Latest / What's Your Problem? / Flying on Battery Power

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Flying on Battery Power · What's Your Problem?

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. The energy transition is here. It's upon us. The
0:24
Speaker 1: marginal cost of new solar and wind power is now
0:27
Speaker 1: below the marginal cost of new fossil fuel plants. Electric
0:30
Speaker 1: cars are amazing, Electric trucks are coming along. You know.
0:34
Speaker 1: The news really in some ways is better than I
0:37
Speaker 1: might have hoped for, say a decade ago. But planes,
0:42
Speaker 1: commercial airplanes, those are still a problem. As other sectors
0:46
Speaker 1: are decarbonizing, emissions from aviation are projected to triple by
0:51
Speaker 1: twenty fifty. This is partly because more people are flying
0:55
Speaker 1: every year, but it is also because figuring out how
0:58
Speaker 1: to build a commercial airplane that doesn't burn jet fuel
1:02
Speaker 1: is a very, very hard problem to solve. It may
1:06
Speaker 1: require combining frontier battery technology with a few tricks from
1:10
Speaker 1: the old dirty way of making planes fly. I'm Jacob Goldstein,
1:19
Speaker 1: and this is what's your problem. My guest today is
1:22
Speaker 1: Anders Forceland. He's the co founder and CEO of Heart Aerospace.
1:27
Speaker 1: Andrews problem is this, how do you build a commercial
1:31
Speaker 1: airplane that can fly on battery power and win the
1:34
Speaker 1: approval of regulators around the world. Andrews Forceland grew up
1:40
Speaker 1: in Sweden, got his PhD in aerospace product development there
1:45
Speaker 1: and he founded his company there, but he told me
1:47
Speaker 1: that the inspiration to start his company actually came from
1:50
Speaker 1: next door, came from Norway, and sort of early twenty eighteen,
1:56
Speaker 1: Norway announces that they want all their all their short
1:59
Speaker 1: haul domestic flights to be one hundreds electric by twenty forty. Okay,
2:03
Speaker 1: this is like the first country in the world that
2:05
Speaker 1: puts forth a mandate like this, and Norway is doing
2:07
Speaker 1: this on the heels they're incredibly successful electrification of their
2:12
Speaker 1: road traffic where you know, the new cars are electric
2:17
Speaker 1: and also you know the ferry infrastructure at all. So
2:20
Speaker 1: they're like, we electrified the boats, we electrified the cars,
2:23
Speaker 1: but like, yeah, there's no electric plane that exists in
2:26
Speaker 1: the world. When they put out the man nothing is
2:28
Speaker 1: even close, right, Well, No, what's happened is that a
2:32
Speaker 1: lot of people have looked at at sort of what's
2:34
Speaker 1: happened with the electrification of the cars, like Tesla, and
2:37
Speaker 1: there are a lot of people that have looked at
2:38
Speaker 1: what's happened with the drones, like the consumer small drones,
2:42
Speaker 1: And there's a bunch of projects that are trying to
2:44
Speaker 1: build what's called urban air mobility, like small like vertical
2:48
Speaker 1: takeoff and landing aircraft essentially a flying car, basically a
2:52
Speaker 1: flying car. Yeah, this sort of George Jetson future, right, Yeah,
2:56
Speaker 1: but nobody's looking it's not really the right product for Norway.
2:59
Speaker 1: Norway's looking for something to replace there. They're sort of turboprops,
3:03
Speaker 1: they're thirty seaters. Yeah, so we're we create a company
3:07
Speaker 1: or first we started research project in Sweden to what
3:09
Speaker 1: are we gonna do about this in Sweden? It's part
3:11
Speaker 1: of it like hey, wait, we can't let the Norwegians
3:13
Speaker 1: out Green US. We can't let them out net zero
3:16
Speaker 1: US to keep up with them or well yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
3:20
Speaker 1: It's really like that. You know, there's a little bit
3:22
Speaker 1: of a brotherly competition, right. But but it's also that
3:24
Speaker 1: I'm recognizing that Sweden is always proud of itself, like
3:27
Speaker 1: were we have this great history in aerospace that goes
3:30
Speaker 1: back to the sort of Second World War and before that.
3:33
Speaker 1: But and we also have this you know, unique competence
3:37
Speaker 1: buility being built in electrifying cars and trucks. Like actually
3:40
Speaker 1: from the industry side side of something that Norway doesn't. Right,
3:43
Speaker 1: So I'm like, okay, maybe I can take this mandate.
