In this episode we discuss the life of test pilot Chuck Yeager, the trust issues that might surround the Boeing 737 Max and how the public will get past them, plus Uber Elevate’s sale to Joby.
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EP38 Transcript – Chuck Yeager, Uber Elevate Sold to Joby Aviation & Boeing 737 Max Trust Issues
welcome back to the struck podcast I’m your co-host Dan Blewett and on today’s show we’ve got a couple of major topics not as many uh scatter shot ones today but number one we’re gonna chat about Chuck Yeager the uh the legendary pilot has passed away so i know Allen’s got a a lot a lot to say about his legacy in our engineering segment we’ll talk about the 737 max and specifically how consumers can get confidence back in this plane because i think it’s really interesting most of us who are not aviation lifers aerospace you know engineers we don’t really know what happens with the faa i mean we’ve heard on one hand this is a like the most technologically amazing plane like it’s one of the best planes ever created but then it’s crashed twice and it’s been this villain of the story so we’ll talk about how those two pieces get married and how people get back uh flying in the 737 max with confidence and lastly we’ll talk about uber elevate who we did chat about last week and they were sold to gob aviation uh right after we had recorded that show so we’re going to talk about uber and joby and that whole outlook so alan number one let’s talk about chuck yeager so who was chuck yeager chuck yeager is probably the the most identifiable recognizable test pilot in the world he’s a legend yeah yeah there’s really two i think uh and on the soviet side it’s trying to be yuri gagarin just because flying into space that’s a big name is the test pilot and on the american side it tends to be chuck yeager there’s a couple others in america that people could rattle off if you’re in aviation but chicken was always the one and a lot of it had to do with the movie that was made based upon the book the right stuff uh that tom wolf wrote years and years ago back in the 80s and the thing about chuck egger and if if you’re interested in aviation you should read chuck yeager’s book the autobiography because it explains a lot about his his life uh he came from i believe it’s west virginia if i remember correctly as a kid really young enlisted wanted to fly ended up in world war ii shooting down some enemy aircraft got shot down in france uh hid out in france him and another pilot i think he carried another injured pilot across the pyrenees mountains and if you’ve ever been to the pyrenees mountains you know because he had to get spain but if you’ve ever been to the pyrenees mountains or seen the pyrenees mountain it’s like it’s like the rockies in the united states those mountains are huge and it’s cold up there and there’s snow on them and they were evading uh german soldiers all the way to get to spain and once he got back into spain he kind of slipped back to the united states and then started flying again in combat and then after the war he ended up working in ohio at dayton ohio for a little while and then getting sent to edwards air force base or air base i guess at the time and uh becoming a test pilot obviously his most recognizable uh claim to fame was break the first person to break the sound barrier back in 1947 with the bell x1 which was essentially a rocket ship with wings and it was full of rocket motors and the and he did it while he had a couple of busted ribs and a banged up shoulder because he had he had fallen off a horse the night before uh wow yeah so he’s sort of crazy he’s not the biggest physical guy at the time a lot of touch pilots you couldn’t it’s like astronauts at the time they’re not the tallest people you see in the world they’re not like uh athletes you see today like an nfl team or a baseball team he’s not very tall person but he’s sort of built built right for flying and he has tremendous eyesight his eyesight was unbelievably good so the the sort of the lore from chuck yeager um in the aviation community was like he was the fastest hottest test pilot forever and i i think there’s a couple of things to remember about chuck yeager and if you had followed chuck yeager on twitter chuck eagle was very active on twitter until literally a couple of months ago and his recollection and things that he would promote or some of the things that he would remember or bring up um were just fascinating and you can go back and look because twitter kind of archives that you can go back and look at some of his discussions about breaking the sound barrier and some of the things that he did but it also came with somewhat of a consequence and and this is the part i don’t think you you read a lot about and i thought the news about chuck yeager passing away was actually very quiet
maybe because he’s been on around for a long time and people have sort of forgotten about all the things that he had done but you know being being in that life is very difficult being a flight test pilot at the time was extremely serious business because pilots died regularly it isn’t like today where an airplane crashing is is uh uh you know a big event it is an airplane crashing today is is a big event at the time when they were you know let’s just talk about late 40s just after world war ii through the 1950s into the 60s airplanes crashed all the time because they just they just didn’t have the engineering a lot of it was experimental and they would just go out there and get the data and that’s what those flight test pilots are there for it was to go out and get the data so that the engineers could figure out how to get the aircraft to the next level and chuck yaeger had a couple of bad accidents in which he was lucky to survive in so it seems like he always had nine lives right now the thing about chuck yeager he’s always seemed to have nine lives i think if you haven’t if you if if you don’t want to read the book watch the movie chuck yeager and in the right stuff he’s actually in that movie he’s a bartender and poncho’s at pancho’s uh uh ranch which was a sort of a place where pilots hung out out out in the desert at