In this episode we chat about the scary ransomware attack that sent Garmin scrambling to get their systems back up. Airbus announced successful autonomous takeoffs and landings; the Sabrewing EVTOL that will haul cargo is getting some press; And Lilium explains why they’re no longer going after the short-range air taxi market–is it perhaps not a viable market?
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Full Transcript: EP20 – The Garmin Ransomware Attack; Airbus Makes Autonomous Takeoff & Landing; Sabrewing EVTOL for Cargo
Dan: This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard, Lightning Tech. At Weather Guard, we support design engineers and make lightning protection easy.
You are listening to the Struck Podcast. I’m Dan Blewett.
Allen Hall: I’m Allen hall.
Dan: And here on Struck, we talk about everything. Aviation, aerospace engineering, and lightning protection.
All right, welcome back. This is the struck podcast. This is the big 2-0 Alan–episode 20. How you doing?
Allen Hall: Great, Dan sighting, another great week of news and aviation, you know, it seems slow out there and not literal airplanes are flying. Their aviation business is busy.
Dan: Yeah. So today, uh, we’re going to cover a bunch of different topics.
So in our new section, um, what seems to be a ransomware attack at Garmin? Pretty scary stuff. Uh, we’re gonna chat a little bit about Airbus. Um, They’re autonomous taxi, takeoff done some landing tests, really interesting stuff there, and a little bit of a scary storm incident out of Russia with a quite old AN-24 aircraft.
Uh, we’re gonna talk a little bit about the EPA and some potential, um, environmental limits. They’re going to set on aircraft. It seems like so much missions testing. And lastly, a couple different, uh, EVTOL’s, uh, so Sabrewing, they’ve got some interesting stuff going along with cargo transport, and lastly, a pretty interesting letter from Lilium about their view on really short trip, uh, flights.
So how let’s get started with Garmin. So they haven’t said the words ransom, but this seems textbook ransomware, which is really scary for any business owner. When you start to hear these, especially with bigger companies, but what’s your take here with the garments situation.
Allen Hall: We’ve been seeing a lot more ransomware attacks in aerospace in the last six months to a year.
And it’s not surprising that Garmin was the focus of one of those ransomware attacks, just because they’re one of the more prominent electronic, uh, highly integrated aviation AVN X companies, but a lot of technology and probably a lot information. On servers. And so it’s not surprising that, that they would be a, an attack point and plus they’re just a kind of a global company now.
So there’d be a lot of ways to infiltrate them. And it kind of sounds like there’s listening, just watching some of the news reports that it was via. Um, You know, some sort of email that triggered the, the system to go haywire, but when those events happen, what’s what, what I’m hearing from the engineers from different companies, not, not just garment specific is that everything gets shut down.
So they lose all the internet phones, internet. Connectivity, all access to drawings and everything that an engineer would need are basically taken offline. So it shuts down the company. And if there’s any, if it is a true ransomware where they’re asking for money, it has to be a big trade off, obviously.
And then what, what seems to be happening at most of these places is a companies are calling the FBI. They’re not playing. They bring in the federal investigators immediately. To one, try to help them figure out what they need to do next, but to. Stop it from happening to somebody else because this sort of nonsense has got to stop.
And you got to wonder where someone was like, Garmin is a very technology driven company and very forward thinking that they hadn’t had systems in place to prevent this from happening. So there’s a little more postmortem to happen in. The news has just been trickling out of the last couple of days. So we need to keep a sense of.
You know, this, this here, where this is where those goes, because it’s, this won’t be the last attack, but let’s just hope that Garmin and the FBI and everybody involved is it’s passing along information so that the other aerospace companies and other companies across the United States killer, uh, don’t have this happen.
Dan: Yeah. So it sounds like, like wasted locker is the, the, the cyber weapon, the brand of a, of ransomware that, but you’re right. Garmin seems like they played this pretty close to the vest and, uh, I don’t know. I mean, I just imagine that becomes like a. Point of embarrassment for such a high tech company. But at the same time, you just, like you said, you can’t plug every potential leak where if it only takes one email or whatever it is, and maybe it’s, you know, the, the old, like, Hey, you’ve won $11 million from some random person in some random continent.
