We talked about Southwest CEO Gary Kelly’s letter to employees and the Cyclogyro EVTOL’s Crazy Design – can it work? We also discussed Boeing 747 fuel tank ignition problems, the Airbus ACJ TwoTwenty, Learjet 75 Liberty and much more.
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Full Transcript: EP30 – Cyclogyro EVTOL’s Crazy Design; Boeing 747 Fuel Tank Ignition Warning; Airbus ACJ TwoTwenty vs Learjet 75 Liberty & More
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 all right welcome back this is the struck podcast episode 3-0 the big 30. so moving right along here in today’s episode we’ve got a bunch of different topics number one we’re gonna talk a little bit about southwest airlines Gary Kelly the ceo released a letter to his employees recently just talking about the trouble that the company is in so we’ll chat a little bit about that lots of boeing news this week uh first uh we’ll talk about how boeing’s consolidating dreamliner production in south carolina we’re also going to chat a little bit about a bird strike actually in a chinese jet fighter which caused the plane to crash and he had to eject so we’ll chat a little bit about that uh we’ll also talk go back to boeing with the 747 and 767 receiving an faa warning about fuel tank ignition and what the implications might be there lastly we’re going to talk about two different business jets the learjet liberty 75 and the airbus acj220 uh pretty interesting to kind of compare and contrast some of the the uh marketing ideas i guess uh in the upgrades of these two jets and then lastly in our evtol segment we’ll chat about the cyclogyro one of the more bizarre designs that we’ve talked about here on the show and uh we’ll chat also a little bit about volocopter and some other plans for the olympics so alan let’s talk about southwest probably your favorite airline right i it is i would say it’s mine but i had some i had a period of rough flights with them not physically rough but just delays delays and like they were telling me that my flight was delayed and then they undelayed it and it was like physically impossible to make the flight this happened three times something like that so anyway but i do respect southwest they’ve always had good leadership it seems like they are still doing great things as far as you know their leadership Gary Kelly is reducing his own salary to zero through the end of next year and he’s asked for a 10 to 20 pay cut from many in leadership and he’s trying to avoid layoffs so does this come as a surprise to you in general i mean do you think things are getting better or what’s what’s your take here well i don’t think airline flights have really increased in terms of number of passengers very much over the last couple of months and with the prognosis that we are probably three months out right now between two and three months out from vaccinations and really protecting the most vulnerable not you know people like us which are pretty healthy for the most part are not going to get vaccinated first we’re going to be probably last in line so it’s going to you know drag out the airline thing i everybody is still there’s still a lot of contention about whether it’s safe to travel on an airplane and i think it’s all about risk and reward and there everything we do today and everything you do every day is full of risk and we have to evaluate risk i do think one of the features of americans in general not to say we’re not much different than other countries but i think there’s this part of america which is uh we take risks and we do we risk freedoms larger than we do uh health consequences you see it all the time america america yeah well it just it just sort of sort of built into the nature of americans it’s sort of how you grow up and i i don’t know if you can really put your finger on about what part of that happens but i think that it’s true it’s just sort of built into the the way culture the culture is yeah well and one opinion from scott galloway over at the pivot podcast with him and kara swishers he said look maybe the airlines are just not going to be as big in the future like do they need to be as big as they were who’s to say they did you know and so that’s also potentially another long-term implication i mean southwest is what a third of the size quarter quarter the size of the other airlines maybe maybe all those airlines are just similar to in size the southwest and there’s just less flights in the second tier city that was kind of his his thesis you know if you live if you live in chattanooga like you have a little less mobility now it’s compared to you know a place like dc or you know bigger city well there’s inefficiencies in any system that’s easy to point to the to the one or two inefficiencies in any system the thing is is that if left up to choice people were flying and it would the the airlines were full southwest carry rate was like in the 80 range they were mostly full almost all the time so yeah people are willing to travel and i think they’re going to still be willing to travel it’s just finding that that sort of happy medium of of where risk and reward are do i want to go visit my family for thanksgiving or do i not want to do that i think this is going to be a really interesting test because in november it’s a large thanksgiving in the united states is the most traveled day of the year bigger than christmas bigger than any other holiday thanksgiving is that one especially for airline travel and i was noticing i was checking yesterday a little bit to see if airline travel is starting to pick up for thanksgiving not really people are not really booking tickets for thanksgiving yet on southwest that’s really