Big Compute - Flying Cars: From Cloud to Cloud

Episode Date: October 19, 2021

For decades, mankind has been enamored with the idea of flying cars -- we’ve seen them in movies, read about them in books, and longed to see them in the skies.  The Back to the Future movies even showed highways in the skies in the year 2015, giving society three decades to make that a reality.  Welp, 2015 came and went, and cars were all still very much on the ground.  BUT we can finally say that change is right around the corner.  In this episode, Ernest and Jolie speak to Madhu Bhabuta, CIO of Vertical Aerospace -- an innovative company working to put flying cars (or eVTOLs, as they’re called) into the sky by 2024 -- potentially changing the way we travel forever.

Hey, did you know that like there was a study done and on average humans accidentally consume several spiders a year while they're asleep? Isn't that that's like an old wives tale, isn't it? Well, I just every time someone clears it, every time I clear my throat, I think about did I ingest a spider last night unintentionally? Well, now every time you clear your throat, I'm going to be like, spider. Get that spider out. Hi, everyone. I'm Jolie Hales. And I'm Ernest DeLeon. And welcome to the Big Compute Podcast.

Here we celebrate innovation in a world of virtually unlimited compute, and we do it one important story at a time. We talk about the stories behind scientists and engineers who are embracing the power of high-performance computing to better the lives of all of us. From the products we use every day to the technology of tomorrow, computational engineering plays a direct role in making it all happen, whether people know it or not. Hey, Ernest.

What? What? You sound like you're really looking forward to this. Yeah. Okay. Does the date October 21st, 2015 have any significance for you 10 21 2015 and don't read ahead in the script no not really not particularly okay well maybe this will help you out. Mind DeLorean?

What the hell is going on here? Wow, such bad CG. But now does it make sense? Yep, it does. Okay, awesome. So October 21st, 2015, as you can see in this clip, was actually celebrated by many in real life as being Back to the Future Day. Today is October 21st, 2015, a date significant to fans of the Back to the Future movies.

You're probably noticing a lot of references to hoverboards and DeLoreans. When the clock reads 429 p.m. today, the future becomes the present. We're descending Fort Hill Valley, California on Wednesday, October 21st, 2015. The future, unbelievable. Marty McFly and company arrived from the past on this day in Back to the Future 2. Michael J. Fox or Marty McFly's version of the future featured hoverboards and flying cars.

So the first part of the second movie shows a bunch of flying cars. Now, obviously, in reality, October 21st, 2015 came and went. And I don't know about you, Ernest, but I have yet to ride in a flying car, let alone see one fly over my head at any point in time. So while the movies totally hold up in awesomeness, they didn't quite ace the tech fortune-telling. And similar to our AI movies discussion we had recently, although we won't go into depth with movies today, it's fascinating to see what filmmakers were envisioning for the year 2015 when it came to vehicles. That said, we do see some innovations today that weren't put to screen back then. Like, for instance, we have driverless vehicles today, whereas while cars could fly and back to the future, they all still had drivers,

as far as I could tell. Yeah, it's pretty funny to see in general. You can go all the way back to the 1950s and even before the 40s and look at science fiction literature and just see how odd it is that this one area has some hyper unrealistic thing. But at the end of the day, it's still like being constrained by some kind of human limitation. Right. And I, too, do not own a flying car. However, I frequently got on flying buses wait but flying buses like an airbus like a plane like like an air an airplane like are you making a joke yeah because it's literally a flying bus that's what it is it's it's a it's public

transportation it's not you know it's not my own plane i was just thinking magic school bus the bus that actually flies around oh yeah i was like i want to get on the magic school bus that sounds like fun we could sing fun songs and learn about lizards right and go inside the human body could we travel through his bloodstream to get to his throat absolutely dorothea so thinking back to back to the future too makes me ask the question, will cars actually ever fly? And if they do, when? Now, lucky for us, there are people out there working to answer these very questions. Specifically, one of these people is...

Madhu Babuja. Who works as the... Chief Information Officer for Vertical Aerospace. Vertical Aerospace. And there is a star-studded roster of companies backing this SPAC. Vertical aerospace is going public via a $2.2 billion SPAC. Avalon, which is the aircraft leasing firm. American, Honeywell, Rolls-Royce.

Virgin Atlantic is also playing a role in this. They are a UK-based aerospace tech company designing and building that very thing that we've been dreaming about since watching the DeLorean hit the skies in the 80s. Flying cars. Vertical Aerospace was founded close to four years ago. It was founded by a real visionary. It was founded by Stephen Fitzpatrick, who's passionate about electric, electrifying aerospace, electrifying Formula One. He had this dream of creating the world's first air taxis. And it comes from a very deep set belief in his core about having a greener, cleaner world where we are not polluting

the planet with gas turbine emissions. And yet we're not bringing the world to a standstill by going back to a very sedentary lifestyle. The fact is that travel is here. It's here with us to stay. Our roads are congested. We cannot physically build any more roads. People want to travel.

They need to get from A to B. How do you do it? And one way of doing it is to use the highways in the sky to actually create the ability to hop from city to city, to hop from one east to west of a city or from north to south of the city in a clean way. Well, I don't know about you, Ernest, but I am sold. Bring these babies to the market today, please. Yes. Although I will caveat that with one thing. If you've seen the typical Bay Area driver, you don't want them anywhere near a flying car. But that's OK, because Vertical has that solved solved too, as we'll see in a minute here. But I remember a few years back. So I had a commute that was probably only about 12 miles long, right?

