Have batteries made electric flight real? Can UK's Vertical Aerospace conquer the skies?

31:12Yes, it was. It was because it had to fly over part of Liverpool to get out to where we were going. One of the things that's interesting, if you look at twin engine helicopter designs, when they're initially sized, they are the powertrain is sized for two seconds of the flight. Two seconds of the flight is what fundamentally sizes it. Those are the two seconds right around the takeoff decision point. So by procedure, by regulation, these transport category rotorcraft, twin engine rotorcraft, are operating in category A type operations or performance class one, where they have to be able to show the same safety margin and same fault tolerance that an airliner has.

32:01where if an engine failure happens at any point in the takeoff or approach to landing phases, the critical phases, the aircraft can then either land safely, reject and land safely in a way that doesn't damage anything. Right. Or continue flying, clear all the obstacles in the airfield and continue flying towards its destination. So you have to do one of those two. So what you struggle with in a helicopter is right when it lifts up vertically to take off decision point, there's a certain altitude that will set that TDP. You fail off one engine and then the other engine has to go to an emergency power rating.

32:43It's typically rated for 30 seconds. So you can go to this really high power, but you can't stay there alone or else you're going to damage it because it's going to get so hot and it's running so fast. and drive so much torque into that side of the gearbox, then you have to size your gearboxes, your gears, your rotors, your motors, all for this just two-second window. Because once you get a couple seconds after TDP, the helicopter has enough speed that it has translational lift, which drops the power off and it starts to climb. So it's just for a few seconds. So if you think about one of the things that stands out the first time you drove an electric vehicle, It's you step on the accelerator and the power comes fast, right?

33:28Electrons can move really quickly, whereas this thermodynamics connected to this complex mechanical and dynamics takes a while, right? There's a transfer function in there that takes time, whereas the electrons create an electromagnetic torque so quickly. that that is such a great fit for vertical takeoff and landing because it's just this little tiny window that you need a lot of power you need in a hurry and it is such a great fit and that's why when the technology matured was it 15 years ago um you look i think joeby was one of the first to be founded and when people saw that and they're like whoa vtol that's what we got to do that's what steven fitzpatrick saw in 2016 it's like whoa this is such a great fit for vtol we need to dive been there because anecdotally everybody sees the demand, right?

34:19Everybody sees that, that population centers are becoming more and more populated and the mobility problem, the connectivity problems are getting worse and worse and worse. Back to Cambridge. I mean, what are their, what are their options? Right. I mean, Rachel Reeves gave a press conference where she said, yes, we're going to commit funds to helping the community solve their mobility problem, but it's going to take a long time and cost a whole lot of money. Right. It's not easy to build more rail lines or more highways. Right. And then you really disrupt the communities when you do that. Whereas the third dimension.

34:54Yeah. Right. The birds are pretty accommodating. They stay away. And there's there's really not traffic jams. You don't get stuck in traffic jam, look up and you see the birds queuing up in traffic jam. So it is the it is a really, really attractive option to solve these mobility problems. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, also, I can imagine one of the real key things, as you mentioned when you were in Miami, because that's the other one experience I've had, is with an air ambulance, a helicopter air ambulance. And I felt that many years ago. That was the second time I ever went in a helicopter. But what that facilitates, the ability to get medics to a remote location where there's people that really need them.

35:44And those you think, that is just genius. Well, this technology surely lends itself to that specific role. Absolutely. I mean, the golden hour. I mean, you expand the reach of the golden hour. There are certain areas where they do have pretty strong air medical services, where if you or a loved one was in an accident and needed to get to a hospital inside of that golden hour, they can get you there. But most communities in the world don't have that type of service right now. Yeah, that's true. And there's also a big cost pressure, right? There's big cost pressure on medical systems across the globe.

36:24And the ability to have a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that solves the noise problem and can be done at a lower operating cost than a helicopter, it addresses the two big items holding it back. and when I was in Cambridge I saw the you know the heart hospital there on the biomedical campus that's that's world renowned and I asked I said wow I see a I see a helipad here I said how often is that used it seems to be the weeds are getting a little little high it doesn't look like somebody's out there maintaining it every hour and like well not that often you know not not that often because it's financed through charities and so there's only so much money right and so you you're basically tapped out of the budget to be able to use it.

