So welcome everyone. This is imagination and action where we have Imaginators, who share how they're using their imagination and the kind of action they're they're making happen. And I'm so excited for people to meet Richard Kane, who's building a new airline. And there's a plane at a Minnesota that was designed. It's an extraordinary plane. And Richard is, is has, I think, at least 15 of them. And he has a whole plan. While he's building this airline, he's also a supplier of information and data to other airlines. So he's very involved in the whole airline world. And we're going to talk a little bit about where it is, where it's come from, where it's going, you know, used to be able to get from one point to another by horse, and then car and then train. And he sees some trends. And he thinks these electric planes and these carbon planes and AI, there's a lot of things that are very exciting these days. And Jean is a board member of Richards and I know Jean has a seaplane that he likes to fly, and we'll hear a little bit about that on the show. We're excited to have Katie Coleman, who certainly circumnavigated the earth a lot. She was six months on the International Space Station, I think she had a key role and one of the telescopes that helps us chart the world. And while she's on Earth, her husband who's a remarkable glassblower, creates art that celebrates our planet. And maybe we'll hear or hear from her too. And I know Allison really cares about transportation and the future of getting from one place to another. I'm a passionate bicyclist. And so that's sort of my contribution for transportation. But Richard, I understand when you were a young kid, you had the apple to Wii U, you did some interesting programming, and the principle of your high school quit to be the marketer of a company that you started. Before you even got your pilot's license, maybe describe what you were like, what were some of the things you accomplished? And maybe how does that reveal the kind of entrepreneur the kind of daring guy you are?
Well, my parents were horrified that I got a pilot's license. They're afraid of flying. They wanted me to be a boater they envisioned that in their retirement, I'd take them sailing or something. And so there was no parental pressure or influence to be a pilot whatsoever. It was just the opposite. I started in high school, they gave us 10 days to do a project. I rewrote the operating system of the apple to added security and then later bubble memory and, and made it an actual machine that could store data and do something. And the state university systems in Florida bought my software. And I was doing tech support for one of the deans and he asked me how old I was. And I was honest, and he said we have this program where the team that created the IBM PC in Boca Raton, Florida will be your professors and the folks at Motorola doing vlsr chip fabrication with the flip phones and the pagers they'll back up the IBM team and this is the best place for computer education in the world right now. And you'll skip two years of college and will pay for it was called the faculty Scholars Program. And I tore up my acceptance to case they were going to give me two dorm rooms to run my computer software company from the dorm and went to FAU and no one understood it no one had heard of that school but it was an amazing place to start from there it was the mathematics of Route Optimization for phone companies and then for airplanes and then on top of that gets built very jet but that's a longer story.
So Richard, why don't you tell us tell us a little bit about the planes that you that make up your fleet How big is your fleet at this point and what what what do you love about your planes your you're so proud of them I've flown with you with them you're the pilot and and it's a unique plane where it has a jet and only one pilot and I guess there's a button that if you as the pilot or whoever was piloting it can land itself but maybe describe this this remarkable plane that you're building your your company on
so we just got our next two baby pictures it's November to six Victor Julia Victor Juliet for Vera jet and November to seven Victor Julia. And wherever you're heading right now we have 15 We'll have 15 on certificate by the end of December and heading for 30 and then 150 and then upwards from there. This is the safest jet ever made. It is the quietest jet ever made. It's 50 decibels quieter than stage for noise requirements. We flew to overhead at Pensacola and an event that Jr arranged and they were in audible on the ground. That's it's just unheard of. This is the most fuel efficient jet ever made. I just tried to establish it's not certified yet the world efficiency record for jets. I was at altitude burning 39 gallons an hour, that's more like a Cadillac escalate than it is a jet. These things go Mach point five, three a little bit more than half the speed of sound, and burn 56 gallons an hour at maximum continuous thrust. Again, this is unheard of efficiency. And then on top of all this the aircraft has a parachute system, it will land itself in case of severe emergency, a rocket motor blows a parachute. out the nose, a three point harness lowers the airplane gently to the ground and you walk away uninjured. But before that the plane can land itself. If the pilot is incapacitated, you press the red button and the passengers can command the AI on board the airplane to land. And before all of that the AI wraps you in this envelope of safety and protects against mistakes that the pilots can make. Literally, this is the safest, most efficient, most comfortable jet ever built. And that's what we based our fleet on we intend to be the safest airline. On and for the planet. That's what we're doing here.
So Richard, I see. In addition to Katie, we also have Esther, I want to welcome them in a moment. But Richard, I know you broke a record. I think Amelia Earhart held it, can you maybe tell us a little bit about your your flying credentials, not that you're a pilot, but what are some of the records you
so I hold the three kilometer low altitude record, the original records were recorded by high speed cameras by observer sets the Federation aeronautique International, that certifies these things. And to beat those original records, you have to do the same thing. So the three kilometer low altitude is you're below 50 feet doing figure eights along the highway that we closed during the XPrize cup. And you do three of them to balance out the wind direction. And the three kilometers goes by in just seconds. It's it's quite something. And then I have the 15 kilometer high altitude. Most recently, and this has yet to be verified the closed course distance record. So that was set in the 1960s by an Italian fighter trainer at about 900 miles. And with the vision jet, we just extended that to about 1200 miles. So that should be certified soon. And then instead of seven records, I'll have maybe 12 or 14, we'll see what which comes through.
Great. So you have this fleet of planes. And you're a computer scientist by training. And but it's not the planes alone. It's the fact that there are all these airports around the country that you want to take advantage of maybe expand on that point. And then after you do that I want to go around the room and see what people's interests are on this topic of the future of flight. So, you know hear from Allison Katie, Esther.
So Esther is an Esther Dyson close friend has a conference called Flight School. And Esther pulled together the best charter operators in the US. So you had I don't know, probably net chats and XL and all these folks. I remember Paul towel for Mexico at this particular panel. And at the time Esther didn't drive and she needed to go from Naples to Orlando to keynote speech. Yoshi invented angel investing. She's amazing. So thrilled to be here with her. But anyway, they took her to the wrong airport. They were all going to take her to Orlando International, so the fuel prices are like $3 More gallon. You tie up your equipment taxing over enormous runways, but more importantly, it could be an hour away from her hotel and traffic. I personally flew her to Kissimmee. And we landed maybe seven minutes from her hotel and because there's no scheduled service at Kissimmee, Carrie limousine could come right onto the tarmac. We put out a red carpet, we move the bags from my airplane to the limo and Esther's at our hotel in seven minutes. And she is like Jean Valentino. She's the first investor in coastal aviation, the first stair to press the I believe button. So cool to be talking with you and hurt at the same time. The CEO of SATs era, then stood up and said, We won't make that mistake, we won't take you to the wrong airport, because we just signed up with Richards company coastal. So that's where it started. And you've just brought everything full circle.
Great. So I don't know if you answered my question in terms of the small airports around the country. How many are there? I mean, I kind of think of Jeff Bezos driving across country when he was thinking about creating an internet company that took advantage of the internet. Aren't you taking advantage of a resource that that already exists? And as these AI fiber planes AI enabled fiber planes, one jet? Yes, you're going to you're going to be able to do something that isn't being done right now, the a the three ATS from Airbus or the 787, or Dreamliners can't.
So this is a NASA program called the small aircraft transportation system. It was unlocking the 5400 airports in our national fabric that are completely underutilized they're less than 1% utilized. 98% of us live within 20 miles of one or more of those airports. So we can take you from your origin to your destination and give you an average door to door travel speed of 300 miles an hour. When you fly commercial and you're flying short haul, your average speed is 75 miles an hour. And that's what NASA was trying to fix. There's this chart called the hubs of misery, I showed it at the TED Talk. And and it literally is the hubs of mystery. When you go through the hubs, your travel speed can drop to 60 miles an hour and you miss your flights and there's horrible delays. And the whole thing is a shopping experience rather than the travel experience. What we aim to do with very chat, what NASA started 25 years ago is take you right to where you want to go to. So today that's the vision jet. It descends from a NASA prototype funded by Williams, the engine manufacturer and NASA, built by Burt Rutan, the same team that built spaceship one, which we'll talk about later suborbital point to point but it was to demonstrate the utility of a single engine carbon fiber flight deck optimized single pilot machine that could land at very low approach speeds and use very short runways. And that's the key to unlocking these 5400 airports. I also funded a Lindbergh grant on the pilot self separation of aircraft about 15 years ago, that helped lead to some of the capabilities we have now with a DSP. That was the last part of this 25 year project that went into force of law, January 1 2020. Airplanes now report who they are, where they are, where they're going, electronically, much more accurate than radar. And it lets us do pilot self separation. And it lets us light up this underutilized fabric of airports. It's game changing. Now you have all weather approaches to 5400 airports, it used to just be the hubs with iOS systems. So it's, this has been a long time coming, but this is the fourth wave of high speed travel. And then
I see Dawn Ailes is in the audience. He wrote the code to land on the moon when Apollo was getting going. So you know, we may hear from him. And I know, he tried. You're you're you're playing and he may have some things to say. So let's just go around the room. Allison. Great to see you. I know you track a lot of trends, and transportation is one that you're passionate about. Any any top of mind thoughts?
Well, definitely, I mean, first of all, Richard and Jean, it was a total delight when John and you gave us access during the Boston TEDx that he ran, it was really an experience that was sort of combined luxury travel, green travel, because I think you haven't quite yet shared your ambitions, Richard for how how the future of air Platt aircraft could play a role in actually greening the skies. And then of course, it was just the most spectacular view and experience and quite that safety feature to have that red button. I do wonder what it'd be like if commercial jets, something like that. So I would love to just hear a little bit more from me to you about how you came up with this business model. I mean, each of you is looked at flight, looked at the challenges, I'd love to know, which features you promoted, what you dropped and how you came up with this unique combination.