And every time I'd get home from work, I was always in the worst possible mood because I had been sitting in aggravating Southern California bumper-to-bumper traffic for an hour and a half. Now remember, it was only a 12-mile commute. I mean, California traffic is just so bad. I mean, I know it's that way in San Francisco. It's like that down here in Southern California. So eventually, I ended up moving only four miles closer to the place I worked at one point and doing that shaved off 45 minutes from my afternoon commute. And that time really adds up, right?

Getting to work as the crow flies would have been life changing. I mean, you can do a lot with the time that you get back. Yeah. At that point, I would have just ridden a bike because at least you could just pass up the traffic while it's sitting there. The bummer is that it's not a very bike friendly path either. But yeah, that's true. I did take a Seg it's not a very bike-friendly path either. But yeah. That's true.

I did take a Segway once, but the Segway took an hour. You know, I would love to ride a bike. But again, because of the drivers here, I'm paranoid that I'm going to get hit. You're going to get hit by a car. No one's paying attention to people on a bike. Exactly. And that's more of the concern for me too. But I really appreciate the green approach that vertical aerospace is going for, right?

Instead of saying, okay, all of our travel is polluting the planet. Everyone needs to go back to horses and buggies or trains or something like that. They're taking a more forward thinking approach by saying, hey, traditional travel isn't great for the planet. So let's come up with a better, cleaner way to travel that doesn't sacrifice our ability to visit one place or the other. That's true. And it's good to see because a lot of people don't know this, but a lot of locomotives, even though they may burn diesel, they're actually electric motors. The diesel engines are powering generators to move them. Really?

Yeah. It's not like a direct transmission, like a vehicle. So they kind of pioneered the electric vehicle movement, if you want to call it that. And then passenger vehicles, Tesla did. And of course, now the other manufacturers are coming on board. But the next frontier on this is cleaning up air travel. And that's one of the biggest polluters out there. So seeing someone say, hey, we want to address the problems of traffic and congestion, but in a way that isn't going to add to the problem. That's great.

I completely agree. And vertical aerospace is actually pretty close to putting flying cars in our skies. In fact, they've already produced two different prototypes that have already taken flight. So they really have been in the skies already, but they're coming to the public skies soon. They're working on their third prototype, which will be the precursor to the certified version, the version that will be given the stamp of approval that it's actually ready for humans. Our aims are to go into production by 2024, and there is a lot to do before then. 2024! That is just a couple years away. Can you imagine what it would be like to see flying cars in just a few years? I am waiting.

It'd be amazing. And while I tend to lean toward the ultra-scientific term flying car, there's actually a more official term for these kinds of vehicles. They're called EVTOLs, or E-V-T-O-L, which stands for electric vertical takeoff and Landing. And they're really at the cutting edge of the aerospace industry right now. Two distinguishing capabilities of eVTOLs are, for one, being able to take off vertically, as their name suggests, so they don't need a runway. And two, being able to transition between vertical and forward flight. So kind of like a helicopter, except electric, much quieter. And as we'll talk about more in a bit, apparently much safer as well. Right. I mean, I think the I don't know if it's

the Navy. I know the military, the military has had a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft for a very long time now, but it is powered by fossil fuel. So this is kind of taking that concept and saying, hey, let's make it where it doesn't impact the planet negatively and also scale it down because I believe the one that the military uses is quite large. Massive. So it seems like it's a perfect fit for vertical aerospace to jump into this market. Yeah, I think so. And as vertical aerospace has been developing the design of their eVTOLs, they've gone through a couple iterations. But I want to show you a picture of their latest design and then we can describe what it looks like to our listeners.

And for anyone who wants to see a picture themselves, we do have one posted on our episode page on bigcompute.org, so you can see it there. So, Ernest, here is that latest prototype picture. Okay, so how would you describe it? So I would describe it as if S.H.I.E.L.D. were to design a small aircraft that could do vertical takeoff and landing that wasn't the helicarrier thing they have, it would look like this. Okay, I could see that. I could see S.H.I.E.L.D. flying around in this thing. It's very sleek, the design. Obviously aerodynamic, but even the tail wing is different from a typical passenger aircraft. I've never seen one like this. Yeah, it's V-shaped. It almost reminds you a little

bit of like a whale's tail. Yeah. The one thing I would kind of point out here is that the fuselage on this thing looks like it belongs to a helicopter. So it's like a helicopter with a wing across the top. It's pretty awesome. That's a good way to describe it. So if you can't see this, it's a black kind of almost airplane looking device, but it's much more sleek. And just as Ernest described, it has a fuselage that looks like a helicopter, like a futuristic helicopter. But then instead of one rotor on top like a helicopter, it has like a kind of airplane wing. But then the airplane wing has eight prop blades on it. So it's like a mix of a helicopter and an airplane and a drone and shield from the Avengers. Pretty much.

