First Cars, Now Planes: Is The Future of Flying Electric? Ep194: Anders Forslund

Transcript

Anders Forslund

A plane like ours weighs roughly the same as a Tesla semi, an electric truck. It carries roughly the same amount of batteries. It has the same system voltage. It has the same power electronics. We're going to be using a lot of the same components. But the cost for a plane versus something like that is two orders of magnitude higher, which means that there is so much opportunity to bring these costs down.

Bryony Worthington

Hello, I'm Bryony Worthington, and this is Cleaning Up. My guest this week is Anders Forslund, CEO of Heart Aerospace, the Swedish airplane developers who've recently established an R&D facility in California to develop their 30 seater hybrid-electric plane. Later this year, their all-electric prototype will take to the skies in its first test flight. Aviation accounts for around 2-3% of global emissions, and it's showing no sign of decreasing. There has been a lot of focus on replacement fuels, but as yet, there's been no real paradigm shift in the industry. Anders has a plan to change that. We met in person in Los Angeles, a city starting to open and rebuild after devastating wildfires leveled roughly 63 square miles of the city, claiming at least 25 lives, while on the other side of the country, President Trump was signing executive orders to repeal federal support measures designed to tackle climate change. While there are a number of companies innovating in the aerospace sector, including Joby Aviation, who we featured in episode 156, Heart is targeting larger planes and longer routes. They already have orders to buy hundreds of planes, most notably from United Airlines, and have received early investment from Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures. I wanted to ask Anders about his company, the sector more generally, and how he's feeling about the coming years. Please join me in welcoming Anders Forslund to Cleaning Up.

Anders, thank you for inviting me to Heart Aerospace to interview you today. I'm really looking forward to this conversation, and I was just wondering if you could start with our usual question, which is introducing yourself in your own words, please.

So my name is Anders Forslund and I'm co-founder and CEO of Heart Aerospace. And yeah, my background is I love planes. I have since I was a kid. Got my education actually, moving from from back to forth. I got my PhD in aerospace product development. I was a researcher at MIT on jet engines. Before that, I did my Masters in space technology and physics, Bachelors in engineering physics. I'm really into planes, I like building stuff, and after a while working in parallel in the legacy aerospace industry, we started this company, and it's been six years now, and we're approaching the first flight of our aircraft.

Amazing. And tell us a little bit about what makes the Heart Aerospace plane special.

It's the first commercial aircraft that is designed to operate for airlines that is hybrid-electric. So it represents a paradigm shift that we haven't really seen in this industry since we went into the jet age, right? And not only is it the first hybrid electric aircraft — and we're going to talk obviously more about why that's important — but it's also the first time in 12 years in the western world that we've see a new clean-sheet aircraft design being rolled out and flight tested and then being entered into service.

Excellent, and so just to bring that to life for people: when you say hybrid-electric, I think perhaps most people would think of maybe the Prius as a car that is similar to that.

Yeah, our mission is to decouple. We talk about the decarbonization and democratisation of air travel. And air travel is one of the greatest inventions out there. It really is something that's a force for good in our society and our civilization, but it's tightly coupled to emissions. So we have two things happening this year. First of all, aviation passed — or commercial air travel passed — the threshold of being a $1 trillion market, but it's also emitting about one gigaton of CO2. Which means that for every dollar you spend on, say, an aircraft ticket, that's one kilogram of CO2. So this is a really interesting one-to-one ratio. And the industry emissions and the industry revenue like this, they've been tightly linked for the past decades. And so we're seeing that we're sort of stagnating a little bit in terms of what we can to optimize the jet-engine technology. So the only way to break this pattern is to find a way to decouple that. And obviously electrification is the solution. Now our aircraft is hybrid-electric, but it has the opportunity to fly, or is designed to fly routes that are up to 200 kilometers, 125 miles, initially. And then as batteries progress, fly even longer. But the reason it's hybrid is that we can also fly longer routes, 800 kilometers, 500 miles. But it's also needed for reserves. So if you build an electric car, and you run out of battery, you can pull off to the side of the road. Whereas, if you have a plane, you need a runway. And about one in every 1,000 flights in the US gets diverted to different places, and if you want to carry batteries for that one in 1,000 contingency, you end up with an excessively heavy plane that has a really bad performance. So instead, you build a small hybrid system on the aircraft to allow you to fly to meet those reserve requirements and fly the longer routes. That's sort of there for safety redundancy. But the core of the aircraft is electric, an all-electric value proposition for the zero emissions use case. So it's not really like a Prius. It's more, you know, you and I talked about it is more like, I understand, the sort of the black cabs of London.

