The Allplane Podcast #58: with Airflow.aero founder Marc Ausman

In the nascent electric aviation industry, Airflow emerges as one of the most serious contenders.

This Californian startup has been racking orders for its 9-seater eSTOL aircraft, including in its amphibious version!

So, I’ve invited its founder and CEO, Marc Ausman, to the podcast to share some insights about this very promising model and its market perspectives.

Marc is a former US Navy pilot turned entrepreneur. He built and sold an aerospace technology company and has been involved in a number of other innovative projects in the field of telecoms and aviation. He was also chief strategy at Airbus Vahana, the European manufacturer’s early project in the field of advanced air mobility.

In this episode we talk with Marc about this entrepreneurial journey and also about Airflow and how a new generation of electric eSTOL aircraft could, very soon, be disrupting the mobility industry by using already existing and infrautilized infrastructure.

Tune in to learn more about one of the hottest startups right now in the field of sustainable aviation!

Download this episode from:

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Things we talk about in this episode:

  • Marc’s background as a pilot and entrepreneur

  • What is Airflow

  • What technology does Airflow use

  • What is distributed propulsion

  • What problem does Airflow solve

  • How many orders has Airflow received so far

The 9-seater Airflow is working on. Picture: Airflow

Interview Transcript

(please note that, although we strive to make it as close as possible to the original recording, the transcript may not be 100% accurate)

Hello, Marc, how are you?

Good afternoon. Great to talk with you today.

Well, good afternoon for me, but good morning to you!  Because I'm in Europe, but you are nine hours behind in California.

Yeah. Right in the Bay Area. Yes. 

Great. So let me first introduce you very briefly, you are the founder and CEO of Airflow, which is a very interesting startup in electric aviation…but, like every other guest, I just want to ask you to introduce yourself. After that we're gonna move on to your project and your technology and what you guys are doing. But just give us a little bit of a feel about your background and your connection to aviation.

Happy to do that! I've been around aviation my whole life. It's a very, very exciting space. My father was an airline pilot, my mother was a stewardess. And when they got married, they had a few kids. And so I was the oldest child. And you know, my dad flew commercially, of course, but he also had a Bonanza, which is a small piston-powered single engine aircraft. And so we would go out and fly that on occasion, and his friends were pilots as well, too. And so we would go to lots of air shows and fly-ins and things like that. So, you know, I ended up getting my pilot's license in college, and then went on to the Navy to fly P-3s. And at the Navy I ended up being based out of Barbers Point, Hawaii, which is now closed, but at the time was a course of great duty being on Oahu for my first tour. And then we did two deployments from there to the Middle East during Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and then another deployment after that.

So, you know that you know, the oceans as if it was your home pretty much…the Pacific Ocean.

Well, yeah, it all kind of looks the same. After a while you could fly for a lot of hours and still see the ocean. But yeah, we flew in the Pacific Ocean. And the Indian Ocean is where we spent most of our time and you know, as the Navy, we fly mostly wet feet, meaning we fly over the water, we don't do much flying over land

Chasing submarines? 

Chasing submarines. And you know, when I joined the Navy, with the Glasnost, the Russians had basically parked all their submarines. And I think they've been parked until just recently, but they parked all their submarines. And so, you know, in finest military fashion, we were looking for something to do. And the P-3 is actually a very capable airborne radar platform, it can stay on station for 12 hours. And we have some really interesting technology on board the aircraft for targeting and for searching for different vessels on the ocean. And so we did kind of we trained for prosecuting submarines, but we also trained for what's called over the horizon targeting, which is where we would go search for vessels in the sea, and then we had weapons on board that could target those.

