Flying on Battery Power

Published Dec 15, 2022, 5:05 AM

Anders Forslund is the co-founder and CEO of Heart Aerospace. Anders' problem is this: How do you build a commercial airplane that can fly on battery power -- and win the approval of regulators around the world?

As other sectors are decarbonizing, emissions from aviation are projected to triple by 2050. This is partly because figuring out how to build a commercial plane that doesn't burn jet fuel is a very, very hard problem that Anders has been trying to solve for years.

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Pushkin. The energy transition is here. It's upon us. The marginal cost of new solar and wind power is now below the marginal cost of new fossil fuel plants. Electric cars are amazing, Electric trucks are coming along. You know. The news really in some ways is better than I might have hoped for, say a decade ago. But planes, commercial airplanes, those are still a problem. As other sectors are decarbonizing, emissions from aviation are projected to triple by twenty fifty. This is partly because more people are flying every year, but it is also because figuring out how to build a commercial airplane that doesn't burn jet fuel is a very, very hard problem to solve. It may require combining frontier battery technology with a few tricks from the old dirty way of making planes fly. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is what's your problem. My guest today is Anders Forceland. He's the co founder and CEO of Heart Aerospace. Andrews problem is this, how do you build a commercial airplane that can fly on battery power and win the approval of regulators around the world. Andrews Forceland grew up in Sweden, got his PhD in aerospace product development there and he founded his company there, but he told me that the inspiration to start his company actually came from next door, came from Norway, and sort of early twenty eighteen, Norway announces that they want all their all their short haul domestic flights to be one hundreds electric by twenty forty. Okay, this is like the first country in the world that puts forth a mandate like this, and Norway is doing this on the heels they're incredibly successful electrification of their road traffic where you know, the new cars are electric and also you know the ferry infrastructure at all. So they're like, we electrified the boats, we electrified the cars, but like, yeah, there's no electric plane that exists in the world. When they put out the man nothing is even close, right, Well, No, what's happened is that a lot of people have looked at at sort of what's happened with the electrification of the cars, like Tesla, and there are a lot of people that have looked at what's happened with the drones, like the consumer small drones, And there's a bunch of projects that are trying to build what's called urban air mobility, like small like vertical takeoff and landing aircraft essentially a flying car, basically a flying car. Yeah, this sort of George Jetson future, right, Yeah, but nobody's looking it's not really the right product for Norway. Norway's looking for something to replace there. They're sort of turboprops, they're thirty seaters. Yeah, so we're we create a company or first we started research project in Sweden to what are we gonna do about this in Sweden? It's part of it like hey, wait, we can't let the Norwegians out Green US. We can't let them out net zero US to keep up with them or well yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really like that. You know, there's a little bit of a brotherly competition, right. But but it's also that I'm recognizing that Sweden is always proud of itself, like were we have this great history in aerospace that goes back to the sort of Second World War and before that. But and we also have this you know, unique competence buility being built in electrifying cars and trucks. Like actually from the industry side side of something that Norway doesn't. Right, So I'm like, okay, maybe I can take this mandate. I can take this electromobility ecosystem in Sweden, and I can take the history in aerospace and sort of combine them into something and see what happens. So, just to be clear, you get some funding, right, Yeah, start hiring some people, you know, Yeah, and you're gonna build this nineteen seat plane powered by batteries and electric plane. Yeah, and it's gonna and it's gonna do the thing Norway needs it to do exactly. Yeah, with the sort of philosophy of you know, the real innovation is getting it done. So you know, this is something that's so hard to do, even for a large OEM. So as the startup, you really have to be cautious of not being you know, biting off more than you can chew. Right, this idea of limiting innovation, you said you're going to limit innovation. That's interesting to me. What do you mean by that. One of the reasons that we have so many startups I want to be like, I think it's because it's easy to generate a realistic image of your vision. So you could make a picture of some crazy futuristic plane on your computer and say to investors, work, we're going to build this. You could do this for free. You can just draw your vision of the future in the sort of CGI and you can you can show it to people. But the challenge of an aircraft is that you need to prove that you won't have, you know, less than one serious incident in one hundred million hours. So you don't just need to build