Author: Richard

eVTOL and the Contempt of Familiarity

A version of this article first appeared in our free newsletter, to subscribe click here.

It has been a difficult few months for eVTOL. Front runner Joby Aviation suffered the loss of a prototype aircraft. Thankfully the aircraft was being remotely piloted at the time.

Outside of the industry it is not understood how disruptive the loss of a prototype aircraft can be. It is not like the loss of production aircraft. In production the aircraft are being manufactured in relatively high numbers and high frequency at a reasonable cost. In pre production each aircraft is eye wateringly expensive to produce and will take months if not years to manufacture and make ready for flight.

If the production cost of the Joby Aircraft is, say, $2M USD, the cost of each prototype in terms of bill of materials, labor and other processes could be $20M USD. This cost is low compared to the extension of the development program. If the new aircraft takes one year to produce and fly it is safe to assume you will have to extend the program by 12 months. As you cannot fire all of the development staff and rehire when the aircraft is ready, you have to carry the cost of the development staff for an additional 12 months. This can cost anywhere between $50M and $100M USD.

So just in cash requirement terms, this event may cost the Joby program up to $120M USD. There is also the loss of investor confidence and customer confidence to factor in and these may create an additional cost greater than the direct dollar value.

Shortly after this event several negative articles were published that attacked the credibility of another eVTOL industry leader, Lilium. There are several serious allegations in this article. I will not go into them in great detail but they are typical of general criticisms of eVTOL ventures – ignoring credible negative criticisms, a lack of relevant experience at the leadership level and the use of potentially optimistic battery energy density numbers to support production performance numbers.

As both Lilium and Joby are now publicly traded the investor confidence in these companies can be easily seen:

https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/joby

https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/lilm

This performance can be compared to the market as a whole:

https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/index/nya

Not surprisingly investor confidence in Joby and Lilium has been falling since their IPO. Bear in mind that these companies are the eVTOL sector leaders and should represent the best in the sector.

The unreality of the eVTOL sector is not helped by metrics such as these https://aamrealityindex.com/. The AAM reality index produced by SMG consulting “…helps assess the industry entrants’ progress toward the delivery of a certified product at mass scale production.”

In reality it is a league table where rankings have an almost direct correlation to the amount of money raised. It is not clear what reality they are referring to – I have to assume it is an alternative one.

Raising money is not always the solution and eventually it will become the problem. Investment has to be repaid. The more money you raise and the more you spend in development, more money has to be generated in order to compensate investors when you get to production.

The flip side to this problem is that just spending money on development doesn’t mean you get a better aircraft that will justify the price or create the demand these projects are predicting – and an excess of expenditure typically means the opposite. Famous examples such as the Sino Swearingen/Emivest/Metalcraft SJ30, the Eclipse 500 and the Beech Starship are all examples of excessive overspend resulting in a product that failed to meet market or commercial expectations (or both) and eventually failed.

So what projects are more likely to be successful? The factors that will influence actual commercial success in the long term are:

Minimize expenditure: The more money you spend the more you have to recoup. Also, giving engineers a lot of money to play with likely will not drive them to the simplest, cheapest, most reliable and most elegant solution to the problem

Simple Design and Existing Technology: See above – inherent aerodynamic instability and lots of moving parts means complex software control, thousands or millions of potential failure modes with the chance of many more catastrophic outcomes that all need mitigating. Basing all of this on a power storage medium that is at a preliminary research stage is not going to help achieve commercial success..
Reliance on existing markets: Who will buy your product? How much will they buy? What price will they pay? Creating an impossibly complex aircraft by spending an astronomical amount of money does not mean anyone will actually buy it. Or at least not in the thousands of units per year that your business plan requires…….

Profitable at sales level of 100 aircraft per year or less: See above – what happens in the urban mobility revolution turns out to be as real as the Fyre Festival or the Millennium Bug? Can you compete as a General Aviation product? How many orders of magnitude are your required sales numbers in error? Can you tempt Pilatus PC12 or Robinson R66 customers to buy your product?
As eVTOL projects see their wildly optimistic initial project milestones disappear in the mists of the distant past and the date of their possible market introduction project forward into a wildly uncertain future, what is really going to happen?

The answer is simple. Anything that does not adapt to the harsh reality of the universe will eventually become just another cloud of historic entropy and exist only as a passing entry on the resumes of a few engineers.

The harsh reality of the universe:

  • Batteries force you to fly impossibly short missions with unusable load fractions.
  • The Urban Mobility market makes no sense. It does not and will not exist.
  • Raising large amounts of money creates a millstone for your neck that will eventually sink you.

Net Zero, the greening of aviation, sustainable skies, carbon free flight and other slogans and political policies are not going to pay your investors back. Sucking more investors in to push the inevitable day of reckoning further into the future can only continue for so long. There is a name for that business model.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ponzi

The Endgame

A version of this article first appeared in our free newsletter, to subscribe click here.

I am hoping that this will be the last COVID post. I know, I know, I said this last time. Things have gone from stupid and destructive to full fascist in a way that no one, no one outside of certain government departments, could have predicted. And this post is not about COVID it is about what the government is now doing and saying, and this is where the truth starts to emerge and obscure the COVID related narrative.

I know that some of you (you wrote to me) thought that the use of the word fascist was inappropriate. So let’s look at what just happened.

The Thing that Happened

Something strange happened here in Canada. I am sure if you live in Canada you are familiar with either the media narrative or the reality, and those outside of Canada will no doubt have heard something of the infamous trucker protest and the government response.

