, I think that the computer controls will really be groundbreaking and enabling for this next generation of aircraft.
[00:19:51] Speaker B: Now, what are some of the biggest innovations that need to happen that can help this entire industry move forward or accelerate the momentum?
[00:20:01] Speaker A: Yeah, so the main thing now, I think that the biggest requirement for the companies that are the farthest ahead, that are kind of in this, say, final approach, maybe for certification, is money.
You've seen a couple companies now in Germany Lilium and volocopter where they have been going on now for many years. Volocopter first flew in 2011 and it's just a simple little two seater, you know, aircraft that they've been trying to get certified.
And easa, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency put place the bar higher or you know, we were saying maybe too high, where it's got to be at least as safe as an airliner or it's got to be as safe as an airline. And it's kind of silly for a two seater or even some of the smaller ones, but that really drove up a lot of weight and complexity and redundancy. But both of those companies basically filed for in the US which you call Chapter 11 protection. So they're still in business.
Lillium has found somebody to invest more, more money into it which keeps them moving along in their progress. But that's really, I think front of mind even for the or top of mind for the US companies like, you know, you look at the 525, the Bell, Relentless and the 609, they've been saying for five years or more now that we think that, you know, we think that this year or next year we're going to get the certification. So they've done the design and they're ready to be certified. But still they're answering questions from the FAA and I don't have any insights into what those things are. But it's, you know, to actually get to certification or actually, actually be certified is, you know, you don't want to know when it's going to come. And so the companies I think are really trying to prove out the designs and that's right now that's the name of the game I think for 2025 and potentially in the future with all these different new designs is actually being certified.
As far as technologies, I'll just say that, you know, batteries are very limited. We think that for the kind of short range urban air mobility missions and maybe some of the mid range missions, you know, 50, maybe 50 to 100 miles, that batteries can do it for some of the smaller aircraft. But as at least with today's technology, you know, you're going to need better batteries, much better batteries. A step change in batteries to get much further than that. But there is also hybrid and then hybrid propulsion using the energy and fossil fuels. And then kind of, you know, farther on the horizon is the hybrid, sorry, hydrogen electric fuel cells which we see as, you know, potentially a game changer. But again, there's a thousand reasons why it won't work. And so we're trying to figure out, you know, the path that will work to actually get the certified viable business using hydrogen electric propulsion.
[00:23:01] Speaker B: Well, yeah, when I'm thinking about propulsion, I think there's a lot of breakthroughs that can happen there. If I'm looking at pure battery, every taking off and landing on my craft is going to be at max gross weight and I'm going to have limited range. It could constrict me to VFR only operations, just with the far rules for reserves, things like that. So there's a lot of focus on hybrid. We spent years researching that ourselves. What companies do you see are really making some strides, some advancement that could really unlock more capacity and capability in what's being developed on the aircraft side.
[00:23:40] Speaker A: You mean propulsion specific or companies?
[00:23:43] Speaker B: Yeah, companies. Yeah, companies or technologies or ideas. I know DARPA's been working on some things, but I'd love your, your just your thoughts on hybrid propulsion.
[00:23:52] Speaker A: Yeah, sure, absolutely. So when battery EV, you know, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, when people were really looking at, I'll say evtol, there was this sense that, well, you could keep it small enough, you know, four passengers plus a pilot and batteries would be fine. But it was always recognized that for longer range, larger capacities, higher speeds, you would need something like, like hybrid electric. But there weren't many companies who had actually done that much work in there.
Some companies would just say, oh yeah, it'll be hybrid electric and not really look at the details. Or I should say when they first started looking at the details and it looked promising, but as they looked at, you know, second and third level of details, it got less and less promising.
So batteries have, I think that's a 20th as much energy density as fossil fuels do. So if you want to go, if you need more energy, just batteries are really a tough argument to make, particularly for vertical flight.
With a hybrid system, you then have two systems, right? So you've got your engine, your turbo generator and you've got all the battery, the buffer battery and the electric inverters and things like that.