3:45
Speaker 1: I can take this electromobility ecosystem in Sweden, and I
3:50
Speaker 1: can take the history in aerospace and sort of combine
3:52
Speaker 1: them into something and see what happens. So, just to
3:55
Speaker 1: be clear, you get some funding, right, Yeah, start hiring
3:58
Speaker 1: some people, you know, Yeah, and you're gonna build this
4:01
Speaker 1: nineteen seat plane powered by batteries and electric plane. Yeah,
4:06
Speaker 1: and it's gonna and it's gonna do the thing Norway
4:09
Speaker 1: needs it to do exactly. Yeah, with the sort of
4:12
Speaker 1: philosophy of you know, the real innovation is getting it done.
4:16
Speaker 1: So you know, this is something that's so hard to do,
4:18
Speaker 1: even for a large OEM. So as the startup, you
4:21
Speaker 1: really have to be cautious of not being you know,
4:25
Speaker 1: biting off more than you can chew. Right, this idea
4:28
Speaker 1: of limiting innovation, you said you're going to limit innovation.
4:31
Speaker 1: That's interesting to me. What do you mean by that.
4:34
Speaker 1: One of the reasons that we have so many startups
4:36
Speaker 1: I want to be like, I think it's because it's
4:37
Speaker 1: easy to generate a realistic image of your vision. So
4:41
Speaker 1: you could make a picture of some crazy futuristic plane
4:45
Speaker 1: on your computer and say to investors, work, we're going
4:47
Speaker 1: to build this. You could do this for free. You
4:50
Speaker 1: can just draw your vision of the future in the
4:54
Speaker 1: sort of CGI and you can you can show it
4:56
Speaker 1: to people. But the challenge of an aircraft is that
5:00
Speaker 1: you need to prove that you won't have, you know,
5:03
Speaker 1: less than one serious incident in one hundred million hours.
5:07
Speaker 1: So you don't just need to build something that can fly,
5:11
Speaker 1: You need to build something that can fly essentially perfectly
5:14
Speaker 1: under every condition you can imagine, with everything going wrong.
5:17
Speaker 1: Like it's it's it's the most high bar to clear
5:21
Speaker 1: for any kind of manufactured thing you can imagine. Yeah,
5:25
Speaker 1: it's like, you know, if you want to prove something,
5:27
Speaker 1: you say, how do you prove that this is not
5:29
Speaker 1: going to break in a hundred million hours? Right? And
5:31
Speaker 1: these is way to do that as saying, well, there's
5:33
Speaker 1: these flames flying around, they have the solution, so we're
5:36
Speaker 1: gonna do what they're doing. And then the certification authorities says, well,
5:39
Speaker 1: that's good enough. So you decide you just want to
5:42
Speaker 1: focus on the fuel essentially, right, switching from jet fuel
5:46
Speaker 1: to batteries, which is a very hard problem, right, I mean,
5:48
Speaker 1: one of the things that maybe is just worth dwelling
5:52
Speaker 1: on for a moment. Is how amazingly energy dense jet
5:57
Speaker 1: fuel is? How good jet fuel is that doing the
6:00
Speaker 1: thing it needs to do? Right? I mean, one way
6:02
Speaker 1: to talk about it is sort of jet fuel has
6:05
Speaker 1: a specific energy density. You have about twelve thousand and
6:09
Speaker 1: water hours per kilo out right, and batteries right now
6:13
Speaker 1: on a cell level are approaching like four hundred. But
6:16
Speaker 1: you know a Tesla Model three is like two fifty.
6:18
Speaker 1: So wait, there's a lot of units in numbers there.
6:20
Speaker 1: But just to get the ratio is it? Are you
6:23
Speaker 1: saying jet fuel is about thirty times as energy dense
6:28
Speaker 1: as a battery. Yeah, thirty to forty times. So that's
6:32
Speaker 1: a huge problem for you. So for every pound, every
6:35
Speaker 1: kilogram of jet fuel, you get thirty times as much
6:39
Speaker 1: energy as you can get for a pound or a
6:40
Speaker 1: kilogram of battery. Like that seems like the fundamental problem
6:44
Speaker 1: you're up against, Yeah, it is. How do you deal
6:47
Speaker 1: with that problem? Like, as you're trying to figure out
6:49
Speaker 1: how to make a plane that's going to carry all
6:51
Speaker 1: this battery energy and fly, Like, how do you deal
6:54
Speaker 1: with that fundamental fact? So first of all, you try
6:57
Speaker 1: to make the plane as good as possible, and waste
7:00
Speaker 1: of doing that is actually building a plane with a
7:02
Speaker 1: large wing, make an entire plane a little bit larger
7:05
Speaker 1: because you're carrying more The weight of the batteries are
7:08
Speaker 1: more than the weight of the past. Basically, you've got
7:10
Speaker 1: to build more plane to carry all that battery. Is
7:13
Speaker 1: that right exactly? That's a really good way you're putting in.
