 Okay right now great privilege this one and real glamour in it because this is aircraft of a remarkable new type. John McGinnis and his family are here it's a family enterprise and he's going to tell us about it because we do know from our own research in our reports we've got a report on drones and a report on manned aircraft we know that these things the time has come and obviously the market for drones is multi-billion dollar already and the interesting thing is now passenger aircraft are coming right small aircraft but we need to hear not from me but from the expert John can you fill us in and how you're moving it forward in a remarkable way. I'd be happy to do so this is a family project to create a technology demonstrator for a breakthrough in our understanding of why we never conquered a particular domain of flight we're very well we fly very efficiently with commercial aircraft and we can fly very slowly with gliders and sail planes with efficiency but an airplane that's 150 to 450 miles per hour we use six to eight times too much energy for the amount of momentum we achieve so the breakthrough allows us to use active drag reduction other drag reduction principles create more stability and control and for the world of electric vehicles it's transformative we have the ability to carry more weight without the weight penalty without the architectural of the batteries or so on that would store our energy so in an electric implementation this aircraft we can fly a family of people for three hours and fly so fast that we have a tremendous range right now that's initially with diesel is it later be electric or specifically you're excellent okay right but you how are you starting you when will you have something for sale well the problem is is that you can't have something for sale you have to have lots of something for sale because everyone really needs this as a fundamental need yeah yeah yeah so will you manufacture or license our pathway gets us to an awareness among the public that's a little bit hard to meet so we have to market first to our niche early adopters yeah in the kit markets and we have to develop certified versions but we mostly have to have a real product and our real product is the ability to manufacture these in scale to deploy them at low cost and high volume so that means a partner oh no it means an entire industry and a reimagining of that right so it's nowhere near soon or it's a long process right like eating an elephant one bite at a time aha right okay but this is no elephant this is gorgeous now I think you told me that you had working models this is not one of them that is working yeah that's a 33 percent what we're seeing here is something that looks like nothing on earth basically and I know that I insulted you by referring to a box-wing and you corrected me so could you tell us about the aerodynamics so what's clever there are six ingredient technologies first we have a passive drag reduction suite of technologies starting with our configurational advantage the double box still configuration gives a stability and control by means of induced drag reduction means I care more carry more weight for a given span with less penalty it leads to natural laminar flow and subsonic area ruling as technological technologies that help us break through this barrier and once we reach the speeds where these technologies are the most relevant we also reach the domain of active drag reduction when you get into the higher speed ranges we can mitigate drag directly through the application of power and we can use boundary layer control and wake propulsion as ways to take away most of the need for more thrust and more installed power so we're basically talking about improved aerodynamics giving us longer endurance longer range but what are we what is the twinkle in your eye is this something that's a trainer aircraft a tourist aircraft up for an hour when it's electric and working at any time of their night of course because it's pretty quiet or is it something that's going to be a feeder aircraft for 20 people or what's the sweet spot the sweet spot is every human needs on-demand regional mobility for small group of people and we don't actually have that we have an automobile which gives us on-demand local mobility and we have airliners which give us on-demand intercontinental mobility but in the smaller distances say between two hour drive and all day drive there's nothing but pain we use airliners the wrong way so having an autonomous smart plane that doesn't require extensive pilot training where in a user can say to his electronic assistant we'd like to fly from here to there yeah that's the holy grail and what's not what's missing is not the technology of that part that's easy we've had autonomous airplanes for 50 years what's missing is that we never built real good aerodynamics into the small airplanes we couldn't have because we were taught something that isn't quite correct in our physics a long time ago but you're are you perhaps getting a bit ahead of yourself in that you say autonomous planes the autopilot in an airliner is not true autonomy and the airliners I thought don't do a very good job of collision avoidance identifying a flying object from other planes or birds coming towards them they're not really very good at that so in terms of true autonomy we had drones but but not planes with people in do we yes we do we do we've actually had soft flying autonomous airplanes and that technology for more than 50 years right and by comparison you know the hazards of driving down a narrow pathway with dogs running out in front of the car and other things the threat the threat matrix is overwhelming yes whereas in the sky you can go out in the sky you know if you're anywhere even supposedly near an airport you'll look around and you'll see there's nothing but