#61 - Meet the Startup Reinventing Aircraft

Today we meet the Tesla of aircraft travel. Let's get into it.

Uh, from my obsession with aviation, I've developed a new kind of supersonic propulsion system. It's very similar to existing jet engines, but, um, so yeah, making affordable supersonic flight.

You can simplify it all down to like 4 forces that are, you know, all kind of acting against each other. Um, and so I think the concept of paying off that mass debt is a really great way to look at it.

That is the long-term goal of like Replace airline travel with low-cost, supersonic, on-demand flight.

It totally— it radically changes, I think, like the operating model of the aircraft.

Well, welcome back to The Tech Optimist. This is a Meet the Startup episode for you today. And the startup today is Astro Mechanica. Now, on the AV side of the ball, who's on the mound? Our starting pitcher is Drew Wanzalag, senior associate here at Alumni Ventures. He's in pinstripes. And then Behind the plate, or up to bat I should say, is Ian Brooke, founder and CEO of Astro Mechanica. And then myself, my name is Sam. I am the guide, editor, and just, you know, I take you through the episode each week. So a little bit about Astro Mechanica and a little bit about the conversation that's going to happen today. Now, Ian is a very experienced pilot and mechanical engineer, so he knows the ins and outs of airplanes like Nobody does like this. This man's knowledge on airplanes and engineering is insane. Like, you'll see it here in the interview. It's really cool. There's a lot of really nuanced sort of engineering and technology that they talk about today in the episode, um, that really helps define what the new jet engine is, which is what Astromechanica is doing. So I want to read a little bit of a snippet from a tweet that Ian gave out in February of this year. My company, Astromechanica, has invented a new kind of jet engine. Unlike any existing engine, it's efficient at every speed. Because it's efficient at every speed, we can use it in a new way: as the first stage of an orbital launch vehicle. The resulting platform will get payloads to orbit dramatically cheaper than all rocket systems, among many possible applications. So they're going to talk more about it here in a few minutes, but I'll stop yapping and let's get into it. Enjoy. As a reminder, the Tech Optimist podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not personalized advice, and it is not an offer to buy or sell securities. For additional important details, please see the text description accompanying this episode.

And we'll start things off. Uh, hello everyone. I'm Drew Wonsalak. I'm an investor with Alumni Ventures, and I am here with Ian Brooke, who is the founder and CEO of Astromechanica. It's so great to have you on, Ian. Let's kick things off with just a brief introduction on yourself and the high, high-level elevator pitch on Astromechanica and what you guys are doing.

Yeah. So yeah, hey, I'm Ian Brooke, founder of Astromechanica. Let's see my quick bio on this. Lifelong pilot. And I should use the term like full-stack mechanical engineer. I do everything from CAD to machining to selling the products. At least that's sort of my prior work. So yeah, everything from atoms, from like the raw material to delivered products, has like always been my thing. And have, from my obsession with aviation, have developed a new kind of supersonic propulsion system. It's very similar to existing jet engines, but so yeah, making affordable supersonic flight.

For those of you who are not aware, like I was not aware, supersonic flight refers to travel through the air at speeds faster than the speed of sound. So this is approximately 767 miles per hour or 1,234 kilometers per hour at sea level. This speed is also referred to as Mach 1, and speeds between Mach 1 and Mach 5 are considered supersonic, while speeds above Mach 5 are classified as hypersonic.

And I think the big unlock here is what you guys are describing as this, this turboelectric adaptive engine. Correct me if I'm— my phrasing is off, or, you know, there's obviously additional pieces to that. Explain the technology. I mean, you know, what is it that you guys are building? How does it work? You know, in as simplest terms as possible, and, you know, we can dive in a little bit deeper where it makes sense.

