Podcast: Play in new window | Download
The Ehang 216 may be certified in a few months, according to new reports. Is this realistic? Plus, is the idea of a supersonic EVTOL feasible or even remotely reasonable? We also discuss the current pilot shortage in the US, the Jetson One sales numbers, Archer news and more.
[powerpressLearn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverters and aircraft lightning protection consulting services. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
Transcript
welcome back to the Struck airspace engineering podcast i’m your co-host Dan Blewett on today’s show got a great lineup first we’ll talk about the rather rather desperate pilot shortage that’s now gripping uh the u.s and also globally we’ll talk about rolls-royce they’ve been testing one of their electric generators now exceeding one megawatt output which is insane we’ll talk about uh hydrogen powered airliners the uk has revealed a plan that they think they can make a long-haul airliner work we’ll see if alan agrees we’ll also chat a little bit through elon musk’s views on the matter obviously he has strong views on electric and hydrogen in the future in general and his are a little bit controversial when it comes to hydrogen power in our EVTOL segment we’ll talk a little bit more about elon musk we’ll talk about archer ehang jetson one uh which their sort of hobbyist uh aircraft have pretty much sold out by this point and a little uh story about apple car engineers and how they’re starting to flee the nearly three trillion dollar company so alan let’s start with this pilot shortage i struggle to understand these things a little bit obviously there’s shortages of workers everywhere but the world hasn’t i mean the world has changed but where did all the people go alan why do we have such a pilot shortage it seems like you know two years ago life was relatively normal obviously covid was a big deal and still is but how could we be desperate that many pilots at this point it doesn’t seem to add up to me well when the when covet hit there was a lot of furloughs and pilots got laid off and in that interim because it was long enough it’s been a year and a half two years going on two years now that pilots are educated people they can they can find jobs in other industries and they did and now that uh some of them are being recalled back they they don’t want to go back in particular maybe they found a better paying job i mean they found a job with better better hours or less stress or a variety of variables there and i there if you look at the tsa numbers we’re at about 85 90 of 2019 levels so the the flights at least the flights in the united states are pretty close to where we were and that means there’s a lot of airplanes flying internally into the united states overseas not so much still and those tend to be kind of the smaller airplanes the 737s airbus a320s 319s uh the 737 maxes are going to be big in that space and so the most senior people don’t tend to fly those airplanes it tends to be the the the towards the youngers younger ages that are flying those airplanes and i think they have other opportunities and and now that uh the the airlines are looking to expand and we have all the evital pilots uber flight kind of pilots that are going to be needed there’s going to be a big demand on pilots and i i don’t know if we have the infrastructure to support it because 50 years ago most pilots came out of the military i think now it’s not nearly that many come out of the maritime like they’re coming out of places like embry riddle and in schools like that or flight schools and they’re just earning their wings over time by flying freight and cargo and all those different kind of airline airplane flights so you’re just getting a different different graphic coming into the marketplace uh and the requirements for hours have gone up the fa jumped the number of hours required so he could fly those particular airplanes has gone up so it’s it’s not easy just to find people and if they don’t want to come back they want to come back and you’re kind of stuck because the pool of new entrants is limited it’s going to be a problem i really think it’s going to be a problem and retirement i assume has also played into this not just uh like lateral moves because the faa is having a problem with you know their senior engineers and all those uh folks also not coming back but retirement is playing into this i think retirement is playing into it i uh i think the covid vaccine mandates played into it on some level i think some people have left their jobs we hear about we don’t hear about that much in the press but i know hospital workers people that are sort of working federal jobs have quit that would mean people at the faa are probably quitting and airline pilots would be that other group right that would leave because of coven mandates and you just can’t really afford to have three five up to ten percent of your workforce just walk out and the fa has a worse problem right fa they’re talking about like 50 of the engineers in retirement age by in the next couple of years that’s not good because it does take time i mean there’s something about having experience experience tends to lead to better outcomes just because you know all the issues lie right so i i don’t know if the airline industry is really accounting for in particular this evital market and what it’s going to do on pilots because at least for the initially we’re not going to have autonomous flights like they do and like we’re talking to talk about in china it’s