Flying Cars Have Arrived! eVTOL Panel: Archer, Joby, Wisk | All-In Summit 2024

for our next panel we are going to have uh a quick introduction to each of the three electric vertical takeoff and Landing vehicle companies the evall companies we'll see a video for uh introducing Joby and then uh Adam from Archer is going to introduce Archer and then Brian from wi and then we're going to have a conversation uh be back in a minute [Music] [Music] [Music] w I founded archer in 2018 to change the way the world moves Urban congestion isn't sustainable this leaves the average American stuck in traffic for dozens of hours per year to combat that challenge we built [Music] midnight all electric aircraft purpose-built to fly back-to-back trips

over congested [Music] cities midnight takes off vertically like a helicopter then his propellers transition down to fly like an airplane it's designed to be piloted and carry four passengers and can travel at speeds up to 150 mph since 2018 we've made an incredible amount of progress to bringing the midnight aircraft to Market our nearly 10,000 person team has designed built and tested the key enabling Technologies to bring electric Aviation to Market this has enabled us to raise nearly $1.5 billion to get however our goal is the same since day one to get to commercial [Music] launch our high volume manufacturing

facility in Georgia will open up later this year and we have incredible partners that are helping us bring this Vision to [Music] life stellantis the owner of Jeep Ram and Maserati has invested nearly $300 million to date United Airlines has ordered up to $1.5 billion of midnight aircraft and with Southwest our goal is to offer passengers 3-hour multimodal Journeys across [Music] Cali we have an industry-leading contract with Air Force and we recently delivered our first aircraft as part of that contract in La we recently announced

plans for flight networks connecting Sofi Stadium USC LAX and Beyond we can't wait to bring midnight to a city near Europe [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Peter teal reminded us yesterday that flying cars are the peak of the hardware Revolution that never quite happened but as you just saw we're closer than ever to making it a reality the aircraft that the three of our companies design take off vertically like helicopters they do a complex maneuver to transition onto the wing into wingborne flight and Fly Like an aircraft when the founder of our company Larry Page first joined this Mission the technologies that enable

these aircraft to fly were just starting to become possible the team that I lead has built the enabling Technologies in electrification and autonomy that's making this possible you see the prior five generations of aircraft that we've designed here on the screen behind me and that iterative design build approach has enabled us to get to the point where we are building now Generation 6 which is the first candidate for an fa certification of a passenger autonomous aircraft this aircraft is designed to take advantage of all of the prior technologies that we developed through those prior iterations and to operate without a pilot on board on those

missions there's two technology trends that we are all uh in that we are all using to create these aircraft Motors and the the same simplification that's coming to your cars and batteries and the same advances that are coming to your cars and also to your cell phones and second autonomy and autonomy has a lot of parts to it so we have to for the first time in a commercially certifiable way show how we can operate and supervise an aircraft from the ground display information in in a way that is safe from a human factor standpoint to supervise that aircraft to use sensors on the airplane in the same way you would for an autonomous ground vehicle to create the software and the

computation to be able to then fly that aircraft autonomously but when you make robots people don't go away they change what they're doing and so we use those aircraft to actually do deployment testing in networks here in Los Angeles yeah last year we flew the first electric Vall aircraft in the Los Angeles area and we showed what's possible with these aircraft and how people can engage with them we are also working on the human interface with air traffic control because again even though we have an autonomous aircraft our aircraft still has to interface with today's air traffic control system like what you saw yesterday from weo we use existing flying cars AKA helicopters

that are piloted to take that sensor package and those computation uh abilities and put them onto of a a piloted helicopter to perfect the algorithms that we use for doing things like Det protecting and avoiding other traffic in environments uh where there's different lighting and where the aircraft that you might collide with potentially that you want to avoid is above or below the Horizon we also have to be able to fly these aircraft without the presence of GPS as we see in conflicts around the world today we cannot rely on GPS to be able to fly an autonomous aircraft so now once you have that technology stack you need to turn it into an actual airplane and all the