It's all of the above. I think they should go for a co-branding opportunity with Marvel on this. Yeah, for real. I mean, first of all, it's an absolutely beautiful machine. It's super sleek. It looks really futuristic. Bravo to the design team. But the thing that stuck out to me when I first saw it is that ever since I was a kid, I pictured flying cars or air taxis or whatever to look like cars as we know them today. Maybe that's because of seeing the DeLorean as a kid. Like I expected them to be this sleek looking futuristic car body with maybe wheels that fold up into it or something when it takes off from the road into the air, probably accompanied by some fancy blue hover lights. But when I look at the X4, which is the name of this latest vertical

prototype, it looks more like a small futuristic airplane than an actual car. And as you might imagine, there's a good reason for that. The reason you have a winged aircraft is because it's a lot more efficient in its battery usage. And I can only assume that efficient battery usage is a huge plus here. I mean, for example, I have a couple DJI camera drones that I use for various film projects, and they're a few years old now, so I imagine that the newer models have improved on this. But basically, the bulk of each of the drones is the battery. The batteries are really big.

They take a while to charge. And that wouldn't be much of an issue, really, except that each battery only gives you about 15 minutes of good flight time before you have to land the drone and then swap out for another battery, which is honestly kind of a pain when you're in many ways, it wouldn't work at all to have a battery that only lasts 15 minutes or 30 minutes or even an hour is really not enough time. I think Tesla batteries give you 250 miles or something, which would be what, like four plus hours at an average speed of driving 60 miles per hour or so. Yeah. I'm trying to think of what our Tesla gives us, but it's around that. On the one hand, yes, 15 minutes is too short, right? Maybe even 30 minutes. But it's one of those things where you're now moving as the crow flies as opposed to being bound by roads that have congestion and have to take roundabout ways to get places. So if you're cutting down the total distance, then it might be possible that maybe an hour is enough time for most use cases.

Obviously, if you're trying to go farther than that, then, you know, things change. So I guess the question is, where's the cutoff, right? Yeah. Do you want to go from San Francisco to San Jose or do you want to go from San Francisco to L.A.? Right. That's kind of two different things there. And I think what you're saying makes perfect sense. I think it's more of the safety aspect, like knowing that the battery only lasts 60 minutes, right?

I don't know that I want to get into a machine knowing that because if there's anything that delays your ability to land, it's terrifying. Like even when flying the drones, like when I first had these drones, they were expensive drones. And this short amount of battery like terrified me because what if I had the drone way too far away at the point that I needed it to land? Like I'd never find it again. Or maybe it would just fly off into who knows what land. You know what I mean? Like it just there's all these nightmare scenarios that were in my mind because of the short

battery usage. If I had to get inside of a vehicle, then I would want that battery to have a big buffer on it so that if, for instance, you want to land on a certain helipad and there's already another vehicle there and you have to circle around for a little bit, that somebody deciding to take a long coffee break on the ground or something isn't going to cause us to fall to our deaths or something. I'm being super dramatic and I know Vertical has thought of all these things and it's not really applicable to them. But that's what I think of when I think of the battery usage. Yeah. It reminds me of like, have you ever flown on like those small kind of puddle

hopper planes like between islands in Hawaii? I thought I was going to die. I flew in one in Guatemala and I was like, well, this is this is how I go down. It always cracks me up when they come ask you, like, how much do you weigh? And you're like, what does that matter? And they're like, well, we have to figure out how much fuel to put in the plane. And so my answer is going to be like, I weigh 800 pounds. Fill her up. That's going to be my answer because I don't want to run the risk that like

you know you put just enough in to get there and then something happens or like you you know undersell your weight because that's what humans do and then it ends up like not quite making it there because you had some vanity problem right yeah so the battery power is important here but i did think this was kind of interesting so Madhu mentioned earlier that they're working on their third flying prototype right now, right? The X-4, which we saw in the picture with wings and we talked about it. But here, Ernest, I've got a clip here for you to take a look at. This is a video of what the X-2 looks like, which is an earlier prototype from 2019. Okay, interesting.

So this is more like just a typical camera's drone because it doesn't even have a tail. Exactly. Yeah, the X2 doesn't have wings on it like the X4. It looks more like a mix between a futuristic helicopter and a drone, like a camera drone to me. Right. Instead, it has like a main body or fuselage where the people would sit. And then it's surrounded by propellers all around above it on like six different arms that jet out. Yeah.

So the design and the body of Vertical's eVTOL, as they say, have definitely evolved over time, as we can see. So in this case, the design went from looking more like a drone to pretty much sprouting wings and looking more like an airplane. And that's because in just a short amount of time, engineers at Vertical Aerospace have been able to perform a large number of, care to guess? Simulations. Yes, simulations. In fact, Vertical is especially interesting to us at Big Compute because they run their simulations 100% in the cloud, which, as we know, allows them to get results as quickly as necessary and iterate very quickly

as well. Because, remember, Vertical Aerospace was only founded in 2016, and they're already working on their third flying prototype, which I think is pretty impressive. If all goes according to plan, their beautiful eVTOLs will be in the skies in less than a decade after the company was first founded. Kind of funny to think about when you compare that to like the slow development of something like Concorde, the supersonic jet that took years to come up with the design for a single aircraft because they had to do, you know, so much testing and wind tunnels as opposed to having access to good computational simulation. Right. Yeah.