going to be piloted flights so you’re going to need a bunch of pilots go do those things and you know if it’s a comfortable much more comfortable lifestyle like if you do it in los angeles you’re not leaving los angeles and you can go home at night every night that may be a little more desirable than ending up in you know poughkeepsie overnight just saying well do you think evtol piloting would be in the same order because like you said fa’s increased hours and it seems like from what we’ve heard with the joby flight simulator that these will be like a different order of like difficulty in flying like do you need to be a seasoned commercial airline pilot to to be an evt well pilot obviously you go that direction but uh i mean will the entrance standards be a lot easier to be a you know to pilot a joby evtl in the future compared to a commercial airliner i haven’t looked at that specifically but i think the answer is yes just because the number of passengers on the airplane it’d be it’d be like flying a charter flight like a cessna citation or a leader jet when you have uh a charter flight they know they operate under diff i think they operate under different rules than the airlines operate under uh and there’s different actual codes rules regulations laws that uh different operators work under different size operators work under so i i don’t think that the jobies and the archers of the world will have not gone the requirements of a 737 pilot right but a 737 pilot could clearly fly uh a joby right and but i i think it comes to a question of lifestyle and airlines haven’t competed with that right airlines have not competed what’s what’s the alternative you’re going to fly cargo you’re going to fly sort of these business flights and that’s a different it probably doesn’t it doesn’t have as it doesn’t didn’t used to have as rich as a pension um some of the french benefits you get you’re a captain on a triple seven that’s a pretty good gig and i’m not sure the jobies of the world would ever get to that level but there’s other factors that play into it like if i want to see my family all the time and come home every night that’s it people make lifestyle decisions like that and it will drive where the marketplace goes so airlines may be a little more of a pinch than they think well if standards are are very different which it seems like you said they probably will be then you wonder if a lot of drone hobbyists would you know be able to like hey i’d like to fly one of those and they sort of make the leap from like you know experience drone pilot obviously just you know handheld like very different but also not that different right that would be a logical leap for the the growing pool of people who love flying drones in the us yeah well i think that the neat thing about drones today is that like the drone racing league that you see on espn every once in a while uh it’s a 3d experience right it isn’t like you’re flying a radio control airplane in the in the olden times you actually have a visor on this headset headsets right you get a 3d view of what you’re doing so it is like you’re flying in the pilot seat and like the joby doesn’t have any rudder pedals well neither does the drone pilot right they just got these control sticks and so their experience well if they can meet the medical requirements and the vision obviously vision requirements and health requirements um that transition may be a lot easier than you would think so it’s it’s it’s not out of the realm of possibility i think if you’re really interested in flying drones and you have been flying basically virtually all that time yeah it wouldn’t be that much of a transition yeah so moving on rolls-royce uh they’re excited they’ve just broken through one megawatt output in testing of their power generation system one uh alan this is a lot of electricity i mean we talk about wind turbines on our other podcast and a megawatt is a significant amount of power and their goal is to reach up to two and a half megawatts at some point in the future um what what engine is going to need to gobble up that much power and what are the implications for for all that like what’s the difference between one megawatt and two and a half megawatts is that just more thrust is that more like they can fly at a higher speed or they can just go longer yes well all the above right yeah all of them that they didn’t really lay this out in the article very well but i’ll i’ll try to connect the dots here i what they were talking is about was hooking a turbo fan engine to a generator and then my assumption was that they were going to drive electric motors that are spinning propellers or have some sort of thrust mechanism of some sort turbo electric turbo fans or something of the sort so that they could in a sense use hydrogen but that’s what it seemed like like they’re going to right now they’re using jet a or maybe sustainable fuels right to power the jet engine to drive the generator and that generator will drive all the other stuff which i’m not sure weight-wise that makes sense at least that’s what i interpreted that to mean uh because there’s like in the hydrogen world there’s like two different pathways that are going on right now basically take the existing jet engine and transform it into a hydrogen burning engine but i think there’s a lot of infrastructure problems with that like how do you store the hydrogen how do you get it to the engine oh it’s so cold right you got all this piping if things get brittle and then get that cold what are you going to do there and then the second way is we’ll make all those motors or make them electric motors and so instead of engines right make them all electrically driven