If you watched any of the unedited live streams of the protest and then the police response, the media reporting and government action you would be confused.

A group of multi racial working class Canadians and military veterans peacefully and cheerfully gathered to petition their government on an important human rights issue – the human rights issue I defined in the last newsletter.

The media reported on a group of violent white nationalists and supremacists consisting of thieves, arsonists and insurrectionists holding the country hostage.
Sitting politicians in parliament stated that ‘Honk Honk’ because of the acronym “H, H” meant Heil Hitler and everyone who said the unmentionable phrase “Honk Honk” or sounded their horns were all Nazis praising Hitler.

The comically outrageous lies about the protest were part of the false justification of the use of the emergencies act, whereby the government assumes wartime powers. By the time the act was brought into force the only manifestation of the ‘emergency’ that remained was traffic congestion in Ottawa caused by citizens waiting to peacefully petition their government.

The Inexplicable Response of Racist Government Pearl Clutching

The Canadian government decided that a wartime level of emergency was required because of some partially blocked streets and parking offenses.

The government and media together did everything in their power to create the impression of a “January 6th” event to justify their response. In all honesty it was a pretty pathetic false flag event, not so much a Reichstag fire but more a series of friendly Canadian freedom barbecues.

The response was absurdly excessive and strangely racist. You can read the specific application of the emergencies act here: https://www.gazette.gc.ca/rp-pr/p2/2022/2022-02-15-x1/html/sor-dors21-eng.html it is very short and makes an interesting read.

In the exemptions section, indigenous, refugees and asylum seekers are specifically immune to having their human rights and due process rights stripped by the government in this ‘emergency’.

I am not sure of the reasons for this other than it would be politically unpalatable for our glorious leaders to beat and drag off indigenous and refugee people. Everyone else – no problem, let the beatings begin! It is and was always about the optics. It was and is performative propaganda for the media to display.

After the application of the emergency act things got very strange indeed.

Almost immediately givesendgo was hacked, simultaneously the Canadian government announced that people who donated to a political cause they disagreed with could have their bank accounts frozen.

The government gave Canadian banks the power to do this unilaterally and immunized the banks against the normal legal consequence of the illegal seizure of property, more popularly known as theft. The banks then enthusiastically went about their new ‘law’ enforcement duties.

Canadian banks used data acquired via an illegal operation in a foreign country, and therefore of dubious provenance and legal validity, provided by the Canadian government to freeze the bank accounts of Canadians who had done nothing more than contribute to a registered charity or peacefully and legally assembled.

This was further worsened by the keen legal analysis of our ironically titled Justice minister, David Lametti, equating everyone who supported truckers to Trump supporters (Oh, the horror!) and using that alone as a justification for seizing people’s assets: https://rumble.com/vv4syl-did-i-heard-what-i-just-heard-from-trudeaus-justice-minister-david-lametti.html

Shortly after this police were deployed to use violence to clear the protest in front of parliament and ‘arrested’ hundreds of people. It is almost certain that those people arrested will have the charges dropped or those charges will fail if they get in front of a court that follows legal standards of due process and evidence.

COVID, COVID everywhere…

During all of this the initial justification for all the human rights violations and restriction of civil liberties to date, COVID, was barely mentioned. The trucker protests where tens and hundreds of thousands of people gathered without masks, in some cases for days, caused no spike in cases. There was no sign of any super-spreader event, the hospitals were conspicuously underwhelmed in Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, Quebec City and Vancouver.

It was almost as if once the government had a new pretext to accelerate the violation of human rights the previous justification was completely forgotten. Yet the federal COVID mandates and human rights violations remain.

The government has partially lifted the emergency powers act – it was never fully in force and it only passed the house of commons and was revoked unilaterally by the government when it looked like it was not going to pass the senate. The imposition of the powers were not justified and they were not ratified. There will be some interesting legal cases ahead. However some emergency powers have been retained and are still in force and none of the Federal level COVID mandates have been dropped.

Even the provincial governments in Canada have realized that Truckers were in the right and every province but one has announced the end of a timetable to lift almost all of the COVID related human and civil rights restrictions and violations. The provincial level politicians face an election in the next couple of years – not four years away as the federal politicians do.

Lessons Learned

The government lies and the Canadian media repeat and amplify the lies of the government in exchange for money. (https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/600m-in-federal-funding-for-media-a-turning-point-in-the-plight-of-newspapers-in-canada , https://ca-news-forum.com/2021/04/20/liberal-budget-promises-new-funding-for-the-cbc/ ). This has been true for a while but it is now obvious to a much larger number of Canadians.

The Canadian banking system is private in name only. The banks are effectively a branch of the Canadian government. All the Canadian banks and Credit Unions were happy to follow the illegal commands of the government in violating property rights, due process and human rights of Canadians based on the Federal government’s promotion of illegally obtained evidence under an unjustifiable and unratified assumption of wartime powers. A Federally administered digital banking ID has been in the works since 2018 and was revitalized two weeks ago: (https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/news/federal-government-partners-with-atb-ventures-for-national-digital-id-tech/ ). So that’s all good then.

The government will procure and wield whatever power it possibly can in violation of international and national rights and laws. The government will continue to do this until this process is arrested by the citizenry. On a not entirely unconnected note the Canadian government has purchase agreements for 95 million doses of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccine into 2023 and 2024 from with further purchase options for 300 million doses from a range of suppliers over the same period – this is for a country with a population of 37 million. (https://www.canada.ca/en/public-services-procurement/services/procuring-vaccines-covid19.html ), the vaccine costs between $15 and $20 per shot (https://www.managedhealthcareexecutive.com/view/the-price-tags-on-the-covid-19-vaccines)
At around 400m doses just for Canada alone, our deeply moral global pharmaceutical industry is set to receive a further $6,000,000,000 over two years, or 0.5% of total Canadian govt spending for each of those years, for a single medical issue. So no lobbying dollars at play or astonishing and extensive misuse of public funds there then.

