Episode #61: Meet the Venture Reinventing Aircraft Engines

Frequently Asked Questions

FAQ

• Where is the transcript for this webinar?

  Samantha Herrick:
  Today, we meet the Tesla of aircraft travel. Let’s get into it.

  Ian Brooke:
  From my obsession with aviation, I’ve developed a new supersonic propulsion system. It’s very similar to existing jet engines, but yeah, making affordable supersonic flight.

  Drew Wandzilak:
  You can simplify it all down to four forces that are all acting against each other. So, I think the concept of paying off that mass debt is a really great way to look at it.

  Ian Brooke:
  That is the long-term goal—to replace airline travel with low-cost, supersonic, on-demand flight.

  Drew Wandzilak:
  Totally. It radically changes, I think, the operating model of the aircraft.

  Samantha Herrick:
  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 Wandzilak, Senior Associate here at Alumni Ventures. He’s in pinstripes. 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 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. Ian is a very experienced pilot and mechanical engineer. He knows the ins and outs of airplanes like nobody else does. This man’s knowledge of airplanes and engineering is insane. You’ll see it here in the interview. It’s really cool. There’s a lot of really nuanced engineering and technology that they talk about today in the episode that really helps define what the new jet engine is, which is what Astro Mechanica is doing.

  I want to read a little bit of a snippet from a tweet that Ian gave out in February of this year:

  “My company, Astro Mechanica, 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.”

  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’s not personalized advice and it’s not an offer to buy or sell securities. For additional important details, please see the text description accompanying this episode.

  Drew Wandzilak:
  We’ll start things off. Hello, everyone. I’m Drew Wandzilak. I’m an investor with Alumni Ventures, and I am here with Ian Brooke, who is the Founder and CEO of Astro Mechanica. It’s so great to have you on, Ian. Let’s kick things off with just a brief introduction on yourself and the high-level elevator pitch on Astro Mechanica and what you guys are doing.

  Ian Brooke:
  Yeah. Hey, I’m Ian Brooke, founder of Astro Mechanica. So, my quick bio is a lifelong pilot. I use the term “full-stack mechanical engineer.” I do everything from CAD to machining to selling the products—at least that’s my prior work. So yeah, everything from the raw material to delivered products has always been my thing. From my obsession with aviation, I have developed a new supersonic propulsion system. It’s very similar to existing jet engines but making affordable supersonic flight.

  Samantha Herrick:
  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. 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. Speeds between Mach 1 and Mach 5 are considered supersonic, while speeds above Mach 5 are classified as hypersonic.

  Drew Wandzilak:
  I think the big unlock here is what you guys are describing as this turbo-electric adaptive engine. Correct me if my phrasing is off or if there are obviously additional pieces to that. Explain the technology—what is it that you guys are building? How does it work, in as simple terms as possible? We can dive in a little bit deeper where it makes sense.

  Ian Brooke:
  Yeah, so I think the way to think about it is that aircraft engines do two things. We tend to think of it as one thing, but they do two things. There’s a thermodynamic cycle, which is extracting energy from fuel to create power. Then the second thing is propulsion or generating thrust from that power.

  In all engines, these two things happen at the same time, so they get a little confused with each other. But what makes for good thermal efficiency and what makes for good propulsive efficiency are two very different things. The insight that I had from some obsessive work I was doing in aviation was that electric motors had gotten extremely lightweight.

  That lets you do something very new, which is you can use an existing jet engine—a turbine engine, turbo-shaft engine, turbine thermodynamic cycle—to generate electrical power. It’s now very light. The electric motors are the heavy piece of this. Previously, it wasn’t viable. Now it’s very lightweight. You can create a separate propulsive engine.

  So, it’s like taking that typical airplane engine and splitting it into two things, and now they can both be optimized for what is optimal for them. The turbine core gets to run at its sweet spot for max thermal efficiency. Then on the propulsive end, the one actually pushing the plane through the air, that one can now adapt.

  This is where the turbine and the adaptive cycle part—and they’re electrically joined—this is where “turbo-electric adaptive engine” comes about. The adaptive side can be the correct propulsive mode or cycle for any given speed that the airplane is at. If you’re subsonic, that looks like an airliner fan cycle that works really well up to 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.

  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—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, in a nutshell, we have a highly variable exhaust velocity that we can trade off for mass flow. That’s it in a nutshell—hopefully, not too technical.