Yeah. So I think the way to think about it is aircraft engines do 2 things, and we tend to think of it as one thing, but they do 2 things. There's a thermodynamic cycle which is extracting energy from fuel to create power. And then the second thing is propulsion or generating thrust from that power. And in all engines, these two things— all engines, these two things sort of happen at the same time, so they get a little conflated with each other. But what makes for good thermal efficiency and what makes for good propulsive efficiency are two very different things. And the insight that I had from some obsessive work I was doing in aviation was electric motors had gotten extremely lightweight. And so that lets you do something very new, which is you can use an existing jet engine, a turbine engine, turboshaft engine, turbine thermodynamic cycle to generate electrical power. It's now very light. The electric motor is the heavy piece of this. Previously, it wasn't viable. Now it's very lightweight. Now you can create a separate propulsive engine. So it's like taking That typical airplane engine and splitting it into 2 things. And now they can both be optimized for, well, what is optimal for them. So the turbine core gets to run at its sweet spot for max thermal efficiency. And then on the propulsive end, the one actually pushing the plane through the air, that one can now sort of adapt. This is where the turbine and the adaptive cycle part and they're electrically joined. This is where turboelectric adaptive engine comes about. But the adaptive side can now Essentially behave— it can be the correct propulsive mode or cycle for any given speed that the airplane is at. So if you're subsonic, that looks kind of like an airliner. It's a fan cycle that works really well up to like Mach 0.8. Then when you go faster than that, you can become more of a jet cycle. You start to combust that air behind the fan. And which, like, your perfect engine would ideally only push air out the back slightly faster than the airplane is going forward. Anything faster than what the plane is— like, if you're going 250 meters per second, you don't want to be pushing air out the back at 500 meters per second. That's a lot of wasted energy. Instead, you'd rather move a large mass of air, say, at 300 meters per second when you're going 250. So it's doing that, and that becomes viable when you have this thing split. So yeah, this is— Because in a nutshell, We have like a highly variable exhaust velocity that we can trade off with mass flow. So that's it in a nutshell. Hopefully not too technical, but.

Yeah, but I think, well, emphasis on not too technical. I still think there was a lot of origin there for, you know, non-aerospace engineers. You know, we joked when we first met, I took some summer classes. So the terms I know, right? But I'm gonna challenge you a little bit here 'cause we talked about some of the difficulties of storytelling around deeply technical solutions. Like, let's do a little like aerospace engineering, you know, 101, class number 1 with Ian. How does a jet engine that people kind of hear about or see about today, how does that work? And then maybe we can dive into the individual pieces. You touched on electric motors and how that's kind of changing the paradigm in jet engines. So in as quick and simple a way as you can, you know, what is the science? What is the technology behind the existing state of a jet engine? Yeah.

Jet engines, as all combustion engines, they do 4 things. We call it suck, squeeze, bang, blow. It sucks in air, it squeezes it, it explodes it, and it exhausts it out the back. That happens on all airplane engines. And so when you go on an airliner, I think we mostly use gates now, but when you walk on an airplane, you see that big fan. That fan is the thing pushing the air, but that's being driven by a separate thing. And that separate thing is the one sort of running this thermal cycle, as we would say. That's the one burning the fuel and that's pushing the fan, or spinning the fan, which pushes the plane. So that's a normal airplane engine. We're really just doing something quite like that, except we don't directly drive it. We take that core that spins the fan, we put it kind of next to it, and we electrically couple them. So that's— and then when we do that, now we can burn fuel behind that fan in another way. And that's what allows us to go even faster. It's like a very efficient afterburner. So yeah, hopefully this is slightly simpler, but—

It is. I think that was tremendously helpful. And then even within that, I'll keep it simple, maybe losing some nuance, but in that kind of jet engine, The engines you see on the commercial airliner that you took on your last trip somewhere on a vacation looks very different than the engine that you would see with an afterburner on a fighter jet. Mm-hmm. Talk to the differences there, you know, again, 'cause the technology and conceptually very similar.

Mm-hmm.

What are those differences and kind of what are the trade-offs between something that is, you know, maybe a little bit more high efficiency versus something that's a little bit higher You know, quote unquote performance or speed.

Yeah. So I guess it can be summarized as you're trying to create thrust. Uh, thrust is mass times velocity. So it's how much air you're taking in, you know, X amount of air and you're pushing it at X speed. It doesn't matter from a thrust perspective whether you're doing 1 kilogram per second, you know, 1 unit of air at 100 units of speed, Or flip that. That is equal thrust. The difference though is— so we've described this. This is true if you're at 0 miles an hour, but as you start to move, well, you have some forward speed. And so the difference ends up being if you have a very low velocity, that becomes like exhaust velocity. That doesn't work when you're going really fast. And that's why fighter jet engines look different is like, well, they're pushing air very fast all the time. So when you're slow, that's wasted energy, but when you're fast, that's necessary. This is why like an airliner engine can't just go supersonic. The exhaust velocity would be too low. But it's really efficient because it's just taking in all of this air. Like air is around us, that is free reaction mass. It's free stuff to push out the back. And the reason you don't want to push air too fast is kinetic energy is 1/2 mv squared. So that v squared really penalizes you. As opposed to just taking in more mass. So, that's why this is a thing that you want to optimize around. And because in a normal engine, these things are physically linked, whatever the size the engine is, you're just committed to that. I sort of have this analogy of like it's a fixie bike. When you build a normal engine, it is committed to one ratio of this. You can't turn these knobs. For us, by decoupling them, it's like we've introduced a gearbox into this equation. So, now we actually can vary these things.