Right. I’m sure it wasn’t something like that, but these things have gotten very sophisticated and sure has never know. I guess, you know, it’s crazy.
Allen Hall: Well, it’s in the United States has happened to national political parties frequently. And you have to think that they have access to some of the best security technology in the world.
You’d hope so I’m in a company like Garmin, doesn’t have those resources to play with, but still, uh, you gotta wonder what garments next steps are because one, they’ve got to get up back up and running again. That’s the first thing. And then too, um, they gotta figure out a way to prevent this from happening in the future.
Dan: Yeah, so Airbus, uh, they have self flying plane just completed, successful taxi, a taxi take off and landing. So this is not a small all plain, either. This was a, a three 51,000 X WB. And, uh, obviously like full scale, like commercial plane, which is pretty cool. So is this getting close to market? Is this something that’s in our near future autonomous or are we still a ways away?
Allen Hall: Well, I kind of wonder if this is driven by all
Dan: the, can I fly the plane? Like just can a IB pilot just go push the button.
Allen Hall: No
Dan: fine. That will not happen.
Allen Hall: Not for a long time, but it’s a larger airplane. The three 50 is a big airplane. The dash 1000 is, is a very long aircraft. Um, I think. Airbus is flexing their muscle a little bit.
And I think Boeing will, would have done it already too. If they could have been, they got other problems right now, they’re trying to deal with the ability to flying aircraft autonomously of that size and particularly taxi taxi is probably the place where a lot more difficulties. Uh, it is not. Easy. So you have to have a very, very talented engineering staff.
Do you even get close to doing something like that and great software engineers and with all the EVT E electric, vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, talking about being autonomous and Honeywell and some others and Garmin. Doing a lot of things that are nearly autonomous. I’m not surprised that her bus just stepped up and said, okay, watch this no way.
Then no way they went to show that. Yeah, yeah. Airbus isn’t playing either and they, if they wanted to do it, they could do it. But then on the, on the other side, Airbus has watched some of the problems that Boeing and Airbus has had with pilots making mistakes in the air. And I know Boeing this past week talked about their, their CEO was talking about how the aircraft is going to be more autonomous and that they weren’t going to let pilots make, uh, as many, uh, critical decisions where they could get the aircraft in trouble.
And Airbus has been down that path was down that path long ago. So I’m not surprised that Airbus is doing it. How, how were they, whatever. I don’t think there were ever to the point in the next 10 years, I don’t see there’s going to be autonomous aircraft in a commercial sense, uh, either cargo or a commercial flight, but if it does release some of the burden on the pilots and make the airplane fly cleaner and smoother on all that, I would expect a lot of those pieces of information that they’ve done at Airbus has developed on this project will be integrated into the aircraft over time.
They will be.
Dan: Well, how does this affect pilots in the longterm? So say, you know, 10 years from now, don’t have to take off. They don’t have to land. And they don’t have to do that much. Do they become quickly out of practice at like actually having to do these things and say, the system is like not working one day and they have to land it and they hadn’t landed a plane in a hundred flights.
I mean, is this, you know what I mean? Like if you don’t cook dinner every night, do you get rusty at, at whipping up a really nice meal? You know what I mean?
Allen Hall: Yes. I think that’s totally true. It’s just a human nature outcome that it’s inevitable. The, the. The other side of that is companies like Airbus and Boeing.
The bigger craft company have the ability to create simulators and put pilots in simulators and to have them quote, unquote, fly the airplane. Because the one thing if you don’t want to do is burn a bunch of fuel, getting a pilot up to speed if you don’t have to. Yeah. And if there’s any complacency, the regulatory bodies like JASA, And the FAA will be all over it.
And the first people usually complain about not getting enough flight time on the pilots. Quite honestly, they want to be as proficient as ever. That’s the big push by all the pilots. Unions is proficiency, proficiency, proficiency, and proficiency means seat time, actually flying the airplane. In fact, uh, I remember flying on Southwest a couple of times on this that’s.