edwards air force base um and so he’s in the movie there you can see him in there he can see him in there it’s sort of it’s sort of funny if he you know sort of inside baseball there but i think in today’s world he just he came out of a different era and my wife was pointing out this morning like how old he was when he broke the sound barrier he’s in his early 20s right yeah i was doing the math in my head yeah he hadn’t been born in what 1923 because he died at 97. yeah so 47 1947 he’s 24 years old right yeah and you know i’ve been a pilot in in the world war so he was young right and uh he’s lucky i mean part of its skill part of he had a lot of skill sets he’s smart uh but he could get himself out of bad situations or he could figure out a way not to get into bad situations and he taught a lot of pilots that’s other thing he did too he trained a lot of pilots on how to fly airplanes and uh it’s just times have evolved in a in an odd sense when you think about the sort of that sort of personality type uh very strong-willed very sort of military base which he was he’s in the military for a long time and uh you just don’t see a lot of that anymore you just don’t and so i think it’s really hard for especially kids now to even relate to something like that because who’s your hot test pilot today you know we just sent up uh people to the space station a couple of weeks ago and i couldn’t name one of them yeah couldn’t name one of them right they just don’t stick out like that it’s it’s almost commonplace the things that chuck yaker did back in the 40s and 50s are so uncommon it just set the world on fire uh but today we do them all the time breaking the sound barrier happens hundreds of times a day all around the world easily easily does so you know it’s a huge loss i think most of it is for me it’s mostly about a loss of that kind of personality style of um get up do the hard work put in you know do do the right stuff and and uh make the world a little bit better and uh you know i think the military has a lot to be proud of there i think that they do and particularly air force totally does one and for me not knowing i actually am interested in reading his book um he seems to just like embody that cowboy mentality like of america like he was just like yep let’s do it let’s break a sound barrier let’s just i mean he like you said he had seemingly had nine lives it says that on a bunch of his flights like you said like in 1953 he was with the uh he hit mach 2.44 and hit inertia coupling and had like the plane went to some violent roll and pitch motions and he cut the engine and then like regained uh control the plane 50 000 feet later it just sounds asinine but he just like like you know like i said it just seems like the modern cowboy just wrangling planes like all these new designs into into control like breaking stallions almost oh yeah i think it is like that i would describe it somewhat like that yeah but the i i think the thing that always sort of stuck out about chuck yeager that he wasn’t a cowboy in the sense that he was doing uh obviously he’s in a dangerous field there’s no doubt about that but he took calculated risks right he wouldn’t he wouldn’t put himself in a situation where he knew he was going to get killed i don’t think that was his way that things ran there i think he had a good sense of how things work mechanically i think he could understand what was happening in an airplane how an airplane responded if you read his twitter feeds um the best airplane ever flew was a p-51 mustang and it’s one of the coolest airplanes ever but that was the airplane that he ended up in the end of world war ii ended up flying a good bit and just because the way it handled and how much power it had and i think he learned a lot about how aircraft work and when to push forward and when to pull back a little bit and you know when you’re describing the time in which he you know got up to i don’t know 80 thousand feet in the airplane went crooked on them i think that’s the one where he he hit the cockpit canopy so hard with his helmet that he cracked the canopy so you know those most people die in that situation he was extremely lucky and the time it is he got fire in his suit and all all that you should read the book watch the movie you don’t have time but the movie is very long but it’s a fascinating life and it’s it’s it’s sad to hear of his passing
all right so in our engineering segment today we’re gonna talk about the 737 max obviously last week in the show we talked about the fact that it’s back right it’s it’s been approved it’s airworthy again in the u.s uh but that still doesn’t change a lot of people’s minds about it right everyone’s got a certain feeling it was certainly like a villainized plane uh or vilified plane and um but yet like you’ve said uh many times faa uh regulators and engineers are very competent very thorough people so Allen how can people be sure the 737 max is safe and why should they trust it i think you should have trusted to begin with in the sense that uh there was a lot of effort uh to make the aircraft safe it wasn’t like there was no indication i s and i still stand by this today there was no indication any other reports or any of the data that came out of hey we’re designing this aircraft to be risky or unsafe there was i think normal banter for any sort of large organization complaining about whatever project they’re working on that’s normal but in terms of you know following the the methodology and the logic to get to the point where the aircraft was certified at the time and there is got to be some sense in the general public that the engineering an anti-aircraft program is not malevolent that there’s not any sort of bad intention here just to push anything by uh to put some sort of unsafe aircraft in the air because you’re trying to profit on it i can guarantee you that not a single engineer that worked on that product got a pay raise because it got out sooner that just doesn’t go on like that right this is not wall street right it is a very regulated very monitored it’s an eight to five kind of job to do those things no one has a vestus invested interest in it so to speak you may own some boeing stock but that’s about it you’re not going to get independently wealthy off it so the intentions i think