The important thing to point out here is that simulation, it isn't so much like the simulation is going to tell you what exactly to do. It's more like the simulation is going to tell you what not to do. Right. And then it narrows down the band or the area of focus. You have to create actual prototypes out of it. Yeah. Before simulations like this, manufacturers literally to create actual prototypes out of it. And yeah, before simulations like this,

manufacturers literally had to make prototypes of every single component, wings, engines, and everything every time, and then run them to failure, right? And then iterate on that design. So this is a much faster and much cheaper way of doing it. Perfectly said. And we'll talk more about computational simulations role at Vertical Aerospace in just a few minutes. But first, let's talk more about why the vertical prototype went from no wings to wings. You can use the power of air itself. So the airflow and the air currents to guide the aircraft, to actually allow it to cruise, basically. So that's why the wings are so important because they help lift the aircraft. So if you didn't have wings,

there would be a lot of reliance on having the rotors continuously going at very high speed to keep the aircraft both in alignment and flying. With wings, you can use the power of the drafts of the air itself to reduce the amount of battery drain i mean if you've you know we've all flown in a plane right when they take off they have to generate an immense amount of thrust to get that thing moving because it weighs so much but once it generates lift and it can get into the air they throttle back on the engines because they don't

need that much anymore and they're moving. They're not solely counteracting gravity. Whereas a helicopter has the opposite problem. Not only does it have to generate lift to get off the ground, but the higher it goes, the thinner the atmosphere is. And it has to generate that much power and even increase it over time. So they just burn a lot of energy, whatever kind it is, whether it's fuel or battery. So drones like you and I think of,

these little ones with cameras with four propellers, they have very short flight spans. And a military drone, which is a winged aircraft, some of those can fly for 24 hours on one fueling, whatever type of fuel they use. So the efficiency is just much, much better. And going back to the flying DeLorean, while filmmakers across time have had their own unique talents and skills. Engineers, they are not. For example, and this will come as an epic surprise, I'm sure, but I looked up all the flying cars I could find in movies across time, and only three of the flying cars out of the 13 that I found had wings. And we won't spend a lot of time on this, but do you want to hear the full list?

Sure. Okay, so the movies that showed flying cars with wings were Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in 1968. James Bond's The Man with the Golden Gun in 1974. And Spaceballs in 1987, if you remember. Yes, it was a flying Winnebago. That thing was awesome. Always when I meet Spaceballs was a parody movie, right? It was making fun of Star Wars. But I think Bond is a little bit different in that. And I realize this is a stretch here, but they're trying to be a little bit more realistic about their designs as opposed to just straight up Star Trek and Star Wars, which are like, OK, we're just going to bend the laws of physics because it's a movie and no one's going to care. Right. And to your point, the James Bond car that flies is it looks more like a full on airplane with huge wings. And then there's just kind of a car attached underneath it.

And I could actually see somebody trying to build and fly that. And then the movies that showed flying cars without wings were The Absent-Minded Professor in 1961. An unidentified flying object is over the city. Is that what's happening to you? No. Grease in 1978, because I don't know if you remember this, but the car flies away in the final scene for who knows what reason. So I counted that. I've seen it, but I don't remember.

It's been a while since I've seen that movie. The ending is so stupid. Also, Blade Runner in 1982, which was also on our AI list. Yep. Over the landing threshold. And obviously, the Back to the Future movies in the 80s.

Where we're going, we don't need roads. The Jetsons movie in 1990. Meet George Jetson. Judge Dredd in 1995. Step out of the car, please. The Fifth Element in 1997. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in 2002. 2012's Total Recall. And then Blade Runner 2049, which was the sequel, of course, that came out in 2017. Where are we going? Home.

And that list actually feels too small, so I swear I must be missing some. I mean, if you counted movies where cars, of course, were launched off of ramps or bridges or something like that, and they, like, temporarily flew through the air during a car chase or some explosion, then the list would be ginormous, But I didn't count any of those. Movies themselves, this list might be comprehensive. But I think that if you start taking into account like TV series and whatnot, you'll find that there's a lot more of these flying cars. And like you said, they almost all kind of share two different things in common. One of them is that they take a literal car and make it fly by some kind of magic.

Or the other one is like the Star Trek thing where they just take this boxy thing, put a window in front of it, and it just flies around. There's plenty of shows I can think of where your flying transportation did not at all look like a car. From supersonic jets to personalized medicine, industry leaders are turning to Rescale to power science and engineering breakthroughs. Rescale is a full-stack automation solution for hybrid cloud that helps IT and HPC leaders deliver intelligent computing as a service and enables the enterprise transformation to digital R&D. As a proud sponsor of the Big Compute podcast, Rescale would especially like to say thank you to all the scientists and engineers out there

who are working to make a difference for all of us. Rescale, intelligent computing for digital R&D. Learn more at rescale.com slash BC podcast. Even though I didn't see as many flying car movies as I've seen AI movies at this point, it's clear that pop culture is interested in flying cars. But not only is pop culture interested, I mean, actual companies across the globe these days are very interested as well. We have already sold 1,300 aircraft off plan. So we are one of the most successful electric retail companies on the planet today. 1,300 aircraft orders already in. And that's from a range of different kinds of companies from, and I'm going to slaughter this name, is it Marubeni?