All right, everyone knows the drill. We're gonna take a break and then we'll be right back. Don't go anywhere.

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And it's incredibly helpful. And the second question I always ask companies after, like, well, first, you know, what are you doing, right? I think the second most important question is the why now piece. And you touched on this a little bit with, you know, I think the performance and the cost and the availability of the electric motor.

Mm-hmm.

Dive into that a little bit more in terms of, you know, why has it taken so long I think as people learn about what you guys do, it's going to go, oh, okay, that makes a lot of sense. Why is it 2024 and we're just figuring this out now?

Yeah, there's a little bit of like, this is a second-order effect of the EV revolution, I would say, is the big one. Even using sort of a Tesla-style electric motor, which are good electric motors for cars, it would be way too heavy. The weight of electric motors Yeah. I've described this thing where like, all right, we, we had the turbine engine and we had the separate propulsive engine and we coupled them electrically. The weight of those electric motors and generators attaching those 2 things would like weigh more than the airplane itself with like old-style motors. So we've seen like a Tesla— I just have to use numbers in this. A Tesla-style motor is like roughly 2 kilowatts per kilogram. Just note this is a number. The number is 2. For— so if we have, you know, 2,000 kilowatts or 2 megawatts, that's like 1,000 kilograms of motor. That's really heavy. The engine that this is being attached to is 200 kilograms. So just the thing that the engine is attached to is like 5 times as much in the old paradigm. What has changed is, in part, we had silicon carbide semiconductors. This allowed really high voltage, higher efficiency inverters that drove down motor weight. And then the other thing is just like we just got much better at making electric motors. We actually get our motors right now from a Formula 1 vendor. Where cost is no object. Let's make this as power dense as we can. And our low-performance motors are about 5 times better on power density than a Tesla motor. I'm sure they're also immensely more expensive, but for aerospace, it's all cheaper than jet engines. And then we've got one more still, which is up to 27 kilowatts per kilogram. So we went from 2 Our current ones are 10 and we're getting other ones that are 27. So yeah, it's like a 14x improvement. Having a 14x reduction in weight is a really big deal for something like this. That's why you can consider this. There's a mass— we had to pay a certain mass debt to this. The higher efficiency that we get from this thing allows us to pay that off very quickly. Before, it'd be like you could never pay off the sort of mass debt that you took on. Even if it was more efficient, the thing was too heavy. But now we're at the point where, like, yeah, it's a little bit heavier, but you save that after not even an hour of flying time. So hopefully that makes sense.

I like the term mass debt that you use. I don't know if I've heard that before because You know, I think most things in aerospace engineering, in aerodynamics, is a series of trade-offs, right? I mean, you can simplify it all down to like 4 forces that are, you know, all kind of acting against each other. And so I think the concept of paying off that mass debt is a really great way to look at it. And part of the paradigm shift of what you guys are doing with this engine is almost changing that formula. In a way, right, where you, you can kind of get that efficiency maybe without the same trade-offs that existing options would have to give up. Um, talk broadly about kind of what the future of air travel, of, you know, aerospace, of airplanes could look like, um, 10, 20 years down the line if, if Astromechanica, you know, engines and systems are, are integrated in everything.

Yeah, you know, I'm realizing I'm falling into the trap of like, we started with the engine, but our main work— this was a prerequisite to what we're doing. Uh, I build airplanes. I'm actually not a propulsion person by background. I was just working on this to make a better airplane initially. There's a second thing here, which is we're not burning jet fuel. I mean, we can, but we're actually using a much more cost-effective fuel. So the world that we're going for is we can— this engine enables efficient supersonic flight. So the big deal here was that bought us— it's a reduction, being a big reduction in fuel burn, But more than that, that gets its range. So back to sort of this mass debt sort of problem. Old supersonics couldn't actually fly that far because they were so inefficient that they had to carry all this fuel and then you have no room for passengers. So you couldn't cross the Pacific nonstop on any sort of prior supersonic, to say nothing of the immense cost trying to run something like that. So the TL;DR of what we're getting to is we're going to be able to do supersonic flights. Anything that a subsonic airplane can do, we can do it at least 3 times faster. and at cost parity with— not like business class fares. We actually can get to the point where it is fully cheaper than existing subsonic airliners. So that is the world that we're going for. Another thing on top of this is I think that we'll actually do that. We're revaluing this whole system. And so we're not going to do this even at airline-size aircraft. Rather, we could, but the first plane that we're making more as like a You know, DOD demonstrator. It's going to be a 20,000-pound aircraft. If you could put people in it, you know, I intend to as soon as I can. You could do 5 people, 5 passengers, like 2 pilots up front, 5 passengers in the back, and it would be probably on the order of a $3,000 cost per flight across Pacific for private— for like a private jet. Yeah. From SF to Tokyo, you'd be around— now, I should say, maybe we shouldn't talk these numbers publicly. That's going to be what I think our operator cost could be. And again, this is our first version of this. There's a lot more optimization that can be had over time, but you sort of flip things in their head. Rather than selling a seat on an airplane, we change this to, well, you're just booking an entire jet. We're in a situation where what we want to make is more like an Uber of the skies and it's supersonic. But to do that, imagine making Uber before you had cars. If there's only buses and trains around, you can't really do that. So you first have to make the car and then you have to make the network. This is a 20-year plan, Thea, that I'm going for on this. But we have lots of businesses that we can do, lots of markets we can serve in the meantime. But that is the long-term goal of replace airline travel with low-cost supersonic on-demand flight.