something that can fly, You need to build something that can fly essentially perfectly under every condition you can imagine, with everything going wrong. Like it's it's it's the most high bar to clear for any kind of manufactured thing you can imagine. Yeah, it's like, you know, if you want to prove something, you say, how do you prove that this is not going to break in a hundred million hours? Right? And these is way to do that as saying, well, there's these flames flying around, they have the solution, so we're gonna do what they're doing. And then the certification authorities says, well, that's good enough. So you decide you just want to focus on the fuel essentially, right, switching from jet fuel to batteries, which is a very hard problem, right, I mean, one of the things that maybe is just worth dwelling on for a moment. Is how amazingly energy dense jet fuel is? How good jet fuel is that doing the thing it needs to do? Right? I mean, one way to talk about it is sort of jet fuel has a specific energy density. You have about twelve thousand and water hours per kilo out right, and batteries right now on a cell level are approaching like four hundred. But you know a Tesla Model three is like two fifty. So wait, there's a lot of units in numbers there. But just to get the ratio is it? Are you saying jet fuel is about thirty times as energy dense as a battery. Yeah, thirty to forty times. So that's a huge problem for you. So for every pound, every kilogram of jet fuel, you get thirty times as much energy as you can get for a pound or a kilogram of battery. Like that seems like the fundamental problem you're up against, Yeah, it is. How do you deal with that problem? Like, as you're trying to figure out how to make a plane that's going to carry all this battery energy and fly, Like, how do you deal with that fundamental fact? So first of all, you try to make the plane as good as possible, and waste of doing that is actually building a plane with a large wing, make an entire plane a little bit larger because you're carrying more The weight of the batteries are more than the weight of the past. Basically, you've got to build more plane to carry all that battery. Is that right exactly? That's a really good way you're putting in. But then it's sort of boils down to philosophy, and this is I think where we are. You know, then you have to realize something about new technology and disruptive technology, and is that you should not compete with the existing technology on the merits of the assisting technology. So we're obviously not going to beat jet engines on range. We're just or ELEC jet fuel on range. So what can we work with? So what we can do is we can have zero emissions, we can have a low noise, we can have zero local pollution, which is a big problem at airports, and we can have superior unit economics because we're replacing not only you know, the jet engine is the most expensive part of the plane, and you're replacing that with a simple electric motor that essentially has one moving part. So okay, so you're designing this plane in Sweden. You're thinking about the Norwegian mark kid, But then one day you get an email from United Airlines in the US. Right. It came through our infomail, and we were so close to missing it. It was like one of those times, you mean, like they just they just emailed you at like the generic at the jet email, somebody from United Airlines. Yeah, among with all this, and you're like and Clara, I god bless her. She was looking through it and she was like, you know, is this actually something? And then we stood up the call and it was like, oh, it's actually the real, real guys, right, And we asked them like, okay, you know, we talked about this market in Norway, the propeller aircraft, the sort of thirty seaters, and we like, give line an aircraft like that, and they said, no, not a single one. But if you go back to the nineteen nineties, they flew hundreds of these aircraft. Okay. So we start telling the story about you know, we think that actually it might be the jet engine, that it's a little bit too expensive, and they're like, are you kidding? You know, it is our biggest driver of costs. We pay so much for our maintenance of the jet engines. So here we are with this value proposition that we've sort of from a sort of an academic point of view put forth, and then we have one of the biggest airlines in the verse just validating that for us and telling you it's actually much worse, do you think? Huh? And by worse that means better for you, right, I mean the yeah, yeah, that worse than you think means they actually want to buy this thing you're trying to make. And they put on an order, right, Like, what is the deal you wind up making with them? So we end up actually they place an order some United in Masa Eage place an order of one hundred aircraft plus an option for initial fifty each, so we get like two hundred aircraft. They both invest in our company. And just one thing I want to clarify MESA is they're not a known sort of name brand, right. They operate small flights for other airlines, Is that right? Like? Which airlines that I would have heard of? Do they run flights for? They operate for among other things, Like one of their big customers is United and they operate as United Express. So okay, Anders has his big order from United and Mason. He has his vision, which I love. I'm gonna say it again, the real innovation is getting it done. But he is