things that Peter talked about about potentially being a bad industry to to go into uh in the 9s are now becoming ever more important the ability to uh do aerodynamics to do mechanical engineering to create these aircraft are now more important than ever and uh by the end of this year we'll be flying this aircraft which will be the first attempt at certifying a passenger carrying autonomous aircraft so let's bring the guys out and we'll talk about it all right well I think that there's a lot of people that probably need an introduction to Vall in a more basic way before we talk about the technology whether it's the actual vehicle itself or whether it's the um the world's best

pilot if you will MH um for the folks out here if they are going to interact with these systems whether autonomous or not what do you think are going to be the biggest issues that they are going to care about and will want resolved before they see it in their Community maybe Joe B if you want to start yeah I think the number one issue and you know for everybody when you're getting in an aircraft is is this going to be safe but then for both the the passengers what they care about is is something that's going to dramatically change the way they they move around their cities and save them time and in order to do that you need to

have takeoff and landing locations that are located both close to where you are and close to where you want to go and so priority uh 2 through n in people's priority stack is about noise and making an acoustic signature that's going to uh get communities to see this as uh a a real advantage and uh something that's uh increases the value of uh of living in that Community because you're you're close to this new mode of transportation um do you guys think that when you see a thousand of these things flying around let's let's just take a place uh in Meno Park California um are they going to be forced to have very specific sort of like air highways

that they have to adhere to or what is the best thinking right now in terms of how the regulatory bodies are going to sort of enable you guys to actually fly commercially as quickly as possible he brand turn you if we if we just take a step back the product exists they're called helicopters and a helicopter is actually way more complex than what we're building we're actually building a much more simplified version of what exists it's safer it's fully redundant and so it should Inspire confidence for people to to want to come and take these vehicles the way they'll start though is going to be really slow if you think about every major city in the world they

have hospitals those hospitals have helicopters this product exists everywhere so if you took all three of us you took our most bullish estimates that we have and you tripled them we still would not even replace helicopters so to get to the point where you're asking thousands of vehicles in the air over one city or even hundreds is pretty far away we could all deploy tens of thousands of vehicles we could the three of us be a trillion dollar companies and there still would not be thousand hopefully there still would not be you know thousands of vehicles in the air but to make the product really really great you do want liquidity you do want a lot of vehicles in on dense routes so

you don't have to worry about is it available is it not available like an Uber right you just it's thumbs up it's available or thumbs down it's not available it doesn't matter what seat you get it saves your time that's where we're all trying to get but I think just to frame it sorry Adam is it is it a thing where it is like uber where there's going to be a version where you get in with people you don't know or you think this is just like one person Provisions it for themselves and then they go from point A to point B no absolutely the vision is uh you know a service that's available for everyone the good news is you can scale these

vehicles because they're just much more simple than helicopters we don't have all the limiting factors that helicopters have so you can put a lot more from the air you can push the prices way down and make it very affordable Bri it's also a dramatically faster trip so you're you're in it for a few minutes to get across La instead of in in Uber where you might be sitting in traffic for an hour or two right um yesterday we heard from Teedra from the CEO of weo their first launch city was Phoenix the layout was good but mostly it was really regulatorily um amenable amenable um Brian what is the version of

Phoenix for Evol is there a city somewhere that has said we want this now come and help us figure this out yeah Houston Houston is is where we're working most specifically um and it's not just because Woody lives there either um but but seriously Houston is um you know the the Airport network in Houston is actually quite good connecting couple of the airports around uh the Houston area it turns out that operating at airports initially is actually quite a good place to start because like I said you know these aircraft they come with a footprint you know they really come with like people and operations and if you've ever seen an airport tarmac area um it's you can't

just drop that in the middle of a city on day one so starting at airports as an initial operating area is quite good um it turns out you know what you saw in that video was from an airspace integration standpoint and where we were going on routes and so on um New Zealand is has been incredibly Forward Thinking in terms of how to evolve their airspace Network so they have more um digital Communications more of an ability to integrate un crude aircraft with crude aircraft in the same airspace and so we've been doing quite a lot of work in New Zealand on that front but hold on I I mean I think it's to me super clear this does not start in the US I really