I think so. From Marubeni Corporation in Japan to American Airlines. And it seems to be a range of companies that are jumping on board because there's a range of ways that these flying cars could be used. Airports who need to shuttle people from one side to another side, or to bring passengers to the airport who then go on to long-haul flights. Which, for anyone who has ever had to drive to LAX during the holidays, or really any days, that is a big deal. Once, I remember, it took us two hours to go one mile around the airport. One mile. It was insane. I was going crazy. It's a good thing we left our

house like four hours earlier or else we would have missed our international flight. So obviously I'm in favor of this. And at first, electric aircraft like those at Vertical will best be served for short distance trips, like a trip to the airport or so. But what we can do is reduce dramatically the emissions of people getting to these points of confluence like airports, like railway stations. Yeah, so it'll kind of be like the first and last mile vehicle of transportation, right? Where it takes you to a larger form of transportation

that moves many people. And then when you get to the destination of that thing, then it takes you to your last hop, which could be your home, your hotel, your wherever you're staying. Yeah, it sounds exactly like that, at least at first, because these vehicles will be new. And I'm guessing things like battery life and infrastructure development probably really play into that. But if we embrace the technology early, maybe that evolution can be fast. In fact, as I spoke to Madhu, I just kept thinking that rideshare companies, for instance, like Uber and Lyft, really need to jump on board so that I can

page a rideshare and then have an eVTOL land on my driveway. Oh my gosh, that'd be so cool. And then I did a little bit of research online, and apparently Uber is already planning to use eVTOLs in its future, and they've partnered with an eVTOL company in their development. In fact, there are a number of eVTOL companies working in parallel to come up with the best designs to land the most solid contracts, and Vertical is ranked as one of the best. So I, for one, am excited to see where they land. No pun intended. That was so bad. I know, it was like an earnest joke. You should have said that joke. I know, it was like an Ernest joke. You should have said that joke. I know, it should have been mine.

You're rubbing off on me, Ernest. Also, one thing that sets eVTOLs apart from a drone, per se, is that eVTOLs in the near future will have pilots. Pilots actually on board. So a person will control them from inside the vehicle as opposed to being remote controlled like a drone is, right? And that's not because of the technology available. There may come a time when there is enough public acceptance of being able to travel in a drone, but I think we're very, very far off from that. So even if it is possible, technically, I think

a droned aircraft in which people would be willing to sit, it's going to take some time to get there. So pilots first, and then when everybody is maybe a bit more comfortable with seeing these puppies in the sky, and maybe when driverless cars on the ground are more trusted, then people will be willing to hop in a remote controlled air vehicle. Yeah, I think that's the key here, right? Because, you know, I have a Tesla, right? And it essentially drives itself.

Now, it's not fully autonomous. I don't want to misrepresent it, but I trust it for the most part. It would be a little bit more difficult to trust a flying vehicle just because if the Tesla autopilot stops functioning for some reason, it cedes control back to me as the driver. That's a good point. And I know how to drive. I don't know how to fly. If that thing, something happens to it and it like turns control over to me, I'm not going to know what to do with it. So that's why you want to pilot, you know, at least

in the beginning. At a certain point, the AI will become so good that even if there's a failure, it'll, I don't know, throw a parachute up and land gently somewhere. That's fine. I'm okay with that once that's been proven, but a car and a flying object are just kind of different in terms of what you're capable of controlling if something goes wrong. But, you know, just look at commercial airlines. So most large commercial aircraft today, most, not every single one, they auto take off and land and they autopilot. The pilots do take over at a certain point. But the thing is, for 90 plus percent of your flight, the pilot is just an insurance policy. If something goes wrong, the plane can fly itself.

So same thing. People are not going to be comfortable if they get in and like there is no cockpit, like it's just a computer doing everything right now, they will be uncomfortable with that. But down the line, 20, 30 years from now, yeah, they'll realize, hey, nothing against the pilots. But when a machine is trained to think of every situation in a fraction of a second, it's going to make better decisions than a pilot every single time. But we're just not there yet. The technology is not there yet. Yeah, I think that's very well put. And as far as Vertical's latest prototype is concerned, it'll basically be big enough to fit a pilot, four passengers, and luggage. So again, comparable to an Uber, except the driver is a pilot, not just somebody like us. Oh,

and the vehicle flies. So maybe I shouldn't compare this to an Uber. Maybe I should compare it more with a helicopter. In fact, the X4 is designed to be small enough to easily utilize heliports, normally constructed for helicopters. So easy landing and takeoff points are already available around the globe. So that's nice. It makes the infrastructure a little bit easier, at least for the beginning. But an eVTOL like the X4 is much different than a helicopter in many ways, not just in the fact that they're electric. In fact, I'm curious, Ernest, have you ever ridden in a helicopter? You know, I did one time, but it was like one of those, you know, you pay like for a tour. Yeah.

And they kind of fly you around to take photographs. So I've done it one time, but I've never flown and like, Hey, I'm taking a helicopter to get from my house to the airport. Like, you know, some people are able to do that. I've never done that. So I have never done that either. I think I've flown in a helicopter a couple of times, exactly like you. I was totally that tourist in Hawaii. So I have ridden in them for recreation, but not so much for travel, right? Not to get from point A to point B. My point A is my point B every time I've taken one. But one thing that I remember is that helicopters are just incredibly loud, right? I mean, they're obviously loud for anyone they fly by on the ground.

