The Gulfstream G700 broke a transatlantic speed record, reaching Mach 0.88 – can they break the sound barrier in the near future? The FAA is investigating Virgin Galactic, asking why they departed from their flight path; they’ll be grounded until the answer is satisfactory. And, Archer Aviation just received their G-1 certification, but the ISS nonetheless has issued a warning to investors to decline the intended SPAC merger deal. Will it go through?
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EP69 Transcript
this episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech at Weather Guard we support design engineers and make lightning protection easy you’re listening to the struck podcast i’m Dan Blewett i’m Allen Hall and here on struck we talk about everything aviation aerospace engineering and lightning protection welcome back to the struck aerospace engineering podcast i’m your co-host dan blewett on today’s episode we’re gonna talk about golf stream setting a new transatlantic speed record at 0.88 mach from savannah to katar uh we’ll talk about faa and virgin galactic some of their woes ryanair also with boeing and talks to get some 737 max 10s out the door but it looks like those talks might have collapsed in our evt well segments say we’ve got a bunch about archer the faa has approved a g1 uh certification for them and the iss on the other hand is advising against the arger spac merger so we’ll talk about that some big stock news there and lastly uh interesting uh article from the vertical flight society uh explaining that they’ve taken a directory of what now includes 500 evtol concepts a which is up from 200 from last summer so we’ll talk about some of that and what we can expect if maybe all 500 designs will come to fruition um i’m sure Allen has a lot of thoughts on that so first let’s talk about golf stream so Allen this is a g700 that reached 675 miles per hour or mach 0.88 on the flight across the atlantic from savannah georgia here in the u.s to qatar and then they also hopped over to paris uh reaching mach 0.90 which is 690 and a half miles per hour so this is pretty fast but i mean how fast is this it’s pretty good for a business jet yeah for especially as large as it is i think the cessna citation 10 which was the fastest at the time was like 0.9192 maybe on mach yeah so it it’s it’s really moving aerodynamically the gulfstream’s earthcraft have gotten better and better as it gotten bigger and bigger obviously it takes bigger engines yeah yeah i mean i mean if you’re going to have a top-end business aircraft gulfstream is definitely leading the pack at the moment it’s beautiful airplane so obviously supersonic flight is a big one um is that just breaking mach 1 like or is it are we really looking like mach 1.5 like companies like the now defunct arion and now boom who are looking in the supersonic jet realm i mean is this not is this not close enough or i mean what’s the big difference here well it just takes a lot more fuel to go faster uh and a different kind of aircraft to break this sonic sound barrier gulfstream has pushed the envelope pretty well in terms of subsonic flight the aircraft is very clean and as they as they develop and continue to develop they have better computational models better aerodynamic cfd models for the aircraft so the aircraft keeps getting cleaner and cleaner if you look at a g3 to the g700 it’s it’s almost a different aircraft in terms of its aerodynamics and its performance i always think it’s really interesting when they do these sort of like speech trials or world records on speed because they used to happen the united states quite a bit they would go from the airplanes would go from like new york to los angeles or new york to miami places where the business flyer would frequent right and where the marketplace was and so you try to set a a flight record there so now the flight records are not in the united states the flight records are over in europe and the middle east where their future customers are so you did it to to do those uh speed records where your customer base was so you can always get an indication of where the aircraft’s going to be sold because that’s where they’re doing the speed record trials got it got it so i mean do you see golf streams breaking the sound barrier or would they have to do a whole whole overhaul to get there well gulfstream i think has dabbled in supersonic over the last 10 years there’s just been a lot of rumors of that they’ve looked at it but they’ve never pulled the trigger on it and i think it as it’s a real combination of technology versus the expense and the in the process of getting something certified and gulfstream’s not going to waste money they’ve never been a company to spend money frivolously they’re focused on producing a really great product and keeping their customers engaged and and unless there’s a great big demand for a supersonic aircraft gulfstream is not even going to pursue it and i i kind of wonder if they have already tapped the potential marketplace for that and realized the number of aircraft they could theoretically sell versus the the amount of money they would generate it’s it’s just a wash right now or negative and so they haven’t pursued it all right moving on um so the faa said the rocket ship carrying uh richard branson and his virgin galactic um space crew essentially or their employees left their air traffic control clearance area as they descended back on their flight on july 11th and so now the faa is saying you know why did this happen and they’re looking for answers and banning virgin galactic flights until then so alan what’s your take on the situation well isn’t it a very weird article and i hadn’t seen this article in the united states i think we picked this article up overseas which makes you wonder what is the real behind-the-scenes story but what they’re indicating is that as the virgin galactic craft came back down to earth on its glide path back down the earth that the went outside of some enveloped area that the faa has designated for them to fly in but i remember watching that