  Drew Wandzilak:
  Yeah, I think—well, emphasis on “not too technical.” I still think there were a lot of words in there for non-aerospace engineers. We joked when we first met—I took some summer classes. So, the terms, I know, right? But I’m going to challenge you a little bit here because we talked about some of the difficulties of storytelling around deeply technical solutions.

  Let’s do a little Aerospace Engineering 101, class number one with Ian. How does the jet engine that people hear about or see today work?

  Drew Wandzilak:
  And then maybe we can dive into the individual pieces. You touched on electric motors and how that’s changing the paradigm in jet engines. So, in as quick and simple a way as you can, what is science? What is the technology behind the existing state of a jet engine?

  Ian Brooke:
  Yeah, so jet engines, as all combustion engines, do four 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. So, that happens on all airplane engines. 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. That separate thing is the one 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 next to it, and we electrically couple them. 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.

  Drew Wandzilak:
  It is. I think that was tremendously helpful. Then even within that, I’ll keep it simple—maybe losing some nuance—but in that jet engine, the engines you see on the commercial airliner that you took on your last trip somewhere on vacation look very different from the engine that you would see with an afterburner on a fighter jet. Talk to the differences there again, because the technology is conceptually very similar. What are those differences, and what are the tradeoffs between something that is maybe a little bit more high-efficiency versus something that’s a little bit higher “performance or speed”?

  Ian Brooke:
  Yeah. So, I guess it can be summarized as you’re trying to create thrust. Thrust is mass times velocity. So, you’re taking in X amount of air, and you’re pushing it at X speed. It doesn’t matter from a thrust perspective whether you’re doing one kilogram per second, one unit of air at 100 units of speed, or flip that. That is equal thrust.

  This is true if you’re at zero miles an hour, but as you start to move, well, you have some forward speed. So, the difference ends up being if you have a very low exhaust velocity, that doesn’t work when you’re going really fast. That’s why fighter jet engines look different—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 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. Air around us is free reaction mass—it’s free stuff to push out the back. The reason you don’t want to push air too fast is that kinetic energy is one-half MV squared. So, that V squared really penalizes you as opposed to just taking in more mass.

  That’s why this is a thing that you want to optimize around. In a normal engine, these things are physically linked. Whatever the size of the engine is, you’re just committed to that. I have this analogy: it’s like 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.

  Samantha Herrick:
  All right. Everyone knows the drill—we’re going to take a break, and then we’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.

  Pete Mathias:
  Hey, everyone. Just taking a quick break so we can tell you about the US Strategic Tech Fund from Alumni Ventures. AV is one of the only VC firms focused on making venture capital accessible to individual investors like you. In fact, AV is one of the most active and best-performing VCs in the US, and we co-invest alongside renowned lead investors.

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  Drew Wandzilak:
  It’s incredibly helpful. The second question I always ask companies after, “Well, first, what are you doing?”—I think the second most important question is the “why now” piece. You touched on this a little bit with, I think, the performance and the cost and the availability of the electric motor. Dive into that a little bit more in terms of why is it taking so long? I think as people learn about what you guys do, they’re going to go, “Oh, okay, that makes a lot of sense.” Why is it 2024 and we’re just figuring this out now?

  Ian Brooke:
  Yeah, there’s a little bit of—this is a second-order effect of the EV revolution, I would say, is the big one. Even using Tesla-style electric motors, which are good electric motors for cars, it would be way, way too heavy. The weight of electric motors—I’ve described this thing where, all right, 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 two things, would weigh more than the airplane itself with old-style motors.

  I just have to use numbers in this. A Tesla-style motor is roughly two kilowatts per kilogram. Just note, this is a number: the number is two. So, if we have 2,000 kilowatts, or two 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 five 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. Then the other thing is just that we got much better at making electric motors. We actually get our motors right now from a Formula One vendor where it costs us [inaudible 00:15:06]. Let’s make this as power-dense as we can.

  Our low-performance motors are about five times better on power density than a Tesla motor. I’m sure they’re also mentally more expensive, but for aerospace, it’s all cheaper than jet engines. Then we’ve got one more still, which is up to 27 kilowatts per kilogram. So, we went from two, then our current ones are 10, and we’re getting other ones that are 27. So yeah, is it 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. We had to pay a certain mass debt to this, and the higher efficiency that we get from this thing allows us to pay that off very quickly. Before, it’d be like you couldn’t ever pay off this 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, yeah, it’s a little bit heavier, but you save that after not even an hour of flying time. So, hopefully, that makes sense.