We do not know exactly when ‘the science’ stopped mattering – or if it really ever mattered. For the Canadian provinces the science abruptly changed (‘cuz that’s how science works, kids!) when the ruling provincial oligarchs, sorry, politicians, realized that their mandate to violate our rights did actually rely on all those icky people voting for them in the near future. Thankfully they all realized they would have to continue to violate our rights in much more subtle ways in order to get our votes. I suppose we have to be grateful they did not cancel elections because of another fabricated racist emergency and just declared that we all needed to be made safe. There is nothing safer than seizing the assets and arresting anyone who doesn’t do exactly what they say when they say it.

We had totalitarian fascism in Canada for just over a week. If you can think of another way to describe it please let me know. As it is, we still have a warmer, kinder level of fascism carrying us into a bright new future. With our safe and secure government/corporate banking system where you can be ruined without due process with the press of a key, our extensive human rights and bioethics violations and continued astronomical wealth transfer from taxpayers to large corporations. We all know what will happen to us if we express dissent in any way that might prove effective. Shut up. Do what you’re told. Or else. These fine gentlemen from your friendly local constabulary in their attractive green uniforms are always available to beat the shit out of you, and the safety into you.

So this isn’t fascism? Go hug a cop!

Postscript

I have not mentioned the lame attempt by a government subcontractor to entrap a bunch of people on the hacked givesendgo list into an online criminal conspiracy. Someone on the list contacted me directly and told me this has occurred multiple times. I hope this is the last time I feel compelled to write about ‘COVID’. As I wrote at the start, this post wasn’t about COVID. It turns out it probably never was.

Mandatory vs Voluntary, Force vs Choice

A version of this article first appeared in our free newsletter, to subscribe click here.

Considering the situation in Canada now, this article from only a few weeks ago looks prophetic. This is not a good thing.

There is something we need to talk about.

There are moves in several countries, Canada included, to make the COVID-19 vaccine mandatory. In Canada, as in many other parts of the world, the civil rights of people who choose not to be vaccinated have already been limited and/or partially suspended.

I think it is important to examine what mandating vaccinations actually means.

When a government mandates something it is not voluntary. When a government makes something non voluntary the government will enforce compliance or else the mandate is meaningless. Enforcement of compliance will mean fines or punitive financial and social penalties for the non compliant. If you refuse to pay the fines you will be taken to court and if you fail to abide by an order of the court you will end up serving a custodial sentence. If you choose to assert your rights and resist the imposition of the order of the court, violence up to the point of fatal violence may be used against you.

When a government mandates anything they bring a gun into the room. The government inroduces the threat of violence and actual violence into the conversation. Most of the time this is fine as we all agree on societal mandates – we have mandatory speed limits, mandatory airworthiness regulations. Many things are mandated for the common good. In each of these cases the government ultimately wields the right to a monopoly of ‘legal’ violence against the non compliant.

We also have human rights that are granted for the common good. These ‘guarantee’ the liberty (within limits) of the individual and act as a check on the power of governments.

Has there ever been a society where the government has exercised excessive power over its citizens that has not resulted in despotic oppression? If you can think of one please let me know.

So what are the COVID-19 vaccines? First of all they are not an inoculation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inoculation) none of the COVID 19 vaccines prevent recipients from contracting or spreading the disease.

COVID-19 vaccines do not grant life long protection, they do not grant medium term protection. They offer some protection in the short term (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02183-8/fulltext).

The vaccines prevent some of the worst effects of COVID-19 for those most at risk for a limited time, possibly 6-9 months.

The COVID 19 vaccines perform the same function as a seasonal flu shot. They offer a temporary boost to save lives, especially for the most vulnerable people. For people without comorbidities vaccines do not create a significantly reduced risk of death as the risk of death is already very low.

To be clear: I think the vaccines are good and they have likely saved many lives. I think everyone who wants one should be able to get one and as many boosters as they want without charge. I am happy for the government to fund this with my tax money.

Let’s be clear on another aspect: The vaccines are also a high profit enterprise which benefits the owners and shareholders of private corporations.

(Side note: We have been in discussions with some of the world’s leading experts on open source for a new aircraft program. In those discussions we have covered the subject of the COVID-19 vaccines. There is concern the vaccines have not been made open source and that they are being exploited for profit, especially, as the development was largely paid for with public money – https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/for-billion-dollar-covid-vaccines-basic-government-funded-science-laid-the-groundwork/. The government has taken your money given it to private corporations to develop a product, allowed them to keep the rights and profits for that product, absolved them of all liability and now want to make it mandatory that we all take the for profit, experimental, liability free, non-inoculation, temporary, partial therapeutic – paid for with your money again)

And, sadly, vaccinated people present as great a risk to anyone as unvaccinated people do. The vaccine does not stop the spread or even reduce the risk of contracting the virus to any significant degree – at least not to the degree necessary to stop the astonishingly swift spread of new variants. The vaccines have not contributed to herd immunity to any measurable extent. You may think vaccines help reduce the spread. They do not and the data is absolutely unequivocal on this.

