Ehang is the target of a class action lawsuit, claiming the company has misled shareholders–what will this mean for the Chinese EVTOL company? Boeing reports a significant increase in orders, reaching positive order flow for the first time since 2019. Southwest is nearing an order of 300 737 MAX aircraft, which is more good news for commercial air travel, and Honeywell reveals their new turbogenerator, which could have huge implications for EVTOLs needing to rely on more than just battery power. And speaking of battery power, can Lithium-Sulfur batteries make good on significant energy density promises?
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Transcript: EP48 – Ehang Lawsuit; Boeing Orders Surge; Southwest Ready to Buy More 737 MAX Planes; Honeywell Turbogenerator
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 to the struck podcast i’m your co-host Dan Blewett on today’s episode in our new segment we’ll talk about Boeing has a net positive on their orders for the first time since 2019 southwest is looking to order 300 737 maxes which obviously ties into both and the code recovery which is great in our engineering segment we’ll talk about honeywell they have a new turbo generator that can potentially power a lot of hybrid electric aircraft in the future which also runs on biofuel and then our evtol segment we’re going to talk about ehang a new lawsuit was filed today against them we’ll talk about the loyal wingman drone which is a boeing project out of australia and lastly we’ll talk about lithium sulfur batteries and the implications they might have on the electric aircraft market so alan let’s first talk about boeing this is good news they’ve got net positive orders since first time since 2019 and um it sounds like things are on the up and up yeah well at least in terms of 737 max sales they’re going to be uh because there’s just going to be a huge backlog of companies that were waiting for the aircraft to get quote unquote re-certified uh for use again so you’re gonna see that airplane explode and they had a couple hundred sitting on the tarmac waiting to be sold since 2019 to early 2020 so it’s it’s there’s going to be a huge surge of uh of sales that happen over the next year uh to to get that backlog into service which makes sense right i mean i don’t know how our airbus is ever going to keep up with that because you just had those contained contained inventory that had that had been sold that you couldn’t release and so now you can release it that’s not you can’t really compare boeing and airbus in that situation at all that’s not fair that’s fair yeah so it sounds like in february 2021 they booked 82 aircraft orders 27 kc-46s which was aircraft or air force order uh 14 747 maxes a 747-8 some 787 dreamliners 11 777 x’s which went are going to singapore airlines so so yeah all all in all it sounds like you know the recovery is starting to shape up and obviously in the stock market and let’s shift to south southwest here like southwest’s uh stock is doing very well they’re in the low 60s now um you know down i mean they were struggling in the summer right i mean that was a scary time warren buffett sold out a lot of his southwest stock so some pretty big recoveries and of course i’m not sure those are going to match like their revenues obviously but there’s a lot of optimism right and so uh and with southwest they’re just announced that they’re close to an order it’s not in the books yet for 300 737 maxes now do you feel like the public is going to understand this because the 737 max is still this embattled scary plane that people are probably rapidly forgetting about but still you know there’s that public image of this is an unsafe plan that’s a really good question because there’s been so much news about it and because the name sticks it’s just like uh you know if you say airbus a321 i don’t think that sticks but that max marketing logo stuck so even though it’s a dash 8-9 it’s it’s going to stick and i i i’m not sure how it’s going to play out in the public perception of it because you know southwest does a pretty good job of you know here they’re flying 737s you know that right every airplane on southwest is a 737. uh but you see a lot of dash 700s and 800s when the flight attendants get on the pa system and say hey we’re flying in a in a max what does that mean i’m not sure that’s how that’s going to play out yet and i haven’t seen any marketing on behalf of southwest that’s trying to explain that they may need to it’s they may need to do that yeah in this article by airlineratings.com um it says the southwest order whatever its size would be a massive boost for boeing and it comes as airlines report no negative feelings toward the max from passengers so it sounds like in in internal surveys or whatever people aren’t really aren’t really concerned about i’m a little shocked by that which does sound surprising right yeah it does sound surprising maybe because of the covet whenever no one’s traveling that it’s just falling off the radar screen in terms of news for a while there it seems like that’s the only thing you’re reading about the all the trouble that boeing was having in the boeing ceo leaving in the turmoil and going in front of congress and all that um maybe it’s been enough time and time’s gone on as society’s in another place they haven’t they’re not thinking about it that’s fascinating i would have thought they would have stuck a little bit longer but that’s good because the max is a is a very good airplane it obviously is it’s it’s it had now double scrutiny went through certification once and then i went through certification a second time so to speak so probably the most regulated aircraft in american history is the 737 max should be in pretty good shape you think yeah it’s kind of like if there’s a attack or there’s a shooting somewhere it’s pretty