about to run into really quite a large problem that's coming up after the break. Now back to the show. Last year, Anders and his team hit a wall. It was thankfully a metaphorical wall. They didn't crash into anything, but it was still a lot to worry about. They started to realize that their nineteen seat all electric plane just was not going to pencil out. They could get it to fly, but in a way with a commercial airplane. That's the easy part. They probably even could have made it work commercially in Norway, but the US, the United States has this rule that requires planes to keep a lot of reserve power in case they have to you know, circle the runway reroute to a distant airport. And the US rules of reserve power meant that anders nineteen seat plane could only use like a third of its battery on ordinary flights, could only fly one hundred nautical miles. They had to keep the rest of the power in reserve, and such a short range was just way too short for that plane to be practical for it to work as a commercial airplane. So a few months ago, after years of work that cost millions and millions of dollars, Anders and his team trash their old plan for that nineteen seat plane. They threw it in the garbage, and they made a couple counterintuitive moves. One, they actually made their plane bigger. They went from one that carried nineteen people to one that carried thirty people. And two, they decided that their planes would carry a little bit of jet fuel to solve that reserve problems. So in the new vision, this thirty seat plane, they could still fly on batteries, would still fly on batteries, but in an emergency or for longer flights, the jet fuel could power a generator that would charge up the batteries give them more power. There was a lot I wanted to know about this shift starting with this. Really was it hard to look at all that time and money you spent working on the nineteenth seater and say, ah, you know, sorry, that was a mistake. We need to build a different plane. Actually, you know a lot of the you know, the stuff that we've done was very just transferable, Like all the words we've done on on avionics, on flight controls, propulsion, it was very like, okay, we've changed a little bit to that dimension. The wire has become a little bit longer. But it was like the same stuff, right. The only thing that we really had to throw away was the structural design, and we'd actually even built like it sounds that sounds non trivial, but we did have in our hanger we had a full scale model, representative model of this ES nineteen structure that we've just built and just completed. We haven't adn't really completed it, but we've built which was going to be this basic for this integrated test facility that we were building. That then you have to say to everybody who just built model, you know, sorry, guys, I got some bad news. Yeah. And I was like, by the way, we built this in about a year. Now you have to tear it down and you have to build a new one that's bigger in about two months, because in September we're announcing this to the work. How did that go over? Well? Surprisingly well. I think they became very crafty and they were like, okay, we can move the wing out. We can like they figured a little bit waste of actually doing a lot of little bit of reuse and they had a lot of lessons learned from building this structure. Okay, okay, but you know this is the startup life, right, So okay, so now you have just as of September, as of a couple months ago, you have a new sort of plan. Right, instead of a nineteen seat all electric power plane, it's going to be a thirty seat plane. It's going to be primarily powered by electric motors, but you're going to have this jet fuel power auxiliary power unit that gets you your reserve power. Right, So for most flights you can fly on the battery, but in a pinch, you can fire up the jet fuel. What do you have to do to get from that idea to having a plane that actually is in commercial service? So an aircraft is a lego kit of different parts coming together from different different suppliers. So it's really we start by then hiring a critical mass of engineers that know everything from you know, mechanical systems such as landing gear to flight controls, to avionics, to electrical systems obviously the electric propulsion structures, and they start then interacting with the worldwide supply chain network, you know, start going to different places looking at flight controls, or avionics stuff, and were you already doing that on the nineteen seater and does that transfer to the thirty seater? Yeah, we were already in that process. And I was like, okay, I need to make the call myself. I need to call my suppliers and say, by the way, guys, you know, change your plan. You know. The thing that scared me the most about this was not the sort of, oh, having to redo the structural work. It was the sort of we have to go out and say that, by the way, we've been really confident about this nineteen seater and we actually think that we were wrong. Right, So we end up making this call and we go through this is the analysis we've done, This is the tradeoffs we've done. We're actually thinking that, you know, we have to make this shift, and if we have to do it, we have to do it now, all right. And we do this with suppliers, we do this with airlines, and you know, everybody is like, yeah, this is what you should be doing, right, So we don't get any of that sort of