And we've got the picture of the actual plane here behind us, and it's a propeller plane, four propellers, and the systems are separated, right? Do you want to talk to us about that?

Yeah, so we looked a lot at the different systems of doing this, and there was a bunch of design criteria that we looked at. So this hybrid system for the short routes will be used only once in every 1,000 flights. And so you want to build a system that can use off the shelf components that you don't have to spend a lot of time developing for the hybrid system. And so we came up with this concept, what we call the independent hybrid. So the inboard engines are two electric motors, the outboard motors, or the outboard propellers are two turboprop engines, and they are off for the short flights, and they're feathered, which means that the propellers are in a position that they're not actually adding drag. So you're flying with inboard motors alone for the short flights, and then you turn these things on in mid air, basically, if you have a contingency, if you want to fly further, which means that you can use off the shelf turboprop engines that are like smaller, inexpensive for a large aircraft. And you can focus on the development of the electric system and the switching between the two. And while that is an operation, it's not very high resolution. So sometimes you have very, very complex hybrid systems with gear boxes and millisecond accuracy and all of these failure cases. Here you keep these systems independent, which makes it much easier to control

And to regulate?

And to regulate, yeah.

And so aviation has got a bit of a reputation as being a very inefficient way of traveling, but actually the big expenditure of energy is to get yourself off the ground and into the air. Once you're up there, it doesn't require that much energy, right, to keep yourself going. And coming down, you're using virtually no energy.

Yeah. I mean, it's actually quite astounding, given the speeds that we can travel at with aircraft. That it's actually on par with things like driving a car with two people and stuff like that. And the beautiful thing about aviation is that, you know, whereas if you look at a car, you have the manufacturing footprint of having a two-ton vehicle, or three-ton vehicle with tons of batteries being built for you. And you also have the road. So I only know this figure for Sweden, but in Sweden, it's about 200 meters of road for every car. So if you think about, what's the ecosystem that I'm buying, what was my buy in for a car? It's not only the car itself, it's 200 meters of road that needs to be managed. And the same thing with trains. A large part of the tickets for trains are being subsidized for the maintenance of the tracks, right? So aviation has this unique opportunity. You don't need roads, you don't need rail, you only need a small strip of runway, and we are actually operating from quite small runways. So this has the opportunity to be the fastest, the most affordable, and also, obviously, the greenest form of travel.

But it does require iteration, right? Because at 125 miles, I'm just trying to think in my world of going up to say, Tahoe, you drive, there's no rail infrastructure, but that's beyond the range of 125 miles.

So you'd have to use the hybrid system for some of these initially. And obviously we will see batteries improve, and we'll also see that technology will improve on the other facets of it as well. But the interesting thing about this product is, you know... you have a mission and a vision as a company and our vision is the decarbonization and democratisation of air travel. And the vision we have, how we imagine the world in the future, is actually quite simple. It's a world that looks like Norway does today. So in Norway, they have 30-seater aircraft going point to point between small communities. It's the backbone of the infrastructure there. And it's designed like that because Norway has a lot of challenging geography and a small population, so it isn't cost efficient to build roads and rail. Something that can be a 20-minute flight can be a six hour drive. So the reason that works and is cost efficient in Norway is that it's subsidized by about 40% by the Norwegian government. By going electric, the value is not only in decarbonization, but it's also that you reduce the cost of operating, because electric motors are very simple. They're maintenance free. Battery energy is cheap, it's predictable. So you end up with a product much like electric cars, where the use cost of it is much less. So the operating economics for airlines means that whilst jet engines are really terrible at flying small planes short routes, electric aircraft are really good at that.

That's the segment that you're hoping to move into. And it's a segment that's lost market share?

Yeah so, I mean, we started, really, with the focus in the Nordics. So we started with this mandate that was given by Norway, where they said they wanted to decarbonize all of that traffic by 2040, and we were the only ones building something for that. Then we ended up getting in contact with United Airlines and Mesa airlines, which is one of their regional partners, that fly United Express. And we asked them, 'Do you fly a lot of turboprops? Do you have that market like in Norway?' And they said, 'No, we have nothing like that. We don't fly any turboprops, but we used to.' So if you go back to the 1990s, we operated hundreds of these aircraft, serving hundreds of communities that have since lost service. And they did not stop flying these things because the aircraft didn't fly far enough. That was not the issue. In fact, the average distance flown by a 30-seater in the 1990s in their network was about 172 miles, which is well within the range of our hybrid system. And a lot of those flights, up to half of them probably, are within the 125 miles that we can fly all electric. So they started just pulling up their old route network, and I started identifying the flagship routes, and realized that they have over 100 different routes that they want to open up with this. And ended up writing an order for 100 aircraft from United and 100 aircraft from Mesa, which was remarkable for us.