Legal Position

The legal position on your rights are crystal clear

Informed Consent (Article 21 on Health)

1. Informed consent is an aspect of the right to health

 CESCR General Comment No. 14: The right to the highest attainable standard of health (art. 12 ICESCR) states: 

8.  …  The right to health contains both freedoms and entitlements.  The freedoms include the right to control one’s health and body, including sexual and reproductive freedom, and the right to be free from interference, such as the right to be free from torture, non-consensual medical treatment and experimentation.  

 Thus, health is not a public good to be pursued independent of the will of each individual, but requires respect for the will of the individual person with respect to his or her own well-being.   This is reinforced by the requirement that health services be culturally acceptable to individuals and communities; see paragraph 12(c) of the General Comment.  

Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights

Article 6 – Consent

1. Any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information. The consent should, where appropriate, be express and may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any reason without disadvantage or prejudice.

The legal position on internationally agreed human rights is very clear. We all have the right to choose the medical treatment that we allow for ourselves, we have the right to refuse any treatment and we have the right to stop any treatment at any time for any reason. These international human rights are ratified by almost every country and are repeated in almost all national laws.

Note that non-consensual medical treatment is treated the same as torture and experimentation. This is the level of abhorrence inferred by our mutually agreed international legal code on mandatory medical treatments.

Summary

I am a supporter of human rights and voluntary, non-coercive relationships in society. I try to lead by example by making freely available as much of my private work as possible. If you use our spreadsheets or our textbook you are a part of that relationship and that community. These activities are entirely by choice, it is without cost to the user and brings everybody involved a measure of benefit. If it does not bring you benefit then you can choose not to use the material available.

The government is threatening punitive measures up to and including lethal force if a citizen chooses to assert their human rights not to take a for-profit experimental medicine. 

We have to speak with clarity so there can be no misunderstanding. 

Even if the vaccination was fully approved and an effective inoculation this proposal is illegal. Any mandates for the vaccines violates our human rights and creates profits for large corporations. These are a fascist policies devised by fascists and supported by fascists.

If you support mandatory COVID vaccinations you are diametrically opposed to the philosophy and spirit of what I do. After examination of the full range of scientific and legal literature, if you still support mandatory COVID vaccination, you are anti human rights and you are a fascist.

If you are a fascist I ask you to unsubscribe from this newsletter immediately and stop using the materials available on our website. I cannot stop you using the free materials from our website or force you to unsubscribe – that is not how we operate, but if you do continue to subscribe to the newsletter or use our materials, every time you use our free tools, read our free textbook or receive the newsletter you can do it with a sense of personal shame.

If you know me personally or professionally and my expression of my position on this issue makes you uncomfortable or embarrassed, good. If you lack moral clarity regarding this issue or if you are not aware of internationally accepted standards for bioethics or universal human rights you have some research and some serious thinking to do.

At some point you have to draw a line in the sand and you have to pick a side. I have made it clear where my line is and I have picked a side.

Your turn.

Open Source and Patents – how far can you go?

A version of this article first appeared in our free newsletter, to subscribe click here

I have been invited to take part in a new aircraft project. It is for a purpose built VTOL (maybe eVTOL) medevac type vehicle. It is an interesting idea and I think we can come up with a configuration that is better at meeting the needs of the mission than the currently available fixed and rotary wing assets.

It is an interesting design challenge. We are not quite ready to go public yet but we will give some details through the project website in the near future.

A few years ago one of my other clients asked me if it would be possible to create an ‘open source’ aircraft project. In that case we discussed it and that project decided to continue with their development program in the traditional protected way.

On the face of it an open source aircraft project sounds a little absurd. Aircraft projects are expensive endeavors, why would you choose to give the technology away as you develop it?

Well, there are some good arguments. If any of you have looked into patents, how they are filed, who files them and what they are used for, you will be aware of the general misuse or at worst abuse of the patent system.

Large companies file many patents in the attempt to claim ownership of absolutely anything they think of. These patents, rather than protecting true innovation, are used as a way of claiming proprietary ownership of anything at all and gives the large companies the ability to pursue and seek recompense against anyone who innovates anything similar.

Large companies are able to do this because they can afford the filing fee for each patent. A patent generally costs between $20,000 and $50,000 to file.

Looking at Boeing’s patent activity: https://www.statista.com/statistics/632961/boeing-patents-usa-registered/

Assuming that each patent costs and average of $30,000 to file, in 2020 Boeing spent 1464 x 30,000 = $43,920,000 on filing activity related to patents awarded in 2020.

Of course no small company can compete with the level of intellectual property protection that Boeing creates. It is also clear that the number of patents Boeing is filing is increasing significantly over time. Does the number of patents represent the level of unique innovation at Boeing or does it represent misuse of the system in order to give the ability to sue, claim ownership of and harm potential competition?

Let’s look at some of the things Boeing had patents awarded for in 2021.

Minor design details: Splice fittings that are affixed to stringers via web-installed fasteners

Something you might put in a warehouse management spreadsheet without thinking: Inventory management

Using a drill: Method and apparatus for drilling a workpiece

A wing spar: Monolithic spar for a wing

This is perfectly legal use of the patent system to maximise the potential for future lawsuits against ‘innocent’ innovations or even claim ownership of standard practice in other companies.

I believe it is also the sign of a corporation that has lost its way and sees anti-competitive mis use of the patent system as a source of future parasitic revenue generation.

Patents are also used to form what I call a ‘patent cloud’ around new aircraft companies. The patents in this instance are filed to perform a number of functions. These are given in order of actual utility:

  1. To create the impression of a high level of unique and valuable intellectual property to impress potential investors
  2. To create the appearance of a large amount protected proprietary information, where there actually is minimal innovation, to discourage anyone copying any aspect of your design
  3. To protect actual unique ideas and real innovation

Somewhere in between the misuse of the patent system between large corporations and self aggrandizing startups there is the use of the patents to protect unique and useful ideas that deserve protection.