And now we have all these applications that come out in marine traffic…

Well, the people we were looking for didn't generally report their position over the internet. So I guess so. Yeah. But that was, that was exciting times, flying around the world, in a plane with a crew of 12 people and, and then after the Navy, it's kind of a transition to civilian life, went to grad school for two years and got an MBA in Texas, and then actually worked in the tech industry for seven years as a product manager for various enterprise software startups. And that was pretty exciting. But I really always wanted to find a chance to get back into aviation. I wasn't really too impressed with the innovation going on in the industry. It's a very, very incremental, and very, very conservative approach to new technologies. And it's understandable that that's the approach that the industry takes because safety is key, but had the opportunity to go work with Eclipse aviation, which brought to market the world's first very light jet. And that was started by actually an early Microsoft employee. So you know, the idea was to bring kind of this tech mindset to the aerospace industry and disrupt the aviation industry and change the economics of travel and therefore changing the way, the ability, to travel and bring cost down to a way where people would start thinking about using their travel, and specifically regional air travel, rather than driving you know, or using cars or trains or something. Instead, in Europe, trains are very popular and in the US are not so popular. So the main competition for regional air travel is either cars or aircraft. And today aircraft are way more expensive. And what we're trying to do at Eclipse time was to bring that cost down so that air travel would be an option. And it was enabled by a new technology, specifically a very small turbine engine. That turned out didn't actually work as advertised. But the promise was this small turbine engine could revolutionize your travel. Today we see that same dynamic but the technology enabler is electric propulsion. And so it's kind of Eclipse 2.0 In many ways, you know, you could debate that all day, but I see a lot of similarities. We see things like high volume manufacturing, we see greatly reduced operating costs. And we see the ability for people to travel outside of these major airline hubs, either with, you know, today with vertiports or with smaller airports that are underutilized today. So I was just gonna say that that was really an exciting opportunity. And, and then actually, after that started a company to make avionics for small aircraft, and sold that about seven years later. And then were consulted for various different, very early companies doing autonomy doing evtols, and ended up with something pretty exciting, which was the Airbus Vahana program, and was a technology demonstrator or let me backup just a bit. Airbus had set up a Silicon Valley outpost to explore new technologies on a project basis in one of the projects. And this outpost was called A-cubed and had several projects going on at one time. One of the projects was the Vahana program, which was an electric evtol vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. And it was a technology demonstrator. It was the first time Airbus or anybody for that matter, had really flown an electric vertical lift aircraft with multiple rotors and electric motors and pure battery electric aircraft. So it was very exciting, very successful. And those learnings were transferred back to Airbus when the program went down. So that was really the genesis of airflow at that point.

Yeah, actually, these Airbus Vahana it didn't really consolidate into something long term, but actually, it it was a sort of a I don't know if it's the right word, a school…it gave to the to the industry, a whole generation of of people of entrepreneurs that are now in a whole range of different companies and doing impactful things.

It is! You know, we left, started airflow, there's people who went over to Archer, there's someone who went to Joby, some at Uber elevate So really, you know, a lot of experience that we gained on that program, people have taken to to other programs, which are generally startup companies, you'd said it never made it into production. And it's kind of a lot of confusion in that area, there's it was never really intended to be a production aircraft. A-cubed was to explore new technologies that really don't fit into the normal p&l responsibility of the other business units within Airbus. And so there were all these different kinds of exciting programs going on and exploring new technologies. In our case, our goal was to design and build and fly this aircraft, we flew over 140 flights. And in, you know, to the whole envelope I think the last flight was about 30 minutes. And really, you know, just all the learnings from that have gone back to you if you can imagine that the future of sort of vertical lift aircraft for Airbus isn't going to happen in Silicon Valley. It's going to happen in Europe. 

Yeah. I just wanted to clarify, I was not very accurate in the description, because actually, Airbus doesn't hasn't given up on this concept. It recently presented a new evtol concept as well, just it didn't, didn't crystallize, it didn't have a continuity as such, as Vahana, under the label Vahana. It just had to continue but in different ways.

Yeah. So you know, along with Vahana in Silicon Valley, Airbus was also running something called CityAirbus in Germany, which was another multicopter approach. So there were these two different programs that were meant to explore this new technology in the use of electric motors and batteries for vertical lift aircraft. And then I think, the learnings from both of those programs, you know, I'm not involved with this anymore, so I can't give any specific details, but the learnings from those programs basically informed Airbus's decision about this program that they announced recently. I believe that his intention is to move forward as a production aircraft.

Yeah, no, definitely. That didn't come out of nowhere. There's a whole experience of many years working on this. So, airflow, you then after Airbus…started airflow straight away, or what's the story?

Well, I spent some time exploring after Airbus, exploring where the opportunities were. I think the key thing learned from the Airbus program was that evtols or electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft represent only one of many, many opportunities to introduce electric aviation to the aerospace market. And while there was a lot of hype, and I gotta say, you know, Uber at the time had Uber Elevate, which was a program to promote the use of electric VTOL aircraft to move people around cities. They did a wonderful job of really putting a lot of attention to this space. And everybody jumped into this and everybody said, it's got a huge market opportunity and a lot of startups, you know, raise money based on those reports and were going to be customers.