It, it, it totally— it, it radically changes, I think, like the operating model of the aircraft. But there still is, there still is this upfront cost to building these systems. And you reach some sort of economy of scale at some point if you're building enough, you're operating enough, and it gets level— levelized across those operations. But, you know, are you able to build— is the goal to build the aircraft itself Yes. Upfront as well?

Yeah. I think there's an interesting paradigm to consider on this. When you're doing a genuinely new thing, vertical integration is the way to go. I think there's these natural cycles. When you're reinventing an industry, you have to be vertically integrated. And the more vertically integrated you are, generally the better. Over time, I can see this, then you want to instead of horizontally Integrate, sort of have others sort of specialize. But when you have to figure out a lot of new things for such a new operating paradigm, we will do everything from the aircraft through the operation because it is just so dramatically different. Now, over time, again, I could see this in 50 years, who knows what the path on that would be, but maybe that starts to get disaggregated again. But yeah, I think it's the natural cycle. And for the company itself, Part of how you also do this is like you do sort of the— I call it— so it's always the Tesla model for something like this. Start with the Roadster, then the Model S, then the Model 3, then the Model E. I think that's the way to do it.

Well, okay, so let's stay with that analogy because I think it's a good one and something that people can resonate with to the extent you can share. I mean, what is in your mind, is this kind of 5, 7-seater the Roadster. And then what's the Model S? What's the Model 3? What's the Model Y of Astromechanica?

Yeah, the first one, this one is like, so it'll be a Roadster for sure on this initial one. And while I'm aiming for having it being something that we can quickly convert to sort of the civil market, I guess I should say, The first aircraft just needs to work and serve sort of DOD functions. Like, DOD is very different from civil. There's not a passenger certification. Like, I would say it's somewhere on the order of— it's somewhere, you know, to make an airplane is some hundreds of millions. To certify it is well into the billions. And so this is like the gap of, all right, you just made the thing work versus, you know, it will never fail ever. That's what you have to do on the passenger end. So the market that you start out with is like, well, DOD is much more concerned with initial functionality. At least as we're talking about it, not going to be people on board. So you start with that and that's like your good— it's a niche. I think it's actually kind of funny to suggest the market for DOD is nowhere near as big as consumer civil market, but much lower barrier to entry. It's more tightly coupled to just technical execution. Then we go to like, I mean, it's the same aircraft, but now we're going to make it Our next step down, kind of our Model S. We're turning our Roadster into our Model S. I might start to confuse analogies here, but we'll sort of buy it. Some billions of dollars. But the nice thing on that is the idea here is you start your financial engine. We've been making money selling and serving the DOD. I think there's other sort of— maybe we can do autonomous supersonic cargo or something like that as well. I don't know. So you go for these markets. First thing is get your financial engine going. And then you can funnel it into later certification. So yeah, we go private jet is the 5-passenger private jet. I guess it'd be our Model S. Our Model 3 is probably going to be a 30-passenger, kind of like JetSuite X, go for something like that. And then eventually you'd have sort of your Model E equivalent where we'll finally, and we'll reluctantly, but finally we'll do a very large aircraft for the major city pairs. Because The on-demand jet thing, while extremely cool, you know, sometimes you just need planes running from like SF to New York or SF to Tokyo. Like those, there are a lot of people that are gonna be going on those every day and you don't have to keep it at this small size, but it's so much more expensive to make a big plane. Just like it's more expensive to make a cheap car than an expensive one. You do that last.