37:07So there's more demand than there is funding available to do it. So it's like, okay, let's say if we come up with a model where you've got an aircraft that can serve the same area, but do it more cost-effectively, if you drive it at half the operating cost, and then everyone's like, wow, okay, then you can do twice as many. How many lives is it that same? But in terms of, I mean, my experience now, Now, you know, I think I feel in a lucky position in that I've driven combustion cars for, I don't know, 40 years before I drove electric cars. So I have a realistic hands-on experience of the amount of servicing of spare parts, of oil, of filter changes, of gaskets.

37:51You know, everything that can go wrong with a combustion car, I've been there. Especially if you like to keep your cars long. Yes. My wife's car is 20 years old, and so she lives it every day and enjoys that. She enjoys the, hey, I'm going to manage the maintenance. I know what I've got to do here. I know what I've got to do here, making those trade-off decisions. Yeah, and that's why it's just the mechanical elements. You take something that's really mechanically complex, a helicopter, and you replace it with something that's electrically complex. Yes, but mechanically. The maintenance issue is a whole different paradigm.

38:29And then if you look at what it takes to develop a new tilt rotor, as I told you, my niche was tilt rotors. And, you know, when I look at companies that were developing smaller tilt rotors and looking at demand and saying, why are startup companies trying to do this? And it's because it takes so long to design and build and qualify and source the supply chain for the gearboxes. It's all about the powertrain. It takes so, so long and it's so hard to qualify the gears because the gears are critical parts and they have to be treated and they have to be coded and they have to be inspected and they have to meet really, really high number of significant digit tolerances.

39:16And when you look at that, you're like, wow, that's that's what drives the delays and how long it takes and and why it's not attractive for a startup company. Or now with electric motors, you look at how many companies, then they start with just drones. And now you scale it up, you scale it up, it becomes a paradigm that can be cracked. You can be a startup company and you go build an electric aircraft and get it tested. Which would have been impossible 20 years ago. You wouldn't have bothered, would you? Right. With the gearboxes and the tunnels. But I think you've kind of alluded to it already.

39:49and it's really, I would love to discuss that whole notion of needing to replace batteries, but I would assume the general maintenance is reflective of electric cars. I mean, they need so much less servicing and maintenance. Obviously, all the mechanical stuff, the steering brakes, lights, wipers, all that is exactly the same. But the difference in, I have, what is it now, a 16-year-old Nissan Leaf. Lots of things have gone wrong with it. It's not a perfect car. It had a lousy range. It still has pretty poor rain. But the motor in it, I don't even know where it is. I know it's got one because it goes along the road.

40:31I've done nothing in 16 years, not one, and it's never been looked at. No garage has looked at it. You know, it's a completely different experience. That's exactly the paradigm. Now, I mean, if you look at it just quantitatively, A transport category rotorcraft will have in the hundreds, if you count the piece parts that are critical, such that if they were to fail, the helicopter will go down and result in a catastrophe. Whereas you just have a few, a handful of them on an eVTOL. You'll still have some. So if the wing breaks, that's still catastrophic. if a hub comes apart, right? If your shaft and the hub just shears through and throws all four blades, yeah, that would be catastrophic.

41:20So you have just a handful of critical parts that need to go through the inspections and the overhauls instead of hundreds. And so that's the two orders of magnitude improvement. So I think you've mentioned it, but the running costs, I mean, I've got no idea what it costs to run a helicopter, but I know from working in TV shows and having some idea of the budget, that when we did use helicopters, and I'm talking 25, 30 years ago, it was not cheap. It was the special treat for one episode in that series. Okay, we'll use a helicopter to get this because that would really help. It was really unusual, very, very rare.