odd so people are waiting a little bit to see what happens over the next couple of weeks probably realizing they can probably still book tickets but if you have a really uh down time around thanksgiving it’s going to hurt these airlines to the point where yeah they’re going to be hurt for a couple years all right so moving on let’s talk about boeing they’re pulling their 787 dreamliner production from seattle and moving it to north charleston south carolina south carolina then they said basically they’re going to make six 787 planes next year per month down from 10 so 40 cut how big of a deal is this it’s a big deal i think from boeing’s perspective it’s a just from the operational side it is a big deal because they’ve always delivered airplanes out of the seattle area so this would be the first time that they have it in a long time during world war ii and for a long time uh the airplanes were delivered out of wichita kansas they had a huge assembly factory in wichita kansas so it isn’t like the first time that boeing as a company and has delivered product outside of the seattle area especially when they bought um mcdonald douglas they had a place down at long beach that was making airplanes also so they had a bunch of places that were making airplanes i think the the thought process and what you hear a lot right now about this transaction is it’s all about the unions i don’t think it’s about the unions so much as just efficiency the plant in south carolina if i remember correctly was purchased by boeing it was owned by somebody else and i don’t want to call them out by name but essentially they were making parts in uh the south carolina area if i remember correctly and it didn’t go right and so boeing acquired the company took over the production so a lot of the production of like the tail sections and large sections of the airplane are made in south carolina and then they’re flown to washington state to be assembled into airplanes there also so if the if a lot of the peace parts of big sub-assemblies are made in south carolina flying them to washington state doesn’t make any sense at that point if you don’t need the production space so it makes a lot more sense to keep it in south carolina just make the whole aircraft there and be done with it which is what the decision they made i don’t think it has a lot to do with union i think it has a lot to do with just efficiency of the system gotcha yeah no that makes sense going from one corner of the country to the other which seems just logistically like a nightmare so moving on the uh there was a chinese fighter jet that was downed they took a bird just shortly after takeoff couldn’t restore thrust uh the pilot dejected and the plane crashed so you don’t hear about this too often with fighters i don’t feel like but i mean what’s the difference obviously if you’re in a commercial airliner you can take a bird in one engine right and you still plenty of rustic to carry on if need be or at least get to a safe landing but right how is that different in a fighter jet well fighter jets tend to be single engine just the way that they built to become more agile uh unless they’re sea based and which a lot of times they’re twin engine but even today a lot of them are single engine the f-16 was is sort of similar to that just one big engine and if you take a bird in that i think they’re made to handle some amount of bird but wrong bird wrong time sticking on takeoff you don’t have any altitude what are you going to do there’s not many places to go you have no thrust you don’t have a lot of lift on those aircraft because they’re not designed for a lift they’re like rocket ships like you just point in the right direction and aim at it and so the there’s very little lift you’re not going to glide very far you better get out of it as fast you can and the same thing happened if you remember with the canadian snowbirds a couple of months ago they were going back to canada or go back to their home base there i think they were in canada but they’re going back to their home base and on takeoff they took they ingested that bird and the two pilots ejected one of them was uh injured and died out of that the other one was severely injured i remember right and on takeoff when you take a bird in the engine you got to get out to as fast as you really can so if you watch the canadian snowbird one which is video of you see the pilots as soon as they see that bird comes through the engine and they lose thrust they just are trying to gain altitude trying to buy more time and it’s such a serious thing and there’s a really interesting video on youtube of an f-16 pilot taking a bird on i think it’s on takeoff it’s not very high above the ground and then just the burden in the engine just basically stops and needs a glider then you know he tries to point the thing in a place where it’s not going to hit anybody any homes and ejects out of it those it’s just part of the deal right if you bad timing bird on one engine bad bad news yeah that’s scary all right so we’re gonna jump into our engineering segment here first topic here for today boeing uh their 747 and 767 aircraft they got a faa warning a new air worthiness directive saying that they basically need to do more to fix their fuel monitoring their fuel tank monitoring systems to prevent the risk of ignition within these tanks so they said that they’ve got 72 months to make these changes which to me as an outsider is like wait six years we could be flying on these planes where they have some risk of ignition does am i wrong and feeling like that’s a crazy long time to fix this or is that more of an indicator that this is not that big of a problem well 767s