inundated with policemen the next day right there’s a lot of security there the next day so there’s that but i i think there’s also just you know you’re an aviation you know lifer how many people actually even heard much about the boeing 737 stuff are cared for even a second you know like in the news cycle there’s a lot of things that people it’s just like maybe it’s probably not as my point is it’s probably not as sticky or as concerning as you think obviously this was big news but how many people are really like concerned about what aircraft they fly in or really give it a second thought when they finally get to the airport i think business travelers do i i think that one particular class of of a passenger the business travelers that do a lot of airplane travel they know what airplane they’re on a lot of times and it’s surprising uh what decisions they make and what airplanes they like to fly on happens all the time i like flying the embraer 190 because of xyz you do see people and business class people and people buying those kinds of tickets do make selections like that and they’re a significant part of that revenue stream for an airline now it’s been shut down for the last year so maybe that’s why you’re not seeing it so much because people on vacation don’t really don’t seem to care that much what airplane they’re on they just know it’s going from you know someplace cold to some place warm like florida that’s what they know but the business traveler knows and that’s so that’s a segment that really hasn’t come back alive yet so i think they still got to play that one out as the business um flyers start to pick up in the next six months and they may have a little more work to do than they think yeah one it’s also not as prominent it’s not like uber where you call an uber and it’s like you’re getting picked up in a honda civic right it’s not it’s not like this big button it’s not like this really heavily touted thing when you book your like i booked a couple flights recently i don’t know what uh what plane i’m going on for anyway really i could certainly find this but it wasn’t it’s not like thrown in your face like congratulations you just booked an airbus a220 it’s like kind of i don’t know like i i really don’t know which ones i’m on for any of my three flights that i booked and every time i’ve booked a united flight i know what i’m on and i do i do select airplanes that i like to be on versus ones that i don’t like to be on well the info is there but i’m just saying it’s not it’s not prominent it’s not like a a main feature where i’m sure i can go back and figure it out in a second and i’m sure if i was thinking about it at the moment i would have seen it like when i was booking my seats i’m sure it’s like this is a 737-8 aircraft check out you know sign up for receipt but again i i obviously we do this podcast together so i have a pretty high awareness of you know commercial air travel and the 737 but even then it just like wasn’t a salient feature in my booking process it wasn’t you know obvious where you can’t miss it you know if you didn’t know this information if you weren’t seeking the information well guess what we’re going to slap you in the face with it it certainly wasn’t like that yeah i i agree with you but i do think there’s a certain segment of the population that does watch it i remember uh traveling back and forth to ireland or northern ireland and you should be able to either fly on a 757 single isle boeing airplane or you could fly on a triple seven well the flight you want to pick there’s a triple seven it’s a lot more comfortable than the 757 and a lot of people have made that decision and so it does like i said that business traveler is very cognizant that particularly on long longer flights
all right so moving on to engineering today let’s talk about honeywell’s their new turbo generator so this is really interesting because you know we’ve talked about the power density issue with evtols how batteries are just maybe not quite there yet and so this seems like it could be a pretty viable solution albeit maybe a expensive one um but their newest turbo generator at 280 pounds uh it can generate a megawatt and this is gonna be able to provide some serious juice to electric engines alan you have a pretty good awareness of this um of this turbo generator run us through some of the specs and what this thing can do and what its applications are just keeping at a top level here at first is that i think one of the issues that the battery powered aircraft is going to have is one range and two what happens if right sort of that what does that backup system look like in terms of power storage and essentially what honeywell and a couple others are proposing is this um what a term is an auxiliary power unit uh it’s a generator system so it’s got an engine uh burns this one burns diesel and a couple other fuels aviation fuels and creates electricity so it’s it’s not particularly complicated and at 280 pounds it’s not bad on weight but uh you are paying for the all the engineering and the design and the manufacturing of such a thing so it’s not going to be cheap to do but i’m also wondering if it’s it’s not the initial thing to do uh to get the aircraft flying with all the all the bells and whistles do you have that backup system on board do you eat the 280 plus pounds let’s just say all in 500 pounds probably uh can you eat the 500 pounds to add more range to your aircraft it may be worth it and that’s where honeywell and rolls and a couple others are headed are like hey everybody if if you want to go 200 miles can you really do it with the battery technology today i don’t think so so here’s your solution bam here’s here’s an off-the-shelf solution and i think that offs off-the-shelf solution when you see like that little article we have seen if you once you see those articles you