So I spent a decade routing phone calls 100 million phone calls an hour, 14 billion calls a month, software as a service basis. 68% EBITA was a company that threw off lots of cash. I read the technology curves that cellular would increase traffic law, compute and storage would decrease and the difference between those curves gave me some dollars to play with. On the board of that company was Peter Diamandis, founder of XPrize he's a pilot, I'm a pilot. We thought it would be more interesting to route fleets of aircraft than just falling costs, more social impact, more economic impact. I was tackling the 40% Empty problem. We were flying heavy metal jets and we were flying them empty to go pick up people and doing a terrible job just not managing them properly, and not managing them across carriers. So delta private jets, which was a managed fleet, it's not a Delta branded pilot and uniform with a Delta plane. It's a third party already planted in a third party pilot is going empty across the country and jet links and other managed operators going in the other direction. And they're just flying empty crossing each other. And if you could virtualize some of that, and just within each of these carriers, if you could optimize it more effectively, you could get it down to 20%. Well, the best operators in the US now run my AI and they run about 20% efficient, as opposed to, um, excuse me 20% empty as opposed to 40% empty. So we fix that that's about as good as you can get it. But we were still flying heavy metal jets on short hops, in average passenger count of 1.8 people. So for example, Santa Monica to Las Vegas, is 200 nautical miles. There's no time for a heavy metal jet that's tuned to go high and fast, to climb to high altitude and be efficient. We were on the ramp at Santa Monica. That's an airport that's under threat because of environmental noise and safety concerns. They've shortened the runway, they're trying to close it. When a challenger 604 lands. It's horribly noisy, it's using thrust reversers I told my audience of pop stars in sports stars 26 of them that this can't be a charter flight, this has to be privately owned, because the runway is too short. And one person gets in and goes to Las Vegas, filed at 19,000 feet, where they're burning enormous quantities of fuel. And 280 miles an hour, which is the 247 knots I told everybody would be the average, every reason they want to close Santa Monica materialized in the form of this challenger. And they wanted to carbon shame the bank that owned it. And like please don't do that. Let's give them a better alternative. Because when it's less than four people in less than 700 miles, it should always be on a vision jet better for the environment safer, quieter, and it takes you to the short runway where you need to go. So that's the second problem we were tackling first the 40% of the and then using the right tool for the job. Think of it as the software fix, and then the hardware fix.
Alison, do you have a follow up question before I go to Katie,
can you say a little bit more Richard about who you sign up for your services and who you see at the end customer? I mean, is this for the 1% for the 1.0 10%? I mean, how far do you think this model could go in the current US population. So my
target is not other charter companies. And it's not the 1%. My target is airliners. And when you have more than two people traveling, and you have no direct service, and you're going to a business meeting, so you need three hotel rooms and a rental car and you can't get back home to your family at night. That's my target. And my goal is to drop the cost of charter to where that target is accessible. So we get 30 to 40% more efficiency from the AI that's managing our fleet. And we get another 40 to 50% from our single engine, single pilot carbon fiber light jet. You take that together, it's the first thing to threaten at least the first class cabins of the airliners. And that's where we're going. This has never been possible before. And so that's 1100 jets in the US 900 jets in Europe, our certificate from the FAA says airline operating certificate and that's where we're going. That doesn't democratize travel. But our next fleet type will be the beta Alia, that costs $45 To top off with electricity is probably 1000 times safer than a helicopter it takes off vertically, it's very quiet. Conceivably, your costs are now what Uber charges for ground transportation. So 80% of the world's population has never been above ground level. Something like the beta Alia is the machine that can open up access to air travel and just the experience of seeing the Earth from above. You know the way that Katie sees from the ISS and has that Halo view of the world 80% of us has never even been above the ground, and we the next machine in our fleet type is cheap enough to actually fix that problem. And since I'm on a soapbox, why pave over Africa and spend a trillion dollars on concrete and all the phosphates and carbon that goes with all of that, why not just to EV talls preserve the natural environment. And they would hopscotch us on roadways the way that they hopped over copper phone lines, and went right to 5g and have the highest rate of wireless adoption. That's the kind of sea change. We're talking about completely democratizing travel. And so it's no longer private travel. It will be the definition of insanity to get on an airliner and connect somewhere when your trip is less than 700 miles and you could fly with us directly in perfect safety. That's what you Richard on
the on this point. Is there any data regarding drones in Africa? That point To this point that you're just making that reinforce what you just said.
So if I say Rwanda to you, you may think genocide and machetes and horror. And if I told you that there's going to be 200,000, drone flights in Rwanda this year, carrying medical supplies and blood, you might be astonished. But the reality is a drive that takes six hours, that can only be made in a military grade four wheel drive over rutted roads, with all dangerous is now being done by a drone in 20 minutes at almost no cost and no pollution. And it's been running today. It's been running for a couple of years. And that's the solution to the lack of infrastructure. And so now this is very, very real. I've seen the teams that do this.
And right now you have like, 15. So you're you you started an airline. And you know, many, there's a graveyard of all the people who tried to start airlines and their businesses failed. But you're not going to fail, you're on a mission, maybe kind of explain before I go around the room to get questions. Explain your you know, your ambition with your airline, why are you going to succeed? And what's the differentiator.
So one of my board members at Coastal aviation was Phil Beck's is the former CEO of Eastern and Continental. And I loved him dearly and amazing man, but he told me Richard, don't start an airline, whatever you do, don't start an airline. And I had to wait for him to pass away until I started an airline. And you have to be a complete idiot to start an airline, you really do. It's an uphill battle. However, my direct operating cost on the Cirrus vision jet is about $700 an hour. And my highest retail price for the general public is 30 to 50 an hour, that's for six seats, if you think about it as $500 a seat, that's about what we're looking at. It's four times our direct operating cost. No airline has ever had that before. And it goes to the efficiency of the jet and the efficiency of our AI based operations. So you take that together at skill, we have about 50% EBIT. That is extraordinary for any company. But for an airline, it's nearly impossible.
And you're taking advantage of all these, these these airports that are within 20 miles of every US, American.
We go right around the traffic trips. So the day of the TEDx presentation, American just canceled 1400 flights, they couldn't reposition around those hubs and their routing computers melted. Our routing program is easily 10,000 times more powerful than what they run their problem is Teterboro Palm Beach, Palm Beach, Newark or whatever. Ours is random chaos with 5400 airports.
Richard, let me let me we'll come back to this. Let me have Katie, Esther, and Dawn, just each share a question or what's on their mind on this topic, the future of flight. And we'll have Richard and his his board member Jean, kind of really react to your thoughts. So let's stack three questions. Katie, our favorite astronaut, I think you were the 20th. US woman to fly. And I know you're, you're You're a legend, and so many for so many people. Thank you for joining us. Katie, what's your question on the future of flight?
So I guess I have a couple. I mean, one one is if if this is what you're brainstorming about, you know, in terms of like, you talked about the models for communication, then applied to airliners, I'd love to know what else you think about in terms of what else can be solved with this kind of thinking.
So the optimization actually here, Richard, let's just stockpile these questions. Katie, I know you were former Air Force. Is there anything else you want to? Like? What's the question behind that question? Yeah,
well, I figured this is our couple couple minutes to look into people who really are great at looking ahead and being in thinking really differently. So I'd love to hear other things are thinking about, but then have a practical question, which is, um, so what's the minimum, like when you talk about all these other other runways? Or what is the minimum runway length? And how can those airports start to get themselves ready to be a better part of your solution?
So Richard, you should be writing this down, you know, because we're gonna have you address all these. And Katie lives in Western Mass like when she wants to fly, she has to come into Logan and you would probably have a solution for all right, Esther, let's go to you. Let's, let's get a few thoughts from you. And then Don, and then we'll have Richard to address them.
So first of all, Richard, thank you so much for reminding me about flight school, which, unfortunately, is no longer exists, but you're making me think I should revive it. The basic vision then is what you're doing now, which is you know, when FedEx started everything went to Memphis and then went somewhere else because we couldn't deal with complexity. And now FedEx is completely distributed. And you're looking at doing the same thing with airplanes. And I'm curious what's happening. I assume you're dynamically scheduling all these things. And everything's kind of optimized. And you're looking at densities, and you probably have dynamic pricing. someone's willing to wait half an hour to go with somebody else. I don't know. But I'd love to hear more about that. That's partly Katie's question. There are so many things in the world that need to be better scheduled, and including Uber is doing much the same thing with cars in some way. But two other things that I just saw. This past week, that might be germane one. I was on a flight from Tel Aviv back to New York. And I was the only person looking at the window, which was shocking. I thought, I we flew right over Rome, I got a new, best from wrong. I agree. Just seeing seeing the world from the air. Is, is amazing. And then the third thing is when I lived in Rwanda, in Morocco, it's the biggest town in Morocco nobody's ever heard of outside of Morocco was basically on a camel route between Marrakech and Algeria. They used to shut down a little piece of the highway every Tuesday and Friday, so that the Air France Flight could land, the one coming in from Paris. And I'm wondering, you know, maybe not Western Massachusetts, but Montana or something. You don't really need an airport, you just need somebody willing to shut down the highway for a bit. So you can land. And I'm wondering, I'm assuming you're looking at that as well. Anyway, some thoughts and questions.
Thank you, Esther. And now I want to turn to dawn, what's on your mind, Dawn was one of the coders that wrote the code the land on the moon. He was, you know, he knew a Neil Armstrong and other astronauts, and he did a hack that made sure Apollo 14 worked out. So Don, what's on what's on your mind, and I know you flown in one of Richard's planes.
Oh, it's like your John. And I'll say to begin with that the airplane is delightful. You know, it has large windows, you would love to be in this airplane, if you were flying over Rome, or any other picturesque destination. I haven't really got any questions, I do find the, you know, the economic argument persuasive with respect to business travel. However, at this point in my life, I don't do business travel. And I seldom travel with four or five other people. So I'm afraid it's sort of priced out of my reach in terms of using this sort of service a lot. But for that business situation, and especially when at one end of the other, a smaller airport is involved. It seems very persuasive. I suppose a great many trips would either originate at or end at a major airport. And I suppose that does affect the the economic argument. The other thing I would say is that it's not just the travelers that would need to be persuaded because as I say, the airplane is delightful. And, but the travel departments in the corporation for which the business people are traveling, would have to become convinced that this was really advantageous. And perhaps that would be a harder argument than the argument to the people who get to experience the flight.
Done. We didn't really get a question out of you. So can you tell us something about what it was like writing the code to land on the moon? Take us back 52 years?
Oh, John, if you know very well, I can talk for hours about that and would be happy to again at some,
maybe just say one thing like,
but I wouldn't say that what we were doing on Apollo really was the origins of digital fly by wire. And that's a historical fact of the sense that the very first NASA experiments with digital fly by wire and an F eight aircraft, were literally done with an a surplus Apollo Guidance Computer. There are photographs that show the Apollo keyboard unit built into the side of that airplane if you if you look for them, and it was amazing. To me to see the mature or relatively mature development of the digital fly by wire concept that although I wasn't in the front seat didn't follow all the inputs to the software that were being made. But it does seem that the airplane is very highly automated. The return to a safe landing site button, of course, is part of that. And I just will say that I was very impressed.