aren’t really not used for commercial flight anymore they’re cargo airplanes and same thing where 747s are pretty much shut down it’s going to be cargo airplanes so as soon as they get out of having a bunch of passengers on them they’re going to extend the amount of time it takes to modify them i haven’t seen the details of and i want to look through this here later this week but the details of what the fa is requiring to do and what regulation they’re holding them accountable to um is going to be fascinating because 767 is a is an older in terms of airplanes is an older airplane design and obviously a 747 is a 50 year old airplane so what are you going to do right and there’s only so much you can do those fuel systems to make them absolutely safe to the latest rules i think that there’s there’s going to be more safety oversight from the faa than there has been in the past because the 737 stuff and anytime that there’s a boeing issue it’s going to see a lot of press just because it makes clicks yeah is it is it really a safety issue you know that’s that’s the hard part i don’t you kind of feel like no because it’s been flying this way for a while but if there’s a reasonable way i mean this and this is sort of the trade-off in terms of time to fix it versus uh really safety impact if it was an immediate safety impact where they thought airplanes are going to have catastrophic problems they would immediately ground the airplanes and make them fix immediately but if it’s something that’s has a extremely low probability and it takes a combination of failures to occur and they can flag those failures ahead of time then they tend to extend out the amount of time it takes to make the mod if they make it at all because a lot of times when they have these long periods of updates the airplanes just get shelved they just get put in the desert never used again that’s what happens all right so let’s chat a little bit about these two new business jets so one the airbus acj220 and now this one’s really fancy because they don’t write the number 220 they spell it with no space so two t-w-o-t-w-e-n-t-y the 220. that’s how you know it’s fancy when they’re writing it out uh but the 220 they said has basically a third less operating costs than the previous a220 family uh and yet has three times the cabin space which is pretty cool so a lot of a lot of amenities and it looks pretty fancy i mean i’m just going to be honest here i’d like one of these so put this on my christmas list you can put it in my stocking um but it looks roomy looks awesome i mean it looks really modern and cool uh now let’s compare this to another one that’s getting some press the elite learjet uh 75 liberty which this is so this just strikes me as really bizarre so it’s about a 10 million jet but it’s not really fundamentally different than the leader jet 75 and here’s a quote from this article on on rob report.com uh this is a quote from brian foley who’s in aviation industry strategist he says it’s an odd strategy when you refresh a product by taking amenities out of it so basically they said the the learjet 75 liberty is basically just a leader jet 75 that they took some seats out of took some other things out of it to make it lighter and thus more fuel efficient and that’s essentially where they’re at with this new jet so i i read these two articles i kind of laughed because on the one they’re like we’ve got you know the airbus they have we’ve got these new engines it’s the most fuel efficient in its class like everything about this is just more efficient and just high-tech and then the 75 liberty is like we just took some stuff out of it so but i might but my guys should stop laughing but am i missing something here uh not much really the the learjet designs an old design coming off the i think the 75 is an older 45 base design which is made in the in the late 90s or no late 80s um but the the the the 75 and in the learjet uh just full disclosure i’ve i’ve worked for learjet in the past so the legit sort of claim to fame was just better performance like more thrust get to altitude sooner more of a race car ferrari uh for the pilot you get to your destination faster sort of thing whereas the um the a220 which is the airbus 220 which was the c-series is more of a passenger jet so they’re sort of in different marketplaces there the thing about learjet and the allerget series and why the litter j85 was sort of be the next step was that the legit 85 was a larger fuselage section and that’s the problem with this the learjets today is that their fuselage diameter is relatively small in today’s world and it’s hard to sell those things and the way the learjet used to be sold was the pilot was the owner a lot of cases that’s the way it was 20 even 20 years ago was a lot of times 30 years ago 40 years ago for sure was that the the guy that owned the company also flew his own jet to get to 8.8 to b that was the typical thing that doesn’t really happen anymore a lot of these things are on leases and whatnot and so what’s happening now is the people that or the companies that purchase these aircraft don’t fly them so the amenities start to play more of a factor this is why your gulf streams are getting bigger and more elaborate and the bombardier airplanes are getting more elaborate cabins and more amenities to them for long flights and all that is that the customers want to have legroom headroom lavatory all that stuff which is what the 220 has and the lear 75 just really won’t have that so you have to make that trade-off of speed versus efficiency and cost and allerget’s always been a little more expensive than its competitors it’s just in a bad place right now the literature