And many professionals as well, that went through that project. Actually, one of the recent, most recent podcasts I did here with a battery expert, we talked also about Uber Elevate, because he had been in touch with some of the guys involved there. 

Yeah, I think they did a great job of really catalyzing the investment community and the industry and everybody around this idea of electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft for this called Urban Air Mobility mission or moving people around cities, you know, in using airports, or mostly, you know, the tops of skyscrapers or buildings or vacant land and cities, if there is such a thing. And so they really did a great job of catalyzing and ultimately, Uber, you know, had other priorities that they had to sort out and drop the program. But again, that was another program with people that from Uber Elevate went into industry, and, and are kind of scattered about but brought a lot to the table in terms of moving and thinking and moving the industry forward. So that was really great. But the downside of that, or I don't have downsides, is the right word. But one of the side effects of that is that everybody was focused on this one specific use case. And in fact, there's many other use cases for electric aviation and moving aviation in general to a more sustainable future, and to building aircraft with capabilities that really don't exist with traditional aircraft. And when we realized that there were these other use cases, and other types of aircraft that we could develop and make better with electric aviation, that's when we started airflow. And, the use case that we've ultimately settled on is the use of an electric short takeoff and landing aircraft, which is a fixed wing aircraft that looks like a very conventional aircraft, but has a lot of smaller electric motors with propellers along the front of the wings. And that type of aircraft can be used to fly from airport to airport, within regions, and we define a region as typically less than 500 mile flight. And so as you may know, around the United States, and around the world, there's a ton of these smaller airports, and many are very, very much underutilized. They're not utilized at all, by the airlines or commuter airlines or anything. And so they don't get a lot of activity, but they're great assets that can be used for the transportation infrastructure, the challenges, there haven't been aircraft that really are economically viable to make that model work when you fly into these smaller airports. And we believe that electric aviation ultimately will make great use of these underutilized assets in the United States and throughout the world. By bringing down the operating costs by moving to quieter operations, and by moving us all to a more sustainable future,

You've been sort of an evangelist for this type of model. I mean, you've got some interesting blog posts on your website. I'm gonna post the link when you explain the differences in the short haul regional electric flight with conventional takeoff and landing. Well, you still so short, I mean, you require less runway…

…less runway, but you can think of it as a sea tall or conventional takeoff and landing as well. The only difference really is the length of runway you can get into Yeah, but they're both intended to be used primarily off airports, not helipads. We look at what we're doing with the fixed wing aircraft and what others are doing with the details is very complimentary. The two very different mission sets and one of the blogs outlines that basically we say that, you know, Evtols have the unique capability, that they can take off and land vertically, which means they can take off the land in a very small space. Although we require a very short runway, you still can't, you know, still, putting a runway on top of a building is different from putting a helipad. And so we think that, you know, the vetoes are great, where you actually have a mission where you do need to take off or land on top of a building in a very small space in our aircraft is best utilized for use cases where you in fact, do have airports are very, very short runways. And the main difference between these two is the operating costs. So anything with vertical lift capability will always cost more to operate. And, you know, then a fixed wing aircraft and so we can do it for less cost. But we need to do it between airports, if you need to take off and land for buildings, that's great USB tolls for that purpose, you're gonna pay a little bit more for it, actually quite a bit more for it. But nevertheless, it's a great capability to have. And so the two types of aircraft are very complimentary in that regard. And once you realize that, you know, the, you know, that's what we realized early on and said, we don't really you know, moving head with an evtol is a use case, but there are other use cases that we want to go after as well. And so we took a little bit of a different path than the hype around the industry was at the time. Install is for the most part.

This is going to be 100% Electric, or are you also considering hybrid versions?