flight and i didn’t see anything abnormal about the way that the aircraft came back down to earth and it maybe there was some winds there that forced the aircraft to deviate a little bit based on which way the winds were blowing but maybe they it sounds like they come out of some faa pre-designed box for a minute or two but dan they’re out in the middle of desert there’s no one else around out there does it really make all that much difference yeah i don’t i don’t know i mean i know the faa is obviously really strict and they want to make sure there’s control i mean is this really just a an incident where they’re just concerned about just the lack like more about the plane itself like why would this possibly deviated or i don’t know i mean why why would they be making a probe into this if there wasn’t something potentially bigger yeah i don’t know yeah and as if you’re the pilot in command you get to make those decisions right if you’re if the safety of the aircraft comes first the faa boundaries come second so it’s a little weird that they’re not going to let them fly anymore until they get the envelope increased the box increased whatever but it is odd because you would think that the faa would say hey virgin what’s going on and virgin would say hey the wind was blowing at 50 knots at 30 000 feet whatever it was and it blew us off course a little bit we corrected we’re back in not a big deal can we work out negotiate a bigger box because this is supposed to be a spaceport this is why they’re in new mexico because it’s a spaceport and there’s no one around and while the fa hasn’t agreed to that is is odd so there’s there may be more behind the story maybe this is just one piece of a bigger bigger problem that they had with that flight it’s going to be hard to tell and rarely going to see these things discussed in public until they’re settled so i have to keep our eye on this one yeah i mean inversion galactica says it was well you said it was a high altitude wind and that the pilots did what they were supposed to do so yeah it seems like they’re they seem like they’re taking it seriously but it’s kind of like well you know what else what else should we do there like yeah i mean that unexpected things happen in flights um but yeah obviously maybe this is just a different magnitude since it’s space and and all that but yeah you’re right it’s something that we’ll probably know more as that story progresses but boeing in in the news cycle here was in talks with ryanair who’s obviously one of the bigger low-cost airlines based in ireland and ryanair said that uh they’re just too far away from this potential 737 max 10 order and of course ryanair has a has a known reputation for swooping in and looking for discounts on planes obviously last year was a great time to get some of those and they they put in a big uh 737 max order but when they were looking for some of the newer max 10s uh looks like they’re just too far away so why is this newsworthy i guess i mean this this seems just like an ordinary like oh yeah i was going to buy a couch and i didn’t have the one i want or it was too expensive and so i didn’t like why is this really that newsworthy well just because it affects boeing and ryanair stock that’s why i mean ryanair has been such a large purchaser of 737s and that’s the model that’s selling right now and boeing needs to sell a lot of those aircraft it’s going to affect the stock price and ryanair is knowledgeable that fact they know if they walk away from the table that boeing stock price could be hurt and may drive them back to the table that’s probably one of the reasons why they walked away because in those big players like a southwest airlines or a ryanair boering responds to them when they have a problem they’ll they will respond to those still airline customers because of the quantities and what financially it does to the company though and i i guess when i saw this article was yeah okay this is just one interim piece to a longer set of discussions and ryan ryanair is is using the leverage as much as they can but you got to wonder if boeing kind of gets tired of that you know because boeing can’t respond right so boeing just loses some stock price because of it and has to swallow that that doesn’t go over well so you know what what what’s the what do you what do you do if you’re boeing i don’t know if you can do anything besides just wait it out or raise the price when they come back yeah that’s a good point it’s not like boeing would release a press release saying yeah we were gonna sell planes this people and then they just pulled out or they couldn’t afford them like it’s not like they would ever do that you’re right it is kind of a one-sided or you wonder if there’s just uh some sort of manipulation where they’re trying to get you know like you said put pressure on them because stock price that’s possible i’ve no idea but you’re right um boeing stock is down 1.2 percent um obviously not a big hit but something so yeah anytime i guess people are learning of a fall through you know sales falling through it’s not a not obviously a good thing for a stock price but right but the marketplace kind of realizes that the way you don’t see huge fluctuations but if ryanair says we are not buying 737s we are going to buy airbus or something else yeah it would have it would have a negative impact on boeing stock well like you said with a lot of fleets want like a southwest for example i mean they’re all 737 so they’re pretty locked in and you know as far as like their service and their training of their technicians and part part interchangeability stuff like that um and ryan already has a lot of 737 so you think that you know a little hey we’re not there on price right now probably doesn’t have long-term implications especially considering all their previous purchases of 737 max’s last year so it’s not like they’re going to like overhaul the fleet and go to airbus like that’s certainly not going to happen but at least right now the the tens aren’t a good fit well if you think about it from ryanair’s position you’re still