And because you had that era of shorter haul, the infrastructure of the airports is there, as I understand it?

Yeah, so the US is quite remarkable. It has 5,000 airports. So in Norway, there's about 50 airports. In the US, there's 5,000 and they were all built,commissioned, subsidized. They're still there, still operational, but only 500 of them are actually seeing any commercial use whatsoever, and only about 200 of them have about 99% of the traffic. So you're seeing this vast infrastructure, 5,000 airports, and actually, like 98% of the population lives within 30 miles of these airports. Even here in LA, we're surrounded by airports. Hawthorne Airport is the closest one to where we are here, but it's only like the large airports, like LAX that are seeing traffic. So we think that this is a massively underutilized infrastructure that is being kept open. We need to put charging in place, but we have all that we need to start flying from these places, and that's what really excites us. We can start building this infrastructure that's almost parallel that works on these 99% of airports that see no traffic today.

But there must be a reason why there was that consolidation, and I'm guessing it's to do with the cost of running a jet

Yeah, I mean, the large factor was that the jet engine is... it sucks. First of all,we never really solved commoditization or mass production of jet engines. So they're still highly expensive pieces of machinery with a lot of advanced manufacturing, a lot of moving parts, and they cost virtually the same if you put them on a 70-seater or a 30-seater. So the game in aerospace is you kind of want to make sure you're amortizing the cost over a large number of passengers. And they also wear the same whether you fly 100 miles or 1,000 miles, because it's the thermal cycle of the engine when it heats up and contracts when it's being used that is wearing it. And that's what drives maintenance. And then it's very inefficient during taxi. For these routes we're talking about, you know, 10% of the fuel can be spent taxiing. They're very noisy in taxi, polluting a lot during take off and landing. So it's not the ideal operating point for these things. So for these short routes, their passenger kilometers are about twice as bad.

And there'd be local opposition, I imagine, in some parts, because of the noise and because of the pollution, as you mentioned.

Noise pollution, runway requirements. So obviously when you bring this, you drastically reduce noise. You operate it from shorter runways, and you have zero local pollution, which means that it's much more... You know, I think residents' see the value of having connectivity as well. So that equation changes.

And I guess from an economic development perspective as well, it's going to open up opportunities for communities to be able to develop around an airport and attract business, kind of, as you say, democratizing this form of transport out from just the hubs, which seem to command so much resource.

Yeah, connectivity and infrastructure has been how we define our civilization. I mean, the first cities were built by the rivers, right? And then it was important to be by the rail tracks and by the interstates. And now, if you want to be in a competitive place, you have to be close to airport connectivity. I mean, it's as important for your business as being connected to the internet, right?

So the vision is really clear, and there's some territories like the US where you've got infrastructure that could be brought back, but talk to me a bit about the economics at the moment, because, of course, you've got this high capital cost of bringing a new airplane into production. I mean, how long is it going to take before you think economics are going to be in your favor?

Yeah, so the challenge of bringing an aircraft through certification is that you sort of have to amortize. We've been fortunate enough to receive these orders. I mean, we have orders for like 500 aircraft. And in the aircraft industry, that's a lot, and that's enough to amortize the cost. But obviously it's getting over that hurdle of certification.

But those orders must have had a price point?

Of course, yeah. And meeting that price point, we feel pretty confident that we can do that actually. Looking at what's happened in the industry, also over the past decades, is that we've seen digitalization happen, a lot of commoditization of subsystems. So there's been a slew of technology like chips and electronics that have been developed from the autonomous car industry that has the kind of high integrity fail safe modes that we need that are now being introduced to the aerospace industry.

And really sophisticated controllers?

Yeah, exactly. So if you think about it, you've seen how drones have come in and shown how this market can really be commoditized. And you have some things on a small consumer drone that are more advanced than what's on your passenger aircraft that's flying. So it's really about taking that technology and then sort of getting it through the sausage machine of certification of aircraft.

