The Allplane Podcast #105 - air freight moonshots w/Natilus founder Aleksey Matyushev
Is the air cargo market ripe for its own technology revolution?
Aleksey Matyushev and his team at Natilus are certainly doing their bit to make it happen.
A graduate of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Aleksey has been working at the cutting edge of aerospace technology for quite some time, both on civilian and military projects.
He is the founder and CEO of Natilus, a Californian startup that is working on a family of truly disruptive blended-wing-body freigther aircraft that are also designed with autonomous flight capabilities and hydrogen propulsion in mind.
A tall order, for sure. But Natilus has secured the backing of quite a few prominent technology investors as well as some major players in the air cargo industry.
The Natilus project encapsulates also some of the themes that the broader aerospace industry faces in decades to come: go for a clean-sheet design or not? should commercial aircraft be autonomous or remotely operated? what’s the role of hydrogen in the future of aviation?
We talk about all this and some more with Aleksey in this episode of the podcast!
Download this episode from:
Things we talk about in this episode
Aleksey’s background in aviation and at the cutting edge of aerospace research
What is Natilus and what novelties it brings about in:
Airframe design
Green propulsion
Automation and autonomous flight
Why Natilus decided to focus on the cargo market
How did the Natilus project start and earlier iterations of its concept
Why a Blended-Wing-Body (BWB) design
Where is the project now and what are the next milestones
Natilus Silicon Valley investors
What market feedback is Natilus getting. Customers and orders.
Last but not least: what’s in a name? The story behind Natilus’ name
Resources
The Very Light Jet Concept (VLJ)
The Boeing X-48 prototype
German WW2 flying wing concepts
The flying wing developed recently by TU Delft in The Netherlands
Hydrogen aviation startup ZeroAvia and the two podcast episodes we did with them:
The podcast episode we did with Marc Piette, founder of autonomous flight startup XWing
Jules Verne and the Na(u)tilus submarine, which appears in his novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas”
Natilus Kona, the smallest of the Natilus Blended-Wing-Body (BWB) cargo aircraft concepts
The larger Natilus Nordes
Podcast Music: Five Armies by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3762-five-armies
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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)