7:16
Speaker 1: But then it's sort of boils down to philosophy, and
7:20
Speaker 1: this is I think where we are. You know, then
7:23
Speaker 1: you have to realize something about new technology and disruptive technology,
7:26
Speaker 1: and is that you should not compete with the existing
7:30
Speaker 1: technology on the merits of the assisting technology. So we're
7:34
Speaker 1: obviously not going to beat jet engines on range. We're
7:37
Speaker 1: just or ELEC jet fuel on range. So what can
7:40
Speaker 1: we work with? So what we can do is we
7:43
Speaker 1: can have zero emissions, we can have a low noise,
7:46
Speaker 1: we can have zero local pollution, which is a big
7:48
Speaker 1: problem at airports, and we can have superior unit economics
7:53
Speaker 1: because we're replacing not only you know, the jet engine
7:56
Speaker 1: is the most expensive part of the plane, and you're
7:59
Speaker 1: replacing that with a simple electric motor that essentially has
8:03
Speaker 1: one moving part. So okay, so you're designing this plane
8:06
Speaker 1: in Sweden. You're thinking about the Norwegian mark kid, But
8:10
Speaker 1: then one day you get an email from United Airlines
8:12
Speaker 1: in the US. Right. It came through our infomail, and
8:16
Speaker 1: we were so close to missing it. It was like
8:18
Speaker 1: one of those times, you mean, like they just they
8:21
Speaker 1: just emailed you at like the generic at the jet email,
8:25
Speaker 1: somebody from United Airlines. Yeah, among with all this, and
8:28
Speaker 1: you're like and Clara, I god bless her. She was
8:31
Speaker 1: looking through it and she was like, you know, is
8:33
Speaker 1: this actually something? And then we stood up the call
8:35
Speaker 1: and it was like, oh, it's actually the real, real guys, right,
8:38
Speaker 1: And we asked them like, okay, you know, we talked
8:40
Speaker 1: about this market in Norway, the propeller aircraft, the sort
8:43
Speaker 1: of thirty seaters, and we like, give line an aircraft
8:46
Speaker 1: like that, and they said, no, not a single one.
8:48
Speaker 1: But if you go back to the nineteen nineties, they
8:52
Speaker 1: flew hundreds of these aircraft. Okay. So we start telling
8:55
Speaker 1: the story about you know, we think that actually it
8:58
Speaker 1: might be the jet engine, that it's a little bit
9:00
Speaker 1: too expensive, and they're like, are you kidding? You know,
9:04
Speaker 1: it is our biggest driver of costs. We pay so
9:07
Speaker 1: much for our maintenance of the jet engines. So here
9:10
Speaker 1: we are with this value proposition that we've sort of
9:15
Speaker 1: from a sort of an academic point of view put forth,
9:18
Speaker 1: and then we have one of the biggest airlines in
9:20
Speaker 1: the verse just validating that for us and telling you
9:22
Speaker 1: it's actually much worse, do you think? Huh? And by
9:25
Speaker 1: worse that means better for you, right, I mean the yeah, yeah,
9:28
Speaker 1: that worse than you think means they actually want to
9:30
Speaker 1: buy this thing you're trying to make. And they put
9:32
Speaker 1: on an order, right, Like, what is the deal you
9:34
Speaker 1: wind up making with them? So we end up actually
9:37
Speaker 1: they place an order some United in Masa Eage place
9:40
Speaker 1: an order of one hundred aircraft plus an option for
9:43
Speaker 1: initial fifty each, so we get like two hundred aircraft.