think it starts internationally I think the regulatory environment here both both of us work in the UAE pretty extensively I mean if I'm going to guess just on the press that you put out Joe B met the head of the um civil aviation Authority in the UAE yesterday I'm leaving tonight on a plane to go meet him as well and so you know we are targeting Abu Dhabi they've been targeting Dubai and the reason is there is a you know a very heavy support for new innovation and the challenge like the reason why I feel like all three of us are up on stage here is probably because of the the whole Woody video that we just watched we all learned

about NASA as young kids and were inspired by new things but the challenge is the existing environment today makes that very hard and these are companies that were started in America with American Engineers that have raised capital from the American Venture community that are listed on the American stock exchanges yet we still can't launch in America and that is really challenging and I think part of it is back to what Bill Gurley talked about last year a regulatory capture the walls are huge to climb and in fact the more things go bad with the incumbents the harder it is for us I don't think that's done on purpose but that's very

challenging for us now I I I would I would say that the amount of bipartisan support on on both sides of the aisle in Washington is off the charts the amount of local support uh support with States uh it the you know yesterday I was in Montreal at the uh International civil aviation uh Association conference uh where they ConEd this is the first time and they were convening 1800 people uh to focus on uh Advanced Air mobility and so this is really exciting to see how much momentum there is and it's imperative that the US continue to lead Aviation is one of our most important exports uh it's been vital to our economy and it is really really important that uh we we lean forward and

we make the the certification process and just to double click on this for a second I can see how Joe Ben and Adam you guys Pure Play startups you know you have to find the Willing parent um but you have the benefit of Boeing mhm um and is that why your answer was Houston is because they have that I guess regulatory gravitas to be able to go and help there or no you're still mostly on your own trying to figure no no yeah so we so the yeah the Journey of our company was obviously you know started by Larry started by Larry became Kittyhawk turned into a joint Venture and and uh and and eventually um we sold the company to Boeing uh last year and uh so we still operate as an

independent company a lot like the whmo um Google relationship right now uh for us the difference is we're really trying to Pioneer the pathway to the introduction of autonomous aircraft at the same time and that's a longer Journey so Joe Ben and Adam are are going to be operating before us there's no doubt because piloted aircraft are coming before these uncrewed aircraft um I think autonomy is key to the future of aviation in the small airplane space if you look at the the um the the the causes of of incidents and the accident rates in helicopters right now they're just unacceptable and um and I think that that can be solved by automation I'm really passionate about that so for

us we're on a longer journey and the question is then uh on that Journey um how do we make sure that the US leads in that and we're trying to Pioneer the regulatory Pathway to ensure that it happens here in the United States but we're also working around the globe like I mentioned in New Zealand where there are Regulators who potentially want to lean forward and innovate on airospace or some other aspects of the problem that we're trying to solve I mean Adam Adam mentioned the concept of regulatory capture but one of our besties Sky Dayton who's on joby's board wrote this great essay and one of the things that's clear is that a lot of the pushback to the vision that you have Brian actually

comes from the pilots unions themselves right I I think it's a bit of a weird set of incentives no do you want to just talk about that for a second I think it's less salacious than that and more uh clinical I mean the the and I'll give an example well so I have my vision for the future is that we're going to have a prolific amount of uncrewed small aircraft that are operating doing that kind of missions that we're just talking about but that large C pilot large aircraft are going to be piloted for probably as far as the eye can see I think the Practical aspect of it honestly is that in 2023 here's a statistic for you that just blows my

mind as a developer of airplanes in 2023 there were 30 million Global flights carried billions of Passenger implements number of people that got on board the airplane um scheduled service you know Airlines zero accidents zero what zero in 2023 zero so so it's it's less salacious than than uh there's a cabal that's trying not to certificate things there is a natural conservatism in the system of holy we've done it it's working don't change it so when new technology shows up it I I understand the perspective of a regulator that's sitting on the other side of that wall and it's saying man this is kind of working um okay then just to put you on the spot I mean I can