We all know that when there's a helicopter nearby, we can hear it, right? We know it's there. It's very obvious. But they're also super loud for someone inside the helicopter as well, to the point where, at least in my experience, everyone had to wear these big headphone things with this little microphone so that we could talk to each other through the communication system, because there was just no way you could hear the person sitting right next to you otherwise. And it probably, I don't know, maybe it does hearing damage without those things as well. That's how loud it is. Yeah, I'm pretty

sure it does because, you know, you got to think the way the helicopter is generating thrust is pushing it straight down where you are. So that wind has to break over the top of the fuselage that you're sitting in. You're going to hear that. And for the same reason, I'm sure that airline pilots wear the headphones up front because the wind is breaking on the front of the aircraft. But we all know how loud it is no matter where you sit in the fuselage, right? It's still loud and super annoying. So hopefully in the case of these eVTOLs, they've got a better solution in terms of the sound dampening. And apparently they do.

eVTOLs are supposed to be significantly quieter. And I couldn't find the sound of one of Vertical's prototypes online. I looked around. I probably just missed it. But I imagine it just sounds like a big drone because instead of just having the one rotor that's pushing down on the fuselage, they have multiple rotors across a wing that are much smaller. Yeah, they're off to the side. Yeah. So maybe passengers could actually carry on a conversation inside the fuselage without these mega headphones. I'd

be really curious to see if that's the case. Well, I could see like if it was your own family. Yeah. But if it's in the context of like a shared thing, like an Uber, I would prefer that it make a lot of noise so I don't have to hear anybody. Antisocial. Nothing makes me madder than like when you get on an airplane and you put on your headphones and somebody just keeps talking to you and you're like i clearly have these things on for a reason like i don't want to talk to you how dare you be friendly i know and it's it's always like that same person that like they have like no technology. Right. Like they're they have a book like a dead tree in their hands. Who reads? They want to keep talking. And I'm like, I really don't care. Like I mean.

So sad. I have a million things I have to get done, even if it's just, you know, listening to music in my case. Right. Because that's mainly what I do. I have a million songs I need to listen to. I'm just relaxing. In that particular scenario, I would not mind if the thing was noisy and I couldn't hear what anybody was saying. Note to self, if I ever fly in a plane with you, talk the whole time. Okay, I'm glad we covered that. But in the case of eVTOLs, they're not just quieter than a helicopter.

Stephen Fitzpatrick, who is the founder and CEO of Vertical Aerospace, has described their eVTOLs as being 100 times safer. For one, when you look at a helicopter, you can see that they have a single point of failure. That single point of failure is it has just one rotor. Our aircraft is going to have eight rotors. Additionally, since the X-4 has wings, it also has the ability to glide. And beyond that... The rest of it all comes from the IT. It comes from understanding the data. It comes from a very simple aircraft. You want to build aircraft that are not hideously complicated. When things are very, very complicated, that's where errors arise. You want to have a very cleanly designed and built aircraft, which is very easy to troubleshoot and super easy to maintain. It also sends live information into our systems about performance.

So you're able to actually monitor it all the time. It's got its life support connected into the vertical cloud, and we're able to see at any point in time, any aircraft, how it's performing, any issues whatsoever, what needs to be maintained and keep these aircraft at their very best at all times. Did you hear that, Ernest? They basically have a digital twin. Yeah. Where have we heard that term before? Like every day. And I mean, we've already established that eVTOLs like Vertical's X4 are pretty awesome. I would totally ride in one. But to be honest, I assumed straight up when I saw Hollywood elites and like senators flying around the sky while the rest of us average Joes drove around on the ground like suckers. But it turns out that

will not be the case with vertical. Stephen and we all share his view is that these aircraft really have to be accessible to all. They can't be the mainstay of just a particular demographic, especially if we're serious about climate change, if we really want to make a difference. She has a point. If rich people are the only ones in eVTOLs while the rest of us are flying in regular airplanes and driving our old pickup trucks, that's not going to have much of an impact on the environment. So their goal is to let everyone fly in eVTOLs. But a few things do have to happen first. This is going to be as pervasive as the infrastructure will allow it to be. So I think the only thing that will determine who gets to sit in these aircraft is how quickly our infrastructure can be built. And that's the defining factor.

For example, if the government only gives permission for these vehicles to fly, like, say, from the financial district to downtown Manhattan in New York or something, and then they don't allow for more universal infrastructure across other states and cities, then clearly only those richie riches from Wall Street are really going to be able to take advantage. But if the planning is done and permissions are considered now, then the potential of this technology really taking off for all of us, again, no pun intended, is so much higher. The rest of it is up to the take up from authorities and foresightful town city planners, businesses will see this opportunity and will grab it. For example,

maybe it starts out that large companies start utilizing these eVTOLs to pick up travelers from the airport and take them to their different campuses or something. But eventually, maybe we start paging our own eVTOLs to come to our homes and take them to their different campuses or something. But eventually, maybe we start paging our own eVTOLs to come to our homes and take us to grandma's house. Madhu didn't use that last one as an example, but I really want to be picked up in one of these from my driveway. So I'm going to keep my fingers crossed for that. But in order for that to actually be a reality someday,

people around the world really do need to be planning ahead now. Everybody needs to be on board because it isn't about creating an electric car for which there are roads and you can go from A to B. This is about genuinely transforming air travel. We know that with even the best battery technology, you can do 60, 70 kilometers today. And so the city planners, the town planners, the regional planners, I think we all need to rally around this concept and look at how our cities are going to perform in future and how we have connected travel so that people are very much less reliant on their cars or on things that pollute than they are today. So I think everybody needs to start waking up to a new technology that's emerging in their backyard and thinking, wow, what would be a really powerful route for me to do? Where can I use a bicycle? Where can I use my legs? Where can I use my electric car?