9:46
Speaker 1: They both invest in our company. And just one thing
9:49
Speaker 1: I want to clarify MESA is they're not a known
9:53
Speaker 1: sort of name brand, right. They operate small flights for
9:55
Speaker 1: other airlines, Is that right? Like? Which airlines that I
9:58
Speaker 1: would have heard of? Do they run flights for? They
10:00
Speaker 1: operate for among other things, Like one of their big
10:03
Speaker 1: customers is United and they operate as United Express. So okay,
10:10
Speaker 1: Anders has his big order from United and Mason. He
10:13
Speaker 1: has his vision, which I love. I'm gonna say it again,
10:16
Speaker 1: the real innovation is getting it done. But he is
10:20
Speaker 1: about to run into really quite a large problem that's
10:24
Speaker 1: coming up after the break. Now back to the show.
10:33
Speaker 1: Last year, Anders and his team hit a wall. It
10:36
Speaker 1: was thankfully a metaphorical wall. They didn't crash into anything,
10:39
Speaker 1: but it was still a lot to worry about. They
10:42
Speaker 1: started to realize that their nineteen seat all electric plane
10:46
Speaker 1: just was not going to pencil out. They could get
10:49
Speaker 1: it to fly, but in a way with a commercial airplane.
10:52
Speaker 1: That's the easy part. They probably even could have made
10:55
Speaker 1: it work commercially in Norway, but the US, the United
10:58
Speaker 1: States has this rule that requires planes to keep a
11:02
Speaker 1: lot of reserve power in case they have to you know,
11:04
Speaker 1: circle the runway reroute to a distant airport. And the
11:08
Speaker 1: US rules of reserve power meant that anders nineteen seat
11:11
Speaker 1: plane could only use like a third of its battery
11:14
Speaker 1: on ordinary flights, could only fly one hundred nautical miles.
11:18
Speaker 1: They had to keep the rest of the power in reserve,
11:20
Speaker 1: and such a short range was just way too short
11:24
Speaker 1: for that plane to be practical for it to work
11:26
Speaker 1: as a commercial airplane. So a few months ago, after
11:30
Speaker 1: years of work that cost millions and millions of dollars,
11:33
Speaker 1: Anders and his team trash their old plan for that
11:36
Speaker 1: nineteen seat plane. They threw it in the garbage, and
11:39
Speaker 1: they made a couple counterintuitive moves. One, they actually made
11:43
Speaker 1: their plane bigger. They went from one that carried nineteen
11:46
Speaker 1: people to one that carried thirty people. And two, they
11:50
Speaker 1: decided that their planes would carry a little bit of
11:53
Speaker 1: jet fuel to solve that reserve problems. So in the
11:57
Speaker 1: new vision, this thirty seat plane, they could still fly
12:00
Speaker 1: on batteries, would still fly on batteries, but in an
12:02
Speaker 1: emergency or for longer flights, the jet fuel could power
12:06
Speaker 1: a generator that would charge up the batteries give them
12:08
Speaker 1: more power. There was a lot I wanted to know
12:11
Speaker 1: about this shift starting with this. Really was it hard
12:16
Speaker 1: to look at all that time and money you spent
12:18
Speaker 1: working on the nineteenth seater and say, ah, you know, sorry,
12:22
Speaker 1: that was a mistake. We need to build a different plane. Actually,
12:26
Speaker 1: you know a lot of the you know, the stuff
12:28
Speaker 1: that we've done was very just transferable, Like all the
12:31
Speaker 1: words we've done on on avionics, on flight controls, propulsion,
12:36
Speaker 1: it was very like, okay, we've changed a little bit
12:38
Speaker 1: to that dimension. The wire has become a little bit longer.
12:41
Speaker 1: But it was like the same stuff, right. The only
12:43
Speaker 1: thing that we really had to throw away was the
12:46
Speaker 1: structural design, and we'd actually even built like it sounds
12:49
Speaker 1: that sounds non trivial, but we did have in our
12:52
Speaker 1: hanger we had a full scale model, representative model of
12:57
Speaker 1: this ES nineteen structure that we've just built and just completed.
13:01
Speaker 1: We haven't adn't really completed it, but we've built which
13:03
Speaker 1: was going to be this basic for this integrated test
13:05
Speaker 1: facility that we were building. That then you have to
13:07
Speaker 1: say to everybody who just built model, you know, sorry, guys,
13:11
Speaker 1: I got some bad news. Yeah. And I was like,
13:14
Speaker 1: by the way, we built this in about a year.