This has been. Tennis years ago, maybe a little bit longer. I remember flying. I could remember the aircraft being hand flown for landing. I thought, boy, that is so odd because it’s been the longest time that I’ve been on an aircraft. That’s been hand flown because he used to put the autopilot how you do dial and that you put in the flight path and it just flies it.
But the Southwest, I asked a Southwest pilot while I was leaving the airplane. You flew that you flew that by hand all the way down. He goes. Yeah. It’s it’s it’s. He said it’s, it’s good for us pilots to fly the aircraft. It just gives us more proficiency. So I don’t see this taking over all the time, but I do think there are times when having redundant systems or helpful systems on aircraft can keep pilots out of trouble.
Dan: Yeah, that makes sense. So there was a incident recently with a Russian AAN, 24, which you said it’s a pretty, it’s a pretty old airplane is going on 50 years. Now, what he said was 1973,
Allen Hall: 73.
Dan: Yikes, but it’s just one of these unintentional that’s for sure. Bell-bottom era this planes. Yeah, it’s tough. It’s tough to have the same aerodynamics with bell bottoms, but it says this plane unintentionally flew into a heavy hailstorm, uh, suffered radar damage.
A couple of lightning strikes on its right hand elevator. So, what are the, I mean, they talked about this potentially just being insufficient experience of these pilots and really just, they didn’t do a good job of using the onboard weather radar, but you said the weather radar may not work that well.
It’s such an old aircraft is that
Allen Hall: it’s an old aircraft and the radars back in the 1970s, weren’t the best in the world. And. That old of an aircraft, or may not be a lot of reasons why you want to upgrade their weather radar system in it. So let me be flying with our really old weather radar system and the problem with old radars.
Couple with old nose radar is the old nose rate radons get full of water and they start giving you false images or images where the sky is clear when it’s not, because anytime there’s hail. Or convective activity that would lead to Hale big sleet, um, really detrimental winds in terms of aircraft safety.
Those show up on the radar as red, orange, bright orange, bright red sort of on the, on the radar, every aircraft ever flown in. It’s always shown that and we’ve always been able to. Fly around that stuff. So there’s no pilot worth their salt. That’s going to fly through the heart of a thunderstorm, just because of the outcome, which is, if you do have flight through hail, you are going to do a lot of damage to that aircraft.
And someone’s going to be really, really upset when they find you. In this particular case, you kind of wonder if it was just sort of inevitable. If it was equipment working correctly, could the pilot tell what was going on? Did he have any help from, from ground control as to are there kind of FAA system over there as to where they were going to?
Cause the FAA would try to flag out like, Hey, there’s a thunderstorm head. You may want to go around it. That kind of thing. Yeah.
Dan: Hmm. Yeah. I mean, at the very least just dip, duck, what is it? The six dot six DS of dodgeball dip, dive, duck Dodge, Dodge, or whatever it is. Just get out of the way on that Hill.
Yeah. It’s in everyone’s best interest.
Allen Hall: Yeah, it just it’s trash as an airplane so fast because it not only just ruins the radar and the windshield, the leading edges, the engines, it just tears everything up. And the engines have some means of trying to divert the Hale away from the critical parts of the engine.
So they can just don’t stop. But it doesn’t mean that the airplane is not going to beat up. It will.
Dan: All right. So in our engineering segment today, we’re going to quickly chat, which this is interesting to me, uh, so that you, uh, the EPA is proposing. Airplane emission standards. And they’re saying essentially that, you know, because aircraft account for 12% of all U S transportation, greenhouse gas emissions, and 3% total in the U S that they should start to be regulated as a mouse.
So as far as. You know, I feel like this fits in engineering because I mean, they’ve got to make some significant modifications to these engines or the fuel or both, or, but, but tell us what goes into them, complying with regulations like this. Cause changes have to be made. I would assume.
Allen Hall: It’s not going to take place really to about 20, 28.
