The Allplane Podcast #135: an advanced air mobility reality check, with Adrian Norris
Every now and then is good to stop for a second, and take some time to think and assess what’s going on around you.
If you are following the advanced air mobility industry on a day to day basis it is easy to get carried away by a deluge of triumphalist announcements and press releases.
But what is real and what is mere hype?
Adrian Norris is someone that not only knows the aviation industry inside out after decades of experience in different capacities, but he’s also been an aircraft entrepreneur prior to becoming a consultant. So, he knows a thing or two about the challenges of developing and marketing a new aircraft type from scratch!
I’ve been following Adrian’s writings on Linkedin for quite some time. In the, he shares his critical analysis, based on objective, known facts, of some of the most prominent aviation projects going on in the world right now.
Does hydrogen aviation have a future? What are the prospects for electric aircraft developers? Who’s going to win the eVTOL race, if anyone?
These are just some of the topics we discuss with Adrian in today’s episode. What’s more, rather than remain in the domain of the abstract and general, we are going to name specific companies and try to assess their chances of success.
So, buckle up for a ride through the volatile world of advanced air mobility. We'll try to separate hype from reality in an industry in which high hopes and promising tech collide with challenging human and physical laws, challenging economics and shifting investor sentiment!
Get this episode on:
Things we talk about in this episode
Adrian’s long and diverse career in aviation and his current consultancy work
Thoughts on the future of electric aviation
Why hydrogen is never going to become mainstream
Is there a real use case for eVTOLs?
Which electric and eVTOL aircraft developers have the best chance at succeeding
Do novel aircraft architectures stand a chance?
The return of the airship (or not)
Is there a business case to bring back supersonic air travel?
We analyze the prospects of:
BETA Technologies
Electra.aero
ZeroAvia
Vertical Aerospace
Joby Aviation
Archer Aviation+
JetZero
Airships
Boom Supersonic
How would the aviation industry look like in a few years time?
Resources
A2 Space, Adrian’s consultancy firm
Kestrel Aircraft, the plane making venture Adrian co-founded
Eclipse, the maker of very light jets that purchased Adrian’s firm
Earth-i, a space company Adrian was also co-founded
Some of the companies we mention or analyze during our chat:
Safran’s CEO declaring hydrogen aviation is “for the next century”
You may also find of interest this critical assessment of the sustainable aircraft development space by with Michael Barnard, here on this podcast.
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)
- Hi, Adrian. How are you?
- I'm very well, thank you, Miquel.
- Thank you very much for joining us today on the podcast from Lyon, in the east of France, a beautiful city. You've had quite a long career in aviation that we're going to talk about now. Like with every other guest, I would first like to ask you to introduce yourself, and then my goal is to talk a little about your views on everything that's going on in aviation in terms of innovation, and the quest to come up with novel propulsion technologies and more efficient ways to fly.
There's a lot of hype in the industry, and at some point it becomes hard to tell what's real, what's just hype, and who has the best chance of actually turning all these promises into reality. You write online, on LinkedIn and I think other platforms, and I really like the analysis you have been putting together. I would say you bring a dose of reality to the conversation, which I think is much needed, and I would like to talk about that now. But as I said, I think it's best if you first introduce yourself, and then we take it from there.
- Cool. Well, thank you, and first of all, thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk on your podcast. As you say, I've worked in aviation and aerospace for quite some time, perhaps with a slightly unconventional career path getting me to where I am today. I started out trained as a scientist, as a chemist, but then didn't work in that field. I joined a large multinational transport company and worked my way up through the ranks, and I spent the last several years as a member of the group's executive board of management. We had a big worldwide operation, and as part of that, we owned what was at the time Europe's largest cargo airline.
So through management discussions, I saw aspects of that side of the aviation world. At the same time, it was a personal passion, so I trained as a pilot. I've been a private pilot for 30 years, and a glider pilot since I was a teenager. After I left that corporate job and studied for an MBA, I moved into a more entrepreneurial role. I bought into a British aircraft development company called Farnborough Aircraft, which had developed a single-engine turboprop aimed at the air taxi market. I took that project to the United States and created a new company there with a partner to try to bring that aircraft to certification and raise the money it needed, and in the process I learned a huge amount. We built a company with a lot of engineers working towards formal FAA Part 23 certification, and it was an absolutely fascinating experience.
I came back to Europe before that company was merged with Eclipse Aerospace, a business jet manufacturer, and unfortunately it didn't ultimately succeed the way we had hoped. Back in Europe, I worked on a different project, the startup of a satellite imaging company. We launched an experimental satellite in partnership with the Royal Air Force and developed a lot of Earth observation systems. Again, it's another aspect of the aerospace world, quite removed from what we'll be talking about today, but an amazing learning experience. After that, and as you mentioned, I'm British but living in France, there was the uncertainty of Brexit.