In any case there are several truisms that are often applied to patents, these are

A patent is just an invitation to a lawsuit.

If you can’t afford to enforce a patent there is no point filing one.


With all of the previous points in mind and considering the expense and effort that a startup company ends up sinking into intellectual property protection; is there a viable alternative?

  • What would happen if you did not protect your technology?
  • What would happen if you made your technology freely available to all without protection?

I have been thinking about this for a few weeks and I keep on coming to the conclusion “not much”

Most people don’t realize that the R&D component of an aircraft startup company is not the majority component of your overall cost for a well run program. You have all of the company systems to develop, you have a manufacturing facility and plant to stand up, you have management, engineering and manufacturing staff to recruit and train and you have a huge amount of working capital to cover raw materials and vendor items for aircraft in manufacturing and for warehoused items before you get to revenue.

If you were to start an aircraft development program and do it completely openly and publicly would people copy your design and try to get to market to compete with you?

The answer to that question is  “probably not”. The amount of capital needed to be invested, even if you sidestep some part of the R&D costs through the use of publicly available technology, is very large. Is it likely that a competitor would risk that amount of capital on an unproven idea that is not their own?

I believe there are several aspects that mean this is very unlikely.

  1. Unproven designs are risky. It is very likely that any competitor will wait for you (the original OEM) to get to market first and let you fully mitigate the technological, regulatory and market risks before they commit that level of investment.
  2. As anyone else can also compete with any potential competitor there is a strong  disincentive to make the level of investment as the risk of facing additional competition is high.

It appears that an open source, or a complete public domain approach can offer a significant disincentive to competition.

What are the advantages?

  1. Avoidance of the costs of filing and defending patents
  2. Increased public attention and PR value of being the first to do take this approach
  3. A level of community involvement in development, checking and scrutinizing of design concepts

What if you went further and made all of the company’s operational systems also public domain? This could include:

  1. Engineering systems – document numbering, change and release control, configuration control
  2. Certification and compliance systems
  3. Quality system
  4. Manufacturing process specifications
  5. Work orders, warehousing, scheduling
  6. Human resource policies

In my experience every aircraft startup company has to develop all of these systems. They are all regarded as proprietary by each company and as such they are all guarded and kept confidential. And, in my experience, they are all very similar.

These systems are so similar that almost all aircraft companies could adopt a single standard for these systems as a baseline and make small modifications in house to meet their own specific needs.

I think this approach would be very interesting and be both disruptive and very beneficial for the whole industry – especially for startup companies. Would it democratize the aircraft development process?

What do you think?

Cancel Culture

A version of this article first appeared in our free newsletter, to subscribe click here

Cancel culture has caught up with me and Linkedin has restricted my account without warning. This restriction involves removing all traces of me from linkedin. This is a ‘restriction’ in the sense of ‘total removal as if I never existed’. There is an appeals process that I am going through out of a sense of morbid curiosity. I may write about this Orwellian process at a later date. If my profile is restored I will be a lot less active in Linkedin, not to safeguard the future of my profile on linkedin because now I understand that my profile is subject to arbitrary removal at any time. There is no point building my profile and creating traffic on linkedin. I need to have an alternative, so…….

I realized that Linkedin was the only public profile that I have for myself. I need either a backup or a main public profile I can rely on. Mike – our web supremo is looking at setting up a resume posting service on abbottaerospace.com so I can post an online resume as a backup/alternative to other services or as my primary public profile. We are looking at making this available as a free service to anyone who wishes to use it.

Engineering Risk Management and the Conspiracy of Optimism

A version of this article first appeared in our free newsletter, to subscribe click here

I gave a presentation to a conference of the Pacific Northwest chapter of the AIAA.

The theme of the conference was “Breaking Barriers of the Impossible!”

Having spent a long time seeing very talented people (including myself) failing to achieve the eminently possible I agreed to present if I would be allowed to present the position opposing the theme of the conference and the AIAA generously agreed.

The full presentation with my notes is available here:

https://www.abbottaerospace.com/downloads/aa-cp-20212-001/

Any individual growing up in the 1980’s in England will recognize the three wheeled technological marvel used in the lead picture for this article, the Sinclair C5 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5). This electric vehicle was going to revolutionize urban mobility. It was possible, it was legal and it failed. It failed because no one bought it. Compared to the alternative – a bike or a cheap car it did not make a compelling case to the market.

There are direct parallels to draw between the Sinclair C5 and the eVTOL ‘revolution’. The eVTOL crop of programs do face additional significant challenges in the ‘possible’ and ‘legal’ (regulatory) field as well as a projected market that is, well, projected rather than actual. I would not say eVTOL projects are impossible but…….

Maybe the risk and cost of eVTOL is worth it because we are going to save the planet. You know, beat back the oceans, regrow the glaciers and save some endangered species – the cute anthropomorphic ones in National Geographic.

For the presentation I looked at some costs and energy consumption figures. These are necessarily estimates based on available information but they are in the right order of magnitude. This is taken from slide 32:

We are told that eVTOL are green. The multi-billion dollar investments that are needed to make them work are an important part of saving the planet. The power consumption of, for example, the Archer Maker vs an electric powered Smart Car is around a factor of 17. For the same journey you are going to use over 10 times the amount of energy. It sounds like I would be greener going to the local grocery store in our 8 liter V12 truck. It turns out that it is. When I take the Chevy Silverado to the grocery store I am greener than eVTOL. I am so good. Saving the planet.

