The invention of flight has been one of the most profound technologies in
history. And for the past century it has functioned pretty much the same
way. But that could all change.
The advent of lithium ion batteries and electric propulsion technologies
is igniting a revolution in transportation.
Everything from cars to trucks and buses are going electric.
But what about planes?
We call this the third revolution in aviation.
The first was the piston engine that enabled the Wright brothers to fly
their first flight. The second was the jet engine, which only really was
applied to larger planes.
And we think the third revolution is electric propulsion.
CO2 emissions and the environmental impact they pose has moved to the
forefront of public attention and has been one of the driving forces in
leading electric vehicle adoption.
The aviation industry is one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse
gas emissions. And unlike cars, aviation is often excluded from national
climate plans because it operates across borders.
Between flight and commercial, shipping constitutes about 5 percent of our
total CO2 emissions per year.
And these are some of the hardest CO2 to decarbonize.
Aircraft emissions are a real serious problem.
It's projected to be up to 25 percent of the entire global carbon budget
to stay below 1.5
degrees C.
According to a 2018 report on CO2 emissions from commercial aviation,
there was a 32 percent increase in emissions over the five years leading
up to the study. And with the FAA estimating the number of airline
passengers in the U.S.
will surpass one 1.28
billion by 2038, planes will be a big source of pollution for years to
come. Jet fuel is also one of the biggest operating costs for airlines,
and electric motors have fewer parts to repair and maintain, making them a
more economical option as well.
When you look at a jet engine, there's thousands of moving parts.
A turboprop has 7,000 to 10,000 moving parts.
And you have to every 3,000 hours spend hundreds of thousands of dollars
and a lot of time to overhaul them.
There's one moving part in an electric motor in a plane.
An electric propulsion system can reduce cost of ownership or cost of
operation dramatically.
Orders of magnitude 40, 50, 60, 70%.
But not only do you have lower maintenance costs, but you also have lower
costs in terms of actually providing the energy required to go from one
location to another.
With so many benefits, why is it we have yet to see the electric vehicle
movement come to aerospace?
Some fundamental problem with electric aircraft has always been that a
good lithium ion battery cell has one fortieth of the energy content of
the equivalent weight of jet fuel.
And so if you were to take an existing airplane and you take out all the
fuel and you take out the engines and the fuel systems and replace those
with only batteries, then you would only fly one twentieth as far.
While the electrification of aviation has been slow to start, the
technology is starting to look more feasible.
So there's been a significant enough revolution and improvement in the
performance of batteries, which the automotive industry is really driving.
It is extremely promising that one of these battery technologies can be
scaled up for electric flight.
So the real question is, is not when will we have electric airplanes?
It's when will the time come where we can have electric airplanes that fly
far enough to then start replacing conventionally fueled air transport?
The first area to be serviced with electric aircraft will be short
regional flights. But battery electric flight is still in early
development. Some of the planes that have flown have been demonstrated.
They're basically all battery.
They're just carrying their pilot.
And they actually don't even have the weight to carry passengers right
now. But the batteries are going to improve.
Pipistrel is one of the few all electric plane manufacturers actually
building and flying today.
Because of limited range and capacity, they're primarily used as trainer
aircraft. Recently, Harbour Air in Vancouver, Canada, partnered with
MagniX to take its fleet of seaplanes all electric.
It just completed its first successful flight and is beginning the
certification and approval process.
Israeli startup Eviation Aircraft showed off its all electric nine-seat
aircraft in summer 2019 at the Paris Air Show.
The company claims the plane will be capable of flying up to 650 miles and
that customers have placed more than 150 orders.
The startup hopes to begin testing in 2020.
There's companies out there, like Bye Aerospace and Pipistrel, that are
doing, I think, amazing things in the light sport and the trainer aircraft
market, where they could go straight to electric with those vehicles and
the cost of ownership and the operational cost benefits are really, really
compelling. Until battery tech improves, hybrid electric aircraft is what
will be utilized for larger capacity flights going longer distances.
A hybrid electric aircraft would be an aircraft that would leverage an
electric motor and electric propulsion in addition to the traditional fuel
sources that we have today.
So one can imagine, just like you would have a hybrid electric car, you
could have a hybrid electric aircraft.
So what we've done is we've taken a very, very successful Honeywell
helicopter engine and we've mounted it with a special gearbox to two of
our ultra efficient generators.