So you've got your order book from United and others, which is excellent. As I understand it, they just approached you through your info@ email?

Oh yeah, it's one of the stories... Klara, who's my wife, and who founded the company with me. She just came to me one day. She was like, 'I got this email. It was in the spam folder.' And she was like, 'Is this legit or not?' Okay, we'll set up a call and see. And it ended up with them writing this large order, and becoming investors in a round that was led by Breakthrough Energy, which is the climate fund that was founded by Bill Gates. So that was pretty, pretty good.

And you were sitting in your Y-Combinator startup, right?

Yeah, this was actually, we were back in Sweden. This was for our Series A. But we were so focused on the Nordics, and then we got one of the world's largest airlines, and arguably one of the leaders on this transition coming in.

And so they've given you that good you know... you've got a buyer, which is super important, it tells you that you've got a good product market fit. But where are you going to scale up this operation? Because the US and Europe have very different markets. You're a Swedish-US hybrid now?

Yeah so we started very locally, because we had a lot of early funding and support from the Swedish government. And we had these orders from SAS and BRA, who still are some of our key partners. But we've seen, as we've grown, this sort of local niche product where we started has had this global appeal. And again, you know, they're very complimentary because Norway is very forward leaning, but it has 1% of the airports that are here in the US. And this is the largest market for aerospace in the world. And it has some of the best talent in the world for development, and really we have all those possible pieces for building a truly revolutionary product. And one thing that we're obviously attracted to, we're here today in El Segundo in this sort of new aerospace ecosystem, and we have a lot of SpaceXers working with us. And we really want to do for aerospace what SpaceX did for launch, which was looking at bringing commoditized systems, building a vertically integrated product, a new paradigm in how you approach product development, which is more about a fast iterative process. It's called iterative product development.

Or move fast and break things?

Yeah move fast and break things is... you know you have to be a little bit careful when you're building aerospace products. But actually testing things towards failure is something that ultimately results in a better product. We're just not going to do that when we're flying it.

No. And tell me a little bit about that process of innovation and your philosophy, because I know you've been highly influenced by another Swede who moved to the US.

Oh, yeah, so one of my big heroes is obviously Kelly Johnson. He's Swedish, he was born in the US, but his parents were from Malmö in southern Sweden, and he lived close to where I live now in LA. And he headed the Lockheed Skunk Works that built some of the most remarkable aircraft. And this idea of a Skunk Work, it's become a thing now, but it was actually just like their word for this special forces kind of small team. And he was basically saying, like a small team of 10% of an average size organization, but highly, highly, highly skilled engineers can be more efficient, right? Like, instead of having the army you have the Navy Seals, if you will. And then he lists these things: simplicity, iteration, full control of the process by the managers and responsible engineers. And these things came from the aerospace industry, and actually were very influential when the software industry created their working practice and their ethos.

Yeah, Lockheed Martin was a sort of Bay Area company.

Yeah they were. They were based in the Bay Area where they sort of spawned some of their work on...

Perhaps famously, the Blackbird.

Yeah, the Blackbird, which is just a remarkable aircraft.

Not very practical though.

I mean yeah, it's beautiful engineering. I mean it's really something that looks like it was built in the future, but it's 50 years old plus, right? But that's why it's so interesting when you're in aerospace, and people are saying, 'You know what, you're trying to do something, people are not doing it this way. It's impossible to do it this way.' And you just have to look back at the storied past and realize that, for instance, all of the commercial planes today, they kind of look the same. And the archetype for that is the Boeing 367, which then became the Boeing 707, and formed the basis for all Boeing aircraft. And you know, still being the platform from which they're building their narrow bodies. And it was built in the span of two years by a team spending about $200 million in today's money. And they didn't have computers, they didn't have the analysis tools that we had. And so there's always, when we talk about the way we want to approach this, it's forward looking, but it's also looking back at the storied past of aviation.

And I find that really interesting, because Boeing has not had a really good run of late, right? So they have this core design that was from the 50s, which they iterated around. But it hasn't necessarily meant that it's been any safer, or there haven't been safety issues, which is kind of curious, right? You'd think the reason they locked down was to try and create fewer uncertainties, but then recently, that doesn't seem to be working.