For those who can't imagine this button. It's like the easy button at Staples a big red button. Allison, can you maybe comment on our three questioners any observation? The questions are asking, and then we'll get Richard, our Imaginator to kind of take them on.
I think the questions came through perfectly. So Richard, go for it.
Yeah, but Alison, in terms of the trend of the questions, is there any, any any anything you want to say on it?
No, I think that. So Alison
thinks they're great questions. Richard, go for it.
So we have a serious problem, because I would rather hear from Don and Katie and Esther, I'm totally starstruck, like, so I'll do my best. So the run on the vision jet is 3000 feet, we have a new version of it with 20% Better takeoff performance and 1000 foot less ground roll, that's a huge jump, they just added power to the engine. And so that's better for high end hot places like Aspen at 104 degrees in the summer. And so our first jets in December all have that feature, but it's 3000 feet for division jet. And that's what we fly today. The beta Alia it's no feat. It's vertical takeoff, and we're going to be putting in prefabricated, very jet verta ports. And they have a battery pack, they have a boarding area, they have the crew lounge, they have rest, you stop, you top it off 400 miles of range in 15 minutes, and off you go. And so that's where this is going in marriage, it is pivoting to a real estate company, where we're looking for places to put these reports. Think of it as a prefabricated helpen. But crazy safe. I want to touch on something Don said, this really shocked me there's a I have a good imagination, but there's things I don't see coming. So I'm presenting to our insurance company. Two things happened. One is their principal asked permission for her company to invest in vergeben. She did. So when your insurance company invests in you know, you've passed the safety check the the Managing Director, that was incredible. But they said to me, Richard, you don't understand what you're saying here, by not bringing the executive who has the key man insurance policy to the big airport. And then he has to drive an hour to the factory site that he's visiting, you can take an hour of that drive time off the road and reduce his risk. And we're going to mandate the use of Vera jet to get these executives off the road, starting with the ones with the highest keyman insurance. I never saw that coming. So it's just the opposite. It's not the executive saying I want to fly private. It's the company and their insurer saying you must fly very edge it to your ultimate destination. And then when it's the beta Leon, it's right next door. That's Game Over
on the question about what else I see. So I'm working with IBM Quantum lab. I've been working for a year with their quantum facility in Melbourne, Australia. So because it's Australia, I'm solving a problem yesterday, which is hilarious. And the traveling salesman problem is something that you don't calculate an answer to you wrestle to the ground with brute force. And I routinely use hundreds of computer cores and an entire data center to try and eke some efficiency out of this. And I can sell you a flight in just a few milliseconds. But I can't reshuffle the entire deck. And so I might tell everyone, there's no availability for 20 or 30 minutes. And I might leave money on the table, or I might not have the most efficient routing, which means more carbon footprint for the planet. With quantum computing, it looks like I can reshuffle the whole deck in a few seconds. So that kind of firepower. If you manage all the taxis in Manhattan, that way, you would only need a third of the taxes and so you could make huge gains. Right now the AI that I'm running for the best floating fleet operators saves 800,000 metric tons of carbon footprint every month. That's like 98 billion cell phone chargers or 173,000 cars on the road. So these are material impacts that we could make with AI. So I look at the what else and part of that answer is optimization and we're just scratching the surface The other part of the answer is spaceship one. So Burt Rutan designed the prototype that illustrated the short runway single pilot concept. But he also built spaceship one, I was there at the x 1x. Two launches, I was one of 100 people that funded the original XPrize 17 years later, my daughter is now 17. And we're at last Crucis watching Richard Branson fly into suborbital space, and glide down very elegant solution. Well, spaceship three, if you tweaked it to be a little bit more flatter trajectory, you could be anywhere on the surface of the Earth in two hours. So with the beta Alia will let you commute to work, I plan to get some boom supersonic machines that's anywhere in the US in two hours, with spaceship one anywhere on the planet and two hours. And we can do these things that they're relatively environmentally friendly. So that's where this is going to Esther's point, we've turned a miracle of technology into a cattle car. The pilots are miserable, the passengers are miserable. The hubs of misery are terrible. Part of our vision is to restore joy and dignity to flying. For both the passengers and the pilots. Our plane is a very small airplane. It is a very intimate cabin, if the pilot is not happy, the passengers are not going to enjoy the experience. On the other hand, if the pilot is enthusiastic and shares their love of flying, then she's going to be able to light up the passengers. And they're going to look at those big windows which are bigger than most because we're carbon fiber. And just communicate that joy of the whole experience. People who are afraid of flying who don't want to get in our airplanes. Invest in our company because they hate airlines, they hate airplanes, they put half of their family on Delta and half on United, because they don't want to all die in the same plane crash. And 15 minutes after my demo flight in the safety speech. They declare we only want to fly virgin and invest in the company. There's one family. It's Robert Altman, who's in Tuscaloosa. He has a roofing company, it was taking him a day and a half. To get to his meetings in a day and a half to get back three days, roundtrip. Tuscaloosa lost all its air surface before COVID. It lost their essential air service subsidies. It's this vibrant city. It's the home of the University of Alabama. And it has an abandoned airline terminal. It's the craziest thing. So used to be able to drive to Birmingham that an hour and a half away and couch, couch Southwest and then southwest with COVID Pear Deck their schedule, so he's got this disaster. And this is an exact quote now. It takes me three days to get to one meeting and back with Vera jet. I can get to three meetings in one day and be home to my family at night. But that's not why I invested I invested because I've never felt safer. I mean, your point and all my team members are now going to fly virgin. So I think that hits all the questions. That's kind of an overview of where we're going. Hi, John, did I lose everyone?
I don't think you lost us. That that was fantastic, Richard and totally wonderful answers. Jean, maybe you want to come in and just share a little bit about your experience being on the board of Vera jet.
Thank you, Alison. Thank you everybody for having us. I came on the board of virgin having served as a CEO and founder of a technology company of my own. That was payment processing in the early days. And prior to that it was cellular I was the president and owner of cellular one for Central California of all crazy circumstances. I won the license in a lottery that the federal government had in place at that time, there was the attempt of government to open up this big utility to John Doe and Jane Doe. The public can become owners in a in a in a utility and by the grace of God I won the lottery for all of Central California and became president and owner of cellular one which was the precursor to the Sprint's in the Verizon at the time I me and my 20 shareholders couldn't spell cellular let alone understand it, but very quickly, and we did what the government had intended and that to get boned up and tooled up, both technologically and financially to build out this infrastructure. In our area for Central California in the course of three and a half years, four years we had put up about 100 69 of these cellular towers, you see, water tanks, billboards, sides of the road all over the. And one of the technologies, one of the parts of the technology in cellular had to do with what's referred to as the Erling formula. The airline formula was a loading requirement or a technology that helped balance off the, the stresses of one tower to another. You ever wonder. In the early days of cellular, you'd say, Yeah, I could use the phone down in this area of town. But as soon as I will, across Main Street and got up to Piedmont street, I lost the signal, but then it picked up again a mile away. When I continued down the road, that was the concept of negative history, recent history sis, dual diversity. And these terms had to do with load balancing of of the of the, of the flow. Fast forward to Richard Kane, I had the privilege of meeting Richard through the icon aircraft company, I think he was interested in learning more about the icon because the icon, which is a light sport aircraft, I fly has two things very much in common with the Cirrus Vera jet branded aircraft. And that is that they're both carbon fiber. And they're both have that, as John referred to the big
red button. In the in the ceiling, it had the ability to land itself, the but it also had the parachute. So it had the the carbon fiber and the parachute system in it. Although each aircraft with different ends of the technology and performance spectrum, we became good friends during that process, Richard had an idea that we literally that I literally watched him pencil out on the back of an envelope, while we set in the fixed base operation in Tampa, Florida some two years ago. And I said this is something we're going to have to take a harder look at, I came to realize Richard had found the solution for load balancing, instead of going from anywhere USA and landing in Atlanta, waiting two to four hours for your next flight. Instead of going through the turmoil and tension of TSA, instead of going through the process of managing your baggage. And then finding out that you're only flying to another hub, that doesn't get you very close to your final destination. Richard had described in the airline formula, you know, in language associated with air transportation, the way I was using the Erlang formula to describe handoff parameters in a telephone call. And so are two very different worlds had met on a common concept that we both that we both understood. What was even more amazing is that this emulated what he was truly trying to achieve. And that's being able to use this phone app that we that John had introduced us to today for this phone call, being able to use the phone app, just as Uber does, for getting picked up by Uber, why not use the same type of phone app to get picked up by Uber certainly, but then to also have Uber take you to the tarmac, stepping out of Uber onto a red carpet, getting into the the very jet aircraft and having very jet fly you most directly to your final destination. So you knew ahead of time, when you were booking it by Uber, what your total cost would be on the fly instantaneously, and commit to it. And then have it come get you literally as fast as Uber but in most cases, as we know, more practically it would be usually a day or two or three out. But the idea is that the decentralization of these big metal hubs with metallic aircraft that are not likely that are more costly, more noisy, and less green are taking you in effectively to your final destination. Unlike the way Vera jet can do it. That's what I
mean. I want to ask you a question and then I'm going to go around the room, again. It's my understanding that before the Wright brothers did their first flight, there was a flight on a lake and I think in Europe in Germany, and they got the weight wrong, so it didn't work. But if it if they had gotten the weight right, I think a flight before the Wright brothers would have been off a lake. I know that you are a pilot and you have a seaplane just curious if you have any thoughts on, on what the future of flight has to do with bodies of water.
I think there is a difference without distinction. Richard addressed it earlier when he talked about EV tall, the vertical takeoffs and landings. And the that issue you just described, John is wide. The Board of Directors under Richards leadership has led to the decision of purchasing see planes as part of the fleet. For Vera jet. It's it's it's transportation that has fewer blockers, fewer roadblocks, and difficulties in in bringing to fruition then, maybe even 10 years ago, 50 years ago. See plane travel is in many cases, the corollary the corollary due to to flight it picks up where very gently leaves off. I was just had guests over at my house today and one left from my hangar earlier today by an end landed in Houston, Texas, hour and a half later, two hours later. And he was landing on a seaplane he was landing on the water strip next to the land strip at the same fixed base operation just outside of Houston. So to answer your question, I think it's, it's, it's a difference without distinction. I think the roofs of many of these empty parking garages will become perfect landing strips for the evtol aircraft of the future. And connect to Uber, the same way I was describing Uber would be connecting to Vera jet.