are good right i think from the engineering standpoint you’re like yeah they did all that they checked all the boxes they did their homework they understood what the risks were a thing that bit them two parts i think the thing that bit the 737 was the aoa probe uh having problems and the repaired aoa pros having problems that were not verified or caught before they were installed then the pilots the pilots had issues controlling the aircraft even after the service bulletin had been put out to say if if the airplane nose is over or you have some sort of uncommanded horizontal stab issue shut it off and they had commands to do that they had instructions to do that in that second crash either the pilots were not informed of it or they just ignored it who knows you’re never going to find out that but in terms of the safety of an aircraft there is tens of thousands of hours of research and study and testing and effort that goes into making sure those aircraft are safe enough that those that your family is okay to fly on them and i would almost guarantee you that there’s 99.9 of the people that worked on that aircraft would fly on it a year ago as it were today so i think we need to be very careful about the way some portion of the media likes to blow things up and not just a blown that’s let’s blow them up or to portray them and the way that congressional uh representatives or representatives in congress like to do that too because it gives them a a platform to create turmoil to create votes whatever their intentions are get on television god knows what but take a step back a minute right things we’re reading today if you’re getting if you’re getting your advice on twitter or facebook or instagram about anything to do with anything engineering it’s the wrong place you got the wrong resources you’re just making really bad decisions those are not those are not resources for anybody to do anything with uh and you know it’s fine if you’re checking out to see how the the neighbor’s vacation went awesome but to rely on sort of the hearsay garbage that goes on in social media to make decisions about what airplane you want to fly on that is ridiculous dig a little bit deeper find better resources than that and that’s probably one of the most frustrating things about aviation today is a lot of the discourse that goes on isn’t and not so much isn’t valid but it’s not worth anything because then nobody knows right when if you read an article in a i don’t name any publications but if you read an article about 737 max from a typical generic journalist not someone who delves into aviation that article is full of our just errors flat out errors and you read them all the time right but if i’m in the general public i don’t know that i have no idea i have to rely upon the sources that are laying in front of me i think that’s the sort of the gel man problem that we have is that the the resources that you have to make educated decisions are not there they’re not there or the problem is so complex you can’t make a decision about it anyway so i don’t know if there’s a real answer to it dan i don’t know but i just right now it’s just probably a bad time because the election’s gone over and anytime you’re on social media like twitter’s making comments about the election and like who that twitter is making those decisions like they don’t know anything about anything and they don’t know anything about airplanes either that’s one thing they guarantee they don’t know anything about is airplanes and aircraft safety they have no idea how the how the process is done they have no idea all the effort has gone into it and it doesn’t mean every product pushes out is perfect but it doesn’t mean that there’s sort of some bad intentions there and i still feel like there’s there is this part of the journalistic community that is pushing there was some malfeasance uh bad actors on the boeing side or on the airline site for that matter i don’t i don’t think those are true i think what it come down to there was an accident and if situations were slightly different they wouldn’t happen it’s a it’s a connection of a series of roughly random events that all seem to line up for the worst time it’s awful that those things happen and we learn from them and if there’s anything that’s happened in the last 10 months it’s boeing’s learned a ton about certifying airplane again
all right so in our final segment today where we talk about evtols and electric tech we’re going to revisit uber over elevate and their recent sell to joby aviation so we shouted about uber elevate last week and a lot of uncertainty like what what are they doing what is their role in evtol development and of course just like clockwork a couple days later out comes the news that yes they’re getting rid of that arm and also they’ve sold off pretty much all of their future forecasting arms of the business uber has sold a 500 million stake in uber freight right they’ve sold off their autonomous vehicle uh section which was um aurora innovation um so alan what’s what’s what is uber doing and why are they shedding all these sort of like future looking assets well i i noticed just a couple of weeks ago if you had watched uh the linkedin profiles for people that worked in the upper echelon of uber elevate they were leaving the company and going on to new ventures not defined they didn’t have it didn’t say they had a position in another company necessarily it was like they were just leaving and that as an investor if and i’m not invested in uber thank god but if if i were an investor i would have been really worried about that because those kind of departures indicate there’s people leaving because this this organization is about to end or be substantially restructured in a not a positive way so uh when those departures happen like man this is not good and uber has been in trouble financially because they really haven’t created a profit center yet they’re still looking for profit right they’re still living on investment money essentially so as 2020 drags on and less people are using uber as a transportation