I'd been living in France for many years, and I had to choose where I was going to base myself definitively. So I came back home to France and set up as an independent consultant working in the aviation and space sectors, largely working with people who are investing, looking at either new investments or follow-on investments, and who want to distinguish between real opportunities and ones which sound exciting but may not have the substance to take them through to commercial success. I've been doing that for several years. The writings you've seen tend to be related to topics I've been working on, though never directly, and never divulging anything I might have learned confidentially. But I think there are a lot of aspects of what I see through my work that needed to be shared more broadly, hence the writings you've seen on LinkedIn.
- Yeah, indeed. I think it would be interesting to delve a bit more into some of the cases you've been analyzing closely. You've been in the trenches, so you have experience as an aerospace entrepreneur. You know how hard it is to create a new venture, particularly in aerospace, which is an especially challenging industry because of all the requirements, the capital requirements, the regulations, and how competitive it is in general. So first I would like to get your view of the macro situation.
Over the last five or six years, even before the pandemic, but I think it accelerated significantly in the years after, we've seen an explosion of entrepreneurship in aerospace, which maybe didn't happen as much in the decades prior. It seems that in the last decade there's been a boom, with many people trying many different things, and I'm still trying to figure out the drivers of this, whether it's easier access to capital or technological advances that have made it possible. But we are seeing lots of people all over the world, in Europe, in the US and in other parts of the world as well, trying their best at things like electric aviation, hydrogen, eVTOLs, and also novel types of aircraft, new architectures, new concepts. A lot of this is related to sustainability and the challenge of finding cleaner ways to fly, but there's also more in general.
We have things like JetZero, for example, coming up with a completely new type of aircraft, and people trying things in fields like regional air mobility, new ways of moving around. And it seems that we had that boom, and now we are moving in the opposite direction, with lots of pessimism now about many of these companies, which are finding out that it was not as easy as expected. Maybe the pendulum is now swinging too far the other way, I don't know. What's your take? Do you think most of this enthusiasm for new ventures was justified, and how much of it is real and how much is hype?
- I think it's justified, and I think it was almost always very well intentioned. There have been some changes over the last 15 or 20 years which have slightly lowered the barrier to entry. With software advances, it's easier to work with new concepts without the barriers you faced in the past, and new materials are easier to work with.
People have seen the evolution of new products like drones, starting at a very small size, and the obvious question is: well, why can't I make that bigger?
What happens if, instead of a one-kilogram personal toy, we make it into something that could transport one person, two people, 10 people? Which is very understandable. And then we've seen the electric car industry, which I think has been very influential. 20 years ago, electric cars were a joke, and then with the arrival of Tesla, 15 years or so ago, people suddenly saw that you could have electric power that was very usable, in some ways better than conventional internal combustion engines. I think that, married with the other factors, led to this explosion of innovation in electric aviation. And capital, having seen projects like Tesla, started following some of those early innovations.
- It's an interesting comparison, because both the aerospace and the car industries started at a similar time, over 100 years ago, at the beginning of the 20th century, and about 100 years ago they were both going through an explosion of entrepreneurship. I was reading yesterday that there were over 200 car companies in the US in 1925, 100 years ago, which then consolidated over the following years, and we ended up with, I don't know, half a dozen big carmakers, or even fewer. I think there were three big ones, right? Same with aerospace. 100 years ago, there were hundreds of people making planes, and over the following decades we ended up with a duopoly. In military and general aviation, there are a few more, but we're talking about maybe the low tens now. And again, aerospace is going through another cycle of innovation, so it seems like both industries are moving in tandem a little.
- I agree. And to the point about the change, the fall in optimism, I think it's the realization of just how difficult it is to develop and certify products for aviation. I've been through this learning myself: the enthusiasm of getting into an aircraft development company, and then having the fortune of working with some incredibly experienced people who had certified multiple aircraft, and seeing how fastidious you have to be. How difficult it is not just to come up with the concept, but then to prove to regulators that it's going to be safe, that it's going to do what you said it was going to do, and that you're going to be able to build it repeatedly to exactly the same standards, following a set of documented processes. It's a lot of work.
People rail against certification, but I think it's vital. It keeps us safe as passengers. But it's a slow and laborious process, and it invariably tends to add weight and complexity to your project, so that the aircraft you thought you were going to design when you first came up with the concept suddenly doesn't perform the way you had hoped. And with electric aviation, with that comparison with electric cars, maybe there wasn't the realization of just how different electric power is in an aircraft.
You need to operate at full power for a long time during the takeoff and initial climb, and in cruise you're operating at extremely high power compared to a car. You use power in a very different way, you put different demands on the battery packs, and you need reserves that you don't need in a car. If your Tesla starts running short of power, you can drive slowly to the next charger, and if the worst happens, you stop by the side of the road and wait to be rescued. In an aircraft, it needs to be delivering 100% power right up to the moment you touch down for the last time on your journey, and that might be after a diversion because of weather or for another reason.