turbo fans essentially and then have a big generator in the back that’s burning hydrogen in a much more condensed area that’s controlled so you’d have a hydrogen tank or sustainable aircraft fuel driving little apu kind of device which is turning a generator and that generator drives all the motors that’ll be out in the wing more than likely right and so i that’s i think that’s where it’s going because there’s just so much weirdly enough there’s a lot of effort by roles and other companies looking at electric motors um because if you think about how much this this this motor the generator they’re talking about uh i think this says it’s about the size of a beer keg yeah which is impressive right that’s that’s a lot i mean that’s way beyond anything we would see in wind power but you know wind power one megawatts the size of a small car so they’ve shoved a lot more energy in a much smaller package uh to cut the weight out and they’re going to have to have some cooling systems to do that uh so it’s just really fascinating how much time and effort they’re using to engineer a much smaller compact lighter more probably more durable generator than we would normally see in in the wild here interesting
so moving on uh the uk’s aerospace technology institute has unveiled a concept for a hydrogen powered long-haul airliner they think they can get up to 279 passengers on it and haul out to flights on up to a little over 5 000 nautical miles so alan we’ve talked about hydrogen that still seems to be a really difficult problem to solve uh having read through this what do you think about this project with uh ati i think they got a it’s an interesting project it’s going to be really difficult to get done and you only see the difficulty once you start digging down off the top level a little bit the the hydrogen i think conceptually burning hydrogen or using hydrogen for propulsion pretty straightforward right and just burning the stuff i think it really gets down to like how you’re going to store it how are you going to keep it cold how are you going to move it around how are you going to burn it is what’s the reliability of this thing what kind of electronics do you need can electronics take the temperature extremes do you need to have a cooling system because there’s just so many different variables to it yeah right i mean it’s a materials problem like in the extreme and it’s uh a reliability problem because we don’t we haven’t probably used some of these materials before we don’t know how they react in in this hydrogen world hydrogen and britain is a thing right on materials and metals and things so there’s just so many different aspects that we don’t have any history on and you would like to like with aircraft you know the aircraft started within um internal combustion engines which were used in autumn autumn motive for years before they kind of really got going in airplanes so we had some history we’re not going to have any history with hydrogen before we stick it in airplanes what are what are the other uses of internal combustion engines or or turbofan engines that are using hydrogen on the ground today i i even in generators like power generators we don’t use hydrogen for power generation so we don’t really know anything about the reliability of that system the answer don’t you see like is that the place to be trying it with passengers or should it be like a military application or a drone application which would be my vote a drone application to make a lot of sense what’s with loading the throw of 200 people it just feels it just feels i’m not saying it’s unsafe well it feels unsafe because you just don’t have the data and engineers love data and right now you don’t have any data and there’s a lot of variables here that’s where you start to feel uncomfortable about it and i think it’s it’s i think engineers would be working on that would have the same questions about it particularly the system safety people would just go i don’t know what to do here yeah you don’t well to throw another obviously influential voice into the mix elon musk’s views on hydrogen fuel cell powered cars are that he said it’s uh full cells was his one of his tweets he said that basically the best case the best case fuel cell car uh is not better than today’s current case battery-powered car um now is that generalizable to the skies obviously especially in an airliner there’s a lot more space to put you know like you said the hydrogen storage storage tanks all that stuff where there’s very limited space with that in a car but first i mean taking a lateral leap how do you feel about his views on hydrogen cars are they accurate and and again i mean are battery is battery technology going to just catch up if hydrogen planes are 10 years away 15 20 years away our is battery technology just going to maybe make that obsolete i don’t think battery power is ever going to get us to cross an ocean and so obviously somebody something will be some of today’s charles lindbergh that will fly from new york to to paris and an electric battery airplane i’m waiting for that to happen actually that would be a really good uh you know uh musk prize or an x prize or google google prize what do they call those things to go do that because that’s a long flight right and i think that’s where the where the problem lies in airplanes it’s just so energy intensive versus automobiles that you just need so much more battery which