you have to know that the honeywell marketing people are out pushing that to all these ebto companies that they’re they’re trying to make connections and say hey are you willing to willing to bet a billion dollars on your battery technology or are you willing to take a safer route and add a generator it’s a lot safer if you’re betting a billion dollars maybe you do take that option and you start as a baseline design with that honeywell generator that that’s something that would be smart if you’re betting that much money on a program and honeywell knows that and they’re experts at that in that field so if you bring it on someone who’s knowledgeable and has a very reliable product i’m sure which is exactly what you need at this particular moment in aircraft design and could they so i have two questions number one you said maybe it’s 500 pounds all in so what where does that extra weight come in that’s just like the the bracket the bracketry and just getting this thing right where does that extra weight go from i wasn’t sure the 280 included the sort of the motor and the generator i sounded like they were going to couple it with the other other half of it to get but yeah you got all this hardware you got the wiring you got all the other stuff um support structure because when you’re putting two let’s just say you’re just putting 280 pounds you’re mounting 280 pounds you just don’t bolt it into the side of the airplane you got to have structure that goes around with it so it’s not just the weight of the component it’s all the other things that keep it mounted properly and all the uh there’s plumbing going to it right it’s got fuel going to it there’s wires coming in and out of it so yeah it’s going to add more than just the weight of that component the fuel itself yeah right exactly right right which you wouldn’t know wouldn’t have a fuel tank on these aircraft now you got to put a fuel tank in where do you put it right and is it crash worthy don’t know right it adds complexity i would say 500 pounds would be on the low end of what the total additional weight would be on an aircraft when you add the system but if it doubles your range do you do it probably yes you probably do do it because it doubles your range and it makes your aircraft sellable in a large larger share of the world market straight up that’s what it’ll do yeah well like we’ve talked about then it could maybe be used for a lot of other commercial purposes like flying offshore to an oil rig like right doing you know filling that helicopter you know segment where you might need a couple hundred miles right the ems segment right the ambulance air ambulance things uh forestry there’s a whole kind there’s all other marketplaces you can enter into now uh how profitable those are or yet to be determined but you won’t be able to enter them at all unless you can increase that range and durability in the life that basically the flight time you can’t do it and is this something that they could easily you know in five years or like hey battery technology is yes in good shape they can swap this out and just go all electric well yeah every every waking moment of that aircraft company if they decide to add a generator system onto it we’ll be trying to get it off right because you can take off 500 pounds essentially what you’re going to be able to do so as battery technology comes up the need for this goes way down and maybe certain groups that may need it like their ambulances may still want it and as an option you may probably keep it but for the uber-like flights do you need it maybe not and maybe you have enough knowledge at that point because now you know what those routes really look like because you’ve been running for two or three years that you say off off it goes i don’t need it anymore yes absolutely you do that
dan it’s one of those things like every waking moment of an aircraft designer is how do i cut the weight of that airplane so i wake up in the morning i think i have our own existing airplane oh let me give you the i don’t want to give you a specific example but okay aircraft h aircraft h is out there that’s selling right now every waking moment is trying to reduce the weight right every waking moment if i don’t need that component because it doesn’t do anything on my airplane it’s off it’s gone i’m taking it off and i’m getting something lighter on there every moment is like that yeah that makes sense i mean and i think for consumers i know we have a lot of people who are in the aerospace industry listening to the podcast yeah but for people like myself who are outsiders to it you know we think about a car if you buy a car today you’re not you’re not swapping like this isn’t 1967 where you could swap in a 450 you know later no essentially what you bought it with is what’s going to be in it right and so it’s easy to think of the same mindset whereas that’s not true at all obviously like 747 750 they’ve been in service since 1980. you have a 40 year old aircraft that’s had new jet engines put on it multiple times and all these upgrades new cabin upgrades i mean everything’s changed so yeah i think just for the more service level consumers you know like myself it’s interesting to think about how swappable some of this stuff is and like you said if there’s a new better lavatory seat that weighs 87 less grams they’re gonna put that on in two years or whatever right yes they are any anything to save weight so yes so yeah that’s a it’s a it’s a good perspective to to keep in mind for all of us all of us laymen folk so well let’s transition here since we’ve been talking about electric let’s transition into evtol so first on our notice and this will be just a quick stop over ehang is officially getting sued so um it looks like a couple different law firms it’s a little unclear to me one’s definitely a class action there’s another it’s a