So what seemed on paper at the outset to be a very feasible concept, which was going to transport people over a reasonable distance, by the time you've factored in the certification demands, catered for the different failure modes that might happen, and made sure you've got enough battery reserve for any eventuality in any kind of weather your aircraft might fly in, suddenly becomes a product that is no longer commercially viable. I think some of the companies that started up have reached that point now. They're in the certification process, it's a lot harder than it initially looked, and the viability of their products is being questioned in a way that it probably should have been upfront, before the first investment.
- When talking about electric aviation, it's also important to distinguish between different types of companies. Some are trying to solve electric, just electric, and the rest of their operations are more conventional, with conventional takeoff and landing. Other companies, as in the case of the whole eVTOL ecosystem, are trying to solve different things at the same time. They are trying to solve electric, but also vertical takeoff and landing, which is an extra level of complication, plus a use case that is not well established yet. It's still an unknown how this use case, urban air mobility, for example, will work. We can get into different types of use cases, but one of the primary ones, urban air transport, is not exactly proven, right? They are trying to solve so many different things at the same time. Do you think this is an investable industry, or are some parts of it more investable than others when we talk about electric aviation?
- I think it is, and yes, I do think some parts are more investable. If we look at the distinction you made between the more conventional aircraft and the eVTOLs, and start with the more conventional ones, working from the smallest scale up: at the bottom end, light recreational aircraft and training aircraft, I think electrification makes sense.
If you're teaching somebody to take off and land, and they're doing lots and lots of landings in a one-hour training session, electric power is a good solution. It's environmentally friendly, it makes less noise, and it suits the power plant. We've seen aircraft in that category starting to emerge, first with the little Pipistrel trainer, which has been certified. In France, there's Aura Aero electrifying their little two-seat Integral aircraft, which will probably reach certification within a reasonable time.
I think we will see people succeeding at that level of the market. It's not a market where aircraft companies generally make a lot of money, but it's a product that is going to succeed. As you move up to larger aircraft, I think the initial route is probably hybridization. We see that with companies like Electra working on a hybrid aircraft that will do things some conventional aircraft won't, but it's fundamentally a conventional type of aircraft, with wings and propellers, looking outwardly quite similar to turbine- or piston-engined aircraft.
- Yeah, we actually had Marc Allen, CEO of Electra, here on the podcast a few months ago, and we talked about that.
- I think it's a great company. It's a very niche product, but it will do some really interesting things if they're able to deliver it, things that other aircraft can't do. And the use of hybrid power removes some of the constraints of electrification in aviation, which today are really limited by battery technology. I'm sure we're going to see improvements over time, but with today's energy density, adding a hybrid power system just makes the aircraft much more usable and flexible. I think projects like that are investable. As you look at other projects, I think they are investable too, but people have to be realistic about what can be achieved with electric aircraft, and they need to focus on how to make them work given the limitations of batteries. That means they need to be incredibly efficient, and they need to target use cases that are achievable: relatively short range, relatively low altitude.
There's no point in wasting all of your electric power climbing to a very high altitude, which is something we do in conventional aircraft, either to avoid weather, or more often to get the fuel efficiencies that turbine engines have at high altitude. With electrification, I think we need to think differently and focus on use cases that are a bit different. There is money to be made, and there are investable projects. But you mustn't think that you're going to take a conventional aircraft, replace its conventional power with electric power, and succeed, because today that's not going to happen. Over time, as the technology improves, I think the range of use cases that can be electrified will increase. But aircraft companies need to be realistic, and investors need to be very realistic, about what can really be achieved today.
- Do you think being based in the US confers an advantage on a startup in this field, because of access to the defense budgets? We're seeing a drive in Europe now to increase defense budgets, linked to sovereignty issues and all that. But still, the US defense budget is a beast, right? It provides a lifeline for many companies in their early stages.
- It does. Now, I'd be cautious about thinking that it's going to continue providing a lifeline for electric aircraft companies. In the military field, people have to be very realistic about what the military needs and how that is compatible with electrification. You're not going to be operating into conflict areas hoping to find a high-voltage charger for your flight back out again. They need more conventional power systems for a lot of their applications.
There's also obviously been a political change in the US in attitudes towards electrification, and I think some of the environmentally focused projects may not get the political support under the current administration that they have had in previous years. So it has been an advantage, and it is still an advantage, and there are many other factors about being based in America, other than the military budgets, that make it attractive. It's the biggest aviation market, it's got the easiest access to capital, etc. There are other factors too, and a regulator that has more experience certifying aircraft than any other.
- Yeah, indeed. One of the other side effects of the US capital markets is that we've got a sample of these companies that have gone public, so we have access to more information about what's going on. So what I was about to suggest is that maybe we can look at some of these companies. I'd be interested in hearing what you have to say about them and what you think about their chances, technologically and financially, of making it through. Shall we do that?