Okay, curiosity kind of got the best of me here, but I did a dive into the process of certifying Airplanes and kind of how the FAA goes through that process, the Federal Aviation Administration. So the type certification process is the primary method for approving new aircraft designs, and it typically has about 4 stages. The first stage is technical overview and certification basis. So the aircraft manufacturer presents the project to the certifying authority. Um, in the US, that's the FAA, and in Europe, that's the EASA. Um, a certification team is established and a set of rules that will apply to the specific aircraft type is also determined. The next step is the certification program. So the manufacturer and certifying authority agree on how compliance with each requirement will be demonstrated, and the level of regulatory involvement is proposed and agreed upon. And then the third is the compliance demonstration. So the manufacturer demonstrates compliance with Regulatory requirements through analysis, ground tests, and flight tests. So this is like the, you know, demonstration, literally the demonstration and testing phase. This covers all elements of the aircraft, including airframe systems, engines, quality of flying, and performance. And the certifying authority reviews documentation and witness tests. And then the last stage is technical closure and type certification issue. So once satisfied with the compliance demonstration, the certifying authority closes the investigation and a type certificate is issued for the aircraft design. So some sort of notes to get across with this, right? Like Ian had said that this process can get into the billions of dollars for a company, right? Um, but he didn't really talk about duration. So the certification process can take many years. So for example, the Boeing 737 MAX certification took almost 5 years. There's a lot of regulatory oversight. So the certifying authority, which is most likely the FAA, remains directly involved with testing. There's delegation. So some certification tasks may be delegated to qualified individuals or organizations such as the Organization Designation Authorization, or ODA. But this is done under strict, you know, FAA oversight. There's comprehensive reviews and there's international cooperation too. So there's often collaboration between civil aviation authorities for approval of aircraft for import into different countries. And so, yeah, it's quite a lengthy process here, but definitely one that needs to be done. So it'll be interesting to see see how, you know, Astromechanica's technology would fit into this in the future. But okay, just wanted to add that, and let's get right back in.

Got it, got it. And you touched on something there that was my next question of, you know, it's such a radical shift that I imagine new quote-unquote markets open up with what you guys are doing. I mean, obviously this on-demand kind of smaller jet travel is, is like radically different than what we experience today. But when I think people think about air travel, they think about moving people with commercial airliners, or they think maybe about fighter jets or DOD applications. Supersonic autonomous cargo. I mean, what are some things that, like, open up with what you guys are doing? Because it's a totally different business model, economic model. The unit economics are different. Do you guys think about that?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I would say that the main one we talked about was definitely the private— like, Getting private jets, let alone supersonic ones, to be cheaper than first class or business class fare, that's just such a reinvention of everything. I think that is going to be the big one. There's some other pretty interesting ones on this. Well, we can go into all the ways that it can sort of change DOD as well. Anywhere on Earth. large amounts of mass can cheaply be delivered anywhere on Earth in single-digit hours. As I've looked at this, there will not be anywhere on Earth that crosses probably the 7 or 8-hour threshold. It could be antipodal flights like London to Sydney. So you start to consider what changes downstream from that. Another one of this is space launch. I initially was talking about this a lot more. Because we've had our DoD traction, we've moved away from— we don't have to start there. Our original thought we did. But if you can very efficiently go to high speeds, you can effectively replace the first stage of a rocket. When you see a rocket, it's actually 2 rockets, 2-stage. That lower rocket, like on Starship, that was going up to somewhere around Mach 5, and I think it staged somewhere around 60 kilometers altitude. That's more or less all— that's like within range of what an airplane can do. So that ends up being a— like, this is to say, if you were to use a plane with our propulsion system, we can reduce the rocket mass needed to get any payload in orbit about 4x. So this was my original big interest. Like, you could take a Rocket Lab Electron. We don't even have to make the rocket. We could grab a Rocket Lab Electron, And, you know, right now it does 200 to 300 kilograms depending on the orbit, and you could 4x that. So it's a fairly big deal on that one.

And you brought up a good point there, I think, on just— delivery's probably too weak of a word, but it's the rapid launch and the rapid response. And this concept of being able to bring mass to different theaters, different locations, is becoming a bigger priority for the DOD. And we've seen it with, you know, there's companies out there trying to store mass in orbit and have it be able to come back down to Earth. Or it's, you know, do you put something in Starship and then figure out a way to, you know, land a, you know, a container? Are you guys gonna kind of be in that market and where do you fit kind of in that realm?