is why we’re using fossil fuel sustainable fuels and talk about hydrogen because the math doesn’t work out for batteries right now except for shorter flights well here’s a question we obviously have these refueling tankers that fly in the sky and you know extend their fueling could that be a thing with an electric cable could you just tap into a electric vehicle or electric plane and charge it up they fly linked for 30 minutes and just have a crazy high amperage or whatever it is to i mean is that would that be ever realistic to charge it on the fly for military purposes i think absolutely if you had to do that yeah i i think that would be doable whatever that refueling plane would look like it could just be like that ship we were talking about the battery ship it’d be an airplane ship yeah i’d be very similar to that uh i think militarily you could do that and you have to be pulling a lot of current to go do that but you know if given enough demand and requirements yeah i think you could do it refilling a civilian airplane is a big no-no there’s too much chance for a problem to occur there and if you’re over the atlantic ocean and you can’t mate up or something happens do you just plummet into the ocean that’s you know yeah not ideal well moving on so back to your thoughts on on hydrogen yeah i the the hydrogen piece an automotive i think is essentially dead uh that happened 10 years ago and the batteries have caught up enough and tesla’s demonstrated that severely enough across the united states and across the world that i think hydrogen is dead in automobiles but that doesn’t mean it’s dead in hilarious industrial equipment big big uh construction equipment that may make total sense hydrogen may be an alternative there you know you’ve propane and buses and things in the united states for a long time yeah so hydrogen may be that next piece and and maybe it is in airplanes too uh again it’s not going to be it’s not going to be a you know a conceptual problem with hydrogen it’s really going to be all about the details of hydrogen and how you’re going to put a system a reliable repeatable um 20-year lifespan system together that has incredible incredible reliability you know an accident once every billion hours sort of thing that’s that’s a remarkable if you just think about the requirements for airplanes right now and when you can have a quote-unquote catastrophic event it’s crazy the the reliability numbers that we’ve we’ve gotten to unbelievable i mean unheard of 100 jericho you would never ever think we would ever be able to put 300 400 people on an airplane and reliably fly them wherever they want but we do it every day and but we only do that through a lot of learned lessons and hard lessons hydrogen just introduces so many new technical challenges that i’m not sure when they make like 20 30 deadlines or 20 40 deadlines it’s going to be tough really really hard to do that and politicians make light of that because they’re not doing it right you’re not regulating it you’re not uh designing it you’re not looking at the materials and the qualification and the testing and all the things that keep engineers up at night uh and the infrastructure to make it happen i just it’s it’s too easy of a word to throw around and i think that’s the issue with hydrogen right now it just seems too perfect and it is too perfect well let’s uh get your quick take on one other elon musk tweet so he’s tweeted i guess a couple of times about supersonic evtols so we won’t spend a lot of time here but is this a possible thing and would there even be a use case for it no and no uh going supersonic at least at this point requires uh burning fossil fuel and sort of like rocket mode i think uh maybe the f-35 can get to supersonic without that but i mean there is some portion of thrust which is uh the explosive gas coming out the back end of the airplane to get it to go that fast a fan really can’t do that because you need fan rotation speeds that are faster than supersonic and that doesn’t really work well and no one’s done it no one’s done it uh and yeah you’d be breaking mock numbers on the tips of these fans and yeah that would not at least my general understanding of aerodynamics like that’s not really a thing you do so it’s really impo i think it’s impossible uh and i haven’t heard anybody say it’s impossible but i think it’s kind of impossible and maybe you don’t know what an msx motor designer could say oh no we could we could if you had enough horsepower you can do it i don’t think so i think that’s when the hydrogen comes in this you just make yourself into a rocket and let go but well like the supersonic here let’s dive into the supersonic thing for a minute because there’s a couple of projects going on supersonic right now boom and there’s one down in atlanta going on right now the the use case in the the the economics of those have not really proven out and and arion obviously folded during cove at times which is down in florida the the use case for supersonic just really hasn’t been there except militarily and i i’m not sure that changing my flight from new york to london from five hours to three hours is such a huge difference i’m willing to pay the extra to get that happen the concord couldn’t make that work and that was in regulated times right and when we conquered wars around there the government regulated airline prices in a free-for-all environment like we have now an unregulated and uh economic environment on airlines i’m not sure that uh basically you’re talking about the elite and i’m not sure there’s