Yeah, I want to be a bit careful, but I would say, certainly since the introduction of that aircraft, we've really improved safety, and we haven't had... I know the safety record for air travel in the US at least, is stellar. But it becomes an issue when the currency in... basically, if you haven't built... It's 17 years now since a clean sheet design was produced by Boeing and it's looking to be the late 2030s before they're actually going to do something else. So the industry is in this dilemma where in order to motivate building a new aircraft program, you need to have a 20% better fuel efficiency than the last one. That's always been the name of the game, and we're hitting the practical limits of actually being able to achieve even a modest improvement in fuel efficiency from jet engines. And that's been the name of the game for the last 50 years — we've seen jet engines have doubled in efficiency. So that's been feeding the industry and feeding the new programs and sort of creating the circulation in the system, keeping engineering competence current. But now that's stopped, and people don't really know where to go. And we're at a place where the incumbents now, both Boeing and Airbus, are saying they're not going to have a new aircraft until the late 2030s because they need this step-change in technology. And that means that new aircraft are not being built, and that engineers are losing their currency in how to operate that. So we're approaching a 30-year innovation cycle, which is remarkable.

Remarkable in a bad way, right? That's a whole generation, someone's working lifespan, where you might not see iteration into a new design.

I mean, imagine if you launched the first iPhone in 2007 and you said, 'great work team, let's do the next one in 2037' Like, there wouldn't be anybody around, right? So all of the knowledge has been sort of lost. When you're building technology, you're sort of running up the escalator. The natural state of everything is that knowledge is being lost. The natural state is decay, and you have to move faster than those natural decaying processes to build accretive knowledge.

And it's especially true, I imagine, in a highly engineered technology like aviation, where you can't really read a book. You need to build.

I mean, if you're at a company and the percentage of your workforce that has firsthand experience of building and designing new aircraft is becoming increasingly diminished, can you really say that the company has... You know, we obviously are good at documenting in this industry and writing down our processes, but it's, I think, a fallacy to assume that just because you have a vault full of documentation somewhere, that somebody just can go in and sort of take up where somebody else left off.

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We are here in LA and on the other side of the country, we've got President Trump, who is now taking occupancy in the White House. It's probably very early days to be making any kind of projections about what this will mean, but how are you viewing this at the moment?

Well, we're also obviously in a place where we lost large parts of the city to a large wildfire, where climate change certainly played a role. And we're in the heels of the hottest year on record, and I think that the political dynamics are going to be changing and oscillating all the time. Unfortunately the wider trend is going to be that climate change is going to be even more real and more urgent and so how do you deal with that? You try to find, first of all, build a product that has a negative green premium. I think this is important, as essentially, we're...

Just unpack what you mean by that. So that's basically saying, Bill Gates has this phrase of the green premium, which means you have to pay a little bit extra (for a green product). But ideally, you find the win-wins where the new approach is more efficient and therefore inherently cheaper. That's a negative green premium as in, you're going to be saving money.

Yeah, exactly, that's the way. And then cleantech sort of incentives can be really important, because they can catalyze a lot of this development and has for us in the past. But ultimately, you want to build a product which combines ecology with economy, that has a better economic performance than the thing that you're replacing. And where electrification goes in, that happens everywhere, like in cars and bikes and everywhere. But also, our mission is to decarbonize and democratize. So the green aspect is one part of it, but it's also restoring connectivity to communities that have lost service. And you know, the time we spend in DC, we see that this is resonating across the aisle, right? Because people want to restore connectivity to their home communities. And finally, I think aviation is one of the greatest examples of American ingenuity. The Wright brothers and everything, right? It's at the core of the national identity and the engineering pride. And obviously we want to keep the US being a global leader in developing this.

It was interesting, on my way here, I decided to come down from San Jose to LA. I took the bus because I thought, I've got to see what it's like to do this without driving myself in an electric car. And in the bus station or the train station, they've got this little exhibit of times past where San Jose was investing in infrastructure. And there's this wonderful advert of trying to get people to vote for and basically say yes to a new airport in San Jose. And the phrase was, 'Let's get San Jose out of the buggy and cart era.' Get us into the modern day. And then next to that is a little pamphlet about high speed rail. And it's so interesting that high speed rail really has not succeeded in the US context, whereas aviation did. And there was this era where planes were modernity, as defined in the American dream, really much more so than trains.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because, I'm gonna say something maybe controversial, but I think despite all of the success of aviation and it's tremendous obviously, this is a trillion dollar market, it's still a niche product. It has not really lived up to the expectations that were set. Like Henry Ford, building the Ford tri-motor aircraft because he thought that cars would not have a role in the future. Why would you, when you can fly and go much faster and go straight? But still, we're at a place where most people only use planes...