is and the a220 civilian version of the thing it’s gonna be a probably pretty good hit actually uh just because it’s it’s it is very efficient the engines are right it’s a twin engine it’s got the cabin space it was it’s it’s it’s got all the it checks all the boxes it’s not as big as the 50s i’m into it yeah yeah yeah so the next one’s like the 737 right so it’s a 730 says a much bigger aircraft and so it sort of fits that bigger than gulfstream roughly gulfstream size airplane but more efficient probably is the argument they’re going to make yeah so i you know i think the problem the problem i think is the airbus is going to market it which is the problem and i don’t think airbus has really marketed that’s upended uh uh business aircraft derivatives very well versus a company like bombardier which will sell the heck out of it and gulfstream too and embraer for that matter that they sell those business aircraft like this no they just know how to fit that mark and how to sell that stuff and airbus is more into selling airplanes to air france and uh delta than they are to the corporate business owner i think well and what real quick what would you say the difference is i mean does bombardier just they go to all like the fanciest restaurants and they slip them uh a pamphlet or i mean what what’s what’s marketing look like oh yeah right so the they’ll have uh hollywood pilots be there spokespeople or f formula one race car drivers be their spokesperson for the aircraft and they’ll demo it and they’ll have these events and it’s like selling an upgrade a very expensive car they’re in the same places where you you go buy your new um picket ferrari maserati whatever um they’ll be there trying to sell an airplane same places the same group of people and i think you have to have connections in that marketplace know who the buyers likely are where they’re going to be what times of year they’re going to be there it’s sort of a click that you want to be in and if you don’t do that you’re just going to miss opportunities all right so our last segment today we’re going to talk about evtols again first we’re going to talk about volocopter so they’ve got some ambitions just to start testing in the paris france region and with an eye to sort of like have a comfort level maybe with the public and and to get to certification so they can be there for the 2024 olympics alan do you feel like that’s a realistic goal i think that it is uh i i think they will definitely get there just because how far their their prototypes are developed already getting to s test mode and doing a lot of flight testing and getting certain checking the box of certification most likely you’ll be able to get to the parish olympics i i think the the question about the volocopter even though i like it is that it’s going to have a lot of competition between now and 2024. and does it get out front and is 2024 too late to to sort of set that pace because just listen to some of the discussions on some of the other evtols the the kicker in terms of battery usage is you don’t want to be in hovering flight very long right and the volocopter isn’t hovering flight all the time just the way it’s set up so it is essentially a helicopter so that smokes battery time just eats up battery time a lot of the other designs that are coming about right now transition from vertical flight to horizontal flight as fast as a humanly can get some lift off those wings decrease the amount of power usage to get from a to b so they have longer ranges faster flight time or shorter flight times higher speed velocities higher speeds versus the volocopter which is more like get from one side of paris to the other side of paris sort of product we’ll see how it goes but i you know volocopter has been very aggressive on driving the market trying to get the thing out they’re showing it and showing that sort of leadership position they need to continue to do that if they continue to do that they will set the pace and that’s exactly what you want to do right now set the pace set the expectations deliver a product as soon as you can get it into service and then work on generation two right so i would i would hope they would come before 2044. that’s what my hope is at that the paris olympics things they are on generation two that’s what my hope is well the last question from me here is how do you have a company that doesn’t have a product for four more years obviously this is what what the aviation industry is like i get it but but i don’t get it like what they’ve got to just burn cash for the next 50 months yes yes this is amazing aircraft awful business yeah it’s because you have to burn cash and you never who would have predicted 18 months ago that we’ve all been in cobia 19 lockdown and no one’s flying nobody right so that’s the risk you take and you’re not taking it with a million dollars you’re taking it with a 500 million dollars and you’re loads of cash to to support the amount of engineers and developers and flight tests and support staff and certification groups and all the other things hr that it takes to get from a to b on these projects it’s it is literally hundreds of millions of dollars i know it’s hard to think about like that but it’s hundreds of million dollars and who are you gonna find is gonna invest a couple hundred million dollars into a project which has shows on the return side how fast can you return it not that fast unless you’re gonna make a lot of these things and you can show you got the customer base to do it you’re going to find very few investors speaking of maybe not that many investors let’s talk about the cyclogyro EVTOL so i saw this design today and i thought of you