Great, thanks, Jean. Now, let me go around the room. You know, also you make me think of I think when Eisenhower spent a lot of money on on us infrastructure, he made sure some of the Federal Highways had straight lines every few miles, so they could be landed on. And I think that was seeing, seeing how Europe how Germany had built some of their roads. But let's go around the room. And this show is imagination and action. We're talking about the future flight. And Richard is a daring guy, he's building his own airline, and this show isn't an infomercial for his airline. But I think what he's doing with his airline is is, is revolutionary. And, you know, I remember when people got blackberries, they they didn't go mainstream very quickly. And now everyone has a smartphone, you know, I do wonder if these kind of boutique type planes are just for the very rich, or if it's going to trickle down and, and everyone's gonna, you know, be impacted by it. And I know there's a green dimension, there's an AI dimension. There's a lot of things going on here. But let's let's let's hear from people in the room. Josh, you know, he's one of my heroes. He's his artists in the Smithsonian, is one of the most sought after glass artists in the world. And I know you're a passionate pilot, and you have, I think, a turbo plane, in your garage, or in your, you know, in your backyard. And what's your math? Do you have a question? And let's stack a few questions. So I'm going to go around the room. So God, what do you got?
Well, it's true. Both my wife and I are pilots. And I'm just thinking about the 5400 airports in the country and how we have landed in some godforsaken crazy out of the way places at times in our, in our lives. And I've just been thinking and kind of smiling and laughing at the possibility of some of these airports having Uber for or I actually think that you could cause an amazing infrastructure change in this whole process. That is that it Deer Island, Maine or at Turners Falls, Massachusetts or any of these tiny little airports that don't really have any services at all at the moment. I think there's there's that I, I imagine that you can foresee some kind of growth in the infrastructure around these tiny little airports.
So Is that your question? Like? Maybe Maybe state your question. Before I go to Allison?
Well, it's, it's it's just, there's there's, do you see a lag in build out of, and services being available? When you arrive in in an airport that is 3400 feet long, but there's literally nothing there.
Great. Thank you, Josh. Allison, my favorite time watcher, I know your transportation is dear to your heart. I'm sure you have.
Sure. Well, Richard and Jean, I mean, I think it's so exciting what you're building. And just as you're describing it, it's easy to see how this could take off in the future. But I wonder if you as futurist reinventing aerospace travel, could paint us a picture of what you see this building to in 2050, on at least a couple of dimensions, like, you know, what will the pilot of the future look like? Will anyone be able to pilot these planes? Will they be autonomous? What will the competitive ecosystem look like? Do you think it will be sort of you can 3d print one of these planes in your garage? Or how do you see that developing? And then how do you see terrestrial aerospace matching up to outer space? Or near Earth space travel of the type that Katie has has led? Where do you think by 2050? will be? And will those merge together?
I love your question, Alison. And you make me think of Safari, airline flights, you know, would you would you just go places not to get to a place but to go have an experience. And maybe this could facilitate it was a great question, Alison, Esther, then Katie, then Todd, and Don. And if you don't have a question, feel free to pass. So I want to recognize that I see Kelly in the room. Kelly's made a tool available to us where we're recording tonight's show. And soon after the show, we're going to post the transcript and the audio. And thank you, Kelly, for building this great network. And this great platform for shows like this. Kelly's one of the leaders of clubhouse. So Esther, another any?
Do you have enough? Yeah, I just want I'd love to hear Richard talk a little. Dick. What's interesting here is a, we've spent sort of the last couple of centuries. Working on economies of scale, everything's mass produced there, airport hubs, they're giant conglomerates. And now suddenly, we're seeing a sort of different trend with, if you'd like decentralization, you're doing it with aircraft and travel, 3d printing, which Ellison just mentioned in somewhat different contexts. You know, it's the same thing. You can get stuff locally, you can design things, it's just as cheap to build one or two of them. And to build it at your house as it is to go get it out of a big factory. Do you see us becoming decentralized? I mean, this is interesting question right now, during the time of the pandemic, and everybody's kind of sitting somewhere remote. On zoom. Talk a little bit about the future from that perspective, this this whole, you know, the decentralization of everything. And do we still want cities? I kind of think we do. But I also think there's a lot of people that want to live in Jackson Hole.
Yeah, no, great. Thank you, Esther. And, you know, this shows about Imaginators. And the way Richard referred to that event that you curated years ago, you you you've been Imaginator throughout your life. So thank you, for your example. Katie, Todd, Don, let's see if you guys have questions. And Richard Oh.
Well, I'm, I'm pretty excited about this in terms of even just the access to places that are inaccessible for a lot of different reasons, you know, some of our sustainability solutions are going to be in places where it's hard to get to them, just being able to monitor the earth and in going, you know, see what it's like on the ground in different places. Because, you know, think places are really remote. So I think this has a lot of potential. I'm, I'm a fan, but I'd love to know, what are the challenges now that we're all sold? What are the things that you know, might be folks on this call that can they can help or have suggestions is it you know, the government is slower to recognize this kind of progress and puts road bumps or not puts road bumps in the way but there are speed bumps in the way that are, you know, in the way of thought making progress. We would love to know what, what kind of stuff you could use help with.
Great. And before we go to Todd Katie, can you maybe just tell us one thing about your adventures on the International Space Station, I know there were many countries represented in your your crew and your son, and your husband were down on earth. You know, that's something that not everyone gets to experience, having a parent in space, but maybe take us to the International Space Station for a moment, as we think about the
boy, I think the view is, is here and I know that when I came home actually didn't want to come home yet, I would have stayed another six months, in a minute. And actually, I didn't want to sit by the window for a while. So Esther, I might have been one of those people in that I just if I couldn't be up there, I sort of didn't want to have that view. And the thing is that we do have that view, you know, down here on the earth as well, the fact that you can just see things from a higher perspective and see, see a bigger picture really makes a big difference. And the predominant perspective from think is that looking down when you realize that everyone except the five or six of you that are in space, or Now that's more like what 10 1214 We count all the space stations. Anyway.
So Katie, in terms of numbers, were you the 20th American female to be in space? And have you traveled 90 million?
At least 90 million? I don't know what number and then to me, it didn't it didn't matter. But it actually well just say not enough, you know, women and as a couple asked him, you know, what's it like to be, you know, black PlayStation, he says the biggest thing is, I'm just really glad I won't be the last. But back to that. But back to that view. And what we see, I think most of us would agree that when you look back at the Earth, it's that every place on the earth is connected and everyone is on the earth can is connected. And I think things like this, make people you know, gives us the ability to connected and make the solutions together. So
and another connection Katie had was on the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight or birthday. I know you did a duet with Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, you played a flute duet, as you are hurtling around the Earth at 1800 miles an hour. Someone was on earth, do wedding with you. And thank you for that celebration. And here's to the next 50 years.
Hey, thanks. But actually, my favorite connection on this panel is Esther Dyson, of course, because we trained together in Star City, and I was getting ready to go. And it really made an immense difference. And plus, I got to explore Esther's world. I mean, people were mentioning that she's the inventor of angel investing. And as you can imagine, that was a really unique world for me to have a little window into. And life for me is never best her.
Yeah, actually, you know, let's digress for 10 seconds. Katie and Esther you have something in common in that you lived and trained in Star City? You know, people have an image of NASA, but maybe tell us a little bit about the the Russian space program and anything that people may not be aware of in terms of flight and their role in it. Sir Ivan.
Okay, so first, I wasn't the inventor of angel investing,
but I was, you're the inventor of everything else good.
Whatever. The amazing thing, over the years, rush, Russia, Russia, the Soviet Union and the US have had a very tense relationship. And that's even true to some extent of Ross cosmos, and NASA. But among the cosmonauts, and the astronauts, it you know, they were just people, they were people up in space living together. And for the record, I did not make it up into space I just trained, but the that that small, little tight link between the two space communities persisted through an awful lot of challenging times, and it still persists for the what? Now we now have Elon Musk, and again, we have some of our own lift, but for I don't know what, 10 or 15 years, the only way for the American astronauts to get up to station was on the Russian Soyuz, which is what Katie trained on a lot of things I've trained just for that one, but you know, and so I was there as a guest. Not of NASA, but ironically Ross cosmetics through a company called Space Adventures. That is the company that sent the first so called space tourists up in the space and For what it's worth, there's a big difference from what's happening right now where you kind of go to the edge of space and look around, versus actually going up to the space station and living there for a couple of weeks, the NASA astronauts and the Russians would stay for months. But it was, it was an amazing place. And I had the luck of being embedded with amazing people like Katie and all her NASA colleagues.
Katie, I just saw a documentary, I think, on Netflix that you're in. And I think in that documentary, Kennedy was mentioned as having given a speech saying that maybe the US and Russians could work together and going to the moon, and you know, everyone knows that, that he was killed in 63. Do you know, any insight into that, what would the US have let Russia do a joint adventure to the moon or it was like a throwaway line in that in that document.
I do not have further insight I had heard that was true. And I think it speaks to the power of individual people having an idea and persisting with the vision that they've got. And unfortunately, he was not around to persist with that vision. Even though Esther said that, you know, it is very different. And I agree, it is actually quite different to go to space and live there, which I really, really loved. But then to just then to see the view. And at the same time, you know, seeing the view is a changing experience. And and I think it's a really great opportunity, or it's a great time for more and more people to see that view. And some of those people being people of means and vision. I think it's very valuable for them to see that view and then get back to Earth and realize that there's a lot of work to do that they hadn't really been able to sort of feel in a visceral way. So I'm a big fan of the going to the edge of the earth. I go on any of these trips, actually, I'm an enthusiastic space person, as you can tell. Here.
Thanks, Katie. Con and done. I want to get back to Richard again. This show is the future of flight and, and Richard and Jean are our Imaginators who are re imagining flight and they're making action around it and they're driving our future. Todd, do you have a question?
Yeah, thanks, John. Thank you everybody else. Great, great session. I'm also a pilot I have a private airplane I fly for business it's it's just such an amazing experience to travel that way you
are on the series plane like do you think this is a big deal plane?