Well and it's highly divided, in the sense that on my bus, you know, that's obviously affordable to, or to a much wider swath of society. To get on an airplane feels still somewhat out of reach for a lot of people. And maybe that is because the core product is necessarily quite expensive to run, with the fuel and the...

Yeah, but I don't think we're anywhere close to where we could be with that. And the interesting thing about operating, when you look at that, and we talk a little bit about the decline of regional aviation, and people think that this is just sort of natural convergent evolution. It's this highly random process that is highly non-linear, which means that in aviation we have, especially in the design of aircraft, we have these snowball effects. For instance, if you're designing a plane and you make the engine a little bit more efficient, you can make a little bit smaller wing, and that means that the whole weight of the aircraft goes down, and then you can suffice with an even smaller engine. And then you get these virtuous circles, and then you have the negative cycles that happen, where things quickly become less and less valuable. And I think it's true for how we design an aircraft. It's also true for how air travel works, for the infrastructure.

And are there other ways in which aviation is benefiting from improvements in material science, you know we hear about, maybe just the way that we cover the plane is a factor in terms of the drag. And I guess there are all these innovations coming.

Yeah. A plane like ours weighs roughly the same as a Tesla semi, an electric truck. It carries roughly the same amount of batteries. It has the same system voltage. It has the same power electronics. We're going to be using a lot of the same components. But the cost for a plane versus something like that is two orders of magnitude higher, which means that there is so much opportunity to bring these costs down. It's not that the materials themselves are expensive. It's just that the refinement of those materials takes a lot of engineering hours, which means that it's another way of saying that aerospace is a technology product, just like software, just like electronics. It's not actually the core cost of materials that is driving the cost of the product. It is the cost of engineering. That means that a software centric or a sort of Silicon Valley ethos to designing these products can be highly, highly effective.

Okay, so this is all in the context of the short haul industry, and as you envisage it, bringing that back. But what about long haul? You've got a great academic history of working right the way through from space propulsion. What are your thoughts on long haul? Because there will be a limit, right?

Yeah, I think that as we go bigger — and we share this on our roadmap — we're looking at going to a 100-seater afterwards, and we think that short haul will go more and more all electric, as batteries improve, and also the hybrid technology can then scale to larger aircraft. And the physics are not really setting the limits. It's more the practicality of the systems and how the synergies you can get with automotive development. But the 100 100 seater is next for us. That's going to be hybrid electric. And ultimately, about 1/3 of emissions are coming from routes that are under 1,500 kilometers. That's 1/3. Because it's like 75% of flights. Like for really long haul that's SAF.

So sustainable aviation fuel would be your bet for the really long haul?

Yeah, I would say it's going to be a combination of different technologies, but at the same time, the technologies that we're developing, there's a role for hybrid systems in any kind of kind of engine, if you combine it with other things, because it's just a way of building better efficiencies. There's a role for redefining how we build our architectures of our aircraft to make them overall lighter. And one thing that we know about SAF is obviously that it's going to be more expensive than jet fuel. So anything we can do to make sure that we get more out of each trip, it is going to be critical to making that play work.

So there will also be a hybridization of those long haul flights.

Yeah. I mean, we've actually seen, even for the Dreamliner and the A350 there's this thing called more-electric systems, where the non-propulsive parts of the engine, like mechanical systems, have been replaced by electrical. Hydraulics have been replaced by electrical. And that's also creeping into the propulsion system. Obviously, the gain is better the shorter the flight.

So obviously, there is still a bit of a debate around the alternative to fossil-based fuels, because we've got sustainable aviation fuel, which is coming from a process of creating from a biomass source, by and large. And then you've got another version, which is hydrogen — green, blue, hydrogen. What are your thoughts on hydrogen in the aviation sector?

I think that hydrogen is, you know... Well, first of all, I think everybody that's working with any solution in the aviation sector should be applauded, right? And we definitely don't have the silver bullet for everything. And there's a lot of unknown unknowns. I think our focus, our gravitation towards hybrid-electric, is that it's technology that is a known entity, that is working today. There are certified all electric aircraft. We understand safety. We can design around that, and we can build a product that has this negative green premium. I think it's much harder to say that for hydrogen. Basically, if you want to create hydrogen out of electricity, your conversion rates are just so bad that you're sort of hit with the loss of thermodynamics. If you want to actually build a product, you're going to be at 5x to 10x more expensive than a battery electric.