  Drew Wandzilak:
  I like the term mass debt that you use. I don’t know if I’ve heard that before because I think most things in aerospace engineering, in aerodynamics, are a series of trade-offs, right? I mean, you can simplify it all down to four forces that are all acting against each other. 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 where you can get that efficiency maybe without the same trade-offs that existing options would have to give up. Talk broadly about what the future of air travel, of aerospace, of airplanes could look like 10, 20 years down the line if Astro Mechanical engines and systems are integrated in everything.

  Ian Brooke:
  Yeah, I’m realizing I’m falling into the trap. We started with the engine, but this was a prerequisite to what we’re doing. I built 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 this engine enables efficient supersonic flight.

  So, the big deal here was a big reduction in fuel burn, but more than that, that gets its range. Back to this mass debt 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 prior supersonic, to say nothing of the event’s cost trying to run something like that.

  So, the deal here 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 at least three times faster and at cost parity, not like business class fares. We actually can get to the point where it’s 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. We could, but the first plane that we’re making, more as a DOD demonstrator, is going to be a 20,000-pound aircraft.

  If you could put people in it—I intend to as soon as I can—you do two pilots up front, five passengers in the back, and it would be probably in the order of a $3,000 cost per flight across the Pacific for a private jet from SF to Tokyo. I should say maybe we shouldn’t talk about these numbers publicly. That’s going to be what I think our operator cost could be. Again, this is our first version of this. There’s a lot more optimization to be had over time, but you flip things on 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 that I’m going for, but we have lots of businesses that we can do, lots of markets that we can serve in the meantime. But that is the long-term goal—to replace airline travel with low-cost, supersonic, on-demand flight.

  Drew Wandzilak:
  Totally, it radically changes, I think, the operating model of the aircraft, but there still is this upfront cost to building these systems. And you reach some economy of scale at some point—if you’re building enough, you’re operating enough—it gets levelized across those operations. But is the goal to build the aircraft itself?

  Ian Brooke:
  Yes.

  Drew Wandzilak:
  Up front as well?

  Ian Brooke:
  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 are these natural cycles. When you’re reinventing an industry, you have to be vertically integrated. The more vertically integrated you are, generally, the better. Over time I can see this—then you want to, instead of horizontally integrated, have others specialized. 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. Yeah, I think it’s the natural cycle. For the company itself, part of how you also do this is it’s always the Tesla model for something like this. Start with the Roadster, then the Model S, then Model 3, then the Model Y. I think that’s the way to do it.

  Drew Wandzilak:
  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 five, seven-seater the Roadster, and then what’s the Model S? What’s the Model 3? What’s the Model Y of Astro Mechanica?

  Ian Brooke:
  So it’ll be a Roadster for sure on this initial one. I’m aiming for it to be something that we can quickly convert to the civil market. I guess I should say the first aircraft just needs to work and serve DOD functions. DOD is very different from civil. There’s not a passenger certification. To make an airplane costs some hundreds of millions; to certify it is well into the billions.

  So, this is the gap of, “All right, you just made the thing work versus it will never fail, ever.” That’s what you have to do on the passenger side. So, the market that you start out with is, 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 it’s a niche.

  I think it’s actually funny that the market for DOD is nowhere near as big as the consumer civil market, but it has a much lower barrier to entry. It’s more tightly coupled to just technical execution. I mean it’s the same aircraft, but now we’re going to make our next step down, our Model S. We’re turning our Roadster into our Model S. Going to confuse analogies here, but we’ll certify it, some billions of dollars. But the nice thing about that is the idea here is to start your financial engine. We’ve been making, selling, and serving the DOD. Maybe we can do autonomous supersonic cargo or something like that as well. I don’t know.

  So, you go to these markets. First thing is get your financial engine going, and then you can funnel it into a later certification. So, yeah, private jet—the five-passenger private jet, I guess—would be our Model S. Our Model 3 is probably going to be a 30-passenger JetSuiteX, go for something like that. Then eventually, you would have your Model Y equivalent where, reluctantly but finally, we’ll do a very large aircraft for the major city pairs.

  Because the on-demand jet thing, while extremely cool, sometimes you just need planes running from SF to New York or SF to Tokyo. There are a lot of people that are going to be going in 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. It’s more expensive to make a cheap car than an expensive one. You do that last.