Yeah, not fun the jet yet. But yeah, certainly the Cirrus 22 has been a great success and as modern technology but you just get in the plane you go the skies beautiful, the grounds beautiful to amazing experience looking at the big windows, you land close all the things people have been talking about. And now I just had to take my first commercial flight. And why I'm crammed in this little cabin and the wonder nobody looks out the window. They're trying desperately to kind of keep grounded while they're crammed into close to people and worried about breathing and some kind of pandemic and then you have the long trip to the rental car all that's all that unpleasantness compared to beauty and enjoyment. So I'm totally one over. But people have had this vision for a while and why don't more people use direct aviation like that. And there's a list of reasons that have been compiled over the years in the aviation press. And it seems like Richards clicked down the list. You know, it's hard to navigate all the electronics there. There's the emergency button. Oh, well, you know what happens? Something happens a plane, you push the parachute button. Oh, it's having a single pilot isn't safe. Well, there's an automatic land button. So I guess my question back to Rich's every really solve all the problems because there's just no question anybody's used to private aviation, smaller airplanes. It's a much more pleasant and safer now from the viewpoint of technology and pandemic, especially if we're really gonna have pandemic issues going forward. Nobody wants to be in a big airplane. I own I took the very smallest commercial airliner I could in this last flight. So I guess, question, Richard, just, it's just all the problems are, there's still a few more technicals out there. Isn't is the Cirrus jet just as good at getting through weather as an airline or things like that.
Great. Thanks, Todd. Don, do you have a question? And for those who don't know who don is, he was one of the code writers for the software to land on the moon. The Apollo missions would not have happened without him. 50 some odd years ago. Don, thank you for your leadership. And Richard, we just had an influx of people come in, we're like 250 So I know, we got a bunch of questions. teed up, but definitely, you know, share why I think you're so remarkable, you know, you're trying to create a new airline and, and change the status quo and, and all of our lives could be impacted. So before we have you answer some of the questions that have been stacked. Don, do you have a question, our favorite software programmer for Apollo?
Thanks, John. No, I don't really have a question. Unlike a lot of the other speakers. I am not a pilot. My entire pirating experience has to do with the lunar module in the simulators, of which I have quite a few hours as a matter of fact, but it does make me wonder what simulation capabilities for these aircraft are available. Now I assume that when a new aircraft is built, the simulator has to be built that corresponds to that, or can an off the shelf simulator be adapted for the characteristics of a particular airplane? So I am a little curious about that. As I say, I'm going to slip away shortly because of other things I need to do.
Great. So Richard, you had four questions from an astronaut from someone who, who's one of the godfathers or godmothers of angel investing? You had Josh, one of the most accomplished glass artists who's in the Smithsonian, you had Todd, who's a fellow pilot? Yeah, say summarize a little bit about why you're so remarkable. And then maybe take some of the questions that were
with this audience. That's not intimidating at all. I'd rather just listen to Katie and Esther and be done with it. I would not be here without Esther and flight school that just would not have happened. I'm a mathematician, a researcher in artificial intelligence to have Cornerstone patents that had been cited about 500 times by every major trading house, major stock exchange, I took technology from telecom and applied it to a different vertical, which is aviation. To tackle that 40% Empty problem where as a nation, we were mismanaging our private aircraft, I fixed most of that. But we were still using the wrong tool for the job, which is a heavy metal airplane on short hops in efficient, unsafe, what AOC would call criminally negligent just not the right tool for the job. So we have a carbon fiber, single engine single pilot machine optimized for the short hops that does it in perfect safety with reduced noise and carbon footprint. That's what we're operating. Because we're losing Don, I'm going to tackle his question first
boy, and maybe just mentioned that the the 5000 airports because you know what's in it for the audience, everyone listening lives within a few miles of these airports. So not only do you have an amazing like Tesla light plane, but you're harnessing a, an infrastructure that
we take you to an infrastructure of airports that's less than 1% utilized. 98% of you live within 20 miles of one or more of these airports, and you don't even know they're there. We have all weather approaches, we have the built. We're now delivering a 300 mile an hour average travel speed, as opposed to the 75 miles an hour on commercial. So this is a NASA program called the smaller aircraft transportation system to highlight the utility of a single pilot single engine jet, optimized for slow approach speeds and short runways. And we're lighting it up that works perfectly. And every time you double the speed of travel, you change out the underlying technology. It's exactly eight years from the first car to the last horse in Manhattan. That's the change, we're talking about unlocking the fourth wave of high speed travel. That's what this project is. Okay, so the questions in reverse order. The simulator on the vision jet is so good that I'm sitting in Orange County, John Wayne Airport. And I'm thinking that's where I made that mistake. My plane wasn't ready or configured for takeoff. And I'm sitting between two active runways and airliners are landing all around me. And it's so embarrassing because jet pilots have their planes configured for takeoff. And then I realized I had never been there before. It was the full motion simulator where I landed at Orange County and made that mistake. And it was you had this sense of deja vu, it was so realistic. And these are a $45 million simulators. They're amazing. You just lose all sense that you're not in an airplane. And it lets you in perfect safety practice things that would otherwise be dangerous that you couldn't do in an airplane. So the simulator for this machine is incredible. No one gets to fly this machine until they pass 11 days of intensive training and get a type rating. So this is no different than an Airbus. You need the same kind of type rating and the same kind of training. And that's what will let us be the safest airline ever because we're building on top of the safest plane ever built. And then we have this incredible training the tiny airports it's not true that there's nothing there at these tiny airports. There's deer, believe it or not, there's wild boar. There's bears. And if you think I'm kidding, Alaska Airlines last month had a bear and the bear died. The bear cubs survived. Our airplanes are all equipped with forward looking infrared we can see the body heat of an animal on a cold runway from two miles away and avoid those kinds of accidents. You do the low pass scare the animal away and then you land. These are have literally rural airports and the one that I have property on in southern Colorado has 100 Wild Mustangs, you go down the runway, scare them away, and then you end there are some places where there's just a trailer. And these 5400 airports are the ones with bathrooms. And that that's how we select it. And there's actually 12,000 airports. It is this incredible infrastructure. After Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, he did a victory tour. And everywhere he landed, they built an airport, and he created this trillion dollar
traveling industry. Because of one successful flight. Like before that flight we were daredevils and Barnstormers. And after that flight, we're pilots and passengers. That, again, is the kind of change we're talking about. Questions about 2050 and autonomy. So I have a plane that's perfectly safe. With one pilot. The second pilot is in AI, fixes every mistake I can make. If I pass out, it can land. If I get disoriented, it can save me actually have a patent personally, on saving disoriented visual pilots think sort of the Kennedy accident. From the spatial disorientation accident, there's a blue button on our panel called level that just levels the plane gives you time to think about it. We have this envelope of safety, the plane doesn't let you lose control doesn't it stolid, that AI does all these things. My plane is certified for one pilot, there's no second in command position. Yet 30% of the time people request the second pilot, and they pay for him. And one of our largest customers were had been demanding two pilots. And their customers started to complain. They're like, well, the one pilots barely doing anything. He's just monitoring the computers. The second pilot isn't doing anything at all. He's watching the first guy do nothing. Why am I paying for that second person and say they withdrew the request. But it's something you have to see the autonomy of this machine. This the incredible workload reduction, I was doing demonstration flights at Boston Logan. But the following morning, I did a young eagles flight for 12 year old I think his mom was teacher there. He's Ethan. And the idea that you can do a demonstration flight at Boston Logan between an A 340 and a Boeing in perfect safety and be able to talk and not have to worry about where you are because the plane knows where you are, knows where everybody else has and has surface watch and safe taxi and all these features. It reduces your workload to the point that you can do things that no one would ever have dreamed of. So autonomy is the challenge our plane today honestly, Finland by itself probably take off by itself. Getting the acceptance of that is going to be an issue. 3d printing. I've spoken with a company that 3d prints rockets. So they're going to want up Elon Musk, instead of just a reusable rocket maker 3d printed disposable rocket. And we talked about airframes. They 3d printed metal but they still haven't solved metal fatigue. Our carbon fiber machines don't have metal fatigue. If you think of Aloha air, and the fuselage being pressurized and depressurized and shrinking and expanding, and then eventually fracturing, with a loss of life, that doesn't happen in our world, and there's no corrosion. So I'm not sure if you can 3d print, carbon fiber, but I've seen machines that can do the layups and automate a lot of that process. So it's think of it more like maybe 3d weaving, and that might work for this application. In terms of very jet itself, we have something called jet Safaris. Think of Governor Schwarzenegger driving one of the first Tesla Roadsters. And now Tesla doesn't have any marketing spent all of these influencers drive Tesla's I drive a Tesla, I would go into shock. If I got out of my autonomous vision jet with my touchscreens and drove my old BMW with all these buttons. It would just be a culture shock. So
we have a jet Safari program where the first 100 founding members of very jet, they buy founders carts, they get to go to Churchill, Manitoba, and look at the polar bear migrations, and circle Hudson Bay, or they get to go to the deep Caribbean, and tag sharks. And so I'm going to touch on that for a bit. There's this idea of blue carbon. And blue carbon is the carbon that the ocean sequester. We have a research partner beneath the waves. They're amazing. You can find a video of very jet beneath the waves if you Google it. And they were tagging sharks and they tag a bull shark and the shark goes out to lunch. And it goes to the seagrass beds and they're just watching it and there's miles and 10s of miles and 50 miles of seagrass beds. There's so many you can see them from space. And they're just kind of daydreaming because the sharks just swimming around looking for lunch, and then they realize how much carbon is sequestered and that's You know, 400 metric tons or something per mile. It's like, it's a crazy amount of carbon that's getting compressed. So we're going to help beneath the waves monitor the health of the seagrass beds, aerial surveys, FLIR type camera package is something that I've been helping to design. And now if the government of Bahamas protects the seagrass bed keeps people from drift fishing or dragging anchors through it, they can sell carbon credits. I have a deep interest in carbon credits for very jet, I have committed to the Wynberg foundation that we will be 10% carbon negative, so that every time you fly, you're removing carbon from the air. There's $100 million.
Richard, let me just ask you on that. I know, you've started with the series plane that was designed and built, I think in Minnesota, and you have a few of them. And your aspiration is to have a whole fleet. But you're just starting with this plane, do you think you would go to electric planes I know beta in Vermont has an electric plane that they want to use to help distribute Oregon's around the world where they're needed, in a way that's current close to carbon neutral. Just curious about how you see your fleet, maybe evolving over time. For those on the show. This is imagination in action. Every week, we have an Imaginator, who we interview, and these are people that we think are using their imagination do extraordinary things really driving the future. Next week's show at 6pm. We'll be with Randall lane. Randall lane is the Chief Content Officer and Managing Director of Forbes, he created the 30 under 30 lists he created the the billionaires list, the 40 over 40 I think women leader list, and he decides what's on all the covers and on the website and what the reporters write about. He's an extraordinary guy. And we're going to be talking about the future of capitalism and the future of media. And I'm really excited for him to join the show. All these shows, and I think we're over 45 shows to date, our long form journalism, they're two hour shows, where we interview people and they tell stories that you can't necessarily get out in a CNN interview or on Tik Tok. So we're really proud of this format. And tonight, the future flight, we're excited to have Richard Kane, these planes that he's purchased, I think are like 2.7 million. He has a bunch of them. And he's trying to take on the modern fleets of airlines, and he has a plan and, and he's also a business guy using data in a very interesting way to help a bunch of airlines. And at some point, I'd love for you to also talk about that. So data, electric vehicles, what's the future your fleet? Those are three questions I'd love to hear for you. And then let's go back to the room and see what's on other people's minds. So Richard, back to you.