backlash that we would have expected. Okay, but the thing that we want to enable is to understand the aircraft are not just products. Their platforms. Right. The Boeing seven three seven is a platform that came out in nineteen sixty nine and people are still flying it and there's no plans of building a new replacement for by Boing. So we wanted to create that platform where all these new technology can come together and and sort of bring to market. But the exciting thing about that is that you get these two hundred kilometer range at twenty twenty eight or you know, and then you start replacing the batteries. You do that with a new technology every two years or so, and you actually can grow. But first you got to get to twenty twenty eight at a plane that can actually fly, right, Yeah, So I want to just talk a little bit about what it takes to get from here to there. Right, that's just over five years, So, I mean there's a few there's sort of the technical questions. There's the financial questions, Like, so one is how much money do you have and how much money is it going to cost to get to having a plane that can fly commercially in twenty twenty eight. It's about a billion dollar project, right, Okay, we're about one tenth of that, right, So it's also a continuous fundraise and it's getting harder to raise money in general. I don't know what your situation is, but it clearly the sort of funding environment is now much harder than it was a year ago. Are you Is that a problem for you? I mean, I think we're seeing a prepared of sort of the HYPESI like, a natural point in the hype cycle of this technology. And obviously you know the market has its oscillations, but I would also say that that I think climate tech is one of those things that people are still very interested in funding and and you know, this is not a problem that's going away, right, So we're on this. So so there's there's the money, and you need to raise a lot more money, and then there's the like the technical side. I mean, is there some particular technical problem that you're working on that we can talk about in a way that's not too technical, but that like gets because like what you're trying to do is hard, right, Like it's clearly a hard problem, and so is there some piece of it that sort of shows that the broader challenges? I think that building aircraft is like a generalist problem, right, It's a hundred different things that you need to do just from a technology point of view, and it's not the best performing of these technologies that can get to decide your success. It's the worst performing. Right. If you build an aircraft by twenty twenty twenty eight, and you've done everything brilliantly, but you forgot to do landing gear, you're not going to take off, right, or something much smaller. Right, there's a million little things like you're not going to get the landing get but there might just be one little connection between two different systems or something, right, Yeah, I mean that there's there's many of stories like that, So everything needs to be like it's like it's like the worst link of the chain is what's going to break it. Yeah, And it's not just goes for the technical stuff. It goes from the commercial stuff. You know, it's infrastructure on the ground. It is yeah, you know, a regulatory it's all of these things. The infrastructure on the ground is a particular if that's a whole thing for you, right, because there's all this infrastructure in place at every airport to put jet fuel into airplanes, but there is not infrastructure in place to recharge the batteries of airplanes because that's not a thing, right, So, and presumably if these are little commuter planes or a little small short hop planes, you're gonna have to recharge them fast, right. You can't just like plug it in and leave it overnight. So is that is that a technical problem? Like how long does it take to recharge one of your planes or no, I mean it's it is about a thirty minute recharge, okay, And that is not a technical problem and definitely not from the charger point of view. We're looking at something that has the same standard. The news sort of standard that's from for electric trucks, which is, you know, goes up to three megawats, is like the MCS standard, which is you know it's going to be like okay, if you can build put it on a truck stop, you can put it on an airport. Electric trucks mean big big mac trucks, big big tractor trailers. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, here's a big one. Are the batteries just too big and heavy? Where? Like, are you sure that that's going to be fine? Yeah? I mean they are big, they're heavy. There's certification problems. That's going to limit my market size, right, it's not going to limit if it flies or not. Okay, we'll build an aircraft and if the batteries become a little bit of heavier, we have to compromise a little bit on an all electric range and then we'll get to the new battery two years later. Right. So it is it is not thing that I think is an existential risk for this, right, It's not something that I think it's that being problem. It's more about figuring out whatever is the state of the art battery technology that's out there and save the automotive industry or other industries. How do you bring that through the solsage machine of actually building then eleation cell. Yeah, and how do we I think that is the problem. But remember there are already certified