  Samantha Herrick:
  Okay, curiosity got the best of me here, but I did a dive into the process of certifying airplanes and how the FAA goes through that process, the Federal Aviation Administration. The type certification process is the primary method for proving new aircraft designs, and it typically has about four stages.

  The first stage is technical overview and certification basis. The aircraft manufacturer presents the project to the certifying authority. In the US, that’s the FAA. In Europe, that’s the EASA. 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.

  Then the third is the compliance demonstration. The manufacturer demonstrates compliance with regulatory requirements through analysis, ground tests, and flight tests. This is literally the demonstration and testing phase. This covers all elements of the aircraft, including airframe, systems, engines, quality of flying, and performance. The certifying authority reviews documentation and witnesses tests.

  Then the last stage is technical closure and type certification issues. Once satisfied with the compliance demonstration, the certifying authority closes the investigation, and a type certificate is issued for the aircraft design.

  Some notes to get across with this: Ian had said that this process can get into the billions of dollars for a company, but he didn’t really talk about duration. So, the certification process can take years. For example, the Boeing 737 MAX certification took almost five years. There’s a lot of regulatory oversight, so the certifying authority—most likely the FAA—remains directly involved with testing. There are delegations; 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 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. So yeah, it’s quite a lengthy process here, but definitely one that needs to be done. It’ll be interesting to see how Astro Mechanica’s technology would fit into this in the future. But okay, I just wanted to add that, and let’s get right back in.

  Drew Wandzilak:
  Got it, got it. You touched on something there that was my next question: it’s such a radical shift that I imagine new “markets” opening up with what you guys are doing. I mean, obviously, this on-demand, smaller jet travel is radically different from what we experience today, but when I think people think about air travel, they think about moving people with commercial airliners. They think maybe about fighter jets or DOD applications. Supersonic autonomous cargo—I mean, what are some things that open up with what you guys are doing? Because it’s a totally different business model, economic model, and unit economics are different. Do you guys think about that?

  Ian Brooke:
  Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean I would say that the main one we talked about was definitely 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 that I think that is going to be the big one.

  There’s some other pretty interesting ones on this as well. We can go into all the ways that it can change DOD—like anywhere on Earth, large amounts of mass can cheaply be delivered anywhere in single-digit hours. As I’ve looked at this, there will not be anywhere on Earth that crosses probably the seven or eight-hour threshold. It could be antipodal flights like London to Sydney. So, you start to consider what changes downstream from that.

  Another one of these is space launch. I initially was talking about this a lot more because we’ve had our DOD traction and we don’t have to start there. I originally 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 two rockets—two stages. That lower rocket, like on Starship, is going up to somewhere around Mach 5, and I think it’s staged somewhere around 60 kilometers altitude. That’s within the range of what an airplane can do.

  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 into orbit by about 4X. So, this was my original big interest. You could take a Rocket Lab Electron—we don’t even have to make the rocket—we could grab a Rocket Lab Electron, and right now, it weighs 200 to 300 kilograms depending on the orbit. You could 4X that. It’s a fairly big deal on that one.

  Drew Wandzilak:
  You brought up a good point there, I think, on 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. It’s becoming a bigger priority for the DOD. We’ve seen it with companies out there trying to store mass in orbit and have it be able to come back down to Earth, or do you put something in Starship and then figure out a way to land a container? Are you guys going to be in that market and where do you fit in that realm?

  Ian Brooke:
  I mean this one again—we found over time, why not do everything—but yeah, this isn’t something in the near term where we’re… well, yeah, we’ll see. I guess back to that, there’s an early question of customer feedback and interest. If this is a thing that DOD really finds meaningful, we’re happy to make and supply the planes for this.

  The one that we’ve heard that was very surprising—[inaudible] was bringing this up—was the concept of a sprint tanker. So, it’s an amusing thing. If you deliver a lot of mass anywhere fairly quickly, we will be making something far faster than the fighter jets that are currently out there. So, if you’ve got pilots in some combat zone, 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: from a military perspective, experts talk logistics, and this changes the logistical landscape so much. We have all these forward staging grounds—Guam and things like that. Well, when you can do San Francisco to Taiwan in less time than it takes for a boat to cross the Taiwan Strait, you don’t need to have all these bases nearby, which can initially be vulnerable. It doesn’t even matter. North America can just reach out to anywhere at that point. Yeah, this is going down some of the ways that this could affect—

  Drew Wandzilak:
  I’m glad you brought up the point of logistics. We won’t dive into it too deeply, but contested logistics and also just thinking about logistics for the DOD and for anything is so important. I think 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,” but that’s not really the case. I mean, we are constrained by land and the range of the aircraft that we can move, or we’re constrained by the speed and the range of the boats that we have to move somewhere.