see you know when Joe Ben and Adam say hey point A to point B instead of hours in traffic you're there in 10 minutes if there are really no pilot errors unlike in cars where there's still far too many unnecessary deaths how do you measure the incremental justification for the investment let alone the reason to the statistic that I just gave you is for large aircraft scheduled air carriers if you then look at the small airplane Market or you look at helicopter markets it is it is orders of magnitude it's well it's Infinity more you know so but it's it's it's way worse and so the question is how do you bring the level of safety of those large aircraft how do

you bring that same level of safety down into the get rid of recreational pilot you have to start you just have to start I mean there is definitely this panel exists in China guess what there's two groups that are already certified there they started that's how you do it you have to get moving you have to set an environment where we can all start flying stuff when we can do it A to B and when you're using a large aircraft you're dividing the two pilots expense amongst 300 seats or 100 seats and in this case you would have a pilot on a Joby flight with which really the Pilot's not doing anything there's they're not flying it so it's they're there to make the passengers feel safer

is my understanding yeah the pilot you know there there are even with with what Brian's doing uh with the incredible pioneering work on um on autonomy you you still have somebody on the ground who's uh making sure that the weather is going to be safe and uh lots of other operational Logistics the benefit is you get to take that person out of the aircraft and put them on the ground so you get to put another passenger in the aircraft um you get a lot of operational flexibility uh because you're the the you don't necessarily have to have the pilot and the plane at the same location at the same time uh a pilot can over time begin to operate multiple do the pilot do in

ajobi because my understanding is it's automated so they're sitting there just monitoring it they're making sure that all of the operations are going to go safely the pilot AR flying there's a there's sticks right I mean there is the option for the the the pilot to fly fly with the sticks as well so in an emergency situation they would take over but it's autopilot essentially there are a lot of a lot of computer systems that are helping the pilot fly and when one rotor goes down I mean one of the great things about this is when you have a helicopter you know a rotor breaks you

die essentially we have layer on layer of redundancy we have six six propellers and each one's driven by separate motors with each separate inverter with each a separate battery pack and so it's just you know the same thing with the flight computers in the uh everything's massively redundant what would it take and that's what we did in big commercial airlines which is why uh you get the incredible safety that that Brian was talking about yeah I mean we haven't had a passenger death in the United States I think the last one was 2009 and the last three passenger jets that went down the United States were all regional Jets which we all know that there's a

collection of problems there um so what would it take theoretically when you're doing your you know edge cases what are the edge cases that are the most challenging in terms of safety well so uh you know with our initial certification we are not certifying for flight in known icing for example so if you if you live in the North Northeast uh you know there will be uh a few percent of the time where we won't be able to offer service you'll just ground them during ice conditions you're not going to JFK when it's snowing well when it's snowing you may be able to go but if it's there's certain conditions where where you get heav icing in terms of concerns and

things that could make these go down exactly so is there anything else though that could you know what's like the what's like the the wind speed or gusting kind of condition Max and so on uh so we're actually very tolerant to that it was actually it was interesting proba better than a wing than a winged aircraft I would imagine right right yeah and and so there's these these folks at Nasa who are working on Wildfire prevention yeah and they came they've they came and did a not the welfare prevention folks but NASA came and did did an acoustic survey where they put out uh a whole array of microphones and we flew the aircraft in Hover and transition uh overlight Etc

and measured the acoustic signature and um showed that it was really low and could fit in the environment in terms of uh but yesterday I was having a conversation with them on Wildfire prevention they're like these kinds of aircraft are going to be game changers for for Wildfire because with helicopters they can't handle really turbulent conditions when you've got lots of convection from the wildfire and and you have six Motors we have six rotors and so there's this thing called Vortex ring state that uh affects vertical takeoff and Landing aircraft and you aren't going to have all six rotors go into Vortex ring State at the same time and you can also one of the