electric aircraft out there, certified in Europe which is the Pipistol values Electro So two seater electric aircraft are already flying. Okay, so we know you can have a battery powered plane that works and that is safe enough for regulators to approve it. So there is some threshold that has been cleared. It is definitely a challenging problem. Yeah, it's a lot of challenges, but it's not the sort of challenge in the sort of winning Nobo price. If you solve it an aerospace program, it's more like an organizational problem that it is like just technical. It's like getting people that are working on various systems to exactly be on the same page that every every page of the project, figuring out all the interfaces. These are not trivial stuff, right, So that's not something that need that we can understate how difficult it is to build that organization and execute on everything at the same time. Right, these are going to be the critical defining decades for this industry. We have the climate challenge, which is the biggest challenge we ever faced, but we also have a challenge where they're not enough new planes being built. The big aerospace companies are still building their old aircraft. So we need to create a culture of actually building new planes, building them faster. And also there's mass retirements in the industry. You know, there's people leaving the industry, there's new people coming in, and we just need to keep the flame alive, and we need to find the flame as much as we can create. Which is a bad analogy, by the way, for somebody that wants to get rid of combustion. I didn't think of that in general. A bad analogy for aviation. If you're building planes, stay away from fire metaphors. Yeah, oh yeah, Yeah. We'll be back in a minute with questions about airports. Abba and Andrew's favorite inventor. It's the lightning round, which probably also not a great metaphor to use in a show about planes. That's the end of the ads. Now we're going back to the show. We want to finish with a sort of lightning round. I want to just ask you a bunch of fast questions. Do you have a favorite airport? Wow, I just landed at Saint Louis Obispo Airport. I say that was the best airport experience that I had in my life. And in California, a little town in the middle. Yeah. Yeah, it's like this glamorized bus stop. You just get off and you walk through it like a nice restaurant, and then you have your luggage waiting for you. In to the ad and I went to the rental car and I was like ten minutes I was in my car. It was just marvelous. That's the experience we want to bring, right, that's the beauty of a small local airport. Right. I used to live in Bozeman, Montana and the airport there was amazing like that, Yeah, it's lovely. And then I and then I dropped the same car off at Lax and it's like, you know, you you drop the car off and you get on a bus. And then he was like, I have to go to terminals seven and it's like, you know, it takes me, you know, hours. So your vision, your vision of flying is San Luis Obispo, not Lax. Yeah, exactly. What's one piece of advice you'd give to someone trying to solve a hard problem? Um, ask for help. Yeah. A good founder is or a good entrepreneurs want to know who to ask because people have had the same problem before. Who's your favorite inventor? I am obsessed with Kelly Johnson from SKO skunk Work. I don't know about Kelly Johnson. Tell me a little bit. Kelly Johnson was this marvelous engineer that led Luckeed skunk Works, you know, the proverbial skunk works that was like, you know, ten times smaller than the other teams. And he built a playing this or seventy one that flew at mocked three point two right, and it flew. They did very fast. To be clear, if that means very very fast, yeah, it means very fast. It's like an aircraft from the future that was built in nineties sixties by this little group of people kind of working off to the side of the main company. Yeah. Yeah, And they didn't have computers, they didn't have cad they drew drew stuff by hand, and they built something that there's no you know, there's no aerospace team that could have ever done that today. And it's just so remarkable. And it was also just a pace of it or you know, it's the pace of innovation, right that was astounding. That's what we need to get better at. You have a favorite Abba song? Oh wow, I'm being pigeoned. Oh less sweet? I will say my favorite is and this you can read in what you will with this, but it is the Winner Takes it All? Okay, very good? Can we end with that? Anders Forceland is the co founder and CEO of Heart Aerospace, and you know, the Winner Takes It All is a genius pick for an entrepreneur's favorite Abba song, but in fact, the Winner does not take it all. One of the great things about technological innovation is you get these widespread beneficial effects. If Anders and his company do succeed in making a commercially viable electric plane, we can all be better off. Or, as Abba might put it, the winner gets to win, but others can join in. Everyone can gain from an electric plane. Today's show was produced by Edith Russolo, edited by Robert Smith, and engineered by Amanda Kay. I'm Jacob Goldstein. One last note, we are taking a few weeks off, so happy holidays, Happy New Year. Thank you so much for listening to the show this year, and we will be back in January with more episodes of What's Your Problem.

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