enough elite to do that it’s from a company standpoint to make the airplane into con thinking to produce like a thousand of these things i don’t see that as uh a marketplace yet i’d say it wouldn’t develop but we’re not there yet yeah plus when you start to talk about the elite like why would they want to be on essentially like a like a commercial flight that’s scheduled to take off with other people that they don’t know on it when they could just again like all right this is gonna shave two hours off my uh translate on a flight but i have to be there on a certain time because it’s a like a commercial flight rather than just take my private jet whenever i want in my in in exceeding comfort right like it it probably wouldn’t trump that you know like why now i’m not going to spend 30 000 on a ticket to save two hours and i got to be there at a certain time i’m sure it would have its own little luxury port at the airport or something but you know like yeah just take your just take your private jet at that point you know what what’s the difference right two more hours of luxury you’re like okay sure i’ll do that
yeah that makes sense and the the the ev2 all thing yeah i just couldn’t think of a case where that unless you’re landing on an aircraft carrier you know what do you need to land this on where the vertical takeoff and landing matters i i couldn’t figure out what that would what that would be plus it would have to be big like those planes are very long their fineness ratio is is it it’s a big ratio or a small ratio small right i think yeah very long very long so yeah anyway that was interesting quick topic but let’s move on to uh to ehang so they’re saying that they’re hopeful they can achieve full-time certification for their eh 216 in the next few months uh of course that’s over in china and their civil aviation administration of china um they think that the guiding principles uh are going to get there and they’re sort of moving ahead so alan is this really going to happen as quickly as they say sure why not but i i i don’t see any reason why they won’t do it it’s more of a the the articles i’ve seen don’t really talk about what the certification process is in china for this particular aircraft uh but there’s a lot of like anti-america look we beat america to the e-vital market stuff like why do you why do you care right you got enough people in your own country that america doesn’t make any difference here right uh we’re not we’re not snapping our pencils like ah they beat us like yeah oh you beat us to the moon no nobody cares right we’re busy tweeting and making tick tocks right now yeah well we’re making the best electric cars in the world uh that’s what we’re doing right now and china’s importing them uh so you know one of the well i think the the issue with ehang is what they’re going to have problems with is getting whatever they quote unquote certify in china to be applicable to the rest of the world they’re going to export this aircraft and they going to send it to paris and to london into stockholm i don’t think so i think the regulators in other countries will look at that very closely and decide that that wasn’t adequate and the the the piece that i think is probably the most difficult for me watching it is they have videos of what i consider to be tourists there’s no pilot in the thing right so it’s like two two tourists and one of these airplanes drones i guess large drones i call it that are flying across water and promotional videos you would never ever see average people in an air in a flight test airplane uh that’s not going to happen
in a promotional video like cessna is not doing that right just not how that works in flight test world because it’s just too much risk right there’s too much risk to put a random person in that airplane and plus they don’t have don’t have a pilot it’s all controlled by the ground right so there’s no way if something were to go wrong there’s nothing that the people inside of it can do it’s it’s over and i i think that doesn’t help the transition to outside of china i like i i don’t see the brazilians thinking oh that’s a great way to certify it and we’ll gladly take that that aircraft into brazil which could probably use it honestly uh that just makes everybody really reluctant so i i don’t understand the politics of this and and let’s just make clear that airplanes are poly political pieces in this bigger chess game that’s being played that uh we’ve seen it a lot recently and we’ll talk about it later but you know ehang great technology cool probably works great love it uh so what certification means i i really don’t know yet well moving on archer is also uh eyeing certification of course it seems like they’re just taking the same steps that you know joby has reached but it says they have a special airworthiness certificate in hand and path to certification in sight what does that mean i think it just means allowed to do flight testing i think that’s what they’re saying there’s a lot of little manufacturing quality pieces before you go flight test um if you’re doing a conforming flight test like you’ve got a conforming vehicle then the fa is going to go look at the aircraft make sure all the pieces are right and then it’s been built like the drawings say it’s going to be built and it’s it complies with the aircraft design on paper or on the computer that’s most of it and the archer the archerpiece i think is interesting because uh the speed at which they’re moving and the the people which they brought on to support the project if you if you look