Yeah, our first aircraft will be a hybrid, think of it like a Prius. And the Prius was out, you know, 15 years before the Tesla Model S came in so you get some benefits with a Prius as a stepping stone to getting to full battery electric. And for very short range flights, like Evtols are targeting, you know, or like, let's say 50 miles or less, an Evtol makes a lot of sense. The Evtols are being designed as a pure battery electric solution. That's fine because their range is about 50 miles Max. Once you consider all the knock downs required for commercial service in flight planning for what we're doing when we say regional flights up to 500 miles in all weather conditions with the ice with IFR reserves, meaning extra reserves required by regulations in order to fly in bad weather. And you need to be able to fly in bad weather to have reliable commercial service. And so in order to do that the bed today's batteries just are not there, full stop. So we have to adopt a hybrid electric solution. And that will allow us to develop an aircraft that is really we believe commercially viable, have better performance and lower operating costs than today's comparable existing aircraft and be able to open up this regional Air Mobility market.

I'm gonna post some renderings and links in the show notes. But just to give a very brief description of the sort of aircraft we are talking about here is a nine seater. Right? So it's nine passengers plus the the pilot

Yes, one pilot is required. A lot of these commuter airlines and regional airlines fly with two pilots.

Okay. And you have that's interesting. It's a distributed propulsion. So that means you have lots of small electric motors all over the wing highway when we build this model, What advantages does this technology bring?

So, this is called blown wing technology. And the way we're achieving blowing technology is with something else called distributed electric propulsion. And blown wing technology has been around for decades. And it's been tried by NASA and others in the past. And the challenge is that with turbine engines or piston engines, it ends up being a very, very complex, mechanically complex system that, you know, isn't commercially viable from a cost or reliability perspective. And so it never really made it past the r&d stage. But once you have electric propulsion, you can actually, you know, electric motors are very, very reliable, very simple to run at very low temperatures so you can also scale them up and they scale in a very linear fashion in terms of power versus wait. And so we can put small electric motors along the leading edge of the wing. And that allows us to blow the wing and basically, you know, blow the air over the wing rather than having to move the whole aircraft with the wing fast enough to do that. So, the blowing technology now with distributed electric propulsion is now that technology allows us to to implement blowing technology in a commercially viable manner where it's reliable, its cost competitive, and it actually works really, really well. And so what that allows us to do is it allows us to design an aircraft with a wing that is much smaller than a normal wing would need to be therefore in crews, it's more efficient because it's smaller and it low airspeeds. We've just blow air over the wing to get more lift. And so we achieve more lift with a smaller wing, normally a wing that small couldn't hold it the aircraft, it's low airspeed, zero plane would stall, but when you blow air over the wing, then you then you get more left and you can use that smaller wing. When you have the low airspeeds, you know, the ability to fly slowly, you can then approach a runway and land at lower airspeed, meaning you can stop more quickly as well. The other benefit is the smaller propellers. So if you have a disk that is, say, six feet across, versus a disk that's three feet across running at the same rpm, the tip of those, those those propeller blades will run, it will be at a slower speed than on the smaller disk and on the larger desk. And so if you have one propeller on the front of an aircraft, versus a bunch of smaller propellers, you're going to have lower tip speeds, and that's what generates the noise. One of the things that generates a lot of noise is the tip of the propeller. So when you run the tip of the propeller at lower or lower speeds, you have less noise. So we also you know, plus electric motors and everything gets you lower lower noise overall too. So all these factors contribute to lower noise, better performance, meaning Lower, lower approach speeds, higher crew speeds and additional aircraft. And then the third aspect is, once you have electric motors, they don't really care where the energy or the electrons come from, right? So you can, you can have a turbo generator, which is like the Prius kind of approach, which is what we're doing now, because that's really the only commercially viable approach.

So, that's the jet fuel, driving the generator, right?

It's jet fuel or sustainable aviation fuel, depending on what the operator wants to run, so we can get the check in the box for sustainability with a turbo generator by running sustainable aviation fuel. And when I say we, I mean our operators, we don't operate the aircraft, we sell it to people and companies that and operators that do fly the aircraft. And then we've also partnered with Plug Power. And yeah, plug power is a publicly traded company that's been in the hydrogen business for a couple decades now. Really has some great fuel cell technology. 

Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that deal. Yeah, I remember reading about it.

Yeah, well, we can. So let me talk about the technology, flying it and then Plug Power. We can take out the turbo generator, and I'm simplifying greatly, of course, you can take out the turbo generator, and then you can plug in a hydrogen fuel cell and generate electrons with the fuel cell. Ultimately, we believe at some point in the future, when batteries evolve, we'd like to take out the hydrogen fuel cell and put batteries in there. Yeah. Or run the hydrogen fuel cell for other use cases, you'll probably always have longer range with the hydrogen fuel cell than you will with batteries as technology improves, too. Both of those are sustainable solutions. And I think that, I mean, there's all kinds of other considerations around batteries and hydrogen, but we won't get into those here. All that, you know, will all get better over time and more efficient. And we'll kind of sort through that. And our responsibility is really to figure out how to utilize those in aviation.