immediately and like Allen is going to have a field day with this because so cyclotech is the company and they’re they have this cyclogyro EVTOL it’s just a concept this is a drawing but they’re talking about applying principles of aquatic propulsion you know the way boats rudder themselves and propel themselves to airplanes alan does this work why or why not no no cut it real short no it looks like a paddle boat so if you’re familiar with uh 1900 era 18 late 1800s 1900 era it’s got four water river boats right going up and down the mississippi river yeah that’s what it looks like and there’s a there’s a there’s a difference between water propulsion and air propulsion is that water is an incompressible fluid and air is compressible so the the physics of it are totally different and uh let’s just say i was looking to see if someone actually had made a a scale bottle of this thing to go fly around in the backyard and they had at least i haven’t seen it so it makes you wonder if the physics work at all but let’s just say that they do let’s just say we’ll just ignore physics for a minute and just say magically this thing flies okay awesome how are you going to certify that thing how are you going to bring in a certification authority which has never seen this thing has all kinds of moving parts how you’re going to certify it because the thing about certification on the f on the faa yasa transport canada picking one of them is that you’re trying to get to some sort of safety minimum level of safety that’s what all these certification efforts are about is just showing a minimum level of safety i don’t know how you do that because it has no proven technology it’s never been done even on an experimental level there’s no experimental aircraft that’ll use this thing it has zero history there’s just no chance and that this is the trouble this is the trouble i think that the aviation community gets in it sort of promotes not that the real aviation community the engineers and the guys that are not guys but the people that really push the envelope we’re looking back at this like there’s no way this thing’s going to be real even if they get it to work on even they get a prototype to work getting it to to be in a sellable form is going to be extremely difficult so it sort of distracts the industry a little bit where they have designs that could be put into service are in question because of this other thing which is this thing in theory and if you’re sitting in a room for investors who don’t know all that much about what the physics of these things are you kind of get these crazy looks around the table like why are these other guys gonna use a totally different propulsion technology why are we not looking at that and as an engineer you’re like well because it’s impossible that’s not that’s not a good answer because the response back he goes yeah but can you check it out you’re like man i gotta waste two weeks looking at this thing like come on right like i got work to do and that’s the sort of cycle you get it and if you watch some of these evt olds and some of the gyrations are going in right now in terms of an industry you’re seeing that like all right we can’t use a ducted fan well why not because well i can’t transition from vertical to horizontal flight with that without crashing this thing once in a while so we need to dump the duct okay but we we like the duck it looks cool yeah yeah but i can’t i can’t certify it well i mean could you could you play around with it a little while like look we’re burning cash at unbelievable rates we have to get to something out in the field and something certified as fast as you humanly can oh we’re all going to be on the street looking for work and that’s sort of the the contention that rises when you see concepts like this well and going back to what we were talking about before say this is super cool and it actually can fly but then certification is going to be super long now what this company’s six seven eight years from being certified they’ve got to burn cash for eight years maybe yeah and that’s just the number i’m throwing out but yeah yeah that seems just like untenable as a business yeah and appreciate to build production facilities who’s going to build this thing what all that you know that all the machinery and components have to go into it it’s all going to be different than we used before there’s a lot to an airplane i don’t know how it does to describe it i know we look at tesla and go oh look i made cars yeah they can make cars but when the thing runs out of gas you’re not gonna or electricity it’s not gonna you’re not gonna crash right you’re gonna kill somebody uh airplanes totally different and cars don’t have that same level of oversight that airplanes do and rightly so they don’t need it so you lose that sort of perspective on how difficult this task really is it is if you look at the number of airplanes that have been successfully certified over the last 25 years it’s not that money and you say they said well why because you know all these engineers and the technic technology is just not good enough to to push advancement no that’s not it at all it’s it’s because all the technology advancements cost money and it takes a whole lot of money and you’re going to make it back one airplane at a time and you only say you only sell 50 a year it’s going to take forever to get your return on investment there it’s a bad investment and that’s what happens is that unless you can show you’re going to have some world-changing technology and you can deliver it your investors are nowhere 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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