So in total, this machine generates 400 kilowatts of power, which is
enough to power 40 homes at one time.
Ampaire is one startup working on and testing hybrid electric aircraft.
The first plane that Ampaire flew is our electric eel, and that's a six
seat aircraft, the largest hybrid electric aircraft that's ever flown.
We're already building our second copy of that aircraft, and it's going to
be the first ever to fly on an actual commercial route demoing daily
operations in Hawaii.
The test flights will begin next year in partnership with Mokulele
Airlines, flying on a route based out of Maui.
This project is a stepping stone for worldwide adoption of electric
aircraft. So we've been working in programs from everywhere like Norway,
where Norway is actually aiming to have all flights under 90 minutes go
electric or hybrid electric by 2040.
And you're looking at the U.K.,
Scotland initiatives going on right now to have electric and hybrid
electric aircraft. Airlines historically have struggled to make money on
shorter regional flights, but hybrid planes could change that.
In a hybrid, we're reducing fuel burn by up to 75 percent.
That is transformational for the economics of airlines.
There's this whole segment of the market, about 40 billion dollars of
revenue that has now been eliminated from airlines' balance sheets because
they just couldn't fly those routes profitably.
We're going to enable them to fly those routes again.
Utilizing hybrid engines in regional aircraft could also make flight more
common in daily life.
I think everybody knows how expensive it is to fly regionally.
And part of the reason that this is the case is that small turbine engines
are very inefficient.
Electricity from renewable sources can be very cheap.
And in parts of the country it's ridiculously cheap, like the Pacific
Northwest, compared to jet fuel flying will be will be a bargain.
It's also going to enable is things like regional commuting that you have
these super-commuters in places like Los Angeles and the Bay Area that are
going to be able to do things like fly daily, air-pooling.
So when could we see larger commercial airliners go electric?
It could be some time.
I think there's a lot of years, if not decades, before hybrid electric and
fully electric propulsion is going to be viable in that space.
And it's unknown when battery technology will be sufficient for those
longer missions. In the take-off, the amount of power that is required is
specifically related to its weight.
Even to have a small passenger plane, maybe three or four people, go for
several hundred miles, you need a battery that is two to three times more
powerful than it is today.
It's more likely that these larger aircraft will convert to hybrid
technology until batteries are capable of supporting longer flights.
When you talk to a Boeing or you talk to an Airbus about a really big
airplane, the conversations in the present tend to be around how do you
make the airplane more electric versus fully electric?
And that does take loads off of the engines and help reduce the fuel burn
of those aircraft and make those aircraft more efficient.
Electric technology also opens up a host of new efficient designs for
future aircraft. There's kind of a cascade of benefits.
You produce less heat, so it's easier to cool your system and your cooling
drag goes down. You can design the plane differently.
The electric motors are tiny compared to an engine.
You can put them in different places.
So it just opens up an entire new design space.
You compare the amount of energy per weight that you could put in a
battery versus amount of energy per weight that's in a gallon of gasoline,
it's enormously different.
And what that forces you to do is to design very, very efficient
airplanes. These efficiencies in combination with the advantages of
electric propulsion, enable an entirely new type of flight: air taxis or
urban air mobility.
Urban air mobility is really a new mode of transportation.
I would actually call it a new era in aviation.
And that revolution is really to overcome the traffic problem we're seeing
around big cities. Perhaps you're 30 miles away from your closest airport.
So you could potentially get into one of these urban air mobility vehicles
and fly that short distance that might take you an hour in traffic, but
maybe fifteen minutes in one of these urban air mobility vehicles.
This new segment of transportation has attracted the attention of Uber,
which is hoping to bring its experience as a rideshare company to flight.
We know that congestion is getting worse and there's limits to what you
can do on the ground. Let's move transportation out of the 2D grid into
the third dimension.
Uber is creating the technology that will help run the logistical
operations of such a service and partnering with manufacturers to provide
the aircraft. When you select Uber Air, we'll get you a car.
You'll take that to the sky port.
We'll walk you through the seamless, minimal time transition into the
aircraft, which will then take off fly to the closest remote skyport to
your destination, where a car will meet you just in time for you to get to
your final destination. Urban air mobility could surpass ground-based
services in investor interest and funding.
Morgan Stanley estimates the market could reach $1.5
trillion by 2040.