What about the cost, because we are under the assumption that this is going to be cheaper to operate than today's conventional aircraft. And that's what allows for this more distributed mobility, what are the magnitudes in terms of cost savings, operational cost savings we are talking about here?

Well, we're taking this incremental approach to the market, because if we went to a pure battery electric solution right away, which we couldn't actually technically be easier to do, we wouldn't be able to sell many of the aircraft, it just wouldn't have the range and capabilities that our customers need today. So there's very limited use cases for a pure battery electric regional aircraft, like I said, evtols, that fly short range, great for batteries. But for longer regional flights, there's very limited use cases. And so we believe the best way to move to a sustainable future is to take this incremental approach where each approach is commercially viable at the time that that technology is introduced, right? If we introduced something that was, like I said, a pure battery electric solution, we just wouldn't sell many of them, I don't think would ever really get a lot of traction. And we know that because we've talked to a lot of companies who operate aircraft, and they just say, you know, it's a non-starter. So the hybrid is the first step there. And we believe that the hybrid electric solution will get about a 30% overall cost savings. And that comes from multiple different factors, but the overall 30% cost savings. And then if we look ahead and say 15-20 years, when we can take the pilot out of the cockpit and move to an autonomous aircraft, one, we will have batteries that are low cost and high energy density, that makes sense, we can save as much as 70% over today's operating costs. And so if you look at this path over the next, say, 20 years, moving from from 30% savings, you know, when the aircraft is released to 70%, when there's some new technology and some change in the regulations, you know, that that change over time really is going to it's going to drive this movement based primarily through lower costs to getting people to fly rather than drive. And that means removing congestion from the roads. That means saving time. And just flying is pretty damn cool being in the air and getting the view and you know, we're not gonna be flying at 30,000 feet, we're going to be flying it a few 1000 feet over the ground, people will be much more connected to the environment around them in flying into the smaller airports that are right near where you live, is going to be an amazing experience.

I want to ask you at this point, because I guess you are planning your business model is to be an OEM to make the planes and then sell them to operators. Correct. What type of operator are you envisaging here? Are you thinking about existing local or regional carriers? Are you expecting new operators that will spring up to service this new new demand

Well, we're not just envisioning. We have 15 customers today who have signed letters of intent. And they have all indicated interest in this type of aircraft. 

15? 

Yeah. And we haven't announced most of them. But we've announced a few. They're up on our website in the news page.

How many aircraft in total?

Well, I can't really announce that right now. I think we've announced we've announced part of the orders, we haven't announced all the orders

Okay, no problem. 

That's all coming out in due time. But the point is that, you know, we looked at early in the company's life, we looked at multiple different markets. And we're not able to get LOIs from other markets, they just weren't ready to sort of commit to this new way of doing things. So what we learned was that the, the, the market entry strategy is to really take the path of least resistance, how do we fit into the way things work today? Right. And I learned this kind of back from my soft enterprise software days. If you want to sell enterprise software into a company, you’ve got to sell it, it's got to fit in with the systems they already have in place today. Yeah, like you can't go in and expect them to set up a whole new infrastructure just to run your software. So yeah, if you fit into the way things work, you know, it's much easier to make a sale. And so that's the key thing now, so those certain markets really weren't interested in moving in this direction quite yet. But the customers that we do have are in the regional charter market, basically, they fly aircraft today. And they have kind of these scheduled operations so the kind of places where they normally fly and you say, I want to fly here today and they'll take you there. Some offer per seat, scheduled flights, some offer you can charter the whole aircraft, but the point is, most of our customers fly aircraft today they fly old, really old and great aircraft like beavers and otters. They fly a 40 year old design aircraft like a Cessna Caravan, kind of a workhorse aircraft in the industry, the logistics industry uses it a lot for regional air cargo.

 Yeah, you even sold an amphibian version right? for Tailwind Aviation in the East Coast.