Yeah, I mean, you know, this one, again, we found like over time, Why not do everything? But yeah, this isn't something in the near term where— well, yeah. We'll see. I guess back to that, there's an early question of customer feedback and interest. If this is the thing that DOD really finds meaningful, happy to make and supply the planes for this. The one that we've heard that was very surprising, DARPA was bringing this up, was the concept of a sprint tanker. It's kind of an amusing thing. If you deliver a lot of mass anywhere fairly quickly, We will be making a thing far faster than the fighter jets that are currently out there. Wow. So if you've got pilots in some combat zone, you could get fuel to them. Rather than having a fuel tanker prepositioned in some potentially problematic area, you could actually catch up to the fighter jet, refuel it, and have it get out of there. You don't have to have a pilot ditch over the ocean or something like that. I guess there's a good expression of this. It's like, from a military perspective, experts talk logistics. And this changes the logistical landscape so much that when you can skip— we have all these forward staging grounds, Guam and things like that. It's like, well, you can actually operate out of North America. Yeah. When you can just cross the entire Pacific When you can do San Francisco to Taiwan in less time than it takes for a boat to cross the Taiwan Strait, you have this sort of interesting— you don't need to have all these bases nearby, which can initially be sort of vulnerable. It doesn't even matter. North America can just reach out to anywhere at that point. So yeah, this is going down some of the ways that this can affect.

I'm glad you brought up the point of logistics. We won't dive into it too deeply, but It is contested logistics and also just thinking about logistics for the DOD and for anything is so important. And I think, you know, years ago when I started diving into that concept, you think we're so technologically advanced that it's like, oh yeah, we could pretty much access most places on Earth relatively quickly.

Mm-hmm.

But that's not really the case, right? I mean, we are constrained by land and the range of the aircraft that we can move. Or it's, you know, we're constrained by the speed and the range of the boats that we have to move somewhere. Yeah.

Yeah. No, sorry.

No, no, I think you were going to touch on that exact point. I mean, so any way that you can change how that operates, and if it's catching up to a fighter jet and refueling in midair, and you can essentially double or even like triple the range of that jet or of that tanker or of that, you know, aircraft, It changes how prepared we are and changes kind of response times and effectiveness on a totally different scale. Yeah.

Yeah. And being able to do this at a smaller size is another interesting one. It's like sort of moving from mainframe computers to personal computers, getting more granular like that. Doing that now with air travel, I think, will really also change, or just flight in general. There's certain places that you want to go to and there's just no direct flight. And so it becomes extremely— even if the distance isn't that large, you want to get more granular with your travel unit. So this goes into travel theory. There's a huge amount of friction at each changeover. So if you can cut down on those, this is why people like private jets, for instance. You're eliminating all— it is just going to where you want to go. And so again, if you're going to someplace, you know, somewhere that's just like, it's near, you know, say you're going like here to Thailand, but like, you know, I know Thailand is a big, big country. There's a big difference of like, you do want to go to the north of it or the south of it. That, you know, maybe that was like another, you know, 6 hours or something on the ground, or actually maybe like a full day. And it's like, this changes things where you just will appear where you want to go. Because you've got these on-demand smaller aircraft that can literally go to anywhere. That is just the point-to-point, not even just vaguely across Earth point-to-point, but literally within— you're going to end up with some few miles of anywhere you want to be on Earth in hours. That's just not how things work right now. It's a wild way to exist.

It's a wild way to exist. And I'm going to throw a question at you, and this is such a small problem in the grand scheme of what you guys are trying to do. But imagining a world where we have this on-demand smaller air travel that gets you point to point, right? It totally changes the hub and spoke model, of course, because you're getting your own jet. How do you— have you— you're a pilot, you're a mechanical engineer, and we both nerd out about this stuff, so I know you've thought about it. I mean, how do you think about dealing with the headaches that come with that? Because now you no longer can have these highly efficient airports, these hubs, which maybe is a worse consumer experience, but there's some safety and there's some efficiency to that. But now it's like point to point to all these regional airports, smaller landing strips, whatever it may be. Have you thought about that? Just a thought experiment. I know this is not a near-term thing, but—

This is actually— this makes things easier. I mean, ideally what you want is you want The fact that everyone is going from San Francisco to New York, for something like that, that's actually much harder because you're having all the planes try to go to the same place.

But

there's many more. So in the US, there's 500 commercially serviced airports currently, but we've actually got over 5,000 airports with a mile-long runway. And then total airports in the US is around 20,000. But of varying lengths and so on. So we'd say there's about 10 times more airports around than we currently service. And so you can actually just spread the load a lot more on that. That helps a bunch. That's a big deal. And there is— but now you want— this is kind of this airplane sizing thing. You also want the planes to sort of fractally represent those different scales. So make bigger planes for the more popular bigger city pairs, but for these ones where you want to be a little more niche, destinations and so on, point to point. Those are smaller planes, but definitionally there's a lower population, fewer people are probably going to be going between these places. The planes can sort of correctly match. But there's many fewer airplanes in the world than people think. I think the most that— I don't know if it's United or Delta. I don't think there's any airliner Airline with more than 1,000 airplanes. The total number of airplanes, and I've seen the numbers, it's anywhere from like 30,000 to 45,000 airplanes total, all airplanes. It's not that many airplanes. So, so yeah, it's not like cars where it's like, yeah, you have that many cars in a single city. So yeah, there's definitely— I don't know what the sort of like scaling challenges are going to be there. I look forward to having this problem.