Do you really need an aircraft for urban travel? Emphatically no. Will you be able to afford the use of an aircraft for urban travel? For most people, emphatically no. Take a regular aircraft cost model and reduce the cost of fuel and maintenance to zero (the most optimistic assessment possible) and what is the seat cost per passenger mile?

Is eVTOL greener than any other alternative? Maybe if you commute alone in a diesel locomotive.

The fact is that the market only cares about ‘green’ as related to marketing. If ‘green’ products do not stack up well compared to the alternatives in terms of cost and utility no amount of green marketing will convince the market. At least not for long enough to make a difference.

To use a quote from the late, great Douglas Adams “The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks” 

Engineers should avoid attempting the impossible. Impossibility is the remit of fiction writers and some lucky research scientists. In the words of Freeman Dyson:

“A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.”

To some people that makes engineering sound boring – but it is anything but. Engineering is the art of the possible. Art is always more interesting than science.

Green Math or Putting the Moron into Oxymoron

A version of this article first appeared in our free newsletter, to subscribe click here

As engineers we like applied math that is grounded in reality. Over the decades I have been playing with numbers and relating them to reality. I have developed a gut feel for when something looks ‘off’. It is not perfect in detecting every incongruity but it is rarely incorrect. This article from our venerable state broadcaster in Canada got that reaction from me:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/canada-electric-cars-2035-1.6085540

This article states that by 2035 all new cars and light trucks sold in Canada will be electrically powered.

I am always wary when the government interferes in the free market. If electric vehicles were a superior product then almost no-one would not buy them. The government only compels you to do something when it is something you would not do by choice.

The first level reading of this can be interpreted as “By 2035 the government believes that electric vehicles will still suck compared to gasoline vehicles”.

This is disappointing as we are being told that battery technology is improving all the time. If the government believes that it will still be rubbish, it is not good news.

Let’s take the government at their word. I was curious regarding the amount of energy this would pull from the power generation and supply grid.

A typical family car gas tank holds about 14 gallons of gasoline – so with some simple math I ran some numbers. 

How much energy is carried by a full tank of gasoline?

Energy Density of Gasoline =8900wh/L
Energy Density of Gasoline (US Gallons) =33690wh/gallon
Typical Family Car Gas tank size =14gallons
Amount of Energy in a Typical Fuel tank =471661wh/fuel tank
Amount of Energy in a Typical Fuel tank =472kwh/fuel tank

Ok – so I have a number, but what does it mean? I went and grabbed our monthly utility bill – for the month of May we used 743kwh of energy.So a tank full of gas carries enough energy to power our family home for over 2 weeks.

This underlines how amazing gasoline is as a store of energy. Now we have to understand the implications of everyone plugging their family cars into the grid every night.

Lets make some simple sweeping assumptions and ignore relative efficiencies and all nuance. We are just after a rough order of magnitude assessments to let us judge if this is clever or stupid. I don’t know the answer to that question until I have run the numbers but I am starting to think that it might not be clever.

OK – let’s ignore light trucks and assume that each household uses 2 tanks of gas a month for their motoring needs (this is probably a gross underestimation).

Lets then round everything up and say that for each household to use exclusively electric vehicles each household will double their power requirement from the grid in Canada.

Let’s ignore population growth and immigration and just use the baseline increase of doubling the power requirement for each household.

The latest numbers (2016: https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/2cdf43fc-d4aa-4604-9f21-29777d955810) shows that Canada’s current Power Generation capacity is 146GW and this breaks down as follows:

Hydro 55%
Biomass 2%
Solar 2%
Nuclear 10%
Coal 7%
Natural Gas 15%
Oil and Diesel 3%

Assuming that the aim is to get rid of all Hydrocarbon sourced energy – Coal, Natural Gas, Oil and Diesel. There is no point exporting your carbon dioxide generation to the local power station (I am assuming the government position actually makes sense here, so let’s go with this). We have to remove 25% of the current power generation from the mix.So we have to meet twice the demand by increasing from 75% of our current capacity. This means that we have to decommission 25% of our current power generation and increase the other components by 2.66 times.

I am sure this enormous infrastructure program has been fully costed and is available somewhere on the seemingly endless network of government of Canada websites.

Despite looking for it for ‘some time’ I could not find anything regarding the level of massive investment required or a plan to execute it. There is lots about adding solar and wind power to make the current system ‘greener’. Oh good.

To summarize: The government of Canada has created a plan to replace gasoline vehicles that would at least double the load on the power generation and distribution system. The government of Canada has no plan to double the capacity of the power generation and distribution system.

So we can draw one of several conclusions:

  1. This is just virtue signaling (or a ‘lie’ as we used to call it) from the Canadian Government.
  2. This is a serious policy and they are not going to increase the capacity of the power generation system so Canada will have to restrict car ownership.
  3. This is a serious policy and they have a covert plan to invest trillions of dollars in power generation. But Shhhhh. It’s a secret.

Like most green policies, from a basic math or very simple engineering point of view, this green policy is either complete rubbish, is a subversive way to restrict the ability to travel for individuals or it’s success depends on some other magical yet to be defined or completely secret and impractical supporting public policy.

Most ‘green’ policies look like this and it is faintly depressing that the media reports on them as if you can trust the government when they make these kinds of pronouncements.

So lets dial the thinking down to the lowest level.

Are gasoline powered vehicles ‘the problem’? If the answer is ‘yes’, what is the solution?