Yes, so Tailwind for example flies caravans today with floats. And you know, the beavers have floats, otters have floats. So these types of aircraft are designed in a way that you can take the landing gear off and you can put floats on. And there's called straight floats, which are just floats that only work in the water. And then there's amphibian floats, which actually have retractable landing gear in them, and you can raise and lower the gear so you can take off on the water and land on an airport somewhere very, very flexible. And so we're, we're going down that same path where you can put, you know, put tires and wheels and tires on it for traditional airports. You can put Busch tires on it for backcountry flying, you can put floats on it for water flying either straight floats, or Amphibs. And so the airplane has a lot of utility and a lot of flexibility. We're also designing it primarily as a cargo aircraft. And there's very interesting aspects about the way cargo has evolved over the last decade or two. The industry is changing in a way that the older aircraft don't really work too well for cargo, even today and looking forward. So our aircraft incorporates some design features that really are forward thinking in terms of the cargo industry. But what that means is you have a very spacious cabin for passengers as well, too. You just gotta put some windows in a nice interior in the seats. And you end up with a great passenger aircraft as well. Yeah, that can fly these missions. 

I checked on your website. Since it can carry in a cargo configuration it can carry 800 or 900 kilos, something like that.

Right now about 900 kilos or 2000 pounds of cargo. Yeah. And that's evolved. It's a ballpark, but it's somewhere in that range. We're actually doing some deeper analysis to refine that figure, but ballpark. 

So, about a ton, to round it up a little bit. 

Yes, yes, exactly. At 10,000 pounds or so of cargo was 900 kilos. And, and that's really where we found that sweet spot. And the reason there's a sweet spot there is because the regulations, at least in the US, and it kind of varies around the world a little bit. But for the most part of the US EU, part one. So these operators that I told you about earlier, the ones who are customers are classified under what are called part 135 operators. That means part 135 of the Federal Aviation Regulations, describes how they need to run their business in order to collect money to carry people in cargo in aircraft. And those regulations stipulate that you can only carry nine maximum nine passengers. And if you want to go above nine passengers, you end up with a whole different world. complex set of regulations. And so the nine seed market is kind of where the industry has evolved to to support that. 

Obviously, you're designing the plane…are you going to manufacture it as well?

We are designing it, and we are going to build it. Now, when we say build it, that could mean a lot of different things. Right. The question is how vertically integrated are we, in terms of building? That’s the question. Yeah. Yeah, it you know, I think it's too early to really dive into the details of that, but but I'll say that, you know, as an OEM, we have some decisions to make around and there are a lot of companies in the US and around the world, actually, that will make, you know, substructures or, you know, make a fuselage and, or make a wing or make a tail section or something like that. I would say, at minimum, we're going to be assembling substructures that we get from other other companies, it most will be you know, building all the structure ourselves and then putting into it, the motors and the batteries in the, in the other components, avionics, and other systems that are come from various suppliers around the world. 

Yeah, even the large jets like Boeing, for example, also have plenty of subcontractors making big parts of it, as well. 

Yes, yes, it's very common. Yes. If you look at Boeing, you know, their facility up in Everett, they have another one on the East Coast. They just assemble. I don't want to trivialize it, it's certainly a lot of work and very skilled people doing the work. But they assemble sections of aircraft together. And you know, they get the landing gear in from somebody, and they get a fuselage section and some somebody else in a tail section from somebody else. Avionics, you know, and they put it all together, and it's a pretty amazing  manufacturing operation, but that's sort of what they've decided to do. 

Yeah. Tell me about the company. 

Airflow is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and that was founded by five people, we all met on the Airbus Vahana program and we all recognize the challenges and opportunities of the Evtol market, and all thought that there was a, you know, there are other ways to bring electrical planes to the market that we think actually have a larger market opportunity that have a more well known and well defined market opportunity. In other words, the market exists today. When you look at the evtol market, the market actually doesn't exist today. There is no market for helicopters moving in between buildings and cities, you know, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, there's a little bit of that, but most US cities and European cities, it's very, very, you know…either is banned outright, or has very limited traffic due to cost. Yeah. So, you know, we think that that's a very speculative market. And yeah, I think a better approach to bring electric aviation to market is by fitting into the way things work today.

Yeah, I read a couple of articles. well documented articles, that were making this point actually from written by independent analysts that yeah, were a bit skeptical about the Evtol mobility market, then I know. I mean, there's others I know, other operators or other analysts that have a different opinion, but they're very, very bullish. But there's certainly a high level of risk. That's undeniable.