So existing aircraft will be exempted from that regular, but the you’re getting forced down really well. Three paths, higher efficiency engines, and we’re doing that via a number of different ways. Gearing, uh, Basically quasi transmissions between the hot and the cold sections of the engine. So there’s more fan, less jet, uh, moving to some sort of synthetic fuel that has less carbon emissions, which there’s a lot of biofuels being tested.
I think I read the other day, there’s like 10 of us, 12 approved different biofuels now was going to become more prevalent. And then the electric area craft is obviously one of the possible solutions in terms of lowering overall emissions. But one of the things that we just take a step back a minute, the aircraft industry and the aerospace industry in general has been.
Really ahead of the times in terms of reducing emissions or in particular fuel burns because fuel is expensive and it’s one of the primary drivers for airlines is costs is fuel burn. So there’s been a big push to make the inches more efficient to make the aircraft more efficient. And that’s why you see.
All that. No, it was just use a seven 37 as an example, the original seven 37. We back in 1975 or it was had jet engines on them. They were the dirty, smoky, straight, hot gas coming out the back end jet engines. And as you’ve seen over time, They’ve gotten engines who’ve got larger, which means there’s a larger cold section to them.
And they got a lot more efficient because there was using electronics to control them and control the fuel burn and to burn them as most efficiently as it can. And they are dynamics have gone up in the engines as we have computers to simulate the air and all those good things. So it doesn’t like the aircraft industry, right.
He’s been sitting around just chug and fuel. All that has been the opposite was because the cost of fuel is a driver. So much that the engines and the efficiency of the aircraft are just getting pushed and pushed and pushed by the hairline. Yeah.
Dan: So it’s not as much even an environmental situation where they are like, yeah, let’s say the planet.
They’re like, let’s say money. Right. And make this easier on us. So that’s, I think that’s the ideal. Cause if it was the opposite where they’re like, no, Killing the planet is way cheaper. They would be I’m sure. Lobbying the heck out of this to maybe not
Allen Hall: know. Well, you got the winners, it predicts winners and losers in a sense, right?
Cause it is, it’s going to force out countries that haven’t developed the engine technology. It’s just, well, they won’t be able to play ball and they won’t think about all the investment they have to make to get to that point. It’s just another barrier to entry. So you really need to weigh off. Is it good for, um, possible like India is just pick India, for example, just because it’s a large country and it has a lot of engineering capability.
Does it prevent them from. Designing a new engine. It may, it totally may. So Airbus, Boeing rolls, Royce GE um, pick all the engine manufacturers and the whole pile of them that are going to be sort of the winners in that. And everybody else is going to be left out. I’m not sure that’s always a good thing.
Dan: Yeah, I guess I didn’t think of it that way. The haves and haves not have knots might get farther apart.
Allen Hall: Oh, yeah, it sits it’s job security for Airbus and Boeing has to be Bombardi and Breyer. Uh, so you borrowed it, you know, all the, all the small aircraft makers are to be the same boat right there.
They’ve gotta be able to invest the money and do this thing. Like it’s like they’re walking down the street. Everybody else has a big Hill to climb.
Dan: All right. So we got a bunch of stuff to cover here in our third segment, which we’re going to chat about some more, uh, electric, vertical takeoff and landing vehicles. So first let’s talk about Lilium. So this article, uh, by their chief operations officer, it was pretty interesting. So they basically said like, Hey, we’re not doing this short trip stuff.
We’re not doing 20 kilometers and under, and they gave us pretty long. You know, rationale for why they feel like it doesn’t make sense financially, why it doesn’t make sense from an infrastructure standpoint. Um, and that’s not really gonna save anyone time because when you. Factor in the cost of going down the street to get you your Virta port or whatever, you’d call at that point and, you know, climb a bore, blah, blah, blah, then shoot, you know, across Manhattan to drop your kids off at school.
By the time you go through all that, it’s going to take an hour and 10 minutes or something. And then you would have been maybe better off just taking a limousine or a bus or Uber or whatever. Or the Metro. Right, right. And so they said, Hey, we know there’s this big competition to get all these things to market and well, but anyway, our company is going to focus on 20 kilometers, which is 12 miles and larger.