cool things they found out with the Osprey is if you just tilt the rotors forward that you can get very very quickly get out of Vortex ring state so basically these new new classes of aircraft and what you can do with electric propulsion and I I don't think we've talked about that enough is is what a GameChanger electric propulsion is can you talk about the the acoustic issue so give us some context for the decibel tolerance where what and what was you know in a city and give us a comparison to stuff that exists today a big truck diesel truck helicopter like and what do we need to be at for this to be ubiquitously accepted in cities and then what's the technology needed to get

the acoustic breakthroughs needed yeah so the background noise level in in cities is around 65 DB and so we set that as our threshold for this is the level that we want uh want things you know want aircraft to be below during takeoff and Landing you want you don't want to be Beyond background right we want to be below 45 DB in overflight um and and we've achieved both of those goals uh you know you asked about other things you know I think a garbage truck is uh 80 or 90 DB every they're the worst exactly the worst like every 10 DB is an order of magnitude more noise energy so it's uh you know a jet engine is like 110 DB helicopters are between 80 and 100 DB uh the other thing about

helicopters that people find really annoying is it's this low frequency and that low frequency sound travels long distance through the atmosphere and so what's the tech needed like it shakes buildings and really what was yeah what's the tech needed to bring the acoustic like how hard is well I mean we you know when I when I started joy in 2009 uh so it's 15 uh 15 years ago uh this week so it's like I've been working on this a long time I've been dreaming about it since I was a kid um and it's it's incredible to see the industry that we've built and uh and again yesterday to see like thousands of people gather just to focus on all of

the issues of bringing this to their cities around the world so that that's really exciting um and the the you know the roll out and and the impact that this is going to have on cities is just really really exciting so let me ask you guys you're eff just you're spinning the propellers slower that's what you're doing that's the electric engine do that just create lower noise that that gets you like 90% of the benefit and then from there you work to all the little efficiencies to get that stuff out so let me ask you guys about like the the convenience of owning a car and like America kind of popularized this idea that everyone should own a car and then we all got a

car the benefit of a car is it's point to point I can go from any point a to any point B um how do you guys think about the challenge of it's such a pain in the ass to go to a port just like it's a pain in the ass to go to a bus station take a bus or you know Subway go to a spot in New York it works where things are dense enough but like in most cities in the United States this is like it is preferable to take a car because I can do point A to point B and my convenience which my time is always faster taking a car how how do you kind of think about the calculus of the benefit here when I have to go to a port to be able to take the vehicle to the to

the next Port I I think you know your spot on I think of where we are today is very similar to where uh the automotive industry was was in the 1890s where it was before we had the ability to mass produce cars we we were building tens and then hundreds of cars and uh that didn't give the scale and so what we were using cars for was taxis we are in a similar mode today where we are going to use these aircraft as taxis uh we still need to save people time and so there's only going to be select routes where this is a game changer because of the multimodal nature uh where you need to uh and you may not have a takeoff and Landing location exactly where you want

to leave from and go to but over time if we can get the acoustic signature down if we can make these aircraft even quieter than they are today rather than needing to go to a a dedicated ver port to do this the dream is to eventually be able to land them at your house Adam let's talk about um propulsion for a second energy density cost those trade-offs speed these are all variables that kind of just work opposing each other um what were some design decisions you guys made and um did you have to remake some of those did you change your mind at some point and just walk us through that process the biggest challenge I think of building these aircraft is just the time it takes to do

it it is very expensive and it does not fit any typical model meaning the Venture guys don't like it and so they're like sorry you want a billion dollars UPF front to build this like that's terrible you rejected me you rejected me I don't think I met with you uh like everybody rejected probably all of us up here so it's not a typical you know what I mean like Mom that's the reality so there was this crazy period of time in 2021 with the capital markets opened up it was a dream scenario raise a lot of money from the public markets that was nuts so that allowed this to happen and then from there it for for me