13:17
Speaker 1: Now you have to tear it down and you have
13:18
Speaker 1: to build a new one that's bigger in about two months,
13:22
Speaker 1: because in September we're announcing this to the work. How
13:24
Speaker 1: did that go over? Well? Surprisingly well. I think they
13:27
Speaker 1: became very crafty and they were like, okay, we can
13:30
Speaker 1: move the wing out. We can like they figured a
13:32
Speaker 1: little bit waste of actually doing a lot of little
13:35
Speaker 1: bit of reuse and they had a lot of lessons
13:37
Speaker 1: learned from building this structure. Okay, okay, but you know
13:40
Speaker 1: this is the startup life, right, So okay, so now
13:43
Speaker 1: you have just as of September, as of a couple
13:45
Speaker 1: months ago, you have a new sort of plan. Right,
13:48
Speaker 1: instead of a nineteen seat all electric power plane, it's
13:51
Speaker 1: going to be a thirty seat plane. It's going to
13:53
Speaker 1: be primarily powered by electric motors, but you're going to
13:55
Speaker 1: have this jet fuel power auxiliary power unit that gets
13:59
Speaker 1: you your reserve power. Right, So for most flights you
14:02
Speaker 1: can fly on the battery, but in a pinch, you
14:05
Speaker 1: can fire up the jet fuel. What do you have
14:10
Speaker 1: to do to get from that idea to having a
14:13
Speaker 1: plane that actually is in commercial service? So an aircraft
14:17
Speaker 1: is a lego kit of different parts coming together from
14:20
Speaker 1: different different suppliers. So it's really we start by then
14:24
Speaker 1: hiring a critical mass of engineers that know everything from
14:29
Speaker 1: you know, mechanical systems such as landing gear to flight controls,
14:32
Speaker 1: to avionics, to electrical systems obviously the electric propulsion structures,
14:39
Speaker 1: and they start then interacting with the worldwide supply chain network,
14:45
Speaker 1: you know, start going to different places looking at flight controls,
14:48
Speaker 1: or avionics stuff, and were you already doing that on
14:51
Speaker 1: the nineteen seater and does that transfer to the thirty seater? Yeah,
14:55
Speaker 1: we were already in that process. And I was like, okay,
14:58
Speaker 1: I need to make the call myself. I need to
15:00
Speaker 1: call my suppliers and say, by the way, guys, you know,
15:03
Speaker 1: change your plan. You know. The thing that scared me
15:06
Speaker 1: the most about this was not the sort of, oh,
15:10
Speaker 1: having to redo the structural work. It was the sort
15:12
Speaker 1: of we have to go out and say that, by
15:15
Speaker 1: the way, we've been really confident about this nineteen seater
15:18
Speaker 1: and we actually think that we were wrong. Right, So
15:21
Speaker 1: we end up making this call and we go through
15:23
Speaker 1: this is the analysis we've done, This is the tradeoffs
15:26
Speaker 1: we've done. We're actually thinking that, you know, we have
15:29
Speaker 1: to make this shift, and if we have to do it,
15:30
Speaker 1: we have to do it now, all right. And we
15:32
Speaker 1: do this with suppliers, we do this with airlines, and
15:36
Speaker 1: you know, everybody is like, yeah, this is what you
15:39
Speaker 1: should be doing, right, So we don't get any of
15:42
Speaker 1: that sort of backlash that we would have expected. Okay,
15:45
Speaker 1: but the thing that we want to enable is to
15:47
Speaker 1: understand the aircraft are not just products. Their platforms. Right.
15:52
Speaker 1: The Boeing seven three seven is a platform that came
15:55
Speaker 1: out in nineteen sixty nine and people are still flying
15:58
Speaker 1: it and there's no plans of building a new replacement
16:01
Speaker 1: for by Boing. So we wanted to create that platform
16:04
Speaker 1: where all these new technology can come together and and
16:08
Speaker 1: sort of bring to market. But the exciting thing about
16:11
Speaker 1: that is that you get these two hundred kilometer range
16:14
Speaker 1: at twenty twenty eight or you know, and then you
16:19
Speaker 1: start replacing the batteries. You do that with a new
16:22
Speaker 1: technology every two years or so, and you actually can grow.