And so they’re, you know, they’re giving examples of going from Zurich to Geneva, Zurich, to Lugano, um, you know, in the U S San Francisco to Santa Cruz or to Palo Alto, San Francisco to like Tahoe, obviously like have high, high net worth areas. You know, tech executives want to shoot over to Lake Tahoe from their San Francisco office.
You know, it could take an hour versus three, three or four hours by car. So I think that makes sense, but I mean, what’s your, what’s your take on this? I mean, is this like another nail in the coffin for the potential, you know, air taxi situation within cities? Where does this, uh, what do you think. Well,
Allen Hall: they’re looking at essentially urban planning.
That’s what it comes down to and how their technology can be integrated with the overall landscape of urban planning in terms of ground transportation, which is electric trains, electric cars, uh, and obviously the Uber situation, which has never going to go away. At least in our lifetime taxis are still kicking around.
Uh, I think they’re gonna have a hard time. Making the case and I’ll give it to you this way. If you were going to hop on, on a, an existing airplane. So say you had a Cessna one 72, pretty simple airplane, kick the tires, do the walk around, make sure it’s got fuel on it. Drain all the stuff. It takes a long time to get that aircraft up running.
So yeah. By the time you drive to the airport, get out, go through secure little security check, get out there, get the aircraft field, all the other stuff you, you smoked an hour. And by the time you’ve taken off, he’s probably smoking on an hour and a half and you haven’t gotten anywhere yet. Right? And I think that pre and post flight stuff adds significant amount of time where, where if you’re not going, but 10, 12 miles is walking through the driveway, CAPA your electric Tesla, and you could be there by now.
Yeah. So there’s that trade off of the overall time. And George pies kind of talked about this at, by aerospace, a little bit of how fast you can get in and out and how much simpler electric aircraft are. Yes, that’s all true, but there’s, there’s a certain minimum things you’re gonna do before you get yourself off the ground.
And. I think Lilium is starting to realize their opportunity is not so much in going from my driveway to the local pizza stand. Their opportunity is going from my local airport to the airport. That’s 20, 25 miles away where it’s going to take a lot longer in a car than it would. In a, in a short aircraft.
So it’s going to, you know, I think was trying to figure this out, Dan, I don’t know if there’s any real way of knowing until you start putting the product in the hands of people. Like, I’ll give you the case of the iPhone. I would never have thought of, and neither did Apple for that matter. Like the app situation would never occurred to Apple.
The sell apps or to sell software to people, or do you let people put their own apps on their iPhone? That was not a thing. Right? So in this particular case of aircraft usage, you’re not going to know until you get a couple of thousand out there to see how people use them. The same thing happened with Tesla on the cars.
They just didn’t know how they’re going to be used until they got them a service.
Dan: Yeah. And I was a, you bring that up because in one of these books that I’m listening to called antifragile, he’s talking about, even in business systems, he gave a number of examples. Like Raytheon was, it was one example that Raytheon started off as an air conditioning manufacturer.
I believe. Hmm, I think that’s, I think that’s right. It could be
Allen Hall: Rockaway. Was it microwave ovens?
Dan: Yeah. We might just been appliances in general. Yeah. And then they ended up being what? The missile guidance systems. I mean, you know, I don’t know. Right, right, right, right, right around the corner from your microwave, but yeah.
You know, he talks about so many businesses. I wish I could quickly recall bunch of examples, but I can’t, um, of just like businesses being ready to just pivot. Right. And so it seems like a situation where, all right, you’ve got your planes, you’ve got some things that like, let’s just start flying and see what happens and then see where it goes.
Like maybe you become a cargo company. You know, maybe you become a trainer, you become an air hand air, like a, you replaced, medevacs like make, who knows where it ends up going to be profitable. Right. And it’ll sort of figured itself out on its own and evolve. And, uh, so that seems like people aren’t really going to know, like you said, until they start actually doing it and start to fail at some stuff and say, okay, how can we actually make money?
Cause because you’re right. If you’re only doing. Four mile trips. Like how much can you really charge for that too? For all the time it takes to, like you said, to inspect each plane, so it’s rigorously safe and all that. And then how much can you charge to go, you know, 30 blocks? I don’t know. But yeah, if you’re like, Hey, let’s go all the way.