not up to max number of travelers you had sort of 2019-ish you’re still not there yet and so you’re trying to cook a deal right now because you probably can leverage boeing but in boeing’s case they’re just saying they’re going to need them at some point so why don’t we just wait if we just wait a year the price isn’t going to change and we’re going to get our money that’s more likely what’s going to happen if ryanair can’t secure that deal now they’re going to secure it in a year from now all right so in our ev2l segment today a bunch of archer news so let’s start with their g1 uh certifications this is a g1 issue paper alan what is an issue paper and why does archer need it the issue paper comes into play uh in when you have your unique configuration of an aircraft because the regular regulations weren’t specifically designed for that particular style of aircraft and a lot of the electric aircraft obviously they don’t have a fuel system they have batteries which is not necessarily envisioned uh and the the way the motors move and the and the the flight dynamics of the aircraft are different than others like a cessna 172. it’s totally different so what the faa is doing is they’re taking the existing regulations some from part 23 which is a small aircraft and some from part 27 from the small helicopter and they’re creating a master list of here are the regulations you need to show compliance with and that kind of gets shoved one way which goes from the faa to the applicant and the applicant gets a chance to respond to them and say yeah no maybe we’d think this regulation may be a better fit whatever so but the first thing you want to do in terms of getting to type certification is to get the certification basis defined which is getting the g1 issue paper there’s been a couple i’ve seen g1 issue papers in electric aircraft a couple of them floating around so it isn’t like archer has done something out of whole cloth here this is something that was already sort of pre-cooked into the faa system the next issue paper that will come out is the g2 if they go down this road which is the means of compliance so they can define how they they’re going to show compliance and aerodynamics and some and a bunch of other stuff noise whatever else so you know it’s a step the biggest obviously with archer the biggest issue is they’re not flying anything at least they’re not telling anybody they’re flying thing their aircraft is still a model and uh you know having issue paper is great having a flying aircraft is a lot better so they got a ways to go well and speaking of archer um interesting story out of techcrunch so iss which is the um institutional shareholder services incorporated is a basically an advisory sort of a group recommended last week that atlas crest investment corp which is the spac that would merge with archer aviation they have advised people should vote against this merger with archer so now iss has done this with the joby aviation and reinvent technology partners back which went through went public so essentially people said we don’t care uh that you’ve you know issued this uh warning we’re gonna go whole go ahead and you know seal the votes to approve the deal so iss sort of has a history of doing this of you know giving their thumbs down to these spac mergers in the evtol sector but with this latest one giving the thumbs down to the archer the archer merger they’re pointing out that this battle with whisk really puts the company at risk um allen do you agree with that where do you fall on this um this kind of like i don’t know it’s a sticky warning out here from this uh this this advisor i think that it is going to be a difficult path for archer to go down uh not only do they have the engineering challenges that they don’t even know about yet as they get the aircraft into some sort of flight test so it’s not even the full aircraft yet get something in a flight test then there got this legal battle thing going on which doesn’t raise investor confidence and the and their valuation has been fluctuating so much you see almost 3 billion down to below 2 billion like the fluctuations are ridiculous in terms of the amount of money if you even in terms of the percentages it’s just widely fluctuating it adds a lot of stress onto a company uh that it doesn’t really need when it’s trying to develop some engineering um article which is what an aircraft is it’s all engineering right and you just don’t have time to devote resources away from that because you’re spending so much money on making a factory getting tooling getting drawings getting the faa happy getting to some flight test hopefully you don’t crash the thing and all those other pieces that you’re just juggling so many balls and archer is adding more balls to juggle simultaneously not sure that’s a great idea and i think the whis thing still is hanging out there uh wisc has released a video last week and which shows them flying their one of their early prototypes in 2017 so whisk has been at this for a while doing the flight test and it was a piloted flight test it wasn’t autumn it wasn’t uh you know remote control it was a pilot in the aircraft which would in 2017 would have been pretty interesting to do uh so whisk has is bringing the goods so to speak saying hey we’ve been at this a long time archer doesn’t even have an airplane what’s the deal and do you have to convince a judge or a jury of that that one that one’s going to get interesting because you can convince a jury about anything if you bring the goods whether they you know took it legally or designed an aircraft in their own backyard in archer’s own backyard who knows nobody knows yet but it does lead to a lot of downside risk so i mean if you had to make a prediction and obviously you know just a prediction do you think the merger goes through like with joby or is joby going to kind of remain the only one no i think the merger goes through i think these specs have to happen they’re they’re the alternative is to collapse the company so they need that financing there’s no way you can proceed without it