And where can I use an electric air taxi? So Tesla is an excellent example if you want to look at the model of how this works, right? But they had the advantage of having roads already in place. So a key part of their infrastructure was already there. My wife owns a Tesla, right? So a little bit biased here, but several years ago when we were first looking into Teslas,

one of the reasons we didn't buy one was because the areas to charge them were not as abundant and the available charging points that were owned by enterprises, right? Third party were very slow to charge. Over that time, Tesla made an aggressive push to get supercharger locations all over the country, mainly along highly trafficked corridors. So now it turns out we have a target about a mile or so from our house. The target has a Tesla supercharger network there. And actually most targets here in the Bay Area have Tesla superchargers now. So it's gotten to the point where there's two things that have to happen. There's the funding and then there's the

infrastructure. And those two have to align or the technology will not take off, which is one of the reasons I want the big auto manufacturers liked and chevy they kind of stayed back until they saw tesla prove the model now they all want in on it right because there's a massive lucrative market so it's like vertical is the tesla of the skies pretty good so let's go back to talking about just how quickly Vertical's innovative technology has evolved and what actually makes it possible. Simulation is really super, super important. It's probably one of the key cornerstones of everything we do, really.

Enter cloud high-performance computing. Simulation enables us to understand various different aspects of all the components, be it the battery, be it the wing and the computational fluid dynamics, forces that act upon the wing, the tail design, the rotor design. Literally everything is simulated component by component to understand how things work. And they're simulated together to understand the effects on the actuators. I mean, think about all the technology that has been developed before simulation tools like this were available. We mentioned Concorde, but also just think of the original automobile, right? The first car was patented in 1886, and then it went through basically public iterations,

starting with this tricycle-looking thing with a gas-powered engine, and then a double pivot steering system was added in 1893, and then the Contra engine came along in 1897, and I don't know what any of this means. I read it online. But the inventors were basically building what they thought might work, and then testing it out, and then rebuilding it a little better, and then a little better, and so forth for decades. That's pretty much how engineering works. You want to get to a flying car, so you start first by making a skateboard. And then you add a pole to the front of the skateboard with a horizontal pole attached that becomes a steering device.

And then you can now steer the skateboard. Then you add an engine to it. Now it becomes an e-scooter. Then you scale that out and put a dome over it, and it's a car. And then you make your way until you get to the flying car, right? So this is just kind of how we do things in general. So we have to start somewhere and iterate. And in this case, because this is a company and they're selling to others, you have to iterate not just based on functionality, but based on what the market dictates, right? Does the market care

about this feature or not? And if the market is demanding something, you have to build that feature. That's just how it works. Yeah. And that makes total sense. I think the difference here, though, is that before computational simulation, every iteration had to be a physical prototype that was constructed. You know what I mean? Yes. It's true. Yes. Whereas now they can run a lot of these iterations and make changes digitally before they actually have to build something, which saves a ton of time, obviously. And of course, it would save a ton of money because you're not having to build

like what Vertical is working on their third prototype now. Had they not used computational simulation? I mean, how many prototypes would that have taken? Yeah, they probably would have been 30, 40 prototypes at this point to get to where they are. So, yeah, I would imagine at the cost of at least a couple of million a pop, I'm guessing. Simulation is absolutely huge. It's the heart and soul, especially when you're trying to build something that's so expensive, is so mission critical, and is so safety critical. You have to be sure what you're doing completely on paper. And then, of course, test it when it's built so that you are sure that it is a hundred times safer. And they use a lot of different tools to run those simulations.

We use MATLAB, we use ANSYS, we use Altair, we use a number of the best tools available on Earth basically for aerospace design. We use a lot of 3D, a lot of CAD design tools. So that's a lot. And we also use the power of the cloud. I think that's one of the key things that's enabled a very small company to do so much. So I'll give you a for instance, before we use the cloud, we use some really high performance computers that were in-house in our small data center when I did some trials to move the data into the cloud. This is an absolute statement of fact. We had 40 times, which is 4,000% improvement in the time taken to compute.

This is pretty staggering. That means that that time you're freeing up from your engineer is not sitting there waiting for the results. They can really get cracking. That means something that takes 40 hours takes one hour. It's so incredible. I'm going to say that again. 4,000% improvement when they moved from their on-prem data center into the cloud. And this is a very common theme when we talk about cloud. And it's a hard lesson to learn. You know, I've been in this industry for over 25 years now. And I distinctly remember the point in time where I discovered not just the cloud, but there's the context of cloud-based things. This is before what our modern concept of cloud is. I kept thinking,

there's no way this is going to work. And the minute it kind of clicked, like a bulb turned on in my head, and then I realized it and said, you know what? Everything's going to go to the cloud. Now, that's an exaggeration, right? But at the end of the day, the vast majority of workloads of any kind are going to go to the cloud. And if you're in doubt of that, just think about it in a consumer context. There was a time when people used to go out and buy CDs, vinyls, cassette tapes. And I realize there's still some hipsters out there buying vinyls. But the point is, it's all streamed to us now.

It's gotten to the point where just about anything can be streamed to you. Microsoft just recently released a service where they will actually stream a Windows computer to you. Really? So you can go and buy the cheapest computer at Best Buy, you know, $200, and then pay Microsoft for what would be the equivalent of a $5,000 workstation and just rent it. That's crazy. You don't have to worry about upgrading it or anything like that. So 4,000% improvement is amazing. But I think the bigger story here is

there's a general movement in this direction and it's not going to end. At some point, just about every high-performance computing or supercomputing workload is going to be in the cloud. I think the writing's on the wall at this point. And if you are currently putting out all of the capital for on-prem, you need to look up and call gone-prem. I'm smart enough to know that if an aerospace engineer wants to shoot his arrows into space, he's going to want to do it from the cloud because it's closer instead of from computers down here on the ground. Call GodPrim. We take all of your troubles and we get rid of them for you. I think the time is gone for people who still have high performance in-house data centers.