service there’s just not enough cash to keep things floating you have to cut everything that uh that you don’t need and if you think about how boeing has cut off their sort of experimental evital section of the of their business out in st louis they cut that off and a lot of other aircraft companies that have the rights to be in that space have that stopped all work uh it made no sense for uber to be in that anymore and i i think i mean listen to podcasts talk about what is happening in sort of the joby uber space and and what possible connection there is i don’t think there’s any possible connection besides you can cut out uber funding anything else right if you have control of that sort of uh marketplace on how to deliver your service to customers which uber does awesome but uh uber’s not investing in any other evtl company that’s for sure elevate’s not so here’s if you look at the financial landscape and the engineering landscape and the evto market you have to if you’re looking at serious contenders right now you need to find the contenders that have at least a half a billion dollars in investment money available to them today if you don’t have a half a billion dollars in investable funds today you’re not going to get to the finish line in the near future you’re just not and joby has toe out of money uh lilliam has some big investors volocopter may have some investors not totally sure about how they’re doing but wisc had larry ellison money it did at one point it doesn’t sound like that’s going on in the future but as a as an outside investor dan if you saw a company that was going to talk about spending a half a billion dollars to create an airplane and they don’t have a half billion dollars available to you to them as an outside investor are you investing in that company at a small level i would i would say no right i wouldn’t uh because you know whatever i invested in it is at high risk and most likely just going to go away yeah and i i don’t own uber stock either um yeah it just seems that at some point like it comes due and it seems like this is a good move by uber that they’re finally trying to stick to their core business and become profitable because for forever i mean they’re not a young company anymore and they’re still not turning a profit so at some point it’s like look we can’t just keep trying to expand and change the future of transportation like let’s try to make money today and then take it one step at a time and it seems like that’s what they’re doing which makes sense like they they bought lime the scooter company uh i don’t know how that acquisition is doing but lime is it’s in here and it’s here in dc it’s in a lot of major cities right it seems like it’s a um a prominent it’s certainly a prominent um you know scooter sharing arm of their business now and then i know lime has just acquired the company jump which also had scooters but more so electric bikes because i’ve seen them rebranded here in dc as well so those are all like real today technologies like people are taking electric bikes they’re taking rental bikes that are not electric they’re taking rental scooters and they’re taking ubers around so those are like the things that make sense today or if they’re trying to you know bring their cash back to the to the heart of the business and actually get profitable that seems to be a good move so yeah it just seemed like we didn’t you and i were talking about uber elevate off and on the last you know whole six months and it’s like what is uber elevate and what are they doing are they really going to build all these planes are they going to build these these locations these these airports for them on top of manhattan skyscrapers like what is their end game and it it’s just like they want to throw their money and be uber everything but it seems like it’s just harder to do that today with lyft being a major competitor and all these other companies that are major competitors to like self-driving cars like are they going to be tesla to the market like no they weren’t right no no so it’s like well why are we in that race like let’s just try to do a couple things well and it seems like that’s what they’re doing well in their business model i i think they’ve pitched a amazonish business model for a while which is that they’re a consignment company they don’t own the car they just get a percentage of the deal right they provide the software to connect driver with user and every one of those transactions you get to keep a percentage of it it’s a consignment uh and aircraft are not like that i don’t know in what world they thought aircraft are going to be like that because aircraft are expensive and it’s and they don’t tend to have independent operators that doesn’t tend to be the model because aircraft are expensive to operate and to own unlike a twenty thousand dollar car kia of some sort this is a totally totally different marketplace and i and i do think again let’s look at the upside downside risk to this if if one of my uber drivers uh and it’s not an employee of uber he just he’s an independent contractor gets into a car accident nobody knows nobody you’re not reading the newspaper or see anything about that but i guarantee you if one of the uber elevate aircraft ev tolls hits the dirt it’s going to be on the front page of our newspaper it’s just basically the same discussion i was listening to today about autumn automatic or automated trucks that could deliver packages across the country the first accident that happens there is going to stop that business from happening and it’s the same thing here it really is all right well that’ll do it for today’s episode of struck if you’re new to the show thank you so much for listening and please leave review and subscribe on itunes spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts check out the weatherguard lightning tech youtube channel for video episodes full interviews and short clips from the show and follow us on linkedin twitter instagram and facebook our handle is @wglightning tune in next tuesday for another great episode on aviation aerospace engineering and lightning protection
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