- Happy to, and I'll try not to get myself into trouble. Okay, yes.
- I would suggest we batch the companies we're going to talk about. We can start with electric. Here we have, I would say, two or maybe even three sets of companies. There are companies doing purely electric. I'm thinking here of companies mostly developing relatively small aircraft right now, operating conventionally with batteries. Some of them are hybrid, like Heart Aerospace, which started out with a purely electric aircraft but has now switched to a hybrid architecture.
Then we have companies that are somewhere between the conventional and eVTOL worlds, like Beta Technologies, now testing a conventional takeoff and landing electric aircraft, but with plans to develop an eVTOL based on that aircraft as well. Then there's Electra, which is conventional takeoff and landing, but with some rather special capabilities, ultra-short takeoff and landing, which overlaps a little with the vertical takeoff and landing use case.
And then we have all the eVTOLs. Some of them are pretty well known. You talked about the companies doing more general-aviation-type training aircraft. And we have a company that has gone public recently, Beta Technologies, for example. What's your take? This is also an interesting case, because it's starting with 100% battery-electric conventional takeoff and landing, with the idea of evolving towards eVTOL. What's your take, and what can you tell from the documents that have been made public because of the recent listing?
- I think it's a really interesting company. One of the intriguing things is that they really started the other way round. They started with the eVTOL, and then moved to conventional takeoff and landing, with an aircraft design that was really very similar to their eVTOL concept, but just didn't have the lifting propellers. I'm sure there are many more differences than that, but from an outside view, that's how it looks. I think it was a very smart move, because vertical takeoff is so difficult to develop and certify, and it needs so much power, which is a problem for 100% battery-electric operation.
So I think moving towards the conventional takeoff design was a really good move. They've got a great team of engineers working for them, and they've demonstrated some impressive flights. I've written about Beta Technologies, and I do have a bit of skepticism. They've raised a tremendous amount of money. Their IPO raised about a billion dollars recently, and when you look at the capability of the aircraft, it's still quite marginal. It's got a very small payload-range combination, and there aren't many use cases where people are going to make money from it.
- You've hit the nail on the head, because I wanted to ask you about that. I have no doubt it's technically feasible to do what they are doing, but how compelling is the business case for this type of aircraft? They are small, but they are meant to operate commercially. On the passenger side, in most cases you would have fewer than nine passengers, or fewer than 19 in some cases, or a small cargo payload. Then there are cases like Heart Aerospace, for example, which started with a 19-seat all-electric aircraft and then made it larger and hybrid, because they basically got feedback that it was too small. So is this really a realistic use case, beyond a very few small market niches?
- I think it's very difficult. If you look at Beta, with their really very small aircraft, they're initially targeting the cargo market. They've got, I think, a 1,200-pound payload, so 500 to 600 kilograms, and a range of just over 200 miles. Now, I worked in the air cargo industry for a long time, and my experience at that small end of the market is that operators are not making much money. They're using aircraft that are cheaper than Beta's aircraft will be, and they need to get very high utilization out of them to succeed. They generally fly at night and in all kinds of weather to get cargo where it needs to be.
Beta, certainly initially, is not going to be flying in icing conditions or in the worst weather. It'll be flying a very short range with a high-cost aircraft and an incredibly onerous battery replacement cost. If you look at the details of Beta's IPO offering, it makes clear that it's going to cost operators about $500,000 a year to replace the batteries. I don't think many people are going to make enough money operating an aircraft in that class to pay the capital costs, pay all the other costs of aircraft operation, the pilots, ground staff, insurance, hangarage and maintenance, add the battery replacement on top of that, and still make a profit.
So however Beta is going to make money for its investors over the long term, it's not going to be from a small aircraft with a 1,200-pound cargo capacity and a 200-mile range. They've got to do a lot more than that if the company is going to succeed and make money for the people who've invested. It's challenging.
- Yeah, indeed. What they often tell you in this field is that the operating cost is going to be lower, because electric aviation requires less maintenance, the cost of fuel, all of that. But I guess you would have to reduce it by much more to compensate for the higher capex you have here.
- Yeah. Fuel cost is certainly a factor, but it's not the only cost. You have to look at all of the costs an operator faces, the ones I mentioned: the crew, the insurance, and insuring a $5 million airplane is going to cost more than insuring a $2 million one. Then getting it maintained. While electric aircraft are simpler, they're by no means maintenance-free.
They're not electric household appliances. They're going to need regular maintenance, especially in the early days when there's limited experience, and there will probably be requirements to replace life-limited parts before there's a risk of them failing. So there will be significant costs, and in my view they're unlikely to be offset by the fuel cost savings. In addition, there are going to be operational restrictions. If you're operating a conventional aircraft, you can land at any airport and get fuel. If you're operating an electric aircraft, you need a network of rapid chargers, and that doesn't exist yet.