I just think that for us, there is no other road but to use cloud high performance compute. And genuinely, you can do so much and so much more. And you're never going to guess what Vertical Aerospace uses to run simulations in the cloud. We are 100% on Rescale. Ernest, use your trailer voice like you did on the Boom Supersonic episode. Boom. Rescale. Yes! That was perfect! I think the engineers from Rescale who worked with us, absolutely first class, really extremely well versed in the cloud, extremely good with people and really understand how to take engineers,

some of whom really had grown up in very much a on-premise world and taking them to cloud in the most gentle way, such a joy to work with, really good experience all the way through. I think the Rescale team will be very happy to hear that. Presenting sponsor for the win. We choose the cloud compute, the characteristics of the cloud, because you can choose. You have such a big menu of cloud types that you can go to. So we go quite often for the cloud that has the most cores available to us and the most amount of memory available to us. And just as we like to ask all of our guests this question, we asked Madhu how

long it would have taken her to run simulations on a single four-core desktop computer? I don't want to think about it. I think it's safe to say not a few minutes. We don't want to go there. It's just a terrible thought. Yeah, it's night and day. Massive difference for them computationally and just the time constraint, the time in which teams can get their results back and start parsing the data set and

discussing with each other the results of it. It's just night and day, the difference. That's all there is to it. It's incredibly fast. Anyone who's doing simulation would use a fairly beefy 16 or 32 core machine for sure. But then when you move to the cloud, you suddenly have access to 128 cores. Like, whoosh, you submit your task and it's done. And Madhu remembers life before cloud. Before we actually adopted cloud, we did a proof of concept. And we were thinking of queuing.

So we were expecting our jobs to queue. And what we were looking for was something that was a broker and a scheduler. So something where we would queue our tasks and then get the results back. And the most interesting thing about the proof of concept was there's no queuing. Why? Because you can submit all your tasks in parallel if you want and get the results almost instantaneously. The concept doesn't exist. It's as long as it takes you to do your task.

You don't have to wait in waterfall manner to do one task after another. I think that is another, it's not just about one simulation or one problem. It's about when, as I said, we are looking at an aircraft in all its dimensions, its subsystems, its subcomponent level. And when you're doing simulation at that scale, you have various teams that are working on various parts of the aircraft and you can in parallel submit and in parallel get answers back.

So you haven't tied up your high performance compute because there's so much of it available. And I've got to say, I mean, how cool is it that Vertical Aerospace gets to take their designs from one cloud to the other cloud? Man, I am on a roll here today. Oh my gosh. Do you get it?

From the computer cloud to the sky cloud. I'm a comedic genius. Oh man. This is is you're laughing i hear you laughing i don't even know what to say at this point we've taken this this show to new uh new highs new heights exactly but you know this is important to note, right? They started their migration in 2019, and the amount of work has been massive, just like you said. And it's one of those things where there are kind of two aspects to this, right? There is the hardware and the software, right? So the cloud providers are partners like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, provide all the hardware, provide all the APIs for you to programmatically apply that hardware and perform these high-performance tasks in the cloud. But that's the quote-unquote easy part. The hard part

is configuring all of the software that's being used to run all these simulations in a way that makes it easy for your engineers, research engineers, scientists to run those simulations and get the results back in a timely manner. And that's really where the power of rescale comes in, in that they make that so easy for your engineering organization to where your engineering organization can easily say, you know what, we don't even have to worry about this. All we need to do is log in, pick the application we need, feed it the data, and get our results. Right, so they can focus 100% on what they're actually trying to do,

which is develop these amazing flying vehicles instead of having to worry about all those extra things because somebody else is worried about it for them. Exactly. And I mean, how cool is it that we started our childhood with flying cars and back to the future and now it's actually looking more and more like we're going to see them in reality? I mean, maybe Hollywood can then make back to the future part four and then instead of using bad cg for the flying cars they could use practical effects and use verticals

flying cars okay part four is really a bad idea actually let's not ruin a good thing now the shark does not need to be jumped nor does the fridge need to be nuked oh dude from indiana jones that scene is so horrible three two one zero it's funny how many people don't know jumping the shark and nuking the fridge just decades apart right because one of them was from what happy days or something yeah i think fonzie like they're water skiing or something and he actually jumps a shark here we go it's just so over the top ridiculous it It was so over the top, exactly. To be able to build something that could be a real game changer is really, really exciting.

It's really exciting to see the product take shape. It's really exciting to see the enterprise systems take shape. Literally everything, our HR systems, our ERP systems, our our manufacturing systems i just can't wait i can't wait to see these planes roll off the production line i mean it's so amazing when you see a wireframe diagram and you see the simulations and you've been part of the journey to say no no no no don't do this on these albeit very high high-end computers. Use the cloud. Come on, let's get the results. Let's see how this looks like. Let's try and do something different.

Let's try and use the latest technology. I think nothing can be more exciting than that. And to see it come to fruition in a few years' time is nothing like it, really. To learn more about Vertical Aerospace, you can visit verticalaerospace.com. And you can also find them on LinkedIn, where they post a lot of their latest news. You can also check out episode notes on bigcompute.org. And if you like what you hear, please tell a friend about us. Post a review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts.

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