16:26
Speaker 1: But first you got to get to twenty twenty eight
16:28
Speaker 1: at a plane that can actually fly, right, Yeah, So
16:31
Speaker 1: I want to just talk a little bit about what
16:32
Speaker 1: it takes to get from here to there. Right, that's
16:34
Speaker 1: just over five years, So, I mean there's a few
16:37
Speaker 1: there's sort of the technical questions. There's the financial questions, Like,
16:40
Speaker 1: so one is how much money do you have and
16:42
Speaker 1: how much money is it going to cost to get
16:44
Speaker 1: to having a plane that can fly commercially in twenty
16:47
Speaker 1: twenty eight. It's about a billion dollar project, right, Okay,
16:50
Speaker 1: we're about one tenth of that, right, So it's also
16:53
Speaker 1: a continuous fundraise and it's getting harder to raise money
16:57
Speaker 1: in general. I don't know what your situation is, but
16:59
Speaker 1: it clearly the sort of funding environment is now much
17:02
Speaker 1: harder than it was a year ago. Are you Is
17:04
Speaker 1: that a problem for you? I mean, I think we're
17:07
Speaker 1: seeing a prepared of sort of the HYPESI like, a
17:09
Speaker 1: natural point in the hype cycle of this technology. And
17:12
Speaker 1: obviously you know the market has its oscillations, but I
17:16
Speaker 1: would also say that that I think climate tech is
17:19
Speaker 1: one of those things that people are still very interested
17:21
Speaker 1: in funding and and you know, this is not a
17:24
Speaker 1: problem that's going away, right, So we're on this. So
17:27
Speaker 1: so there's there's the money, and you need to raise
17:29
Speaker 1: a lot more money, and then there's the like the
17:32
Speaker 1: technical side. I mean, is there some particular technical problem
17:38
Speaker 1: that you're working on that we can talk about in
17:40
Speaker 1: a way that's not too technical, but that like gets
17:44
Speaker 1: because like what you're trying to do is hard, right,
17:46
Speaker 1: Like it's clearly a hard problem, and so is there
17:50
Speaker 1: some piece of it that sort of shows that the
17:54
Speaker 1: broader challenges? I think that building aircraft is like a
17:57
Speaker 1: generalist problem, right, It's a hundred different things that you
18:01
Speaker 1: need to do just from a technology point of view,
18:04
Speaker 1: and it's not the best performing of these technologies that
18:06
Speaker 1: can get to decide your success. It's the worst performing. Right.
18:10
Speaker 1: If you build an aircraft by twenty twenty twenty eight,
18:13
Speaker 1: and you've done everything brilliantly, but you forgot to do
18:16
Speaker 1: landing gear, you're not going to take off, right, or
18:19
Speaker 1: something much smaller. Right, there's a million little things like
18:23
Speaker 1: you're not going to get the landing get but there
18:24
Speaker 1: might just be one little connection between two different systems
18:27
Speaker 1: or something, right, Yeah, I mean that there's there's many
18:29
Speaker 1: of stories like that, So everything needs to be like
18:31
Speaker 1: it's like it's like the worst link of the chain
18:34
Speaker 1: is what's going to break it. Yeah, And it's not
18:36
Speaker 1: just goes for the technical stuff. It goes from the
18:38
Speaker 1: commercial stuff. You know, it's infrastructure on the ground. It
18:41
Speaker 1: is yeah, you know, a regulatory it's all of these things.
18:44
Speaker 1: The infrastructure on the ground is a particular if that's
18:47
Speaker 1: a whole thing for you, right, because there's all this
18:49
Speaker 1: infrastructure in place at every airport to put jet fuel
18:51
Speaker 1: into airplanes, but there is not infrastructure in place to
18:54
Speaker 1: recharge the batteries of airplanes because that's not a thing, right, So,
18:58
Speaker 1: and presumably if these are little commuter planes or a
19:02
Speaker 1: little small short hop planes, you're gonna have to recharge
19:05
Speaker 1: them fast, right. You can't just like plug it in
19:07
Speaker 1: and leave it overnight. So is that is that a
19:09
Speaker 1: technical problem? Like how long does it take to recharge
19:12
Speaker 1: one of your planes or no, I mean it's it
19:15
Speaker 1: is about a thirty minute recharge, okay, And that is
19:18
Speaker 1: not a technical problem and definitely not from the charger
19:22
Speaker 1: point of view. We're looking at something that has the
19:24
Speaker 1: same standard. The news sort of standard that's from for
19:27
Speaker 1: electric trucks, which is, you know, goes up to three megawats,
19:30
Speaker 1: is like the MCS standard, which is you know it's
19:33
Speaker 1: going to be like okay, if you can build put
19:34
Speaker 1: it on a truck stop, you can put it on
19:36
Speaker 1: an airport. Electric trucks mean big big mac trucks, big
19:39
Speaker 1: big tractor trailers. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, here's a big one.