I remember also when XCI was looking at hybrid electric systems that putting the electric motor in the hub then blocked a lot of the fan, so you weren't getting as much airflow because they had this big, relatively big diameter motor in the middle of the fan. So, yeah, so at first blush it looked like, hey, this is a great technology to make it all to make the electric motors in there. But then when you actually do the, like I said, the second third level studies, it's like, huh, this isn't as easy as I thought it was. And I think Also when in 2016 when Uber Elevate came out with this, the study, it was based on a couple companies who had really done the work. Companies that are out still today, you know, Joby and Wisk that have, that had already done five or more years of development testing. So there was sort of like, yeah, we know this can work. And then it was try to encourage other companies to come up with designs that could also work. And that really inspired a lot of people and a lot of companies.
But again, I think there is a whole kind of get rich quick scheme of people not coming in from outside of aviation and not really knowing all the challenges, particularly with certification that were required to make something that's actually a viable business case.
[00:26:38] Speaker B: You know, that's a good point. Any of these systems, hydrogen, turbo electric, they're eventually going to have to be certified because I can't sell an airplane that's not certified. I don't get to sell a Beta.
I have to sell a certified aircraft.
It's going to be interesting to see where that goes. That's, you know, when we looked at, when we did all of our research because we wanted to have a range of 700 miles and a payload 1800 plus pounds, we're looking at that.
We could not do it with anything we saw, either battery or even hybrid. So it's our development plan as technologies mature. And I know a lot of other players are also looking at, you know, some similar approaches. Be as green as possible as you get there because that's important. You know, we were talking to some possible customers in Canada that that's critical, you know, if they're going to be buying new aircraft up there for use inside of Canada and globally. So very aware of that.
[00:27:35] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And especially like in Europe, I mean they are very, the population is very concerned about climate change and pollution. And so I was talking to somebody from Europe this morning where the companies, and this is a major airline in Europe, companies are saying if you're, if you have a meeting that's less than 600 miles away, then you need to take a train and not fly and it's going to take an extra day so you need more hotel space. But anyway, it's like, you know, there are places in the world where continuing to use conventional fossil fuel is not, is not going to be acceptable for especially some of these things. But to the XCI's, case in point. Yeah, I Mean, what you want to do is not possible with batteries and difficult to do even with hybrid electric propulsion.
[00:28:34] Speaker B: Well, you know, it's interesting. A sustainable aviation fuel which has about a 70 to 80% less carbon footprint, you know, that qualifies under Canada's regulations as a green system. So, you know, I mean, that's going to be part of our platform.
[00:28:50] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And sustainable aviation fuel is a fantastic solution and there's not really any technology involved. The only thing is, is they can't make it fast enough and cheap enough. It's the capacity today. But there is, they've proven it out in all kinds of, in all kinds of engines. And so it's Safe.
[00:29:10] Speaker B: Well, the US Navy test.
[00:29:12] Speaker A: Yeah, especially in a blend when it's 100% SAF, there's some question about some of the durability of the seals. But yeah, I mean, airliners today all over the world are using saf. And if, and hopefully the US and Europe and other countries can really scale up production because that'll have a significant impact on carbon generation.
[00:29:37] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. Now, we've talked a lot about regulations in all kinds. Every aspect of developing these airplanes. What are you seeing of any coordination between the FAA and ESA and other regulatory bodies? Because things that are being developed in Europe or China or here in the US are going to be cross sold into these markets. Dubai is probably going to be one of the first places where a lot of these are going to be tested. They're very. But what are you seeing in that area of harmonization of regulatory and certification?
[00:30:13] Speaker A: Yeah. So the FAA and EASA came from very different perspectives. Kind of as I alluded to before, those two companies, Volocopter and Lilium, had these massively redundant systems with 36 or 18 different propulsors. So it's all about this massive redundancy and then they kind of up the game of this. It's one in a billion chance of having an accident from a failure.
So they came at it for different perspectives, but the FAA obviously also wants to have things that are very, very safe. They're coming at it from different perspectives, but I won't say harmonization, but there's compatibility where if you prove that something's, if you certify something in one country, that there's pathways to have it accepted, obviously without as much work as starting from scratch, certifying it from the whole different thing. So all the companies, you know, in, I'll say those, the Western Hemisphere are very much looking at this global market of, you know, North America, South America, Europe. And there's good communications and discussions and collaboration. I think maybe even to be able to have something where it's, you know, when the FAA comes out, well, you look at it with EASA and vice versa. And a lot of it is a means of compliance. So you've said this is going to be 10 to the minus ninth, you know, one in a billion chance of failure. So how do you prove that, you know, means of compliance? How do you prove that to the FAA or to EASA and things like that?