The evolution has been like nothing I've ever seen.
I've been in aerospace for decades and there's been an influx of capital
at each end of the value chain, from the vehicle manufacturers to the
technology to the infrastructure to the regulatory environment.
Hundreds of startups have recently entered the space, all working to
develop their own aircraft.
Vahana is developing a short range vertical takeoff and landing vehicle
funded by Airbus. Joby Aviation is backed by JetBlue Airways and Google's
Larry Page is an investor in two startups as well.
Traditionally, only a few hundred planes are manufactured a year.
The advent of urban air mobility could change that and have a big impact
on the automotive industry.
The volumes are gonna be like nothing we've ever seen.
In a traditional aerospace market, five hundred airplanes a year, six
hundred airplanes a year, those are a record-setting numbers of airplanes
and for urban air mobility, could be tens of thousands of vehicles per
year. And quite frankly, the traditional aerospace industry isn't equipped
to support those volumes.
Anticipating this convergence of aerospace and automotive led Honeywell to
partner with Denso, one of the world's largest automotive suppliers.
We talk about urban air mobility, not as a replacement for an airplane,
but as a replacement for a car.
And so you have a lot of automotive companies that are very, very
interested in participating in the market.
We build millions of motors and inverters.
And when we bring that kind of technology and manufacturing know-how to
our aerospace customers, it's seen as really, really monumental because
they are used to building in such low quantities.
Air taxis are only just starting to enter testing.
But how soon could we potentially see them out in the world?
We do see some urban air mobility operations using conventional
helicopters today. But when are we going to actually see these electric
vertical take-off and landing vehicles?
My best guess would be as the technology develops, we'll be most likely in
the 2035, 2030+ timeframe.
We've said publicly that we think that 2023 is an achievable date for
launch of a real commercial service.
It'll be a handful of vehicles starting out on key routes.
It's going to start at a price point that's a little bit more premium.
But before air taxis or fully electric planes can be a reality, batteries
still need to improve.
If we want a small air taxi to fly for, say, five hundred miles, that will
require a battery that has more than double the energy density of today's
electric vehicle batteries.
Another roadblock is ensuring it will be safe and reliable under heavy
use. There are 200,000 planes taking off and landing every day.
So the reliability of a battery powered plane has to be very high.
As the technology improves, they'll be entering an industry built around
heavy regulation. Aircraft manufacturing and systems are required to
undergo intense certification to ensure reliability and safety.
This is no longer dad's little Cessna 172.
This is a vehicle that needs that reliability and that safety to move
people who are expecting that same experience that they would get in a 737
in a small vehicle. Not to mention the logistical obstacles of navigating
the crowded airspace. As more flight technologies come to market, there
will be more aircraft in the skies than ever before.
Think about hundreds or even thousands of these vehicles flying around.
They have to stay away from all the other traffic that's flying in the
space. So not only will we have to ensure safe operations for the
passengers on board, but also for off nominal cases, ensuring the safety
of the folks that are on the ground.
And with urban air mobility emerging as a new field in aviation, a whole
new set of research questions and processes need to be developed between
the FAA and vehicle partners.
To address these challenge, NASA has created The Grand Challenge.
The Grand Challenges is focused on providing an ecosystem or a proving
ground to enable not only NASA, but also the FAA, vehicle industry
partners and airspace industry partners to come together to really
understand the key questions of what will be required to enable urban air
mobility operations.
The hope is that together they can outline safety certifications,
regulation and integration into the national airspace and urban
environments. Seeing an electric plane as a prototype is quite far from a
mass produced one.
Unless there is a significant policy shift to put, for example, a cost on
carbon emissions, battery based planes will have to compete also with jet
fuel based planes and currently the economics do not work.
As planes progress toward electric technology, we should expect it to
follow a very similar path to what we saw in the automobile industry.
Where you at one point were talking about small vehicles like a Nissan
Leaf, now you're talking about electrifying entire buses.
And I think in aerospace or in flying vehicles, we're going to see sort of
a similar evolution.
To stay in service for 30 years, the aircraft that need to be flying 30
years from now need to be in development today.
I think that we will start seeing regional electric aircraft happen.
And I think that will certainly be in the next 15 years.
Every type of transport is going electric has already gone electric and
planes are next. And it's not just some far-out future.
It's happening right now.