what we did was we said okay what is the business case meaning we thought when we looked at like what are these we call them hero routes where there's a lot of people doing these trips like Manhattan to JFK it's like 30 million people go from Manhattan to one of the three big airports in New York okay so all we have to do no brainer that's a no-brainer yeah all we have to do is have a couple around the city which already exist there's downtown Wall Street Hort wests side and just put them into the three airports and that'll be an amazing thing to start with okay so short routes 20 to 50 mile routes now let's design an aircraft around that the fastest thing

we can do to get to Market so we don't die before the investors decide nah we're kind of like done with this one now on to the next thing oh AI here let's everybody go all in on AI and so I'm just moving as fast as we can so that was the biggest trade-off so it was always what is the minimum thing we need to do to get that done so you need to look at speed range and payload payload is definitely the hardest because batteries are heavy and there's just physics you're always fighting and then speed the difference between these planes want to fly around 120 mph you go faster it's just more drag it just kills

your battery faster so you don't the difference between 120 150 on a 10 Mile flight doesn't really matter it's more of how do you go at least that 20 to 50 mile route and go at least you know call it 120 m per hour and do that as fast as possible what kind of batteries what kind of batteries did you guys choose what lium ion cells commercial offthe shelf stuff uh Molly cell makes you can find the cells today there's millions of them that are made and power tools and supercars and pretty conventional what's the range with the range of the aircraft we're designing to go up to 100 miles but the the real design is around back to Rapid backtack 20 to 50 MP what do

you guys all need in terms of Battery Technology improvement from where we sit today or do you not and what's on the horizon in terms of Battery Technology improvements what does that unlock in terms of range yeah so the batteries that we're certifying our aircraft with or have a specific energy of about 300 wat hours per kilogram to put that in context when I started the company in in 2009 we had cells that had sufficient specific power uh to do a vertical takeoff but also so uh we're at about 170 W hours of kilogram so we've almost doubled the specific energy in the cells over the last 15 years um that we have cells in our lab and then there's a third dimension which really matters is

This Is The Life and uh so we have the the cells we're uh taking the certification are give us a uh 10,25 M flights so our our kind of sweet spot is is also in that uh in those shorter range flights and we want to be able to do a lot of flights between uh between Replacements both for the environmental impact of it but also from the economics of replacing those battery packs and when the the plane takes off that's a lot of um energy usage the the wings tilt forward and now you're flying more like these ospre is as a plane the energy goes way down the consumption and then on Landing you got to be very careful and use a lot more energy is that correct yeah and there's there's uh

different trade-offs you can make basically the more propulsors you have uh the smaller each propulsor is and the and the heavier you're disc loading and the higher the amount of power you're using in Hover the the harder you're pulling on the batteries um the uh but then more propulsors also gives you more redundancy so there's this uh there's a trade there breast tax when do you each think we're going to pick um a quarter in a year so you know fourth quarter 2025 second quarter 2026 you all have to answer it uh you agreed backstage um and Americans will be able to give money to get in one of these not a test flight you know in a major city in America um

to to when we all be able to use it uh not just yours yeah these guys should answer for themselves but I think they'll get it done in uh in 2026 and you should yell at it's different ah man I don't um first quarter first quarter 26 I want to give him some heat we'll be we'll be a couple years after that but that's an incredible thing I mean we're less you know a year plus away that's yeah that's crazy now you should um tell tell me how you feel about my expectations yeah I I think pretty clearly there's a route to do this internationally next year and so I think we'll launch with passengers next year um he said in the US I know I'll start there I'll start

there in in in 2025 job is to make sure we have a safe I think probably fourth quarter I think we have a my job is to create a safe aircraft if Pete Budaj called and said hey there's a way to do this in the US I'm going to help cut through all the red tape and we're going to help you get it done like my phone's on I'm ready call me I we'll find a way to do it Pete why didn't we invite Pete he seems Dynamic so he was actually yeah we uh we nearly had him yeah very close so I I think we're on a on a Time timeline which we publicly announced to uh to begin commercial Service uh in the UAE next year um you think Q4 2025 as well I I think that's it's likely back