  Ian Brooke:
  Yeah, yeah, sorry.

  Drew Wandzilak:
  No, no, I think you were going to touch on that exact point. I mean, 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 triple the range of that jet or of that tanker or of that aircraft—it changes how prepared we are and changes response times and effectiveness on a totally different scale.

  Ian Brooke:
  Being able to do this at a smaller size is another interesting one. It’s moving from mainframe computers to personal computers, getting more granular like that. Doing that now with air travel, I think, will really also change just flight in general. It’s like there are certain places that you want to go to and there’s just no direct flight. Even if the distance isn’t that large, you want to get more granular with travel units.

  So, this goes into travel theory. There’s a huge amount of friction with each changeover. If you can cut down on those, this is why people like private jets, for instance—it’s just going to where you want to go. So, yeah, if you’re going to somewhere that’s near—say you’re going to Thailand—but Thailand is a big country…

  There’s a big difference if you want to go to the north of it or the south of it. Maybe that was another six hours or something on the ground or actually maybe a full day. 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 anywhere. Not even just vaguely across Earth point to point, but literally within a few miles of anywhere you want to be on Earth in hours. That’s just not how things work. It is a wild way to exist.

  Drew Wandzilak:
  It’s a wild way to exist. 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, it totally changes the hub and spoke model, of course, because you’re getting your own jet. 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, not a near-term thing.

  Ian Brooke:
  Actually, this makes things easier. I mean, 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 actually, we’ve got over 5,000 airports with a mile-long runway. The total number of 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. You can actually just spread the load a lot more on that. That helps a bunch. That’s a big deal.

  This ties to airplane sizing too. You also want the planes to 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 correctly match, but it still is an interesting thing.

  There’s many fewer airplanes in the world than people think. I don’t know if it’s United or Delta, but I don’t think there’s any airline with more than 1,000 airplanes. The total number of airplanes I’ve seen in the numbers is anywhere from 30,000 to 45,000 airplanes total—all airplanes. It’s not that many airplanes. So, yeah, it’s not like cars where you have that many cars in a single city. I don’t know what the scaling challenges are going to be there. I look forward to having this problem.

  Drew Wandzilak:
  You have done well. You have done well if that is the—

  Ian Brooke:
  Yeah, this is the issue we’re having. Yeah, I’m very happy—mission accomplished.

  Drew Wandzilak:
  Exactly right. Then I’m going to bring it back to almost a question that I could have asked first, but your background—pilot, full stack mechanical engineer, self-proclaimed, truly full stack from nuts to bolts to the actual selling. What was the aha moment for you? So, I got why now it’s the motors, there’s some other tailwinds here. 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”?

  Samantha Herrick:
  Okay, we’ll give Ian back the mic and let him answer the question right after this. We’ll be right back.

  Speaker 5:
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  Ian Brooke:
  Yeah, I started from a really young age. Before building real airplanes, I built model aircraft, and I was 13 or so with that. I think it was really obvious for us back then. 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 to the electric stuff. You’re like, “Oh, this is just obviously so much better.” 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, that was always in the back of my mind.

  But one of the problems, of course, is batteries could get 10 times better and they still wouldn’t be nearly as good as burning fuel because I like to fly far. Everybody likes flying for different reasons, and mine is 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.

  Yeah, and I had done well enough through my flying career that I was flying myself around in jets. When I got to that place, I thought it’s really annoying. Again, jet world, unsurprisingly, they’re very expensive and the reason they’re expensive, when you start paying these bills and seeing everything, is fuel is actually one of the cheapest things on a private jet. I wish it was just fuel. No, it’s fixing things. They are insanely expensive, and this went into this whole world for private jets. They don’t make that many of them.

  There’s not that many people that can dump millions or tens of millions into airplanes. So, the volume is low. Private jets are not small airliners. They’re not built that way. So, there’s no economies of scale to make them cheaper to build.