call for those who have suffered losses above fifty thousand dollars uh to reach out to this another this other law firm um and uh the complaint has a couple different things i’ll read the the five main ones so um purported regulatory approvals in europe and north america for its eh216 were for use as a drone and not for carrying passengers um that ehang had a relationship with purported uh pri that their primary customer is a sham uh that they’ve only collected on a fraction of its reported sales um and that they’ve been uh their manufacturing facilities were practically empty and lacked evidence of advanced equipment and employees and as a result some of their public statements were material materially false and misleading to shareholders so this is obviously directly seems like tied to the wolfpack research stuff which we talked about before but now they’re moving forward with the lawsuit and so i don’t know this provides any more legitimacy because we still don’t know how legitimate the wolf pack research stuff is right we don’t know but are you know these law firms going to get um engaged in this if there’s no merit whatsoever i’m not sure you know i have no experience in law and i don’t know but this is certainly an interesting result because now ehang is going to have to defend itself in court there’s going to be the whole um you know exploratory period is that is that what it’s called yeah where to take depositions and they’re going to have to make good on their claims and yang is going to provide evidence of their position so some interesting stuff will come out of here and we’ll figure out what’s true and what’s not i suppose well i mean you may never ever figure out what’s true or not but i think what happens in financial disclosures is that in the at least in the united states you don’t want to make false disclosures or demonia seen as making things that may be interpreted as false right so you’re being very careful when you see financial disclosures made by any corporation in the united states are usually very direct and do not make extravagant claims without having a lot of data to back it up because this stuff happens right so you want to sort of downplay what you think your perspectives are going forward and if you if you ever read financial statements out of companies they’re very dry and bland for the most of them because they’re trying to make sure they can back up everything they say and this and they’ll say like hey this is for looking information and we’re not you know things change and we can’t guarantee none of this is guaranteed but if you’re if you’re making statements that um that become sort of indefensible you got to be really careful you better you back them up otherwise at least the united states you’re going to have this class action lawsuit thing pop-up which is you know it’s part of the system i guess it’s part of the checks and balances in america it’s a weird way of doing it dan don’t you think so like the only way to get a check and balance on a on a company is to sue them like huh okay not sure that’s the best way to do it yeah so we’ll see how that evolves it’s continuing just to be an interesting situation with ehang and just to figure out what’s true and what’s not because it’s certainly not the case that everything in the wolfpack research thing was was correct and there’s some context and i’m not over in china so i have no way of knowing and i think most people and i’ve read some more articles about you know from people that have a position in ehang and they’re defending him and there weren’t their claims their counter claims weren’t particularly strong they’re like just sort of saying no that’s not true no that’s not true that’s not true they didn’t there doesn’t seem to be a lot of direct evidence besides the videos but again the videos could be misleading in lots of different ways right so right anyway moving on uh in australia there’s a there was an interesting test flight with the loyal wingman drone which is a boeing project for the australian royal air force and this thing has a pretty significant range it’s got swappable noses which they can change depending on the mission um they’ve signed an agreement of 115 million to buy three more of them which will increase their total to six of these loyal wingmen and alan i mean you you have some some thoughts on the design of it and the aerodynamics of it that you think maybe it’s not going to have a tremendous range is that right well it seems like it’s got to be mostly gas tank and engine because it doesn’t have a lot of lifting surface to it so it’s got to go really fast to go very far so it’s it’s not going to loiter right it’s not like a global hawk we’re just going to sit at 70 000 feet for hours at a time and just circle around a a target or a piece of land and monitor it it seems more like a fighter aircraft than anything else based on this base based on its sort of layout and template and the renewable nose things makes makes you also think you can put different radar systems monitoring systems in the front of it which is the only reason you would change in those if you’re using different frequencies and different radar systems up front you would have to do that so why would you not change the nose but the the there’s sort of two interesting pieces about this one this is the first aircraft designed and manufactured in australia in quite some time which is surprising because australia is a very industrious place and they have a lot of really good engineers there and it just seems odd that they um haven’t built an aircraft down there in a long time but maybe this will help kick-start that industry because they’re more than capable of doing it and the second part is that the loyal wingman uh is intended to be you know at least on the top surface it’s supposed to be flying along something else right it’s supposed to be flying as a wing wingman yes a