And there's this chicken-and-egg problem: is it worth investing in charging infrastructure when there are no aircraft? Is it worth investing in the aircraft when there are no chargers? The two are going to have to go hand in hand, and that's going to need investment by somebody, whether it's the aircraft operators or the aircraft manufacturers. So there are a lot of costs, and at current fuel prices, the fuel savings aren't sufficient to swing the business case decisively.
- The other business case that has been proposed for small electric aircraft is regional aviation, based again on these theoretically lower operating costs and a lower noise profile, being able to operate from and between many more places, in kind of an air taxi or regional aircraft role. In some ways, that's Electra's business case. Their pitch is that they can operate from thousands of airports in Europe. We have companies like VÆRIDION and Maeve [Maeve went bankrupt in early 2026, a few months after this podcast episode was published - ed. Note], and, to some degree, Heart Aerospace's case is also based on the idea that it's going to be more feasible to fly between these smaller points. So what do you make of this? Is it realistic?
- I think it is. It is realistic, but we have to be realistic about it. What I would question is: is the lack of that business model today due to the absence of suitable aircraft that could fulfill that mission, or is it because of other reasons? We have to be very careful in aviation. We've seen it more than once in the past: people designing a new type of aircraft and saying it's going to fill a niche that can't be filled today by any existing aircraft, and that they're therefore going to sell a lot of them. We saw it with very light jets in the early 2000s, and that didn't happen. We'll come to eVTOLs later. But with regional aircraft, there may be cases where it's not feasible to operate a conventional aircraft because of the noise limitations at a certain airport, while it might be feasible to operate an electric aircraft there.
But I think that's quite a small number. So can you make a business case for it?
I think you can, but it has to be targeted. There are city pairs or airport pairs where it will be feasible to use electric power. There are countries where zero emissions, or at least zero emissions at the point of use, is a decisive factor in whether a service can be operated, or in whether it's accepted by the local population. I'm sure there will be a market for those aircraft, but it gets difficult as you move up to the higher certification categories. Certainly once you get above 19 seats and into the Part 25 certification requirements, it gets tremendously difficult to prove to the regulators, to the FAA or EASA, that your aircraft meets all the requirements it needs to meet.
And you need to build in contingencies for diverting and for flying in bad weather, which eat into the range of the aircraft. With conventional fuel that's manageable. With electric power today it gets very difficult, and if you end up only being able to fly 150 or 200 miles, well, there aren't that many cases, certainly in Europe, where it will be quicker to go to an airport, get on a plane, fly 200 miles and then take a car to your final destination. It's generally going to be quicker to go by train or by car than to fly. So it's a difficult market, and the certification and operating requirements are going to make it hard for people to make money.
- And again, talking about use cases: eVTOLs. We now have some data from the listings of Archer and Joby, and in the UK there's Vertical Aerospace. There are a few more contenders, but those are some of the companies that have made the most headlines, let's put it that way. Then there's the whole world of Chinese eVTOLs, which is an entirely different scene, but they also seem to have been making progress. What do you think is going to happen in this space? Are we really going to see flying taxis? Are these companies going to survive, in your opinion, or consolidate?
- I'm skeptical. I'd love to see it happen, because I love the technology and the innovation, and I have tremendous respect for the people working on making it happen, because I know how hard it is. But it's going to be incredibly difficult. I don't think we're going to get anywhere close to the numbers forecast in some of the projections.
If you look at Joby's initial listing, when they went public through the SPAC merger a few years ago, they forecast having 900 aircraft operational by 2026, each of which was going to make a million dollars in profit for the operator. Well, I doubt they'll ever have 900 aircraft operating, certainly not in the foreseeable future. And the use cases are problematic.
You have to look at what an eVTOL can do that a helicopter can't. It can potentially operate a bit more quietly, which is a factor in some places. What else can it do? Helicopters are a known quantity, and they're available today. They can fulfill the point-to-point transport missions the eVTOLs are targeting, and in most cases they can do it with better range and similar cruising speeds.
- They are noisier and more expensive, though. At least theoretically.
- Indeed, but the eVTOLs have big problems as well. If you get into the detailed analysis, the small rotors create a very strong downwash. If you look at the risk of vortex ring state, it can mean that eVTOLs need a very shallow approach path, which is not compatible with city-center operations.
They need a shallow approach and departure path to a fairly large landing site, a vertiport, and that can work outside cities. But you're not going to have those aircraft operating in the center of busy environments, and you'd need to change the rules in the many places where flying over built-up areas is restricted. So they need legislation to change, they need operating approach paths that are not compatible with tall buildings, and they need quite sizeable flat areas to land on, where you can keep passengers waiting for the next flight away from the downwash risks, and so on.