So we plan to fly the beta Alia as a passenger carrier that can seat five with a pilot optional, can the challenge of autonomy and pilot optional gets really interesting. So the plan there is for the Alia to fly 400 million packages, let's say for UPS, and Amazon. And you'll have no trouble finding a picture of the beta earlier and UPS delivery. And you'll have no trouble finding that Amazon's put $480 million in their climate fund into beta. And beta is a spectacular company and they're there. They're going to pull this off. We talked a little bit about decentralization. One of the ways that these shipping companies will use the Ilia is to bypass their hubs. So when you don't want a no prime today, you can get a next day or same day. Who knows maybe a drone will drop it right to you. Autonomous electric cheap to operate machines are going to drop the price point and open up this infrastructure to unimaginable capabilities. So we talked about decentralization. Why would you want to live in a city when you could commute to work less than the cost of an Uber non polluting totally safe, be in a suburb get more house for your spend, not have the problems of a pandemic and the congestion of an urban area? I live in Wellington our idea of a traffic jam here in Wellington Florida is an equestrian crossing the road on the way to the showground there's no traffic, and I live in an airport. Jean Valentino also lives in an airport we can wake up and be hundreds of miles away an hour from now. That's a freedom that when people have that they'll never go back. That's what a beta Leah and a very jet verta port will deliver. We'll put them all over and you'll be able to fly and I can't begin to tell you how much cost comes out of this. The motors are electric they're more like a model threes motor where it goes a million miles and there's no visible wear. And it's 10s of 1000s of hours between inspections and the whole thing is inspected and preflighted by computer. That's where this is heading. So we're going to take cost out of aviation, we're going to incredibly improve the safety division jets, the safest jet ever adult period. And I'll be happy to talk about that the beta Leah is 1000 times safer than the helicopter. And if you don't believe me, Bell Helicopter is now called bell because they know the helicopter is going extinct. So there's huge decentralization there's huge point to point capabilities coming. Everyone to your point earlier, which is going to want to live in Jackson Hole, or our Pioneer Park for that matter next next door. So incredible things going on. Some of the challenge is getting all this accepted. So after the 400 million packages if we don't drop any, how do you get the FAA to agree with this? So a few weeks ago, I was with Martine Roth Platt and Dean Kaman. They're both gods. They're visionaries. They're incredible. And they're on the board of beta. And I was with Kyle Clark, the CEO of beta. And I just with the head of NBA and the head of the FAA, and the question is, will you let us carry passengers on an all electric distributed electric propulsion autonomous, beautiful machine with the wing of an Arctic turn? That was their design inspiration? And the short answer was yes. But you know, there's there's hurdles, right? Well, like Esther, I've had several amazing mentors. Another one is Peter Diamandis, I'm a seed investor in a company called Zero Gravity Corp. So the idea behind zero gravity Corp. It's a 121 scheduled airline, it leaves and returns to the same city. And the idea was, we're going to take out the seats, let people unbuckle and float around the cabin, as we plumb it, 14,000 feet. And honestly, they thought Peter was crazy. And you know, as everyone said, an idea is crazy until it actually works. So this is zero gravity, we got the FAA to approve an airliner with padded walls that lets people bounce around. And we took Stephen Hawking up for a zero gravity flight. And even though he has severe ALS, he was able to smile, and we floated him with an apple. So if you can do that, and you get to meet Stephen Hawking, and I'm sorry, I'm gonna take a right angle turn. But Stephen Hawking does stand up comedy, he actually goes and says, I can't tell you the difference between the joy of sex and the joy of discovering new knowledge, except to say that the joy of discovering new knowledge last longer, and I was blown away, and then we flew him in zero G and took him out of his wheelchair and flipped him around. So if you can do that, and get the FAA to approve it, and it took a decade, and it takes me a decade to 25 years to change industries, just I'm pretty slow. But if you can do that, you can probably get autonomous all electric.
Richard, I asked you about data, can you and then I'm going to call on Allison. But is there any, you know, you've been doing some interesting things with data support for airlines? What Why is that put you in a good position to kind of be a leader, show how you're using your imagination. For the
last 15 years, I've been tackling the efficient use of the jets that we have. And as an industry, we were flying 40% empty. And it's terrible. It's terrible for the environment. It's terrible for the economics, it makes private charter unattainable. And also we're flying the wrong equipment. So I've got the best floating fleet operators in the US to use my AI occasionally to trade trips when that made sense, and to manage their fleets more effectively. And this is a 16 quintillion routing solution, supercomputer massive problem. More recently, I've been working with IBM and quantum to help tackle this. But traditionally, it's 400 servers trying to tackle this, and it's worth it because we're saving, you know, 800,000 metric tons of carbon footprint a month. That's enough to take 173,000 cars off the road, or charge 98 billion cell phones, it's incredible amounts of energy that were being wasted. So we fix that 40% Empty problem. It's now 20%. But we were still flying heavy metal unsafe jets at low altitudes through dense atmosphere with engines that were optimized to go high and fast. And it's terribly inefficient, noisy and unsafe. I haven't touched on this yet, but those big barrel engines that go high and fast are actually bird vacuum cleaners. And you all know the Miracle on the Hudson story. Be probably don't know that spirit adjusted to Canadian Geese a couple of weeks ago blew up an engine that caught on fire. It happens all the time. And our position of the engine on our plane shields it from foreign object damage and bird ingestion. So when you're flying, the short hops around California you don't want to ingest a California In your Condor, and lose your airframe. And that will happen on these other planes. So when I say that I'm flying, the safest jet ever built, I mean, this literally, it's not exaggeration or hyperbole. hyperbole. So that's the let me
get some other questions in the room. Allison, can you, you follow transportation, and we're gonna get some of the other people in the room. But what else should we be covering?
Come back to the combination of Katie and Todd's question because I love the point that you're making an already appealing concept which is avoiding those hubs of misery 10 times more appealing. But I'd love to know what you think Richard is your answer to Todd's question? Like how much of the private aviation trade off challenges do you think have already been solved? And you're just waiting for the FAA to catch up? And which parts of that do you think are going to be the hardest parts to solve? Like, really? If we were all up in airplanes? Would there be a challenge that the FAA wouldn't be able to handle as we get drones and planes up there? Does that concern you? What what do you see as sort of the challenges that next need to be tackled?
So with certainty, we're going to have to decentralize air traffic control. There's just not enough trained human beings, and there's not enough transponder codes to support all of the flights of manned aircraft of drone aircraft. Thankfully, that's an artificial intelligence problem that's reasonably solvable, even if it's something inefficient, where we chop off chunks of airspace. So the EV TOS that are going within a city or below 500 feet and the ones going between cities are 1000 feet. That's the the very unsophisticated way to do it. The research that I funded on pilot self separation of aircraft a while back with an FAA researcher who couldn't get his own agency to jump in, that kind of technologies is what will be needed. But honestly, it takes a while to build these aircraft we have time and the pace, the advancement in computer science will more than keep up with what we need to do here. It's like me using routing technologies that can route 100 million phone calls an hour while the phone is ringing on a fleet of a few 1000 aircraft. It's like using a sledgehammer on a net. So I'm not worried about that. One of the big ones that I was able to take care of was getting single engine single pilot nationwide authority on an airline operating certificate. So we did that two years ago. Another one is distributing biofuel. So I want my fleet of jet powered aircraft to be viable for the next 20 years. And to do that, we're going to need sustainable aviation fuel. Elon Musk and Peter Diamandis announced the carbon sequestration XPrize at Kennedy Space Center. And if you did, you'll find a tweet from Peter that says, I just announced this XPRIZE. And now I'm flying very jet home to see my mom in Boca. And there's four or five different tracks of technology that will pull carbon out of the air and give us jet fuel. And the people steering that price include Eric Limburg, and Eric is on my board. And I'm on the board of the Lindbergh Foundation, and have committed to do this 10% Negative. And the way we're going to do that is these carbon sequestration technologies, for example, Craig Venter and blue green algae that's been engineered to do that. So that's one of our challenges. Getting that sustainable fuel right now I can buy it at La lax and San Francisco, and maybe two dozen airports that signature has, but I need to distribute it everywhere. And we're going to make some vertical investments in biofuel companies, in part just to make sure that I have that fuel at a reasonable price hedging the fuel. But in part because I want it to be ubiquitous. And then we go from there to electric aviation and it's game over. There's one other two other questions I want to tackle. Getting people to understand you can fly privately. So again, back to Peter. He was the keynote speaker to Expedia group and Expedia is every major travel portal you can name in 10 seconds. It's not just Expedia. And his topic was how to avoid disruption. And the answer is provide point to point service on Virgin when there's no direct service, and it's more than one person traveling on hundreds of city pairs. So now the general public can discover that wait a second, I thought charter was unattainable. It's actually cheaper than three executives flying and getting three hotel rooms as a nice rental car. And they can get there directly have their meetings get home the same day back to their family. So just getting the word and
also, you know in the talk of self driving cars was how you could suddenly use your time differently. You can have these planes with screens and do board meetings and do remote meetings. As you travel, you can look out the big windows, but you also could get work done. Because the passengers could be collaborating as they're going from different places on earth.
Something really backfired. So we now have Wi Fi on our planes. And one of our clients was able to have a team's meeting on their way to our big safety meeting out in out west. And they lost something because now they can actually pull down the screen and have a team's meeting. And they did switch the monitor around so they could see the flying pilot, but now there's no escape because you can be plugged in and work and it does that beautifully. We had a question about weather and the capabilities of this plane. So unlike any other plane that I'm aware of, except the stealth fighter, this plane has active turbulence depression, the bottom strikes are under computer control. They sit there and paddle and dampen out the turbulence. If you think of role control on a cruise ships, you don't get seasick. It's it's that type of technique. People say this is the smoothest jet they've ever been on because of the act of turbulence depression. We have radar, that's the equivalent of any airliner. I can take a horizontal or vertical slice of a storm. So I have weather from XM Radio. I have weather from Iridium satellite, I have weather from frisbee transmitted from ground stations and other airplanes. I have more.