realistically now the question dan i i don’t understand the details of what drives all these companies to spec because maybe just the simplicity of it but if you’re if you’re a joby or a an archer and you have an existing company and you need a fun and need to raise money what you would normally do is you just become a public company you just go public and announce you go in public and you go through the sec uh paperwork and filings and all the things you got to go do does this which would make transparency one of the keys right that’s why they have that process is it this very transparent does this back somehow hide the transparency part of this because it’s starting to feel like the investors are saying we can’t tell what’s going on inside when you go from because the spec envelopes the company i can’t i can’t penetrate this back to look around inside so i don’t really know what the value is does that is that what happens i’m not sure exactly there’s just a lot less steps involved i mean that’s why the whole spec thing is was a craze this past year it just makes there’s it’s a much faster i’m not sure if it’s less transparent or not that’s a good question i’m not an expert on it but obviously when there’s such a shortened path from private company to public company you assume there’s going to be less of a deep dive into finances but again um don’t quote me on it yeah it just seems like the the the spac creates the the marketplace and becomes public right and so uh the sec is evaluating the spec and whatever they purchase is something separate right so it does seem like a way to shorten the process and you’re right i think shortening process maybe eliminates a lot of visibility that we’d otherwise get to see well last up on the docket today the vertical flight society released a press release um recently a little bit last month that basically explained that there’s been 500 different evtol designs that their company has uh sort of cataloged into a directory um including 200 new ones since last july and just 101 100 so far this year between january um now and september so 500 designs um and that includes up to 288 different companies or developers now is this is this normal for this or is this just a crazy free-for-all of everyone i mean we’ve reported on a lot of these and there’s been some silly ones for sure there’s been some that seem like that well this is never going to happen this is just you just made a website and a prototype and a drawing does this surprise you is that i mean that 500 is a lot it does because the aircraft industry never has had that quantity of participants particularly participants that may not have a lot of aircraft experience in their company uh proposing airplanes you’ve always seen the popul what i would term the popular mechanics kind of aircraft oh there’s a new aircraft company they got this unique design feature yeah yeah yeah it’s cool but most likely they’re probably not going to make very many of them if they make any at all in this particular case you just see the flooding of the market which gets back to our i think to our discussion about the spax is it just a free-for-all right now that uh if a spec can grab hold of a theoretical design does that then allow them to create an airplane company you know do you just have enough credentials if brute if bert rutan were out there and he’s not but if bert rutan you know the great aircraft designer we’re out there uh pitching at evtol i guarantee you he could have a deal and you know those those days are sort of long gone so what you’re seeing and sort of the retain areas are long gone so what you’re seeing is uh just a lot of different design groups and maybe a small aircraft manufacturer dabbled in some home built aircraft talking about building you know a literally a billion-dollar company so the question in my mind is and this relates to the archer uh again because the archer had a youtube open house video pre-canned video they released last week i wish there were only 400 people watching and i was i was one of the 400 watching what was going on there and i was a little shocked because you know if you’re if you’re having so many people enter the marketplace that would make you think or feel like there’s a lot of demand for this product it’d be like saying uh we have this ipod or you know a thousand thousand uh songs in your pocket right which is the apple thing and so which which would automatically create quite a real sense of demand there’s a lot of demand for something like that when an aircraft company supposedly has huge demand and when they make an announcement no one’s paying attention it makes you wonder like what is the real marketplace here is it as big because i think archer was talking about doing uh 30 to 40 flights a day that’s a lot of demand so these two things don’t seem to jive right now in terms of the number of aircraft companies the variety of aircraft and the the the money available to them and what the existing marketplace the total addressable market the tam looks like like what is the tam because you hear numbers thrown about you go yeah how many taxi rides are given in a day i don’t know how many people would be willing to do it i haven’t seen it maybe you have seen it but i haven’t seen anybody throw real hard numbers at it but just like just saying we can do 30 flights a day between doing 30 flights and selling 30 flights that that’s the difference so we have a lot we’re going to have a lot to see over the next year i think yeah there’s a lot to prove out here right there’s going to be quite a narrowing of the field as there already has but you’re right there’s still a lot of a lot of unanswered questions well that’s going to do it for this week’s episode of the struck aerospace engineering podcast thanks so much for listening wherever you are on spotify itunes stitcher youtube thanks thanks again for being here and be sure to subscribe share the show with a friend and we will see you here next week on struck strike tape weatherguard lightning tech’s proprietary 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