19:43
Speaker 1: Are the batteries just too big and heavy? Where? Like,
19:45
Speaker 1: are you sure that that's going to be fine? Yeah?
19:48
Speaker 1: I mean they are big, they're heavy. There's certification problems.
19:53
Speaker 1: That's going to limit my market size, right, it's not
19:55
Speaker 1: going to limit if it flies or not. Okay, we'll
19:58
Speaker 1: build an aircraft and if the batteries become a little
20:00
Speaker 1: bit of heavier, we have to compromise a little bit
20:02
Speaker 1: on an all electric range and then we'll get to
20:04
Speaker 1: the new battery two years later. Right. So it is
20:08
Speaker 1: it is not thing that I think is an existential
20:10
Speaker 1: risk for this, right, It's not something that I think
20:12
Speaker 1: it's that being problem. It's more about figuring out whatever
20:18
Speaker 1: is the state of the art battery technology that's out
20:20
Speaker 1: there and save the automotive industry or other industries. How
20:23
Speaker 1: do you bring that through the solsage machine of actually
20:25
Speaker 1: building then eleation cell. Yeah, and how do we I
20:29
Speaker 1: think that is the problem. But remember there are already
20:32
Speaker 1: certified electric aircraft out there, certified in Europe which is
20:36
Speaker 1: the Pipistol values Electro So two seater electric aircraft are
20:39
Speaker 1: already flying. Okay, so we know you can have a
20:43
Speaker 1: battery powered plane that works and that is safe enough
20:46
Speaker 1: for regulators to approve it. So there is some threshold
20:48
Speaker 1: that has been cleared. It is definitely a challenging problem. Yeah,
20:53
Speaker 1: it's a lot of challenges, but it's not the sort
20:55
Speaker 1: of challenge in the sort of winning Nobo price. If
20:58
Speaker 1: you solve it an aerospace program, it's more like an
21:02
Speaker 1: organizational problem that it is like just technical. It's like
21:06
Speaker 1: getting people that are working on various systems to exactly
21:10
Speaker 1: be on the same page that every every page of
21:12
Speaker 1: the project, figuring out all the interfaces. These are not
21:15
Speaker 1: trivial stuff, right, So that's not something that need that
21:19
Speaker 1: we can understate how difficult it is to build that
21:22
Speaker 1: organization and execute on everything at the same time. Right,
21:26
Speaker 1: these are going to be the critical defining decades for
21:29
Speaker 1: this industry. We have the climate challenge, which is the
21:33
Speaker 1: biggest challenge we ever faced, but we also have a
21:35
Speaker 1: challenge where they're not enough new planes being built. The
21:40
Speaker 1: big aerospace companies are still building their old aircraft. So
21:42
Speaker 1: we need to create a culture of actually building new planes,
21:45
Speaker 1: building them faster. And also there's mass retirements in the industry.
21:50
Speaker 1: You know, there's people leaving the industry, there's new people
21:52
Speaker 1: coming in, and we just need to keep the flame alive,
21:55
Speaker 1: and we need to find the flame as much as
21:57
Speaker 1: we can create. Which is a bad analogy, by the way,
22:01
Speaker 1: for somebody that wants to get rid of combustion. I
22:03
Speaker 1: didn't think of that in general. A bad analogy for aviation.
22:07
Speaker 1: If you're building planes, stay away from fire metaphors. Yeah,
22:11
Speaker 1: oh yeah, Yeah. We'll be back in a minute with
22:16
Speaker 1: questions about airports. Abba and Andrew's favorite inventor. It's the
22:20
Speaker 1: lightning round, which probably also not a great metaphor to
22:24
Speaker 1: use in a show about planes. That's the end of
22:33
Speaker 1: the ads. Now we're going back to the show. We
22:36
Speaker 1: want to finish with a sort of lightning round. I
22:38
Speaker 1: want to just ask you a bunch of fast questions.