How Not To Startup – The follow up

A version of this article first appeared in our free newsletter, to subscribe click here

Sometimes, largely by chance, I manage to call things correctly. This article came to my attention last week

https://www.chicagobusiness.com/manufacturing/flying-taxi-startup-wisk-says-feds-are-probing-theft-secrets

If Wisk is to have the courts take their civil action seriously it would help if there was a criminal case opened, charges laid and eventually, convictions.

It looks like the FBI has opened an investigation and a grand jury has been convened to consider charges against at least one individual.

I expect the individual engineer will be charged with theft. Depending on the evidence that has been subpoenaed it will be interesting to see how many other individuals at Archer will be caught by charges of criminal conspiracy. If there is evidence that the alleged procurement of the data from Wisk was discussed within the company, or its alleged use was known about, then I expect criminal conspiracy charges will be filed as well.

Even if it cannot be shown that the allegedly stolen data was not used by Archer the individual engineer can still be charged as theft is theft. Although I expect that if he had taken the data and kept it solely for his own personal records Wisk would not be pursuing civil and criminal action.

In the article linked above Archer takes two slightly contradictory positions. On the one hand they state:

“This is a baseless motion in a baseless lawsuit,” an Archer spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “Archer independently designed its aircraft, before any employees from Wisk joined Archer, and Archer looks forward to demonstrating that in court. Archer is moving forward with its business plans, including the development, certification and production of its proprietary aircraft.”

A few paragraphs further down they also provide the information:

In April, Archer said it had “placed an employee on paid administrative leave in connection with a government investigation and a search warrant issued to the employee.” A spokesman said at the time that Archer and three other employees had received related subpoenas, and “all are fully cooperating with the authorities.”

By placing the individual on paid administrative leave, is Archer tacitly admitting that the employee is in possession of stolen data but that they never, ever saw it – honest?

Are Archer distancing themselves from any potential contamination, concerning both data and the morality of the situation, and throwing the potentially innocent employee under the bus?

As I wrote in the previous newsletter. The valuation of the SPAC based IPO these projects receive is based on confidence more than any other measure. The addition of a formal criminal element to the legal problems facing Archer will add to the damage done by the civil case and further damage the valuation they are likely to receive.

Wisk’s unspoken strategy of removing a competitor from the field of battle looks more likely to succeed.

From Tragedy to Regulation to Corona

A version of this article first appeared in our free newsletter, to subscribe click here

I had a short exchange with a contact online concerning the state of the eVTOL regulations and specifically those applied to electrical batteries, controllers and motors for primary aircraft drive systems.

Regulations formulated in advance of a new type of system entering service are just best guesses. They are educated guesses made by smart people but there is necessarily some part of the behaviour of these systems that cannot be knowingly predicted.

What happens to very high power batteries, connectors, wiring, controllers and electric motors after they have been operated in extreme environments for years or decades? What failure modes will develop, how will they impact the systems and interact with the software controls and what are the correct mitigations to avoid the consequences of those failures?

The truth is that we will not be able to predict all of these aspects of new technologies and regulations will develop that are informed by tragedy, as they always have.

In accepting new technologies into aircraft service we have to expect the unexpected and that inevitably means tragedy and loss of life.

In our ever more risk averse societies, will this be acceptable? And that thought leads us onto…

Corona Virus and Your right to make your own Risk Assessments

In Ontario we are under very strict lockdown measures. This is because of the third wave of coronavirus. Hospitals are filling up, ICU beds are becoming scarce and we all need to be protected.

Our government has decided that the risks are so high that we cannot be trusted to make our own risk assessments and take our own measures to protect ourselves. It is so pressing that they have had to suspend our civil rights again and impose a set of measures so strict that every municipal police force in Ontario refused to enforce them because the police were afraid they were being granted too much power. That reaction alone is reason to pause for thought.

So what risks are we all being protected from? What risk is so great that we need to bankrupt hundreds or thousands of small businesses? What risk is so great that we need to suspend civil rights and institute a police state (powers even the police have rejected)? What risk is so great we need to run up public spending and debt to a level that will cause (and already is causing) massive inflation and ruin the financial future of millions of people?

Let’s take a look;

Ontario makes some high quality data available to the public. You can review that here https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data

We are bombarded with the daily case counts but no mention of the effective fatality rate. The fatality rate is the most valuable measure of risk and is what we all really care about. Why is the daily fatality rate not openly published and discussed and why does it not form the central metric for public policy? There is a reason why we do not have society wide lockdowns and quarantine for cases of athlete’s foot. This is directly related to the very low fatality rate of athlete’s foot and yeast infections in general.

It follows that the level of concern we have as a society about an infection is a function of the fatality rate and not the infection rate.

Using the data taken directly from the website reference above this is the daily number of cases and the fatality rate plotted over each other (this is smoothed using a 7 day average). This is from March 2020 to the latest available date:

This graph demonstrates that the current fatality rate is about .5%. This is great news. The fatality rate has dropped from a peak of over 15% and is down by a factor of 30 from the peak of March/April of last year.

If we look at the number of COVID deaths per day vs number of new cases per day it looks like this:

This is good news again, the current number of COVID deaths per day, about 30, is lower than the last wave even though the number of cases is higher. This Third wave is causing much fewer fatalities and is much less dangerous.

From the same website, the at risk age groups are very clearly known and understood.

It is also very well known that there are specific comorbidities that place people at much higher risk.

Despite the falling fatality rate and the clear understanding we have of who is at risk – this is no surprise as it is the group of people who are at risk from a normal flu every year (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html)  – the government has seen fit to try and protect everybody.