And you could see at night you could see a cow walking across an air airport, right.
I've got forward looking infrared. I was having a discussion with air traffic control. They were vectoring me towards an active thunderstorm with lightning. And I told them, I don't want to go there. I see lightning, and they couldn't see the lightning. They don't have the weather sophistication. As an air traffic control center that I have flying at 31,000 feet. For that matter, the airliners don't have it. We had our
let's get let's get a few other questions here. And then Jean has been so good to be on the show. Is there anything he's also uniquely qualified to kind of weigh in on or, or talk about? So Richard, can you think of a question for Jean? And let's let's stack the compression. So aviation? I don't know. Aviation. Marie, do you have a question you want to ask?
Yes, thank you. I just wanted to welcome Richard and Jean to the clubhouse. They know me as their lawyer. And actually my Hey, Richard, and my actually my profile picture on here on clubhouse is Richard was actually the pilot on this flight Vera jet. SF 50 That I'm I'm saying I'm sitting in so you guys to clubhouse. I've gone ahead and followed you. And I'm so excited to hear you guys speak. I'll take any opportunity to listen to you guys.
Great, thank you. D DM, do you have a question? And if not, we'll go to the next person.
I did that. Richard? Just I mean, just the answer that was related to air traffic management. You know, we know that future is electric future is autonomous that for sure. To be told that most of the theme team tanks of the future, still thinking about air traffic management. And I believe we are already covered that so
great. Thank you. Damn, Jess, do you have a question?
Hi. Yes, I do. Thank you for taking my question. This is for Dr. Coleman. And for everyone. I spend a lot of time thinking about the emotional side of space residency. And I would like to know what kind of entertainment is craved while living in space, the kind of entertainment that doesn't exist yet, but could be a potential future mark.
Great, excellent question. Thank you, Jess, for that. Josh, do you have another question?
No, I'm fine. I'm sorry. Yeah.
Great. And if people don't know who Josh is, you should look up his work. It's some of the he's my favorite class artist in the world. And one of my favorite artists, you should definitely follow his work. Esther, do you have another question?
No, I'm enjoying
Do you want to make a comment or kind of reflect on where the conversation is going so far? You're good.
I'm good. It's, it's just it's amazing to see how much progress you've made. And I'm really excited because I hit those big hubs to
great thank you, Esther. Katie, our favorite astronaut. I know there's a few 100 US astronauts but you're number one in my book.
I'm glad to still be in your book although there's a really, you know, we're all different. And you'll hear if he asked, you know, six astronauts, you'll get nine opinions. But I wanted to just share that. We talked about the Stephen Hawking flight. And it was recently on a flight called a zero gravity Corporation flight called Astro access. Where it was, it wasn't a joy ride, it was really to understand for disabled people going to space, what are the barriers, and one of the places that we test things before we go to space is we go on the zero gravity airplane to understand and when about 30 seconds or so of being weightless? What can you understand about your both the problem and the solution to your problem, and it was very profound experience for me, and made me think about, you know, think about what this, this added access to transportation could mean. Now, when I go through an airport, this is just a few weeks ago, and if, if you have a chance, just look up, I think there was a New York Times article about it, if you look up Astro access, in New York Times, you'll see astonishing pictures, there were two, two deaf, four blind, and six mobility disabled folks flying on that airplane, and I was privileged to be one of the coaches. But now, you know, going through an airport, you know, I see how many people are going through the airport, in a pretty slow and painful way of, you know, in on in chairs, having people help them, and to be able to pull up to someplace and, you know, the, at the smaller planes, you're literally going through a small building, you know, doing the right inspections before you go out on the flight line. But, you know, as individuals, and then going into a plane, I think this has really extraordinary possibilities for folks that, you know, have some special needs flying. And as a mom, I'll say that, you know, I'd much rather fly with my family sort of all together in one place and not be all, you know, in the midst of having having our family sort of all over one plane, you know, trying to keep your gun or keep its travels hard on everybody. And so being able to do that in a small group is certainly going to be an easier emotional experience. And people more people will do it. So that wasn't really a question. But more I just find there's a lot of possibilities as we think more about this.
Katie, maybe can you tell the audience, you played a role in helping a telescope be able to kind of chart the universe? Can you talk a little bit about what you did on one of your missions?
Well, I'm always interested that the more that we can measure things, that means the more experiments we can do, and the more we're going to know. And so I was part of the team on the on the space shuttle Columbia, to launch the Chandra X Ray Observatory. And this is a telescope that looks at X ray. So the really energetic things that happen out in the universe, everything from galaxies colliding to stars exploding, which he calls supernovas, but especially black holes, which have X ray particles associated with them, they're sucking things in, but they're also spewing things out. And those things are these high energy particles. And so a really innovative telescope was designed and it is not like the Hubble or the space station, you know, not in orbit to really close to the Earth at about 400 kilometers turn 50 miles, but it's about 55,000 miles away, has to be outside the atmosphere because our atmosphere actually protects us from those x rays. So I'm very proud to have been part of the team that that launched that telescope. And in literally everything that we know about black holes came from that telescope. But I also asked answer Jessie's question real quick about entertainment. Being up there with an international crew. There's things we want to be we want to be entertained together, and finding things that six people from different countries with different language levels, even though we're all you know, reasonably fluent in English, and recently fluent in Russian. It's still I find it's interesting to find things. And often comedy is a good vehicle. Some of these shows, like one of the guys said, you know, you're going to figure this out sooner or later because we can all see each other's web pages, what we what we have sent up to us in space, there he goes. I like American Idol. You know, I think it's really great for our crew to watch. And we can all like either celebrate or make fun or ask questions. And the judges are usually actors and actresses. They speak really clearly. I think it's really good for our international audience. Anyway, so we're all sorts of different shows. And actually listening to a show. You know, listening to something listening to music is actually a way to kind of create your own world, so that you actually really have kind of your own little space inside a space station.
Great. So this is imagination and action. Thank you everyone. Every week we have Imaginators next week, it's the founder of 30 under 30, the Chief Content Officer and Managing Director of Forbes this week we have Richard Kane who has was a child prodigy is the principal of his high school quit his job to be as marketer for some software he created on the Apple two Wii. He's been a major business player, Fortune five 100 Company, and he's he's helping get data to different airlines. And then he decided that he created his own airline. And he found this new kind of plane that is being developed and he has a fleet of them. He wants to disrupt how we get around the country and use the little airports that all exists. I think they're 5000 of them all within, like 20 miles of where the majority of Americans live. He's really doing something extraordinary. I also see someone in this room, who's extraordinary, I want to do a shout out to Paul who created clubhouse and created this tool that is able to create social audio and have people be connected without having to go into studios and and allow for this kind of dialogue and conversation. And every week we bring the show together as a way to change the vector society there are all these cascading challenges that are interlocked and we think we can get Imaginators who are doing extraordinary things are talking about how they're using their imagination and making action happen and we couldn't do it if clubhouse didn't exist so we're really proud to have it as a platform of choice. So Richard, I don't know if you want to ask Genie question or if you want to take all those questions from from the audience that we just piled on you
so I would ask Jean how many gallons per hour does an icon a five burn and you have an idea of what miles per gallon it gets. And but mostly I want to know what it's like for you to essentially have created drone airport and and go to your backyard and be able to fly anywhere you want. What's that freedom like?
creature is Richard is I'm in awe of his green energy system at Vera jet which is why I invested but he's it all by little Tweety Bird icon eight five which is a light sport aircraft VFR burning Richard four and a half gallons an hour. It's, it's, it's your truing out at around 105 miles an hour doesn't even compare to the Cirrus s r 22. Not to mention the Cirrus SF 50, which is the vision jet. But it's fun. It's it's great for a 450 mile radius. It's it's very economical. It's great hopping around for me I get to places locally and most people are obviously traveling locally at less than 400 miles. So it really does the job for me getting around locally, conveniently. You know, just if I may I just want to say to John and to the clubhouse folks, this isn't my first visit here. So thank you for having me and Richard have been coming tagging along with Richard. Let me just help Richard put something in perspective for everybody. I was in sixth grade, watching black and white television. We weren't the richest family in the in the world we were we were a modest family of modest means growing up. And I remember watching a live television broadcast of Neil Armstrong putting his first step on the moon. What was more amazing to me is looking over at my father when he said to my mother. Wow, Honey, would you ever believe the moon we were smoking under years ago is the same moon we're watching a live broadcast on now. It got me thinking if this was so amazing to my dad, when I was in sixth grade. What is it that I could access? I said to myself, what is it that we cannot even imagine will be happening to us in our lifetimes. Before we pass? What is it that's out there around the corner that's totally outside our comprehension? Did you ever think we'd be talking about this sort of autonomous travel and efficiencies in flight? Did you ever think that the Dick Tracy, watch we saw in the comic book when we were kids is now a reality. In terms of telephone. It all puts it into perspective for me. I hope that helps.
So you have better fuel efficiency than Toyota press if I'm calculating correctly.
Yes, indeed. I'm sorry. Get off the subject. Yes.
You go more than 100 miles an hour as the crow flies so you're not having to go circuitous roadways. And what's it like to be able to just wake up and know you can be anywhere you want to be an hour from now?
Yeah, it's it changes the whole concept of lifestyle. It's socio economic paradigm shift for most of us. While we look macro at the stars in the universe and Dr. Coleman, your comments about space have just amazed me in a macro sense, in a micro sense, it changes all of us in our own backyard. And the way we put a value on local flight and getting around. It's it's a paradigm shift. And it all happened within one generation of time. That's really my point about my earlier story.
So I came up to Boston to speak. But on the way I picked up one of my investors, I live in Wellington at the edge of the Everglades. And I picked up my investor in pumping. Oh, he's three cities over, that's an hour and a half without traffic. And I 95 is a terrible highway, there's just carnage every day. There's fatalities, and there's backups. And it can be three hours. It took me six minutes to get to pumpkin over to pick them up. And then I turned around and went to Boston, no TSA, no nonsense, off we go. It's transformational. It's like having a superpower. And everyone's gonna have that and it's not 100 years or 50 years, it's 2024. When we're going to be filing for passenger carrying on the beta. You have that now with the vision jet. We went to Beverly Massachusetts, beautiful airport, no congestion dropped him right off where he needed to be. So very jets here now we're flying now we've flown 1500 flights in the last year. Everyone loves it. It's just where we're starting. We're going to democratize this to where it's literally going to be cheaper than car travel. Because
you so Richard Richard, just as we're coming up to the two hour mark, Allison's going to do a summary of what was discussed. But we had a few questions that were posed, do you want to maybe, you know, just kind of give a few short answers to the questions from the last round?