I think you mentioned China.
So the Civil Aviation Authority of China, CAAC was the world's first authority to certificate an EVTOL aircraft. That's the Ehang Eh216 and that's a single seat vehicle EVTOL aircraft. It got 16 propellers, it's completely autonomous, there's nobody on, on board. It's obviously monitored and guided from the ground.
They actually certified it as a, as a passenger carrying drone, which was, which was interesting. There also are cargo versions of that.
So that's significant. And they've also.
China is really interesting. We knew this was coming but I think in the last two or three months there have been like 10 or 15 companies in China that have, that have been flying full scale large passenger carrying prototypes.
So you know, for the last 15 years it's really been Europe and the US that have been leading in development of these advanced air mobility aircraft. And from quantity anyway, the Chinese, I mean the Chinese government's putting a lot of money into different companies, drone companies, aircraft companies, universities. So you just see this explosion of different concepts in China generally countries are Western companies don't accept Chinese certification. Just off the bat, that had to be also validated by other authorities, whether that's FAA or Transport, Canada or Europe.
[00:33:41] Speaker B: How would you describe the differences maybe for us to understand it, between maybe CAAC and how they would certify an airplane and how the FAA would like. What are those gaps that are there?
[00:33:54] Speaker A: And I'm not an expert on regulations, I will say that the Chinese are much less transparent. So if there is an accident that happens in Western company countries, sorry, you know, there's in the US there's a National Transportation Safety Board, there's an investigation, you publish the, you know, results, you study these things, you look at how to improve it. It's all public knowledge.
You don't have that in China. You don't know if anything's ever crashed. I mean the Ehang for instance, we don't know that any aircraft has ever crashed. And Maybe they haven't.
So there's a transparency and I don't know that there's any less rigor. But I would say that the, that in general that FAA and eos are probably more conservative than Chinese. And maybe you're looking at this one passenger aircraft and okay, well, if it falls out of the sky, you know, that person who got in there, that person will be hurt or killed and maybe there's some impact on the, on the ground.
And that's very different than if you have, you know, an airliner where hundreds of people are putting themselves in there and the Chinese have now, I believe, certified their, the COMAC. Whatever it is. Nine, I can't remember that. AC919, C919, I think it is.
So they have an airliner, so just a level of risk. Whereas in Europe particularly, like, they don't like to have single engine helicopters because they're concerned, flying over populated areas, that maybe that helicopter will crash and hurt people on the ground. So I think there's just a different mindset and philosophy between the Chinese and the Western authorities.
[00:35:36] Speaker B: I wonder if the FAA looks at it almost like they do a military aircraft because it doesn't go through an FAA certification process, its own internal process. But it's not FAA certification for commercial sales.
If I wanted to take a military airplane, even if it was a twin engine turbo prop, but it hadn't gone through certification, I'd have to start from square one if I wanted to sell that commercially. I wonder if that might be their perspective.
[00:36:02] Speaker A: Maybe it's not quite the same if you have data, if you've flown your aircraft hundreds of hours or thousands of hours or millions of hours or whatever, that's a lot of data. And so it's no longer theoretical numbers of how safe something is. Right. You have to have the data.
So the FAA really likes data, so that would help. Right. So if EASA actually, sorry, if Ehang, for instance, said, okay, here is all the data about all of our flights, we've never had an accident, it's completely safe, then that would really help their case for certification either in the US or in Europe.
[00:36:41] Speaker B: Well, I love that. Now as we wrap up, Mike, put your director of strategy, that strategic hat back on. That's right. And let's just think two or three years out, it's 20, 28, and we're looking back at the industry and the state of things. What are some things that you think we'll be talking about if we were having this conversation three years from now?
[00:37:03] Speaker A: Sure. Well, hopefully we'll be talking about how several companies that are, like I said, in hopefully the final approach for certification today have been certified and had initial operations. So some of these companies, like Joby Archer Beta, that are looking at, you know, this passenger transport and cargo transport, hopefully they're all certified and have begun operations, maybe multiple flights a day, you know, hundreds or thousands of flights a year. And people really learn from these. If you look at the iPhone, iPhone came out in, what, 2009. So more than 15 years ago, it wasn't really that great. I mean, compared to what we had today, it was marginally better than a BlackBerry. I mean, it did some things better and didn't even have a keyboard. So, like, how are people going to use this thing?