  What I realized though was there was a way to use electricity… If you made everything on these aircraft electric, they would be far cheaper and simpler to fix. So, this was the genesis of everything. It took a while to get there, but including propulsion, if instead of having bleed air and hydraulics and low-voltage electrical, you 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 in the 787. The cabin is not pressurized from bleed air from the engines. They actually just have one and a half megawatts of electrical power, which is a ton. That’s just to run the systems on the plane. Everything is electrically powered.

  So, it started with that. 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 insight. I was actually going out fundraising for the first time. Unsurprisingly, maybe investors weren’t too excited to fund this. They’re like, “This seems really scary, FAA certification, and so on.”

  I was getting turned down on that a lot. 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 myself, 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. I want a small, fast, nimble aerobatic airplane. Ideally, I want a cheap-to-run fighter jet for me to put 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 a propeller. Propellers are obviously just less cool than integrated fans, but the problem is you have less thrust if you use a fan over a 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?” I started looking at the thermodynamics of this and this is weird. This actually can work extremely well. [inaudible] thermodynamics 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 stumbled into this and then it was like, “Oh, this changes everything.”

  Ian Brooke:
  This is dramatically more efficient. It’s like what I was doing before, but now supersonic. There’s one more big insight since I was looking at space launch things, and I like the idea of doing space planes. Rockets are not using jet fuel. They’re all switching to methalox, which is liquid methane and oxygen. I was pricing this out. I was like, “This doesn’t seem right.” LNG is a tenth 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 that’s just a thing that should just be done, period. Make planes that run LNG. So, that was the next big thing, the low-cost fuel, and you’re like, “Holy shit, this really makes sense now.” So those two things together is just a one-two punch. Yeah, so I guess.

  Drew Wandzilak:
  It’s a great story and I think it just showcases, one, taking a very first-principles approach to design, and two, just the benefit of having experience and knowing about all these other different worlds where if you’re at a larger aerospace company right now, 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 it stumbled into it a little bit, but you took a very different perspective, which I think has led you to where you are today.

  Ian Brooke:
  Yeah, I think this is the vertical integration thing of at the end of the day, what you want to do is you’re optimizing for the end output. There are tradeoffs within any given complex system like aircraft are complex systems, and so there’s lots of instances where it’s okay that this one component got worse because it had some other attribute that across the whole system was much better. You need that when you want to do something radically new. This is why it works so much better to be vertically integrated. It’s like, yes, there’s just tradeoffs 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 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 figured it out. We don’t need the flexibility across the full spectrum.” 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 then you can do things. You have flexibility and agility that you wouldn’t in the old paradigm.

  Drew Wandzilak:
  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. Well, great. For all the listeners who are now very excited and big supporters like we are in Astro Mechanica, what’s on the horizon? What can people be looking out for? Is it a prototype? What’s the next big announcement for you guys that people should be setting their alerts for?

  Ian Brooke:
  Yeah, so late October, we’ve got a big event. I believe some AV folks will be stopping by. 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. Yes, this is the thing, working this way can power the plane. So, that’s going to be late October. Then the next step after that is we can finally stop just being thought of as an engine company and we will go into making the airplane. Yeah, that’s going to be some few years. I mean, I want to fly in this airplane, so I am going as quickly as I can on this, get to flight as quickly as possible and go for our Trans-Pacific demo.

  Drew Wandzilak:
  Well, that’s a good personal motivator. There’s some story at some point in here where it’s like you will be the one that flies the first piloted one off the assembly line.

  Ian Brooke:
  Yes. Yeah, it’s the perk of starting… We’re actually going to be the first to probably do autonomous flight testing for a manned aircraft, so I can feel a lot more comfortable getting in the first one because I actually flew a bunch without humans. Yeah, definitely, my joy of aviation and I’ve done test pilot things before. I’ll be flying that.

  Drew Wandzilak:
  I love it. I love it. Well, Ian, thank you so much for taking the time. I had a blast and 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.

  Ian Brooke:
  Awesome. That was a great chat.

  Drew Wandzilak:
  Awesome.

  Ian Brooke:
  Yeah, good.

  Samantha Herrick:
  Thanks again for tuning into the Tech Optimist. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d really appreciate it if you’d give us a rating on whichever podcast app you’re using and remember to subscribe to keep up with each episode. The Tech Optimist welcomes any questions, comments, or segment suggestions, so please email us at [email protected] with any of those and be sure to visit our website at av.vc. As always, keep building.