42:00Whereas now you just have a guy with a drone. All those shots you now do with a drone. I still find it bizarre. I said, oh, God, yeah, we actually hired a helicopter to get that aerial shot. And there was a cameraman hanging out the side of it. You know, now it's crazy. But, I mean, are they able to run? That's the basic gist. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And we're seeing that right now because when we do our experimental flight testing and it's an envelope expansion test, we have a chase aircraft. Right. So I don't know if you do, if you Google Velo in-flight or vertical aerospace in-flight videos, you'll see some flights and then you'll see a helicopter.

42:38flying behind it. So the helicopter is flying Chase just to be an extra set of eyes to the test model. And what we have to pay for that Chase helicopter per flight hour is really expensive. So we can't wait until our next generation, right? When the Velo, the production versions are coming off the line, and then those are flying, we want to use the pre-production ones that are mature as Chase. So we're going to have a Chase that's a lower cost to operate than renting a hell of a guy and save ourselves a lot of money. But that, so that's, I think people, a lot of people who watch this will know about a fair amount about electric cars or will drive electric cars.

43:16So that, the only way you can sort of equate the two things is if every time you got in your electric car, you had to accelerate from naught to as fast as you possibly could. Yes. Every time, even if you're just going down the road to get it. You know, that's the pressure that you're putting on the battery. Every time. in a second or two. Yeah. So, I mean, because the batteries you're using now, are they similar to batteries that are in electric cars or are you having batteries specially manufactured? So the ESS itself, and I love the fact that we don't officially call it a battery system. We call it an energy storage system just to kind of give it that name that points to what it does.

44:00The energy storage system itself is an innovative part of the technology, part of the aircraft, because it takes these cells, which are automotive type cells. It takes the automotive cells, cylindrical cells are the ones that we're using, but packages it in a way that meets the safety requirements. requirements. The safety requirements include vibrations. It includes high impact crash loads. And one thing where we put a lot of time and effort is the mitigation of energy release, right? If a cell catches on fire, if you get a thermal runaway. So we have a proprietary approach, which has three different levels of mitigation protection.

44:48And then we test it, and then we optimize those three levels, and we test it again, and then we optimize those, and we test it again. So just going to show you a little flavor of this development process that's been ongoing at Vertical for the last 10 years. And I've seen it firsthand the last three and a half. It focuses on fast iterations. It focuses on let's get to that next level of discovery quickly, right? Quickly, safely, efficiently, learn as much as we can, and then iterate. So what we're producing in Velo is going to be our third generation energy storage system. We had a different one in aircraft one, now a different one in aircraft two and three, and production is going to be a third generation.

45:32But each of those three generations goes through five formal cycles of design, spiral evolution. So we have our alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon. And so at each of those, we run specific tests on it and then say, OK, what can we do then to optimize it for this next iteration? And so that gets carefully planned in with the project so that we can still support the integration of that battery into that next level. So, hey, we may not be fully at the at the Epsilon version because right now we have a gamma version that's being integrated with the other aspects of the Velo detailed design for our critical design review.

46:14Knowing that, hey, there will still be a couple of iterations on a couple of these internal things we expect as we go through some of these tests. You hang it about 60 feet above the air and you drop it and you show that it absorbs all the energy and there's no hazardous release of energy. And then similarly, you light multiple cells on fire at the same time just by putting in a little mechanism that short circuits them. You deliberately make them catch fire. Deliberately. Deliberately have it catch fire. and then you let it run for 15 minutes and show that you can vent all the hot gas out the bottom of the aircraft and not have the propagation of the fire create a hazard on the aircraft so that the aircraft can then get to a landing spot, land vertically, get everybody off, and then deal with it.

47:08Because that's the obvious thing is the kind of level of safety equipment you need or safety knowledge and understanding and procedures in anything that flies. I mean, it's not just vertical takeoff, anything that flies is a very different beast. I mean, you've got four wheels that are on the ground and two of them steer. And you want, you know, how basic cars were when they started. And in fact, how fairly basic but also very dangerous aircraft were when they started, when you were sitting in a box of wood with some string tied to it and you hope for the best, I guess. And so then if you assess what can go wrong, and if you look at all the things that can go wrong with a mechanical powertrain, and that mechanical powertrain then is the sole source of you propelling forward.