So it's not as straightforward as people thought at the outset, and that's before you look at the problems of the aircraft themselves: the battery power they need to take off, and the certification challenges of managing the various failure modes, if part of the battery pack fails, if a rotor fails, the vibration issues. I know that some of these companies have struggled greatly with managing vibration, especially during the transition from hover to horizontal flight. It's difficult, and even if they get through certification, I don't think the market is as big as has been promised.
- With what we know, if you had to pick a winner among the ones that are there, which one would it be? And remember, this is not investment advice.
- Not at all. In many ways, it's unfortunate, because it can be a little unrelated to the amount of money they've got. If they all had equivalent funding, I think Vertical Aerospace has a lot of things I like. I like their approach to certification. I like the fact that they've chosen to take the hard path of certifying in Europe, where they need to meet much higher requirements than their competitors, and I think they've achieved a lot on a smaller budget than their American competitors. So I like what they're doing. They suffer from not having raised as much money. I think they were just a bit too late to the SPAC process, and they didn't get as much out of it as Joby, for example.
- They have quite a few pre-orders, though.
- They do.
- Whether those have come with money or not, that's another story.
- Yeah, I think there's a whole other discussion about when an order is really an order. I'm sure they've got orders from very credible, experienced operators, and I think we should recognize that and give it value. But it's generally not enough to have an order. You've got to have the money to get through certification and deliver your product.
- And what about the Joby versus Archer battle? Do you have a favorite here?
- No, I think they've both got problems. They're both working in the Middle East and promising early passenger flights there long before they're certified in the US, and I think that's something a lot of people in the industry are uncomfortable about: that you can try to find a jurisdiction where you can do things you're not allowed to do in the United States or Europe. I'd love to see them succeed, but I think they've both got a lot of challenges.
- There's another field of experimentation that has had lots of attention lately, let's put it this way, where it now seems the pendulum has swung in the other direction, and that's hydrogen. There were a lot of expectations around hydrogen just a couple of years ago, and now everyone seems to be becoming very pessimistic about it, though it was always a very complicated proposition to start with. Still, there are some players that have been very prominently sharing their progress and what they were doing. What's your take on hydrogen? Do you think it's going to happen in the next 10 to 15 years, or is it something for the next century, as I think Safran's CEO said the other day in the French Senate?
- I think it's not going to happen in the next 10 to 15 years. And if you say it's going to be next century, for most people that puts it safely beyond their retirement age, and they won't ever have to worry about it. I don't think it will ever happen as a realistic mainstream solution for commercial aviation. The challenges are so big, and they fall into so many different areas. The physics of hydrogen is just not something you can get around. It needs a lot of space to store, whether you store it as a gas or a liquid. It's extremely challenging to work with. It leaks out of everything you try to hold it in; hydrogen will always try to find a way out. For aviation, it only makes any kind of sense if you're using green hydrogen. There's no point in using hydrogen derived from fossil fuels to replace conventional aircraft fuel.
Green hydrogen is produced by the electrolysis of water, and the energy you need to break apart the water molecule and produce hydrogen is significant. I think for one kilogram of hydrogen you need 39.4 kilowatt-hours of electricity, and it will never be less. You can make the process more efficient, but there's a thermodynamic limit that defines how much electricity you need. Then you need to compress or liquefy your hydrogen and transport it to where it's going to be used, and all of that adds to the cost and to the amount of energy you're using. If you can produce a lot of electricity from a renewable source, it's generally better to use the electricity directly: put it in a wire, send it somewhere where you can charge a battery, and use it directly. In my view, don't use it to break apart water to make hydrogen, compress it, transport it, and then burn it and make water again, or make electricity again in a fuel cell. You lose at every stage. If we look at the more practical challenges, storage in the aircraft is really problematic. ZeroAvia have released photographs of the fuel tanks they used.
You can see the tank they put into their Dornier aircraft, first the original gas storage. It's a huge tank, filling almost the length of the cabin, with a diameter of a couple of feet, a bit less than a meter, and it stored the equivalent of, I think, 17 liters of jet fuel. It was a huge volume. It could be compressed more, it could be made better, but it's never going to be remotely comparable to storing jet fuel. Their later version was a liquid hydrogen tank, again a large tank, heavily insulated to keep the hydrogen liquid at minus 253 degrees centigrade, with all the additional components you need around the tank for storing it and reducing the pressure so that it can be used in a fuel cell. It fills a large part of the cabin, and it holds, I think, 16 kilograms of hydrogen, which is equivalent to around 50 kilograms of jet fuel, or thereabouts. So it's really problematic. If you put hydrogen into a conventional-looking aircraft, it will fill the cabin if you want any kind of usable range. You can't put these storage tanks in the wings the way you put conventional fuel tanks in the wings, because they need armor-plated high-pressure cylinders for gas, or heavily insulated cryogenic storage for liquid, which doesn't fit in a thin aircraft wing. It's hugely problematic.