A typical flu season fatality rate is 0.1%. We are currently at 5 times that number but we are heading down towards a normal flu fatality rate.

For context, on average, 85 people die in Ontario every day from Cancer. COVID has never reached that level even at it’s very worst. Why is dying of COVID totally not acceptable (quick, shutdown society and ruin the economy) but dying of cancer appears to be the state approved way to snuff it?

Is the government any good at managing risk on my behalf? What evidence do we have that they have demonstrated any competence in that regard? Why do they care so much about one relatively low risk that they are prepared to sacrifice the economy?

We are at the lowest risk of death from COVID since the start of the pandemic. Actually, COVID is not a pandemic anymore, it is now endemic, and the fatality rate is approaching that of regular flu. Why is the government behaving like this? 

How Not To Startup

A version of this article first appeared in our free newsletter, to subscribe click here

There are many eVTOL programs out there. Not quite as high as the number of atoms in the universe, or the number of grains of sand on a beach, but there are a lot.

When there are so many startups trying to exploit a market that has yet to be shown to exist, there are a few things a startup should want to avoid.

Getting into a lawsuit with two of the world largest corporations is probably one of the things that you most want to avoid.

Wisk is owned by Boeing, Google and likely a bunch of other organizations – but Boeing and Google, and their lawyers, are the ones you would worry about. Wisk appears to be well financed and have a powerful but low key presence in the industry. They have been developing their product for more than 10 years. Their design is mature and they are well into flight testing, and as far as I can tell, some way into the formal certification process.

Archer is a more recent company who have gone through a rapid engineering development phase and have some very nice renders of a multirotor concept that they are using to generate excitement in the investor community.

Wisk has filed a lawsuit against Archer (https://wisk.aero/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/2021.04.06-Wisk-Complaint-Against-Archer.pdf)

The basis of the complaint is “This is an action for trade secret misappropriation and patent infringement”. Wisk is accusing Archer of stealing data/information and patent infringement.

It is worth reading the whole document, however there are some immediate similarities between some Wisk designs (that Wisk did not pursued for their chosen first to market configuration) and the Archer Aircraft.

I think the patent claim is weaker than the claim of “trade secret misappropriation”. The key paragraph is on pages 18 and 19:

“On his last day with Wisk, Engineer Z turned in his Wisk-issued laptop computer. A forensic analysis of that computer revealed that, between 3:00 and 4:30 pm, on December 25, 2019, he downloaded approximately 380 files from Wisk’s secure, corporate Google Drive repository. During that same time period, he also inserted two USB storage devices into the Wiskissued laptop and copied files to those storage devices. He did not turn in those USB storage devices before leaving Wisk and, on information and belief, the files written to those devices remain in his possession while he works at Archer. 

The USB devices were just the tip of an iceberg. After downloading hundreds of files in the afternoon, Engineer Z did not call it a night. Instead, forensic records from Wisk’s Google Drive account reveal that, between 10:52 pm and midnight on December 25, 2019, he connected to Wisk’s Drive account from a private network and downloaded thousands of additional files—more than 3,400 files. This download is not reflected on any device he turned in to Wisk when he resigned and, on information and belief, those files remain in his possession while he works at Archer. ”

The court filing goes on to define the data they claim was taken:

“The sheer volume of the theft makes it impractical to describe every single stolen Wisk trade secret in this Complaint. Nonetheless, the stolen files can be categorized into at least five general categories of trade secrets: aircraft designs, component designs, system designs, facility inventory, and test data.”

This is described in more detail in the court filing.

Two key points spring to mind.

  1. If Wisk has evidence of data theft, this is evidence of a crime. You would expect that Wisk would be working with law enforcement towards a criminal indictment of the individuals involved. Such an indictment, and a conviction, would help this lawsuit as it would add significant credence to their claims. Even if Archer did not benefit from the alleged data theft the individuals would still be guilty of the alleged theft and a criminal case could proceed separate from this lawsuit.
  2. If criminal charges can be brought, how many people inside Archer are at jeopardy of being charged as an accessory to the crime? When you consider the potential value scale of the alleged data theft it is huge, Archer has declared a market valuation of over 3 billion dollars. How much of the value is directly due to the value of the data alleged to have been stolen. What did Wisk pay to develop that data? Who at Archer was aware of the alleged theft. If the allegations are true there would also be charges regarding accessory to the crime and possible criminal conspiracy charges.
  3. What does Wisk want? I don’t think they are short of funding so they don’t really need the money. In a crowded field of competitors it would be in their interest to remove one of their opponents from the field of play. I have to believe that the true aim of Wisk is to end the Archer program and make sure they are closed down. If the claims Wisk are making are true this would be rational and justified.

The individuals involved know who they are and they should be lawyering up in a hurry. Archer and their SPAC partner Atlas Crest must be having some tense conversations. So much of the SPAC valuation that Archer is relying on for funding derives from the confidence of the investment market in the company. If you have Google and Boeing trying to take you down, you may have trouble creating the confidence you need (sarc.).

Will the filing of the lawsuit alone be sufficient to prevent the SPAC valuation Archer need and has their doom already been cast in stone?

And a note to engineers – when you leave a company there is a fine line between retaining a record of the work you retrain liability for (designs and reports you have signed) and appropriating data you do not own. What are your rights? What are your responsibilities to your employer and yourself?

Could there be an innocent explanation for the behaviour Wisk describes in their lawsuit? If criminal charges are not brought does it mean that Wisk’s suit has no merit?

Time will tell.