48:01Now, in a vertical takeover landing aircraft, this powertrain is what holds you in the air, right, and propels you forward. so if it goes out gravity wins um so it becomes a hazardous situation so then you you do your assessment of what are all the things that can go wrong that's where we get into the hundreds right that's this big long list on a mechanical whereas with the electrical system the ability to improve the fault tolerance by just adding wires and silicon chips right wires silicon chips and electric motors. It provides a practical way to get a higher safety level. So we're designing and we'll certify Velo to airliner safety standards as published in our certification by the United Kingdom Civil Aviation Authority.

48:51And they are using the standard that was developed by EASA, the European Aviation Safety Authority. And they made a strategic decision when they developed that within the last decade to establish a safety standard that's the same as an Airbus jetliner, the 10 to the minus nine standard. And the rationale was that if you project the realization of this demand in the urban areas over the next 10 years, you can forecast a really high utilization of number of sorties, number of aircraft that will be operating in these urban areas over populated areas. And if you use the accident rate for helicopters today, and you apply that to a forecast growth and demand, you will see a completely unacceptable accident rate for the public.

49:50Yeah, you will have multiple accidents in and around popular areas every week. But if you take the airliner safety standard, I mean, which is the safest way to travel right now, right? It's safer for me to hop on an airliner and fly from Heathrow to Philadelphia, than it would be for me to walk to work through Bristol. Statistically, it's a lot safer. Yes. No, they're all lovely. Bristolians are lovely. but you know it's the bicycle and the buses and cars and yeah and so statistically it's a safer it's safe safer way to travel and so then you will have a fatal accident once every 30 years right right right which is acceptable yes and so that's the that's that's the difference and so um the concern initially was is that practical because it's not practical to take existing single engine helicopters and retrofit them to 10 to minus nine.

50:48You just have too many mechanical elements. But it is practical with distributed electric propulsion, the technology available today, the ability to take proven parts. And what we did in Availa was we teamed with Honeywell. Honeywell produces the flight control computers for the Boeing 787. And I started as a flight controls engineer working on the B-22 Osprey back in 1989, developing the control laws and looking at the safety of the system and how you manage the redundancy. And it is a long journey, right, to optimize all those algorithms and how you monitor and how you build in enough dissimilarity so you don't have a bad computer processing unit come off the Pentium line and that can corrupt all three computers at the same time.

51:39Those type of things. And Honeywell has mastered it over the last 20, 30 years. And so we said, oh, we're going to use that, right? They've got this high pedigree that's already to the airliner standards, really, really terrific safety record with Boeing. So we're going to just take that and incorporate that. And then Honeywell also came with this proprietary tech, which I think is so cool. They call it their Mach, M-A-C-H, control law. And so the controller was originally designed for missiles, for flight vehicles that are over-affected, where it's got more ways to steer the aircraft through the sky than the four degrees of freedom that you're trying to steer to.

52:20So it's over-affected. And so they have this algorithm, which I like the way they call it. They call it the SMN. So solve for M equations in N unknowns. so you have a whole lot more unknowns and you have equations right you got four equations of motion but we've got 30 different control effectors if you count the brakes on the main landing gear which we used to steer on the ground um we have 30 and so you have more ways to control it so you have a non-unique trim solution uh at any given trim state um so it has this this this marks built into it that allows it to optimize the allocation based on where the aircraft is and how it's sensing the aircraft is performing.

53:04And so that is such an enabling tech because what it allows the aircraft to do is, number one, is the transition where you actually have to go through a change in the aerodynamic characteristics. The fact that you can control the pitch roll, yaw, and heave by changing the RPM and the thrust of the eight propellers changing the way that you do it together right you can get pitch moments you can get rolling moments depending on how you uh how you change the thrust level um with the the wing surfaces right right multiple wing surfaces and multiple tail surfaces and you've got four tilt actuators that can move forward and out and you have the ability to change collective pitch on the four props in the front which can allow you to spin at the same rpm and change thrust.