empty but nevertheless so air traffic control made a mistake and you were heading straight towards another plane it doesn't do a very clever job of telling you about it and dealing with it models systems can identify that and manage that better than humans can really and we have that technology already packaged today commercially available off the shelf technology can navigate fly an emergency land almost any aircraft and we need a home to take that simple technology and put it to use the missing ingredient is the efficient aircraft yes yes right so we're going to have autonomous cars which almost certainly are not going to be private cars much they're going to be autonomous taxes and you sound to me as if you're talking at least in part about the flying version of that some of these will be air taxes is that right they won't necessarily be all privately owned the majority of earth species fly for the simple reason that it's the most efficient way from going from one arbitrary location to another arbitrary location this decentralizes everything instead of having a concentration where airliners are forced to land every minute on this tiny little strip we take all those people and we distribute them out into where they really want to go and they don't even come close to concentrating together so the autonomy allows people to reduce their regulatory burden and their techno their training burden and the timeline of how this deploys is such that the infrastructure and the regulation precedes the availability of adequate numbers of vehicles okay and there's obviously a lot of development parts on all these things that cannot have a range extended significantly like the aviation and other planes with solar wings is that a useful adjunct at some stages not central but I mean we have a proprietary technology which were is pretty competitive we're not disclosing but in which range is really not a principle limitation for us so without solar just well solar can certainly play a part we're interested in okay yes absolutely we also feel that electric is the preferred method for propulsion integration it's not necessarily an energy dependent arrangement it's energy independent so I can have hybrid systems in which I have fuel sources for example for the high power climb to altitude applications but we have a drag mitigation technology that allows us to put an object in motion and have it remain in motion because we're we're removing the only thing it's acting against which is the atmosphere viscous atmospheric drag of having lift and and moving very quickly and and in terms of again a twinkle in your eye technology road map for what about extremely short takeoff and landing are these going to be taking off from the terminal building literally on top of the terminal building by means of motors in the wheels before the propeller gets up to speed do you dream of those things too yeah you're talking to an aircraft designer so of course we have vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that follow on we have multiple iterations of other and related technologies we even have the future flying car it's not time to talk about any of those things it's time to look at the history of the facts that we didn't fix the problem in one aviation domain of making something that the public can operate yes we want to do it first yes that's nice and what ends we're all going to be living in cities or most of us 70% soon and 2080 well so they say but I mean that seems to be the trend growth of our region of mobility well there's so they're 20 minute commute or the half-hour commute whatever our time budget is that defines the area in which we live and if we increase that time budget through affordable regional mobility yep yep we decentralize our need for cities we don't have to bring everything in the city to our home environment and we don't have to worry about leaving our home environment for other resources nearby where I live in Montana it's five hours to those resources and it's over mountain passes in the winter so aviation turns that five hours into a half hour yes in terms of where we are now though there are more than half of the people in the world living in cities and in terms of easing that situation what's the sort of minimum endurance needed for approval of any form of aircraft vertical or this type in a city I mean we see things like the Bollocopter and the Chinese unique is it drone manned drone I mean these things are so like 20 minutes 40 minutes not even an hour that sounds to me something extremely dangerous in the city surely it will not be allowed to fly in the city if it has that level of margin of safety there's no margin of safety but one day they'll be better yes the pace of the required change is slow enough that most of those issues evaporate before they cause trouble for us right the number of vehicles and the deployment of the vehicles are up against regulatory barriers and science barriers manufacturing barriers and other barriers so we feel like one thing we can do that helps a lot is understanding that our desire is shared for safety and economy and range and all of these things noise abatement and it all revolves around the design of the vehicle itself so if you have a powered lift vehicle you're very dependent there are other technologies that deliver the same goal and I can show those technologies in the future right where you mean in short takeoff short takeoff vertical takeoff all of these technologies flow from good physics in aerodynamics well that's absolutely fascinating I mean talking about good physics good engineering we've always been taught that good engineering is beautiful boy this is beautiful this is good engineering thank you very much can we get close to the to the mural this is 4,000 photos of my family and I building this aircraft in our family garage