And so this is true, even though the theoretical density of the fuel is higher?

Yeah. I mean, it's obviously dependent on what aircraft you're talking about, what route length you are talking about. And I think that hybrid hydrogen electric aircraft could theoretically fly farther than battery electric aircraft, but for any route that you could fly battery electric, you'd want to fly battery electric. But yeah, so that's that. And then obviously there's the discussion of, if you're using hydrogen, why not just go for SAF? If it's going to be expensive to build up that infrastructure, why not use something that is more of a known entity, not redesign your entire plane and your infrastructure?

And I guess if we are electrifying ground-based transport at pace, there's already a sustainable fuel blend that's going in. Certainly in Brazil, they have these very high levels of ethanol blended into the road transport fuels. I presume with the ethanol subsidies in the US, there's also ethanol that could be freed up as we electrify. So can you see a point at which the SAF fuels are abundant enough that they can come down in price?

Yeah, I'm not an expert in SAF, so I don't want to speak with that much authority, but I agree with what you're saying. And I guess our marching orders are just to do everything we can to improve the efficiency by introducing hybrid systems. It means that we're acting as a force for good. I think in general, we talked about this before, the whole crystal ball exercise that people are doing, people are saying, you know, we're gonna be somewhere in 2050... that's 25 years away. When I started this company it was 30 years away. Whatever you're going to be predicting for 30 years away, you're going to look like an idiot. Your long-term vision should always be matched with short-term action. Because whatever we're assuming the technology will look like, we're going to be wrong. So we've got to put ourselves on a trajectory of educating ourselves and improving ourselves and that process is by doing and building. So in order to be somewhere by 2050, like in order for us to reach the finish line by 2050, we need to at least have made the first big leap by the end of this decade.

And that's exactly what you'll focus on right now? Do you want to tell us a little bit about your test flight that's coming up.

Yeah, I mean our aircraft, you know, six years into the company, where we're sitting here behind us is our first flight test demonstration. It's a full scale aircraft. It has a 106-foot wingspan. It's the largest battery electric aircraft ever to fly by a large margin, and it's clean sheet. We're going to be flying this within the first half of this year.

And how long will it be before you yourself, the inventor, might be able to step onto your own plane?

Yeah, I mean, I'm having those discussions with my wife.

You're not going to do the Orville Wright thing where you're flying the plane?

Actually, unfortunately, you know, people ask me if I'm a pilot, I'm more of a builder than I am a pilot. But yeah, maybe in the next iteration, after this one, I can get into the jump seat.

And so before we end, I really wanted to also ask you a question about Sweden.Because here you are this inventor who's come out of Sweden, now in LA following the footsteps of Kelly Johnson, as we talked about. But there's another very famous Swede, Greta Thunberg, who, amongst the many things she's achieved — she's a wonderful person — She did, I think, get involved in the Swedish concept of the flygskam. Can you tell us what flygskam is?

Yes. So, I mean, before I started this company, I was a researcher, and I was leading the Swedish project on electric aviation. And the first time I went to Parliament to speak, this was in 2018, Greta was sitting outside parliament. She had started her protest that week, and she was in the local news. And I took note of that as I walked past and got into it, and I thought it was sort of a cool thing she's doing. And that kind of blew up after that. You know, she became the Time Person of the Year the very next year. And part of it was, obviously, when she traveled over to the US, she took a boat across the Atlantic, just to show how aviation is the cause of our emissions, right? And I think we should obviously applaud that sort of incentive. We saw that actually regional aviation in Sweden, because of flight shaming, this idea of you should not take an aircraft, (passenger numbers) went down about 12%. And in Germany it was a similar number. And it sort of caused these snowball effects that the industry is still reeling from.

Do you think it was that, or was it really COVID and fuel prices?

It was pre COVID. It was a 12% downturn, and obviously that matters a lot for an industry that has very, very tight margins. But yeah, I mean to me, I know this is an impossible choice to make between climate... if you have to make the choice between flying and traveling. I think air travel is such a net good for our civilization. It's what brings us together. It's what opens us up to new experiences. It is the antidote to many of the trends that we're seeing in society that we don't like. There's nothing that compares to going places, right. Like you can't believe that the internet or media or something like that will make you understand the world. So I mean to me, my passion for travel is actually even bigger than my passion for planes, but it's just such an important thing for our understanding of the world, which is what we need to stay together as a civilization.