22:41
Speaker 1: Do you have a favorite airport? Wow, I just landed
22:46
Speaker 1: at Saint Louis Obispo Airport. I say that was the
22:49
Speaker 1: best airport experience that I had in my life. And
22:51
Speaker 1: in California, a little town in the middle. Yeah. Yeah,
22:53
Speaker 1: it's like this glamorized bus stop. You just get off
22:56
Speaker 1: and you walk through it like a nice restaurant, and
22:59
Speaker 1: then you have your luggage waiting for you. In to
23:00
Speaker 1: the ad and I went to the rental car and
23:02
Speaker 1: I was like ten minutes I was in my car.
23:04
Speaker 1: It was just marvelous. That's the experience we want to bring, right,
23:08
Speaker 1: that's the beauty of a small local airport. Right. I
23:10
Speaker 1: used to live in Bozeman, Montana and the airport there
23:13
Speaker 1: was amazing like that, Yeah, it's lovely. And then I
23:17
Speaker 1: and then I dropped the same car off at Lax
23:20
Speaker 1: and it's like, you know, you you drop the car
23:22
Speaker 1: off and you get on a bus. And then he
23:24
Speaker 1: was like, I have to go to terminals seven and
23:26
Speaker 1: it's like, you know, it takes me, you know, hours.
23:30
Speaker 1: So your vision, your vision of flying is San Luis Obispo,
23:34
Speaker 1: not Lax. Yeah, exactly. What's one piece of advice you'd
23:39
Speaker 1: give to someone trying to solve a hard problem? Um,
23:42
Speaker 1: ask for help. Yeah. A good founder is or a
23:45
Speaker 1: good entrepreneurs want to know who to ask because people
23:48
Speaker 1: have had the same problem before. Who's your favorite inventor?
23:52
Speaker 1: I am obsessed with Kelly Johnson from SKO skunk Work.
23:56
Speaker 1: I don't know about Kelly Johnson. Tell me a little bit.
23:59
Speaker 1: Kelly Johnson was this marvelous engineer that led Luckeed skunk Works,
24:03
Speaker 1: you know, the proverbial skunk works that was like, you know,
24:06
Speaker 1: ten times smaller than the other teams. And he built
24:08
Speaker 1: a playing this or seventy one that flew at mocked
24:11
Speaker 1: three point two right, and it flew. They did very fast.
24:15
Speaker 1: To be clear, if that means very very fast, yeah,
24:18
Speaker 1: it means very fast. It's like an aircraft from the
24:20
Speaker 1: future that was built in nineties sixties by this little
24:22
Speaker 1: group of people kind of working off to the side
24:25
Speaker 1: of the main company. Yeah. Yeah, And they didn't have computers,
24:28
Speaker 1: they didn't have cad they drew drew stuff by hand,
24:31
Speaker 1: and they built something that there's no you know, there's
24:35
Speaker 1: no aerospace team that could have ever done that today.
24:38
Speaker 1: And it's just so remarkable. And it was also just
24:42
Speaker 1: a pace of it or you know, it's the pace
24:44
Speaker 1: of innovation, right that was astounding. That's what we need
24:47
Speaker 1: to get better at. You have a favorite Abba song?
24:51
Speaker 1: Oh wow, I'm being pigeoned. Oh less sweet? I will
24:55
Speaker 1: say my favorite is and this you can read in
24:58
Speaker 1: what you will with this, but it is the Winner
25:01
Speaker 1: Takes it All? Okay, very good? Can we end with that?
25:11
Speaker 1: Anders Forceland is the co founder and CEO of Heart Aerospace,
25:26
Speaker 1: and you know, the Winner Takes It All is a
25:29
Speaker 1: genius pick for an entrepreneur's favorite Abba song, but in fact,
25:34
Speaker 1: the Winner does not take it all. One of the
25:37
Speaker 1: great things about technological innovation is you get these widespread
25:40
Speaker 1: beneficial effects. If Anders and his company do succeed in
25:45
Speaker 1: making a commercially viable electric plane, we can all be
25:49
Speaker 1: better off. Or, as Abba might put it, the winner
25:52
Speaker 1: gets to win, but others can join in. Everyone can
25:56
Speaker 1: gain from an electric plane. Today's show was produced by
26:04
Speaker 1: Edith Russolo, edited by Robert Smith, and engineered by Amanda Kay.
26:09
Speaker 1: I'm Jacob Goldstein. One last note, we are taking a
26:12
Speaker 1: few weeks off, so happy holidays, Happy New Year. Thank
26:16
Speaker 1: you so much for listening to the show this year,
26:18
Speaker 1: and we will be back in January with more episodes
26:21
Speaker 1: of What's Your Problem.