end I think it's at the back end of next year let me let me we will begin non uh you know begin operations before that but uh we will not being to buy a buy a ticket have you figured out the flight profile that you're going to start with like it's airport to X or something like that or we have we have uh four ver ports that are um uh that we're planning to build in in Dubai and uh the RTA which is I would like one from the airport to the wind which opens in 2027 yeah from Dubai to the new win it's a little far cuz it's in rock so it's a little far away there's a win in Dubai that's opening opening a win that's we got to go we got to

go oh kidding aside I want to talk to you guys we talked yesterday with about this you know he said it's taken longer to get approval to launch Starship than it did to take launch so this sort of push on regulatory we're hearing over and over again you work with the FAA closely um can you just describe the path to bring them along get the certifications that you need um and how much of a push or a pull that is in each of your businesses yeah I mean I guess I'll just start you know obviously um from the autonomy standpoint specifically you know we're really we're trying to push the frontier and so whenever whenever you're engaging with a

regulator no matter if it's Aviation or if it's biotech or some other thing if you're really really on the frontier it means that that the regulator doesn't necessarily understand the technology any better than you do and so part of it needs to be kind of a journey where you're going together to really learn how to make it safe at some point um you need to be regulated you know there there needs to be a process of you putting forth um you know the engaging in what what are the requirements you putting forth here's how we're going to meet those requirements and then as a process I think that you know honestly from my standpoint that actually works okay um I just wish that it was a little

more responsive or engaging on some of the like deep technical subjects that we have to advance do they have the people inside the that's part of the challenge so part of the challenge is that is that in aviation partially because of what Peter teal said yesterday you know there's sort of a generation of you know if you went into Aviation when I went into Aviation the demographics were completely upside down people you know people were retiring new people weren't coming into the industry and so all many of the experts in the fa that that have regulated some of these systems that have created really safe airplanes have

retired um there's a lot of new people coming into the industry which is great but um don't necessarily have the expertise of having built some of the systems that we're now building and so there's some way that we almost need to get people to come through the industry and then I think this is a really important point and it's countered to what RFK Jr has been saying over and over again and this is why I I push back on him I'm sorry this is off topic there there is a very important reason to have people from industry become part of the regulatory framework for regulating the industry because if they don't they don't know how and they're going to have

a a complete aversion to embracing technological innovation that's why I think it's important that there is a rotation of people that are you know consequentially not economically motivated in some way but that understand the technology and can motivated but in that let me ask you guys in markets where there is a regulatory framework that allows for Accelerated output of innovation let's take China for an example um there's a good ab test maybe underway right now what companies are doing eval technology in China how good are they and then given the way that the Chinese government can kind of step in and accelerate outcomes are we going to see

and are we seeing uball and Technology you know kind of coming to Market fast and in a kind of accelerated way in China like we're seeing with nuclear and other tools that the government is a priority in a mandate yeah I mean you have you have ehang and autoflight and they uhin and you know a bunch of them are making great progress there's a lot of enthusiasm in China the regulatory uh pathway there is uh uh more forward leaning I I think as as Adam pointed out and uh I think you're going to see more more rapid iter iteration I think the good news here in the US is that the fa is uh in the process of releasing something called Mosaic which for aircraft that are smaller than ours uh

aircraft with with like two passengers in them more of a personal ownership type of thing that's going to allow much more uh rapid development and a lighter a lighter touch from the fa just to put this in context the fa has done I think an incredible job and they've really been leaning in when I went and first talked to them in 2009 they they thought this was like absolutely crazy like they just did not think we were going to be able to build an electric air aircraft let alone one that could take off and land vertically and which was quiet and all these all these different dimensions we then you know began working with them regularly in 2015 uh began formal certification 2018 had uh stage 4 G1 and