I think that's a lovely point. I do think there's this feeling, though, that it's been the luxury that the elite have had access to, and that a large number of miles are flown by a very, very small percentage of people. And so it's that feeling that this is not democratized currently. This is an elite activity that only a few benefit from, and I'm sure, at the heart of flygskam, is this feeling of injustice.

Yeah, yeah. But I mean, I've seen, I've traveled around. So today, only about 20% of the world's population has been on an aircraft. And we've got 6 billion people that are looking to be connected to this infrastructure. And that's driven largely by the emerging middle-income countries of Asia, right? So in India we're seeing constantly, like record sales of aircraft going into India. It's going to be probably India and China that are going to be the largest market. And so that becomes the backbone of their connectivity. And what's been remarkable about aviation is that yes, there's a portion of people that fly a lot, and I'm one of them, but obviously it's become accessible and affordable for...

A wider group, even if it's not everyone.

Yeah, a wider group. And it's remarkable how much cheaper it is, for instance, than taking the train.

Yeah, but both India and China, and maybe we should talk a little bit about China, have invested hugely in rail. I mean, the Chinese high speed rail system is the envy of the world now. Is there a paradox here? Does an over reliance on aviation mean you under invest like we've seen in the US. Here, we've had aviation almost replace the train and there's been virtually no investment into that infrastructure.

Yeah, I mean, I think that we should never try to sort of put different modes of transport (against each other). And I think there's a place and time for different modes of transport. I mean, going to China, going to Japan, the high speed rails are an excellent way of getting around. They obviously have the population to support that kind of thing. So we need a combination of all these things. The exciting thing about aircraft is that whilst investments in trains are generally sunk costs. They're just, you know, not scalable. If you invest in technology, you could bring those investments into a wider product that you can then export as a technology across the world, which I think is unique about aviation.

Something that I've learned from talking to you, actually, is that there needs to be a population density to support rail, right? There's a reason why Europe is good at rail and China's good at rail. It's because it's got these very large population centers that are relatively distributed. But my experience of living in the US for the last two years is this is a vast continent that's largely empty, some pretty challenging geographies to navigate. And is that why? It's not a conspiracy that it's been anti rail. It's more that this is a hard thing to make it economic?

Yeah, I think rail has just struggled. I mean, it is challenging. Obviously you need to build and maintain that quite extensive infrastructure. And even in Europe, we've seen it's highly subsidized, but it's still a strong challenge to keep it actually operational, right? And obviously, the other thing that's beautiful about aircraft is that it is not picking winners and losers, right? We've had this discussion of a high speed rail in Sweden, where cities are fighting to be on the rail line because they know that it's going to make all the difference in the world, whether or not they're going to have a vibrant city in the future, economically competitive. Whereas aircraft is like this network that can adapt. As long as there's an airport, you don't have to say, this is how many planes are going to land there every day. If that city grows organically, the air travel can sort of dynamically support it. And I think that's a really beautiful thing.

Yeah, by its nature, it's a small world network, right?

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

And as you said, I think you said to me that in the US, 95% of the population lives within 20 miles of an airport, which you definitely cannot say is true of rail infrastructure.

So the infrastructure is there. It's being underutilized. And we can set this virtuous cycle in motion. The more aircraft we build, the more routes we can open up, the more connections we can have, the better the value proposition for the customer. The more we can amortize their technology development. If we set these wheels in motion, these wheels have been moving in the opposite direction for the past decades. But if we can reverse that trend, which I think electrification can be this great catalyst for, we'll just see this accelerating. It will become a self-playing piano.

Well, thank you so much for spending this time with me. I'm wishing you very well with your test flight later this year. And yeah, hopefully we'll stay in touch.

Yeah, come check it out. You want to fly it?

If only I had that pilot license. But yeah, thank you so much, and I look forward to staying in touch.

Thank you, I'm excited to be here.

So that was Anders Forslund, CEO of Heart Aerospace. As usual, we'll put any relevant links in the show notes. My thanks go to our local videographer, Anthony Panayiotaros, Oscar Boyd, our producer, Jamie Oliver, our editor, and the growing number of people who together make the Cleaning Up podcast and Leadership Circle possible. Thanks for listening, we hope you enjoyed the conversation, and please join us next week for another episode of Cleaning Up.

First Cars, Now Planes: Is The Future of Flying Electric? Ep194: Anders Forslund

Bryony Worthington

Anders Forslund

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