We will have done well. We will have done well. That is— yeah.

were having. Like, yeah, very happy. Mission accomplished.

Exactly right. And then I'm gonna bring it back to almost a question that I could have asked first, but your background, pilot, full-stack mechanical engineer, kind of self-proclaimed, like truly full-stack from like nuts to bolts to the actual selling. What was the aha moment for you? So I got the why now of it's the motors, there's some other tailwinds here. When were you— you'd run other companies before. When were you like, I'm going to start this thing and I'm going to just change how aircraft are built and operated?

Okay. We'll give Ian back the mic and let him answer the question right after this. We'll be right back.

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Yeah, I mean, I started from like a really young age before building real airplanes. I built experimental or like model aircraft, you know, and I was like 13 or so straight with that. And I think it was really obvious for us back then, you know, so this is like 2003 in my case, We were the first to see lithium batteries, electric motors. We were switching from these little nitro-fueled gas-burning things that were a total pain in the ass to the electric stuff. And you're like, oh, this is just obviously so much better. So when Teslas and things like that came about, I was like, well, duh, this is way better. So knowing that that was the thing to apply to aircraft, I always liked that. always in the back of my mind. But one of the problems, of course, is batteries were never— they could get 10 times better and they still wouldn't be nearly as good as burning a fuel. And because I like to fly far, everybody likes flying for different reasons. And mine is like, I like going on long-distance missions. So I like heavy IFR. I like a good challenge. It's just way more interesting. It's boring to just go putt around. Locally. So yeah, and I'd done well enough through my flying career. Like, I was up flying myself around in jets. And when I got to that place, I think that's really annoying to get into, like, jet world is they're really, unsurprisingly, they're very expensive. And the reason they're expensive, when you start paying these bills and seeing everything, is like, it's not just fuel is actually one of the cheapest things on a private jet. I wish it was just fuel. No, it's like fixing the things. They are insanely expensive. And this went into this whole world of private jets. They don't make that many of them. There's not that many people that can dump millions or tens of millions on airplanes. And so the volume is low. Private jets are not small airliners. They're not built that way. So they're not very cost-effective. There's no economies of scale to make them cheaper to build. So what I realized though was there was a way to use If you made everything on these aircraft electric, they would be far cheaper and simpler to fix. So this is like the genesis of everything. So it took a while to get there, but— Yeah. Including propulsion. Instead of having bleed air and hydraulics and low voltage electrical, have one system, highly redundant, but a high voltage electrical system, and then everything on the plane is that. That is a cheaper plane to fix. We saw a little bit of this. Boeing did this with the 787. The cabin is not pressurized from bleed air from the engines. They actually just have 1.5 megawatts of electrical power, which is a ton. That's just to run the systems on the plane.

Yeah.

And then everything is done electrically. So it started with that. All right. This now puts us— and I was working with Honeywell on a potential hybrid system to make this initially subsonic private jet that was very affordable to operate. We could already get to that place where we could compete with airline economics with a private jet. But then I had this sort of insight. I was actually going out fundraising for the first time and this actually came about in a sense where Unsurprisingly, maybe investors weren't too excited to fund this. They're like, this seems really scary, FAA certification and so on. It was in getting turned down on that a lot that I was like, you know what? Screw it. I want to make a plane with this hybrid thing and I have my own business. I'm just going to go build this hybrid plane for myself using this architecture. But if I'm going to make it for me, this is what leads to the insight. What I want as a pilot is very different from what someone would want as a private jet experience. I sit in the cockpit. I don't care what's— I want a small, fast, nimble, aerobatic airplane. Which is to say, ideally, I want a cheap-to-run fighter jet for me to putt around in, which is very different from the typical private jet experience. But to do that, using this hybrid— I wanted to use the hybrid architecture, but for something that's more fighter jet-esque, you want to use a fan as opposed to propeller. Propellers are obviously just less cool than integrated fans. But the problem is you have less thrust if you use a fan over prop. So I started thinking, well, what if I burn fuel behind the fan? That seems a little weird. But I don't know, why couldn't you? So I started thinking, why couldn't you do that? And I started looking at the thermodynamics of this and this is weird. This actually can work extremely well.