right so it’s going to fly adjacent to it but it’s also autonomous so i think my guess is that the autonomous part is probably more valuable to australia than the wingman aspect of it because why do you need a person up there anyway um you just don’t for most most missions you don’t need a human there unless it’s some sort of shooting incident where you do want to put a human out there and even in the case of united states a lot of shooting incidents today happen off of drones and missile strikes are off drones very similar to this laura wingman thing so it’s a very interesting concept because it is not a loitering thing it’s more of a fighter jet autonomous fighter jet which is fascinating
yeah so last on the docket here today so lithium sulfur batteries and there’s a really good article from evtol.com and basically this new chemistry has a very significant impact on weight so with lithium-ion you’re looking at the top end maybe 265 watt hours per kilogram whereas this company oxus energy uh out of the uk they are developing a lithium sulfur battery that is achieving 470 watt hours per kilogram and they hope to reach 500 and then maybe 600 by 2025 but alan that’s a pretty big um that’s a pretty big weight savings per watt hour right and one of my questions is is is the volume still a concern here so even if you get weight down it’s still going to have to be physically large um how does that that trade-off work well you don’t want to increase the volume because you’re just increasing the size of the aircraft to contain it right which has increased the size of the aircraft you increase drag so it all goes negative so even if it is more energy dense and so to speak if the volume is not down then you know you’re sort of losing part of its advantage i mean you would like to get more energy density and you know have a smaller package more energy and a smaller package that’s ideally what you want um all these different sort of battery variants all have pluses and minuses right and the difficulty is going to be that for the any sort of new battery technology you’re going to need a whole new set of control systems to monitor it and to properly deliver power out of it so the battery is one piece it’s just like all the tesla work that goes on so a lot of tesla’s innovation obviously isn’t making the batteries but it’s also in the battery team monitoring system and power usage system to control the recharging and the discharging of the batteries to maximize the life span that’s going to exist on lithium sulfur batteries or any other kind of batteries it’s you know once you get the chemistry there you can get it in a package form it’s all the other software electronic monitoring systems you’re going to need to make it work properly particularly on an aircraft right because your worst your worst event on an airplane is fire so you don’t want to have a fire you want to have systems that prevent fires from battery overheating and and making sure you’re properly you know sectioning off batteries that may have problems and all that kind of stuff so there’s a lot of other things than just the battery chemistry i i’m just curious because you know we’ve you you’ve seen it you’ve been this weird pause and sort of battery technology so to speak i mean we’ve watched tesla make some improvements and the last elon musk’s discussion about batteries which was last summer i think was more about just sort of increasing the manufacturing throughput and getting the getting things more manufacturing
be able to quickly manufacture them and make it a little bit denser just turn and be able to pack them together it wasn’t really a change in the structure of the battery and what the elements are in the battery is basically the design elements around it and then this lithium sulfur things popped up recently where there’s been discussion about using into cars but i think the other piece to it is is that it can be made almost anywhere because the ingredients are sort of in the soil anywhere so you could put a battery factory in since almost anywhere on the planet to make these things so why is not a elon musk sort of grabbing on to that right when is that going to happen yeah that’s a good question and to be uh to correct my own like i’m not saying that this is has a higher volume for the same i mean this is almost twice almost twice as energy dense for me just looking at different avenues um yeah i mean there’s no nothing in this article that says that it’s higher in volume that it’s just it’s just essentially twice as energy dense but it’s not just the batteries it’s very similar to the the auxiliary power units or generators like the honeywell generator it’s 280 pounds but it’s all the other stuff you need to make it work right it’s not the batteries themselves i mean that’s probably a significant part of the weight and problems that you have to deal with it’s all the other stuff you need to do to make it work right and that’s where the whole as a system is that work together as a system and what does that what does that look like as a system is it weight effective cost effective right can i manufacture it expensively relatively inexpensively is it aerospace quality what means does it last a long time all those little all those little bits and bobs need all those little boxes need to get checked and we’re not there yet right and that’s what that’s what the engineering people are doing right now and saying well the technology is great but what are the what are the downsides of this and can i live with the downsides don’t know yet still don’t know yet
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 at wg lightning tune in next tuesday for another great episode on aviation aerospace engineering and lightning protection
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