Well, I think we pretty much got them. I do want to touch on COVID. So I was flying the vision jet to meet investors. And my job is to fly a nice airplane, to meet nice people and nice places and come back with more airplanes. That's been my job for the last year, I'm loving the heck out of it. And I was fine. And then I needed to bring my jet in for maintenance. They detected something that might one day be a problem. And they fixed it before it was ever a problem. And so we're built on that foundation and safety. And I stopped in Centennial and I ordered united. Because I was concerned. I had first class first row bulkhead wearing PPE gear. And four days later, my wife and I had COVID. And we were really sick. And I took pictures of that flight as I boarded it, because when I took the tray table down, there were still crumbs from the last meal. And United showed me this wonderful, comforting video that how the whole thing was sterilized. I called United and I said, guys, you're not leaving enough time for your ground crews in Denver to clean up the airplane. And they said, you know, fill out a web report, and we'll get back to you in 14 days. I said, No, no, you got to do contact tracing. And they're like, no, 14 days. I'm like, I'm an airline CEO. 14 days. Well, I looked into it, someone died of respiratory failure related to COVID on a United Flight United didn't tell anyone about it. And you can find that CNN picked it up and read it. So flash forward, I was just on American Airlines connecting through DFW pulled down the tray table, same thing dirty trade table. There's no time to sterilize an airliner in an hour between flights. And if they add more you just destroy the system. When I was up in Boston, American and just canceled 1400 flights, there's no real us aviation dependable infrastructure anymore. So when the system worked, it was 75 miles an hour when they cancel your flights and there's a meltdown. It's zero. And it's so we're trying to provide that decentralized alternative to the hubs of misery. I got to speak to Prince Charles trust for at rescue. We're gonna hire a bunch
just before you go to this next point. You know, you remind me the internet you know the ARPANET was a precursor to the internet was created for decentralized communication. You know, you're you're you're onto something I think here and it's just it reimagining flight and the way it is is become common, but I think you're onto something you're taking a few variables and and doing some interesting things with it. Actually, before you say your last point I see Cami and will you guys have a question you want to pose?
I did I found the conversation about the autonomous flight fascinating. So as far as what how you see, the tomorrow's looking as far as autonomous flight is will eventually our planes just come pick us up and whisk us away without pilot's licenses?
Yes, that's correct. So there's a recreational machine seats, one, you'll be able to pilot yourself with about five hours, excuse me, five minutes of instruction, you can go out over water because of the safety issues. If you decide not to come back, the computers are going to take over and bring you back. That's coming next year. It's really cool. Just imagine the fun of being able to fly your own sort of personal helicopter. Great, the beta Alia and the other
for time. Let me just get in Kami, did you have a question?
I'm just real briefly. And thank you for hosting us. And I apologize, I joined late. My question is, What role have any the solar play in
so the idea that you could charge your Tesla at a solar station that's kind of gathered battery juice together, and then bulk charge your vehicle also applies to aviation. So the beta Alia, systems we're using have a battery pack that can trickle charge off of the grid, or trickle charge off of solar. And when the beta comes in to be immediately charged, it's pulling off of batteries. So it's really a storage question. And a clean energy question. The jets that we fly, they burn Jet A and they indulge carbon. But the sustainable aviation fuel is going to be carbon negative, that we burn the money. And I had our engine certified for four types of biofuels so that we can burn biofuel without any impact to our maintenance schedule or cost basis. And so that's how I'm going to preserve our fleet of fuel burning machines while we electrify everything, but it's it's intertwined. Short answer is you need to trickle charge off of solar for a long time before you can power one of these machines. But we're happy to do it.
Great. So this is how I see the rest of the show. Love to hear from Allison. Some people stick around just for Allison's summary, for Alphen to kind of share what she thinks just took place. And then Richard, I'm going to give you the last word. You know, there may be saying that Allison says that you may think Oh, there's another point I want to make. Or you may want to emphasize one of the themes that she she picks up on. But thank you, everyone, this is going to be recorded and posted and or this is being recorded. And we'll post it and we're also going to post the transcript and this is a place you can come to kind of hear interesting people and Richard is definitely very interesting. And thank you for our supporting team of Katie and Esther and, and Josh and Jean and others. But Alison turned to you and before you do your summation, if there are any things you want to say just about why you're so excited about us taking on this top
Oh such an exciting discussion the follow the actual experience of being in a very jet flight so I would encourage all of you to to follow up with Richard and direct message him and port near you that you can meet a map. But tonight we had a fascinating panel on the future of flight. And Richard told us that that is to restore joy and dignity the flying witch having just flown commercial this last week I think is is desperate need. We had an amazing panel of imagination in and Jean Valentino joined by Katie Coleman, Esther Dyson, Dan Ailes and Josh Simpson. Richard was, as John mentioned, a computer scientist by training currently heads bear jet. And for all of you who joined us later very Jetson airline that is really reinventing aviation on so many dimensions. Richard told us he took technology from telecom to figure out how to optimize calls and apply it to aviation. Today Vera jet has 15 series 2.7 million airliners and it's building to 150. It aims to add vertical takeoff planes, they're going to add the beta Alia and then sea planes and then I'm sure Richard and Jean will be adding others. Vera jet did 1500 flights last year. And what was really exciting about tonight was Richard described what's involved in building the fourth wave of high speed travel, which really will be not a evolution but a revolution. And he described that along five different dimensions moving from heavy metal jets to light single engine carbon composite planes, moving from 40% Open occupancy and inefficiency that only 20% empty so having that moving from short hops and hub travels which he calls hubs of misery to leveraging a network of more than 5400 air ports and if more bathrooms get added, it sounds like that can go up to 12,000 moving from very loud experiences, which no one wants next door to them to quiet experience with turbulence suppression. And then really most excitingly to me moving from burning lots of fuel and emitting carbon, to building greener fuel options, and eventually being a carbon sink or absorption. There jet is a company reinventing air travel on multiple dimensions, and the four that Richard mentioned were safety. So their vision is to be the world's safest airline. That includes what John described as the red buttons so the plane can land itself a parachute system that if something happens to the pilot can safely land the plane AI that picks up anything on the runway, extensive training on $45 million simulators and much more. It's also building a whole new level of performance aiming to be the quietest jet ever made, and the most fuel efficient jet ever made. Leveraging AI for all kinds of optimized performance. And then of course building in new materials. So we now have carbon fiber, which can create lighter jets that leads to that energy efficiency. The thing I find most exciting is that Barry jets managing it marrying not only software and hardware innovation, but also marrying in business model innovation. So that's things like using AI to supplement pilot run aircrafts and eventually having aircraft that could be autonomous. Also avoiding those major airport hubs which
which are hardly pleasurable in the best of times, and and even more miserable with COVID. And then traveling to leverage the NASA extensive base of airports that exist all around where 98% of people live within easy driving distance. Richard shared with us that after Lindbergh's flight, he went all around on a victory flight through the country. And that was the beginning of this incredible airport network which NASA and others have reinforced. But just in the Boston area, there are 10 local airports and many of them are very lightly used. The next phase that sounds like for very jet include vertical takeoff planes like the beta Alia Amazon has already invested about 400 million from their fund. But that could reduce the cost of private travel and also allow for vertical takeoff, where the base could be right next to your house or your company. And pilots could be optional for package delivery. Richard tells us that 80% of the world's population has never flown in the air, which just seems like such a missed experience. Then we had a fascinating discussion about 2050. And Gene told us the pace of changes he's seen. And we talked about what else we might see in the next 30 years. Gene asks what exists outside of our current comprehension. And when we talked about the future of flight, Richard talked about a number of dimensions. Definitely the idea of using AI to fix mistakes from the first pilot and eventually fly autonomously. The idea of 3d printing could apply to rockets, but we haven't yet solved metal fatigue, the idea that carbon fiber could be used and we could come up with new materials, the concept of blue carbon where we use aerial monitoring to understand the health of seagrass beds and actually marry up maritime needs with with aviation. Then very excitedly this idea that the Lindbergh foundation commitment that Richard made is to be 10% carbon negative, so planes could actually pull carbon out of the air instead of those long trails of emissions you see coming off of planes. And Richard also said we're gonna need availability of biofuels at scale. So today, Craig Venter has Blue Gene out blue green algae, but we need to make that available at more than a few airports. He said when planes go to Evie status, it will be game over. And he described that both gene and Richard live in airports. So home is hubs. And he says, when you wake up and know you can be anywhere on the world, you have what Gene described as a socio cultural paradigm shift that's happened really within just a couple of decades. So if you're interested in experiencing flight in a 2.7 million series plane ride, reach out to Barry jet Richard and Jean are visionaries who tell us that in the coming decades, we will have access to a transformational superpower for each of us, that includes flight. And thank you for an amazing evening.
Great. And thank you, you know, Allison's the chief futurist for BCG, and she follows a lot of trends. And I know, transportation, alternative vehicles is a real passion. And I think that came through in her summation. You know, Richard, I want you to have the last word, when I think of planes, they're not trains that evolved in the planes, it had to do with people thinking new ways of transportation. I think what you can do with your new airline, you could kind of reshuffle the deck on how we use the tools to get from one place to another. And the digital economy is a big part of that and excited for you to use data and AI. But to close out the show, Richard, what's your closing thought, and I see we had close to 1000 people in the room. And we post this and 10s of 1000s. Were following, read, or listen to the show afterwards. So this will take a life of its own. So here's your platform.
So Allison summary was breathtaking, and amazing. And I'm going to riff on it. The idea of hubs as homes, I love that. So just Just close your eyes and visualize that you go upstairs to your apartment, or you walk across the street to the thing that used to be a gas station, but now has a very rigid verta port. And it just whisk you to work or to your meetings or for fun. And you can do that at a cost that's roughly equivalent to an Uber. And you can do that in perfect safety and what that changes, it changes where you live, it changes where you work changes how you see and what you think about the planet gets you out of that two hour traffic jam that we all sit in every day. greener, better safer. This is incredibly transformational, and that's where this is going and very jet will power quite a bit of it. So I just really appreciate the the time and I was blown away by the attendees here. I really just want to listen to Katie and Esther so but thank you for making this happen.