Then we look at the storage of hydrogen at airports. I could go on and on. If you're storing a few days' supply of hydrogen fuel at a large airport, we can't even imagine what that would look like in terms of large, multi-million-pound or multi-million-euro storage tanks full of liquid hydrogen. It doesn't work. I think it's an absolute non-starter for mainstream commercial aviation, whether it's burning hydrogen directly in a jet engine or using it in a fuel cell, which has all sorts of challenges of its own. It may be a niche for some small operations, but it's not going to be a major feature. I'd be willing to bet my reputation on that.
- I was about to ask you about ZeroAvia precisely, but you brought it up in this conversation, so I think your position on this one is clear. Okay. There are other types of very radical innovation taking place right now that are not directly connected with propulsion, although propulsion is of course always part of it, but more about the way you design the whole airplane. I'm thinking here of JetZero in the US, the blended wing body concept, for example. There's another startup in the US that we've also had here on the podcast, Natilus, that is working on a similar type of concept. What do you make of this? It seems to be very complicated, but it also seems that the industry is fully on board with it, and many people are keen to see some radical innovation in aircraft design, because we've been flying basically the same shape of aircraft for many, many decades now. So people are keen to see something radically new.
- I think it's interesting. If you link it back to our previous conversation on hydrogen, if hydrogen were ever going to work, it would need blended wing body aircraft, so that you had enough internal volume to store the hydrogen tanks. I think in some cases that was where the Airbus…
- ZEROe was trying to go.
- Yeah, Airbus was looking at that, because they needed space for the tanks. Blended wing body aircraft have aerodynamic advantages. They're more efficient, and you can reduce fuel burn. They obviously give you the possibility of doing things with cabin volume that you can't do in conventional aircraft. Aerodynamically, they have traditionally had challenges with stability, but you can work around that. And there are issues around getting the angle of attack you need to rotate the aircraft on takeoff, where people have been looking at quite innovative solutions with the nose landing gear, using it to help lift the front of the aircraft when it rotates. So they're interesting. Are they going to be mainstream? I reserve judgment on them at the moment. I think they offer some really interesting possibilities, but they come with some problems for certification, for manufacturing, and for operation at today's airports, where they're big and the wrong shape to fit into gates designed for conventional aircraft. But those are manageable issues.
So I think we probably will see them coming, and I think the potential efficiency savings these aircraft offer are really interesting and worth pursuing. So yes, it's an intriguing solution. And coming back to our earlier conversation about electric aircraft, it might be applicable there too. There's a very small startup in France working on an electric regional air mobility blended wing body concept, and they've flown scale demonstrators. Quite interesting. It gives an electric aircraft the efficiency to have a better range, and allows it to store batteries in a way that is not feasible in a conventional aircraft. So it's definitely an area where some interesting innovation is happening. I think we will see it, but I think it will take a long time before it becomes a mainstream replacement for conventional aircraft design.
- I would like to wrap up with two concepts that were a thing in the past and seem to be making a comeback. One of them is airships. There are quite a few companies now trying to develop a modern-technology version of the airship. Do you see this becoming a thing?
- I don't know. Whether it will be something investable that people will make money from would be an easier question, because I think it's going to be quite a niche solution. You can see applications where airships might work, if you need to deliver very heavy things into remote areas for construction, for example. It's a possible solution. But are there enough use cases where an airship makes a compelling case to make it something people should invest in? That's more difficult.
Personally, I would love to see them. I think they're fantastic machines, and it would be fantastic to see big airships. But they're limited in the conditions they can fly in, and they tend to need a lot of people on the ground to assist with operations. Even if modern systems are very different from the 1930s airships, they still need a reasonably sized ground crew. If you want to store them in a hangar when severe weather is coming, well, you need a big hangar. Can they operate safely in all weather conditions? I think that's a challenge. They can do things conventional aircraft can't, but is there enough demand for that to make it a viable business? I think that remains to be seen.
- And last but not least, supersonic. We have Boom Supersonic in the US, and there are a couple more companies trying to do supersonic, or even hypersonic. Some companies have been talking about developing hypersonic aircraft, though I think they later toned down those claims and are now more focused on the defense side of things. But what do you make of this supersonic revival in the US, now even with an executive order recently and some regulatory changes that would, in theory, make it easier to develop a new Concorde, to stage a supersonic comeback?
- The aviation enthusiast in me would love to see it. I flew on Concorde, and it was fantastic.
- Wow, amazing!
- It was. I would love to be able to do it again. But the rational businessperson in me is more skeptical, because it comes back to the same recurring theme: the challenge of getting these things certified. Technology and experience have made it easier than it was for Concorde back in the '60s and '70s, but it's still tremendously difficult to develop a supersonic aircraft, to demonstrate that it can meet Part 25 certification requirements with the level of safety passengers expect, and then to recoup the investment you've made to get it certified through sales of an aircraft with quite a small passenger capacity. I'm not sure how big Boom's is, but I think it's 40 or 50 people, and it's a niche market. There won't be a lot of buyers, and it will still be an expensive ticket for customers to travel on these aircraft. So I'm a bit skeptical that the business case really flies for them.