53:53So you put all that into the mathematics and the computers, and you can have some really precise control. One thing that I found fascinating coming from a helicopter and tilt rotor world is the ability to take off vertically and just hover one to three feet above the ground, right at the ground, and just hold it rock steady. And then you look at the test pilot, because he's still eye level with you, and he's not working like crazy to do it. He's pretty much just making sure it's steady and watching the system do his thing. But if you look at the tilts, you'll see them all moving in high frequency because the high bandwidth control system is working hard because the aircraft is seeing a whole lot of disturbances because you've got these eight propellers that all have a wake coming off it.

54:47And this wake effect has velocity And then it impinges upon the ground. And then it's got to go either outboard or inboard. And if it comes inboard, then it joins up underneath the aircraft. It comes up like a fountain because it's got to go somewhere. And then it bounces the aircraft left and right, forward and aft. And if you ever watch a V-22 Osprey video of it taking off on a ship or on the ground, you'll notice that when it takes off, boom, it jumps up to 10 feet above the ground. It doesn't hang out between 10 feet and the ground. because if so, it'll start to wobble back and forth and pitch forward and aft.

55:22So the power of the flight control system with the 30 control effectors, the high bandwidth mock control law allows you to just take off and hold it. And so you get the benefit of, hey, it's smooth for the passengers. As we talked about, the passenger experience is going to be so key for this to take off. Number two, it's not super high workload for the pilot. So the ability to be able to get pilots through the train to proficiency right instead of it taking six weeks to train proficiency it'll take three weeks yeah so you get them through and initially the model is to bring um pilots already with a commercial pilot's license they already have that level of experience and uh and skill proven on another aircraft and then bring them in and then they're trained in a type rating to the valo to train them to proficiency.

56:14So it won't take as long because it's not as hard to fly. And then you also get the benefit that when you have this effect of the wake hitting the ground and coming back up, it essentially puts a cushion on the aircraft so you don't use as much power. Wow. Okay. So if you then start to accelerate when you're close to the ground instead of when you're far away from the ground, the amount of power that it takes and the amount of state of charge that you burn is lower right and then that also helps you as you come in and land right as you come in and land you can you can you you can slow down to a hover closer to the ground and get some benefit of the ground so you also get the benefit of that and and the performance as we mentioned before to be able to still do the vertical takeoff and the vertical landing after any combination of failure is not extremely improbable that's what sizes the power yeah because i mean the thing that i would love to sort of i do understand it because i've sort of been in enough aircraft to get stuff but you go up you're not moving forward let's just say you go up and you're not moving towards and then you you adjusting so you start to pull forwards as you drop them to the front motors the the wings need you know for wings to work this is the one thing i'm saying they need a certain amount of wind you need to be moving at a speed where they have an effect where they get lift and it's that intermediary period as you go from going up and you're not moving forward to moving forward i'm just totally intrigued by how that how that works i mean and that's not new to this is it in a way the osprey has to go through that process as well presumably yeah i mean it's almost magical And so when I started in 1989 was right when the V-22 Aircraft 1 had its first flight.

58:08So I was there when it did its first transition. A lot of it was done down at the Arlington Municipal Airport, Bell's Flight Test Center in Texas. And it was just magical, right, because it was seamless. And what happens is, as you said, it's Bernoulli's law, right? As you pick up speed, you get more aerodynamic lift on the wing. Pressure differential, air flowing over versus air flowing below the wing, starts to build up, build up, build up. At the same time, the thrust that you're getting in the vertical direction from the prop rotors, they're called in the tilt rotor world, starts to come down.

58:46So lift goes up from the wing as lift slash thrust from the propellers goes down, such that the net is holding the aircraft in the air is equivalent to the mass and so you can go through several different trajectories of how much power you have in the propellers as long as you sized it properly and the speed for the lift on the wing so you have a transition quarter a conversion quarter that says here's the combination of tilt angles and speeds and powers and and then even flap angles right you can even adjust the the high lift surfaces on the wing give you a little bit more as a function of speed.