You know, Lake Tahoe, it’s we can charge three times more, whatever, you know, it probably starts to make more financial sense. So they’ll probably find that that butter zone where, like you said, it irons it out and may they. Wholesome cargo too, or who knows. So it’ll be interesting to see once they start going, but right now it’s just that race where no, one’s actually carrying anything.
None of these , they’re just all talking about it all talk and yeah. So it’ll be interesting when it starts to take flight, but, um, in that same vein, So saber wing, uh, has kind of just like shot onto the scene a little bit, but they’ve got 265 million in preorders. They’re backed by the us air force. And, uh, what’s interesting about the saber wing is, is kinda what we just mentioned, which is that they’re really just focusing on hauling cargo.
So what do you think of this business model? As far as them being a window list? Human human list, kind of a, you know, well, at least no passengers. Um, what do you think of their potential business model?
Allen Hall: It could, it could be a kind of a James gamechanger. The struggle I’m having with it is we haven’t heard a lot about it, which is odd.
And the air force has evidently. Port a good bit amount of money into the program and help out the company a was access to different facilities. And they’re talking about having it quote unquote certified by 2022. And if that’s the case, then it must be thoroughly through some sort of certification program.
And it must have been doing a lot of testing to make sure the thing’s going to be okay. My struggle. With this is it doesn’t look. And maybe this is all theoretical talking at the moment, but it doesn’t look like a lot of the aircraft designed. We’re seeing now, um, with those ducted fans, it’s for ducted fans that look like they pivot at least two of them do.
Uh, and if they do pivot, I know those ducted fans, a lot of the, uh, retail companies have changed the design from a ducted fan to initially. Blades in the open, like a helicopter, because they’ve had problems with transitions from four flight to vertical flight that the air coming into those fans as kind of get stalled out because it’s angle attack and all this other things.
So it’s not the best safe. Thing in the world. We’re not having it having cargo in it probably, you know, when you put a human in it, you want to have smooth transitions. Right. Because everybody freaks out when the aircraft starts to do wild maneuvers, cargo doesn’t care. Right. So you can do some really wild maneuvers dropped down a thousand feet or whatever, and no one’s going to freak out.
If it’s just cargo. So you can maybe not have the most efficient design in the world or the most smooth riding aircraft in the world, but they’re trying to fix a couple of problems that look like where they’re trying to get. Cargo and remote places without putting people on the aircraft at risk. Right?
So if you have some four deployed troops and you want to feed them ammunition or food or medical stuff applies, you can get it there without risking other people, which could make sense. Right. Um, so I want you to keep track of this. I just. It just feels wrong. You know what I mean? It kind of feels wrong right now, but maybe there’s a lot of technology behind it and it’s going to be great or just have to keep an eye on
Dan: it.
Yeah. The, uh, the design in general looks very not conducive to hauling square packages. Also. That’s like the first thing that sticks out in my mind, it looks like it’s shaped like a, like a dolphin essentially. And it just, I just look at it and of course, it’s way bigger than. It appears in the renderings that they said it’s comparable in size to a Cessna citation, which is bigger.
Was that a small, Oh yeah. It’s not a small, yeah. It’s like a 50 foot long business jet, so it’s not small, but at the same time, it just, you see all these, you know, just like with packaging on a supermarket shelf, like everything is manufactured to be. Tightly fit and not waste space. And this thing just seems to get earaches of wasted space.
But then again, this is I’m sure far from the potential pro or, Oh, this is, they only have a real prototype yet.
Allen Hall: So well, though, what they could be doing is just trying to get something in service and see what it does, which used to be the air force way of. Of development back in the late forties after world war II and into the fifties and sixties, the number of aircraft that were produced and tried was incredible.
And then the price of a single airplane shot up so high that you couldn’t do that anymore. But with autonomous aircraft, when the cost of a couple electric motors, you can do that now and play a lot of different designs. All
Dan: right. Well, that’ll do it for today’s episode of struck. If you’re new to the show.
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