It can do this, yeah.

I got an outside thermodynamicist as well. It's like, is this right? Can you also build a model on this? Yeah, it turns out that this whole cycle efficiency is actually much higher. So yes, it came from the very silly interest of I just wanted a thing that looked a little cooler. It could be fun for an aerobatic system. I sort of stumbled into this. And then it was like, oh, this sort of changes everything. This is dramatically more efficient. It's like what I was doing before, but now supersonic. And there was one more big insight since I was looking at space launch things and I liked the idea of doing space planes. Rockets are not using jet fuel. They're all switching to methalox, which is liquid methane and oxygen. And I was pricing this out and I was like, this doesn't seem right. LNG is a 10th the price of jet fuel. So it's more energy per unit weight. It's 50 megajoules versus 42 per kilogram. It's much cleaner burning because it's a simpler hydrocarbon and just dramatically cheaper. It's also 30% less CO2, so it's actually also cleaner. Everything about it is better other than it takes up a little bit more space and it is cryogenic. If you design it for those things from the start, it's actually not that big of a deal. But I think one should just make airplanes— that's just a thing that should just be done, period. Make planes that run on LNG. So that was the next big thing, the low-cost fuel. And you're like, holy shit, that's like— This really makes sense now. So those 2 things together is just like a one-two punch that, yeah. So, yes.

It's a great story, and I think it just showcases the, one, taking a very first principles approach to design, and 2, just the benefit of having experience and knowing about all these other different worlds, right? Where, like, if you're at a larger aerospace company right now, like, you may be very siloed into one area of How do we make X component more efficient? Or how do we make X component a little bit cheaper? Maybe you stumbled into it a little bit, but you took a very different perspective, which I think has led you to where you are today.

Yeah, I think this is the vertical integration thing of, like, there are so many— at the end of the day, what you want to do is you're optimizing for the end output. And that doesn't necessarily— there are trade-offs within any given complex system. Like, aircraft are complex systems. And so, there are lots of instances where, like, yes, it's okay that this one component got worse because it had some other attribute that, like, across the whole system was much better. And you need that kind of— back to, like, when you wanna do something radically new, this is why it works so much better to be vertically integrated. It's like, yes, there are just trade-offs that we can make across the spectrum that you're just not able to when you only have your one little siloed thing that you get to tweak. Now, once it sort of recrystallizes, again, I think this is the natural cycle of things. In some decades, it's going to go back to like, okay, we've kind of figured it out. We don't need this sort of flexibility across the full spectrum. And maybe it goes back to that. But for new things to happen, I mean, Tesla and SpaceX are the best examples of this. You want to be vertically integrated, you want to control everything. And yeah, then you can do things. You have flexibility and agility that you wouldn't in the old paradigm.

And cost at some point. But I think to your point, it's the flexibility, agility, how quickly you can iterate. It just totally speeds up those timelines.

Yeah.

Well, great. For all the listeners who are now very excited and big supporters like we are in Astromechanica, what's kind of on the horizon? What can people be looking out for? Is it like, you know, prototype? What's kind of the next big announcement for you guys that people should be setting their alerts for?

Yeah. So later, late October, we'll be debuting our— we've got a big event, I believe, Some AV folks will be stopping by. Wow. We're going to be demoing our first flight. It's like the full performance engine of what is going to power our initial aircraft. This is showing the full operating regime and efficiency and like, yes, this is the thing working this way can power the plane. So that's going to be late October. Then next up after that is we can finally stop just being thought of as an engine company and we will go into— we're making the airplane. Cool. Yeah, that's going to be some single digit, like some few years. I mean, I want to fly in this airplane, so I'm going as quick as I can on this, get to flight as quick as possible and go for our trans-Pacific demo.

Well, that's a good personal motivator. And there's some story at some point in here where it's like, you will be the one that flies the first one off the, you know, the first piloted one off the assembly line.

Yes. Yeah, that's the perk of starting. We're actually gonna be the first to probably do like autonomous flight testing for a manned aircraft. So I can feel a lot more comfortable getting in the first one because it actually flew a bunch without humans. And, uh, yeah, but yeah, I definitely— my, my joy of, uh, of aviation, and I've done test pilot things before, I will be flying that.

So. I love it. I love it. Well, Ian, thank you so much for taking the time. I, I had a blast. And, um, you know, we could We could probably spend a couple more hours talking about this stuff. So appreciate it. We're excited to be on board and rooting for you going forward.

Awesome.

That

was great chatting. Awesome. Yeah.

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