in 2020 G2 uh and and then G3 and now we're working on stage four so it you know with each uh you know we are building momentum we are writing all the rules uh it's very heavy lifting uh and told me once he uh cuz has been kind of the first through the through the pipeline there and he said I feel like a pipe cleaner for for how to certify these things and uh I guess I there's one thing I would just throw into the regulatory like context just just because I I think you're bringing up a good point is it's not like these things were sitting on the shelf and and a regulator was sitting somewhere saying you can't use that we have been on a journey that we just all talked about

getting these things ready so they're now just at the point where they're ready and the question is can we take that first step in the US to really get it done and does the US do they approach that from a culture of let's just try something if we get it wrong we can iterate it or it's is it more we must get this right because there's all kinds of consequences political or other it's so much more simple than that they want to do it the people at the top are actually genuinely very excited former fa administrator Billy Nolan stepped down from his role joined Archer the new one Mike Whitaker came from an e talk

company they were very excited to do it the challeng is with probably most regulatory you know setups is not a lot of incentive it's not like there's a downside to not doing it a lot of disincentive to do it meaning if something goes bad it's there's only downside there and it's a slog and it's hard like this is hard this is not easy to go through all this there's the incentives are not great and then on top of all of it there's no policy saying hey America needs to be Innovative we need to go do this let's go and get it why is there no mandate like it would be great if some leader said you guys need to get this done and we need to have these things flying safely

in the next 36 months like how does that happen in our current system I can understand Happ Trump literally put out a video on it he put out a video agenda number whatever 39 or something like that where he talked about building future cities I'm guessing he went to Dubai and then I'm sorry but is that something Adam that we could change through an executive order I think it's culture you have to change meaning like we will do this and break down all the barriers to get it done because it's it's not that hard like you can like we've all laid out the rules to certify like why can't you let us just go do the tests and then if we do the tests you check them off we're

good that if you're a bureaucrat if you're working in one of these organizations if it goes poorly you're in big trouble if it goes well are you well the SEC had you know this mandate it's very similar to you know allow more accredited investors sophisticated investors allow people you know to to take tests and to just allow more access to private companies and invest which would be good for a company and they and they have slow walked it so I think that's part of the problem is just to build on what ad okay let's just say the SEC doesn't do anything it or they do it and they make a mistake nobody at the SEC will get fired just like I I don't think the culture is that if you know

something if a commercial airline has an issue or for example in the 73 Max 737 Max issue did more people at Boeing get fired did more people at the FAA get fired or did nobody get fired nobody Aviation Aviation is different on the like in the comparison with the SEC as an example like Aviation is different like actually Aerospace is different and and and I would just call out one thing that I saw on the stage yesterday which which really hit me if you saw elon's face when he talked about the safety of the astronaut like you saw his face he was almost crying yes he was almost crying and that's what Aerospace is all about and so I there is a um the the reason that the industry has been able

to get to that unbelievable statistic that I just talked about is that it's gone through all accidents it's gone through terrible things that have happened and have turned into the rules that we are now all being regulated towards what's happening now is that we're showing up with new technology so I'll give you an example like regulations they currently say the pilot shall do X and it says that you know 50 times Well we don't have a pilot and so when we're showing up we have to kind of rewrite what that is I understand why it says the pilot shall do X it says that because there were accidents in the past

that have now been regulated out of existence but you're also looking at it from the the negative point of view how many lives could be saved if we got this stuff into pick a country India or Africa we could bring clean water and medicine and supplies to people disaster relief it doesn't cost $10,000 an hour to fly a Blackhawk anymore into some disaster relief situ situation costs $500 an hour and we can send 50 immediately and they're always available the uptime is super huge and so I actually think you could save a lot of lives too if you what about saving lives here in the US we we lose 40,000 people every year on the roads which is insane uh and we fly almost as many miles as we

drive so like driving is more than 10,000 times more dangerous per passenger mile than flying is so we can actually by moving people into the air for their daily Transportation make the you know save thousands and tens of thousands of lives but we need to get the technology out there we need to start learning I hope uh Peter teal had it wrong and we are going to get flying cars in the next couple of years and I want to thank you all for being here please join me in thaning our than