- But wouldn't it be the case that if one of these companies managed to overcome the regulatory hurdles and get it certified, all the major airlines competing for premium customers would then feel compelled to include it in their offering, because otherwise a competitor would have something they don't have? I'm thinking, if United Airlines gets it flying between London and New York, then BA, American Airlines and Virgin would all feel compelled to have it, because otherwise they would no longer be competing for that super-premium customer.
- That's exactly the argument that was made for Concorde, and it didn't happen. There were initial orders for Concorde, and they all got canceled except the ones that had government support. And the thing that has changed dramatically since Concorde is the advance of private business aviation. There is certainly a group of people who would pay a premium price to cross the Atlantic in three hours, but there's also a market that didn't use to exist, of people who will pay to cross the Atlantic in their Gulfstream or their Boeing Business Jet.
- Pretty fast aircraft. The latest Gulfstreams and Bombardiers get very, very close to the supersonic barrier, I think, right?
- They're fast, but I think what they offer that a supersonic airliner doesn't is that you bypass the whole airline experience. If you fly a private aircraft, you've got the flexibility of departing when you're ready to.
- Privacy and all that.
- Yeah, you can work confidentially with your colleagues, or enjoy the company of your friends and family, and you're not trapped in a seat next to somebody you don't know for the duration of the flight. You've got everything the way you want it, and the time you save at airport security and getting your baggage back offsets quite a bit of the time you might save on the flight. So I think there is definitely a category of customer for whom that time saving would be valuable, or who are just willing to pay for the experience of supersonic travel, but who don't have the money or the desire to fly a private aircraft. But I think it's quite a small group, and it's going to be difficult for supersonic airliner companies to make money, just as it was with Concorde.
- Well, maybe the market is the executive jet market. Could you then have a smaller version of the Boom supersonic aircraft designed for this market? After all, some private jet users fly converted airliners. I guess that's a completely different approach and business case, though.
- There was a company that worked on that concept for many years, Aerion, and it didn't succeed. It's marginal. When you look at what tends to work in large, long-range business jets, people want comfort and range. Are there enough business jet customers for whom the mission is saving three hours on a transatlantic flight? There are some, but are there enough to make a business from it?
- So, just to recap: what's your view for the next, let's say, five years? What do you see happening in all these different segments we have discussed?
- I've probably sounded like a Luddite who doesn't think any of the new technology is going to work, which is not the case. I do think that, mostly, conventional aircraft will continue to dominate, and we'll see continued improvements in how we operate those aircraft and in their efficiency. On electric aircraft, I think we will see increasing uptake of electrification at the smallest end, recreational and flight training aircraft, and gradual electrification up to the 19-seat category in the coming years, especially with hybridization.
We haven't talked much about hybridization, but there are companies doing really interesting things, with solutions that are very close to certification, like Ampaire in the US. I think that's an interesting niche that is going to develop into a commercially viable solution relatively quickly. It will be interesting to see what happens with battery technology. If we get solid-state batteries delivering better energy density and removing some of today's challenges of electrification, then I'm sure we will see electrification of the regional air mobility class, the lower end of the airline market, become viable. Will it become viable without that? It's difficult.
With hybridization, I think yes. Without hybridization, no. eVTOLs: so much money has gone into that, I'm sure one or two of them are going to certify eventually. I think it will take a lot longer than they're saying, and I think the market will be much smaller than any of them have forecast. There are going to be more failures in that sector, and consolidation, or people just disappearing completely. I hope one or two of them succeed, but I don't think it will ever be the sort of ubiquitous urban mobility solution people dreamt of 10 years ago. And on hydrogen, I don't think we'll see hydrogen aircraft.
There's technology associated with hydrogen, on the electric side, in the aircraft using fuel cells, which need electric motors, and I think the technology being developed there will have broader applications. But the hydrogen side of it has just got so many challenges, and I don't think it's going to work. I fear that the companies working on it are not going to succeed, and I don't think the very substantial taxpayer funding that has gone towards hydrogen-powered aviation will prove to have been a good investment.
- All right. Well, thank you so much for sharing your view, a very well-informed view based on your experience and the constant analysis you perform and share on your social media channels. Where can people read your thoughts? Where can people find your analysis of the industry?
- I'm on LinkedIn. That's where I mostly post my thoughts. And on my company website: I have my own small consulting business with a partner, which is Alpha Two Consulting. The website is a2space.com, and you'll find a little bit there about what we can do, and also some articles, often very similar to the LinkedIn ones, but all accessible in one place.
- Perfect. Well, thanks so much. It's been very insightful, with lots of things to digest here, lots of food for thought. It's just left for me to say thank you so much again.
- Well, thank you, Miquel. I look forward to staying in touch.
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