at joby if you look at beta if you look at whisk kitty hawk um i could probably name a couple others they’ve been working on this they’ve been working on these aircraft for like um five ten years ish right like beta went through a number of iterations before it got to where it is today whisk it went through a number of iterations before they got to where they are today uh joby went through a number of iterations before they got to where they are today name that name the development cycle an archer like how long has the development cycle been in archer a year maybe two years it’s been no it’s been not that long and the the little you know bell that goes off in the back your head is like man this is moving really fast did they miss something that’s the concern i think that the faa would have is like okay this thing’s really rocking along and i’m sure it’s being super aggressive because of the financial stakes that are involved with it is it right and and aren’t just going to fall right in the middle of this faa exercise that’s going on right now where they’re being uh extra cautious with delegates and conformity and quality and making with the with all the boeing stuff that’s happening the faa is not going to let or is going to be very reluctant to to accelerate any aircraft program just because the investors are antsy faa shouldn’t care and and i hope that they don’t and i i it to me just watching from the outside it’s like okay the joby thing i get the beta i get kitty hawk whisk all those other ones i get because they’re on the normal development cycle archer’s not on that same pathway so what are we going to see when they get to flight test not sure hopefully it goes well i mean that’s the goal is all this stuff goes really well but it doesn’t feel right to me right now hopefully prove me wrong well there’s definitely a lot of buzz about it and so you can imagine that all these companies are trying to get to market as quick as they can speaking of which uh the jetson one which is one of these personal ninety two thousand dollar experimental aircraft that we reported on you know a bunch of months ago it says they’ve pretty much sold out which was not a large run it sounds like um upwards of 60 orders have been placed but that’s you know small company so that seems like that’s about tapping them out does this surprise you that this that this has sold out that quickly that there was so much interest it doesn’t surprise me you know it seems like there’s enough rich people who would love a cool new toy right right you got eight billion people on the planet you can find a couple hundred to buy an aircraft typically right it just comes on the other side of economics do you have the cash to buy the materials to make the thing and deliver it and then you use use those proceeds from that first sale to fund the next airplane that’s that’s the way it works right you sell the first airplane so you can make airplane five it’s that kind of continual flushing of cash ask tesla how that goes right it’s that you need the cash to build the next set of airplanes or cars uh and so that’s why you see the build rates probably so low and that in order to get to higher build rates they have to invest in a lot of tooling and infrastructure which they don’t want to do because they’re concerned at the at the first accident or there’s something that happens that they could lose their shirt and so they’re being really smart about this i got to give them some credit like the airplane is cool i like the way they put some guards around the propellers i don’t know if you saw that last last video down they got actually some guards on the propellers which it feels better to me a little bit better uh yeah so i mean i think they’re thinking about what the marketplace is also thinking uh but they’re also being very cautious it’s like they’re bootstrapping this design and in the company so that they don’t go bankrupt that they’re going to make a little bit of money uh get a product out there and then if it all works well then gen 2 will happen right and that’s the goal to get to the next get to the next one get to the next one and then maybe you have an airplane company yeah cool so last on the docket today uh apple has lost some talented engineers to the evtl market so they’ve been having obviously apple attracts top talent whether it’s design engineering whatever and they had some pretty good people on their apple car project but it seemed like they’ve had a lot of difficulties retaining some of them and you know apple’s very secret a very secretive company so we don’t know what’s been going on behind the scenes but we do know that a handful have left eric rogers who is a former chief engineer for radar systems is now a joby alex claire but went from hardware engineering to engineering manager of battery systems at archer steven spateri is now archer’s power electronics manager so people are moving laterally of course you know this always happens in every industry people move jobs etc but this is being reported like it seems like maybe there’s a little bit of an exodus and maybe this apple car project isn’t coming to fruition as fast as people would like and they’re seeing maybe something better in evtl what’s your take here yeah the apple car situation has been really odd the last well i think kobe had really affected it in terms of the marketplace the ability to dump cash into that project the car design i’ve seen bits and pieces of the car design starting about three years ago and at that point it was kind of developed uh but i