[00:37:53] Speaker B: It reminds me of Henry Ford.
Somebody said, why don't you pick a different color? Why don't you pull your customers? He goes, well, if I pull my customers, what they would have told me is they wanted the faster horse.
[00:38:04] Speaker A: Right? That's right.
[00:38:06] Speaker B: Because they didn't know the utility and capacity of what that car was at the time. And I think we're kind of in that same realm now.
[00:38:17] Speaker A: Yeah. And we're also.
We can't really take advantage of new technology that comes out today for something we're trying to certify tomorrow because you have to have the thousands of hours or the flight test. So these designs are basically tweaks to something that was designed five years ago. Right. So it's. What was that? State of the art. So once you get the first one certified, you can then. I shouldn't say in parallel with that. The company's already working on, okay, what'll be the next aircraft? You know, is it going to be better batteries, longer range, or is it a slightly different application or things like that? Right. So 20, 28, maybe we'll see some of these early 2.0, or maybe it's 1.1 or 1.2 configurations that take advantage of, you know, improved batteries or, you know, different configurations. And again, learning from the. The first cases, the first use cases, obviously helicopters are much better today than they were when they came out 80 years ago. And the latest helicopters are even a lot more advanced than they were a few years ago.
So I think we'll see some of that.
We.
I don't think we're going to see any hydrogen electric VTOL aircraft by then.
Maybe some initial uses of hydrogen for conventional takeoff and landing. I know companies like ZeroAvia want to have.
Get. Get certified or at least start doing some testing. I shouldn't say testing some flights in the uk so there's a lot of momentum towards hydrogen. But like I said with Evtol, there's a thousand reasons why hydrogen won't work and it's hopefully we think that they're all solvable.
But yeah, in this time I think companies will start, I hope will be closer to solutions and certification for hydrogen and for that matter for greater levels of autonomy for aircraft as well. So those are the kind of the big what's next? I think we'll see battery electric, hopefully more hybrid electric configurations and hydrogen electric. And then of course, you know, other designs, new innovative designs, you know, like XDIS shaft driven lift band configuration, the Bell 525 Relentless and the AW609 civil tilt rotor. You know, certainly hope that these will be certified and be well in that those aircraft will be well certified and well in use by then, well advanced.
[00:40:55] Speaker B: We'd like to see that in three years too.
[00:40:57] Speaker A: Yeah, sorry, I got a little bit doubled up. But we think these technologies will hopefully be proving themselves out.
[00:41:02] Speaker B: Well, you know what, there'll be some exciting things to talk about and Mike, we'd love to have you come back on and you know, as you're working on some things with vertical flight society and our whole community, you know, if there's issues that are coming up you'd like to talk about, we'd love to have you come back here and use this as a platform, talk about what you're doing, upcoming conferences, maybe something that comes out of this conference. They're like, hey, here's a couple things, you know, we'd like to come back on and just share with the community. So yeah, absolutely, we'd love to do that.
[00:41:30] Speaker A: Our website is vtol.org, so vtol.vtol.org, you know, great material, planning. And it's been that way since we had our first website in 1995. And it's got information on our upcoming conferences, our Transformative Vertical Flight, our Hydrogen Electric Symposium. And we have a big annual forum that covers everything, all the technologies from little drones to helicopters and everything else beyond.
[00:41:56] Speaker B: And what's the date of the forum? The big one?
[00:41:58] Speaker A: So our annual forum is in May. It's in Virginia Beach, May 22nd through the 20th. Sorry, 20th through 22nd.
And that's usually about 1200 attendees. And we have about 300 presentations, technical presentations, and a lot of executives and you know, researchers from again in industry, academia and government.
[00:42:20] Speaker B: Yeah, that's where I learned how to fly the F14 mike. So that's one of. That's. That place is near and dear to my heart, so maybe I'll have to make it out there for that one.
[00:42:27] Speaker A: Yeah, that'd be wonderful. That'd be great.
[00:42:29] Speaker B: All right. Well, man, thank you so much. Keep knocking them alive out there. Thanks for the work you and all the team do, and we'll talk to you soon.
[00:42:35] Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you so much.