There is certainly an exciting opportunity. I, you know, I hope it goes well. I don't have any crystal ball that's different from anybody else's crystal ball. So, you know, all I have is my opinion. And those are, those are, you know, there are many of those out there today. Yeah. So all we can do is say like the people are doing that, you know, let's support him. Let's see how this goes. Moving forward. And hope it prevails.

Yeah. And I wanted to ask you also about another aspect of your project. Here on the podcast, a few months ago, I had a conversation with Lucas Kaestner, from Germany, from the Sustainable Aero Lab. I think you participated in their program, right? 

We did

So what was your involvement with the sustainable aero lab? I'm just curious.

So they have a process that they take startup companies through and the reason we did sustainable aero lab was that we wanted to get some more exposure and introduction into people in Europe. And it's based out of Hamburg, Germany, and you basically meet on a regular basis and talk about progress and get feedback and other you know, other things like that. So it's very low touch, it's very easy to do. They don't ask for equity or anything, it doesn't cost anything. So it's very easy to do. And they bring in some great people from all around the industry from all around the world. So I would say, you know, the key benefit of that was really getting input and perspective from, from different people who work in different parts of the industry from all around the world, and then being able to meet these kind of people and make introductions. And, so I thought it was a very worthwhile effort. And I would certainly recommend it to any other startups doing any kind of sustainable aviation startups. And, by the way, they don't just do aircraft OEMs, I think, the majority is not aircraft OEMs, also enabling technologies and different aspects of aerospace. And, you know, it's really, really exciting, though, is this point in history right now that we're seeing more money, more interest, more people coming into aerospace? You know, it's generally been, you don't see that sort of industry, it's been a very insular industry, where it's kind of the same players kind of doing very, very incremental stuff. Not a lot of new people come in. And it's primarily because it's a highly regulated industry, and there really wasn't an opportunity for change, it was kind of the same technologies moving forward. Right now, with electric propulsion, I think there's really an inflection point in the industry where we're new players can come in and really introduced some new exciting stuff, there's a combination of autonomy, technology, kind of, you know, machine learning all that being smart enough to really come in coming together, it's a perfect storm of, you know, that's one aspect of it, electric propulsion is another aspect, you know, those two technologies aren't necessarily don't have to be linked together. And, you know just a whole lot of capital coming in to support this and interest in sort of this next generation of mobility, recognizing that, you know, cities are clogged, that traffic is an issue that people want to move around, mobility is really a big thing. And if aerospace can really contribute to that, and recognizing we have this massively underutilized infrastructure in the US and around the world, that perhaps electric aircraft could, in fact, provide a way to utilize those in an economic commercially viable manner. That would be great. So it's really, really exciting. I started a company in 2006. I think I mentioned it earlier, but it was making avionics for smaller aircraft. And nobody was interested in investing in aviation stuff at the time, like it was really hard to get people interested in this business. But now it's quite the opposite. There's, you know, tons of money coming in, and there's lots of interesting ideas, and different technologies. And we're looking at new air, you know, air traffic control stuff. Drones are driving a lot of these smaller drones to move. Yeah, do deliveries and imaging and other kinds of things. So you have this, this confluence of all these different things coming together. And investors being interested in the space that really is making for an interesting time in the industry, for sure.

Yeah. And I don't know if there are any specific, let's say next milestones you can comment on at this point, anything that we can should be keeping an eye on? I can't say anything other than stay tuned. Okay. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, well, I'm definitely following your channels. Where would you send people that would like to learn more about airflow and stay on top of what you guys are doing? Any website, social media channels, this type of thing?

So LinkedIn. Airflow.aero has a LinkedIn page and we post up on a regular basis. We also have a newsletter, we send out perhaps once a quarter. So if you go on our website, there's a way to sign up for our newsletter. And then just go visit our website at airflow.aero. And there's a news page, you can see recent news announcements. There's a blog where we share some of our thoughts on the industry. And then just the latest information is there as well. 

Okay, well, thank you so much for your time today. And definitely, as you said, exciting times for everyone that is following the aviation industry. And so wishing you all the best with the project, hope to see many of these environmentally friendly and cheap aircraft flying soon.

Yeah, thank you very much. Appreciate you having me on the show.

Pleasure. Thank you very much.

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