figured the timeline for it was never really established and tim cook never really said anything about the project that was definitive uh so i’m wondering if apple’s going to eventually shut that thing down you know the the the kicker on the airplane side when everybody moves over to the airplane side because they want to stay in the silicon valley region which is where archer and joe b and these companies are that’s where the investment money is they’re walking into a completely different world right designing automobiles or designing battery packs or designing radar systems on a on a vehicle on the ground is not the same as designing them and using them in aviation the requirements are totally different and the system safety aspects are are majorly different because someone’s going to hold you accountable to them you have to demonstrate them and you have to demonstrate just crazy high reliability uh that there’s a learning curve there and it’s not a media when i’ve seen people make the transition from automotive to aerospace it does take a year or two to kind of get acclimated to all the stuff that has to happen and all like why do i have to have some somebody come and look at my part that i just built before i go off to test well that’s the way that system works right uh or why do why do i have to have this engineer sitting here watching my testing go on yeah because that’s the way the fa told you it’s going to go right and it works opposite from aerospace to automotive if you go from aerospace to automotive it’s like i can do a lot of things i can’t do in airplanes oh yeah i can tighten the bolts on this on this uh car yeah well i can’t do that on an airplane no you cannot right it’s so it’s just a different it’s just a whole different level of uh oversight and it just and when i think that when i think they want to bring people in who have been experts in one particular automotive or computer field and i bring him in as a manager to a bunch of airplane engineers the success rate for that is has not been tremendously high from what i’ve seen uh it’s been well below average and just because there’s so much to to learn like all all the engineers know what all these little details are that are going to have to go do and yet they’re managed by somebody who doesn’t know anything really little about what the faa world is telling them and so you have to not only do your job you’re training this guy who’s your supervisor or not guy but person who’s your supervisor that’s not what you want to be doing there right you got enough on your plate designing the aircraft then you got to go teach somebody else like what’s going on that’s just not maybe not a very good use of resource if they come in as a technical expert like if they’re doing battery design and they’re going to help you on just on the battery design forget about certification awesome put it put them in the technical side and leave them over there but it’s when you start to cross-pollinate the technical people with the certification people where you know nuclear fission starts to happen it doesn’t always go the way you want it to so that’s that’s i think that’s what the concern is so if you know the apple project may be dead but the transition to airplanes is not going to be easy yeah it’ll be interesting to see what happens with the apple car because apple doesn’t typically enter markets second right or if they do it’s for some peripheral thing like their headphones i mean they obviously have had wild success with their their air pods uh because of their brand clout so they know they can sort of push you know barrel through and make a hole for their products but their airpods were also like kind of game changing a little bit right but as far as the apple car you wonder if they can really barrel into that market and have the same clout with tesla there because tesla has that similar high quality prestigious trendy well-designed and market leader first you know first into that market really so yeah you wonder if apple’s kind of like ah maybe this isn’t worth the resources full self drive dan i think the full self drive is the real game chamber changer there and that i think apple was looking at the full self drive so it was google but tesla has basically opened that up in the last week or two right the full self drive and and some beta version of the computer system that they have and and they’re letting people with like perfect driving records do full self-drive that’s the holy grail and if tesla’s there then why would you build a billion-dollar factory to make a car if tesla’s it’s going to take you too long to get you’re right i think you’re totally right about that it’s gonna take you too long to get to market you’ll spend a bunch of money and it’s not a marketplace that you have been before so if you’re not the first one in like tesla is now you will always be second so tesla’s gonna own 50 plus the market probably 70 percent of the marketplace no matter who comes in next they’re just not going to own that space well that’s going to do it for this week’s episode of the struck aerospace engineering podcast thanks so much for listening be sure to subscribe on youtube spotify itunes stitcher wherever you listen leave us a review share with a friend and we will see you here next week on struck striketape weatherguard lightning tech’s proprietary lightning protection for radomes provides unmatched durability for years to come if you need help with your radome’s lightning protection reach out to us at weatherguardaero.com that’s weatherguard aero.com