59:21And you would solve that equation so that it becomes routine. If you go look at some published videos, you can see some good videos of Simon Davis, who's our chief test pilot. And Cy will tell you the rigor that we went through as we expanded the envelope from taking off and landing hover. Our first one was, you know, tied to the ground with tethers. And then we slowly get faster, faster, faster, review all the data, correlate the models, go a little faster. He said, you're looking at it at increments and you're balancing your mathematical models and you're predicting, tweaking some software. He said, but then once you get through it, he said, it's just so routine now.

59:56You just, you take off, you press forward and, and you don't even, you don't notice it from a pilot's perspective is what he was saying as you transition. And that's, as you transition from thrust born to wing born. And that's what I've heard from, from tilt-order test pilots over the years. And I mean, presumably then that experience for the, for passengers is going to be smooth. They'll feel it going up and then they'll feel it going forward and they won't suddenly go whoa yeah yeah and right that's part of the optimization and so i even mentions he said it becomes i think he's the word magical right around 60 65 knots he said everything just gets really quiet as soon as you get to the point that you feel you're you're in wing-borne flight he said everything just quiets down you don't feel the propellers anymore you don't hear the propellers anymore you um you don't feel the you know that any vibrations or accelerations he said everything just gets really quiet yeah and then that's where the aircraft flies except for the last minute yes yes you go back to the rest part yeah so then i mean not because we've i've kept you for a long time but the one the other thing i'd love to know is it you know so it can take off like a conventional aircraft on a runway goes along gets faster goes up in the air is that is that one of weeks.

1:01:13So that's a good question. Our prototype right now can. Our prototype we do, and we're going to do conventional takeoffs on our way to ferry the aircraft to the farm next week. But in production, we have sized it so that it can do short takeoff and landings of 40 knots. But we're not going to qualify the landing gear to do full wing-borne, but we will get the benefit at 40 knots so 40 knots you still get half the power required goes down right um where you're kind of in this partial mode of of wing-borne and thrust-borne uh without having to show that we qualify for full takeoff and landing and that's just as part of this optimization the way to qualify the landing gear to a full airplane type landing gear is going to be bigger than i understand we're going to carry all ass around for uh for for for something that's not really the use case of the aircraft so that was part of the optimization but then roughly what size of landing area or takeoff and landing area does it need?

1:02:15I mean, clearly, it's a lot less than an airport and a runway. It's much smaller. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and that's a good question. I'm trying to think because you can do it just from a tarmac. I mean, I'm thinking, you know, Leonardo, when we were doing short takeoffs and landings at 40 knots on the AW609, it just used the kind of the tarmac just outside the hangar and just towed it to the one end and it took off at the other end. So it's, you know, it's on the order of, well, it's not even 100 meters. But then if it's vertical, I mean, would a landing pad for what you need where you're literally doing vertical takeoff and landing, I mean, is it football pitch or tennis court?

1:02:56Is it, what scale of? It's, yeah, it's a 60 foot diameter. Right. It's fine, right? And so a lot of twin engine helicopters take off from a D of 60 feet. Our D is 16 meters. So it's less than that. It's 52 feet or so. It's the rotor tip to rotor tip at the end of the wing. So that's what size is our footprint dimension. And so if you count that as the diameter, it's 16-meter diameter. So it's rough. I mean, you could land then where they've got an H painted on the ground, you know, for an helicopter. Yes, absolutely. That's part of the key. So I'm getting some messages now that I'm already over time.

1:03:34This has been so much fun. It has. Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed talking to you. It's been wonderful. Thank you so much, David. Well, thanks. Thanks for having me. All right.

1:03:48Really hope you enjoyed that. Please do check out our live events that are coming up soon. One in Twickenham at the beginning of September 11th and 12th, I believe. And then a week later in Sydney in Australia, which is going to be – they're both going to be spectacularly big shows that's for sure um but that's that's it really yeah do yes that's it yeah there'll be another podcast toddling your way very soon but for the time being if you have been thank you for watching leaders aren't born they're made and they're made like everything else through hard work well the chevy silverano was made for hard work and designed to handle the big jobs.

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