PILOT - Venturing into the Future of Transportation with the eVTOL

In the pilot episode of our podcast, we had the pleasure of hosting Tim Kelly, the mastermind behind the revolutionary eVTOL Student Team.

 The eVTOL is a unique vehicle that represents a significant leap in transportation technology, promising to redefine how we commute in the future. It's an intriguing blend of a conventional aircraft and a drone, with a focus on energy efficiency and reducing carbon emissions. 

One of the standout aspects of this groundbreaking project is the role students play in its development. Kelly stresses the importance of fostering a culture of innovation from an early stage. This project serves as an invaluable learning platform for students, providing them with hands-on experience in cutting-edge transportation technology.

Tune in to gain insights into this revolutionary project and join us in exploring the future of transportation.

Thank you for joining us on this episode of "Takeaway with the MEF."

We hope you found this discussion insightful and engaging. If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider subscribing, rating, and leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform.

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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are solely those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily represent the official position of the MEF or its affiliates.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Takeaway with the MEF. This series follows a group of students and industry experts as the joint forces to create a flying taxi, or EV-Tool. I am your host, naraj, and this is a chat I had with Tim Kelly, founder of the MEF. The MEF is a manufacturing network on the Sunshine Coast. Tim also founded the EV-Tool student team. He is an internationally experienced aeronautical engineer, now also turned social entrepreneur, amongst other things. So, without further ado, let's take it away. We're trying to come up with a way, like you imagine, if you're explaining what an EV-Tool is, to how old is Charlotte now? Nine, nine, okay. Well, charlotte is probably more advanced than most kids of age, I would say.

Speaker 2: 0:57

Let's not give her too much credit. It should not. No.

Speaker 1: 1:02

So if you were trying to explain what an EV-Tool is to Charlotte, how would you explain it? Flying car Fantastic.

Speaker 2: 1:11

Yeah, because most people you say EV-Tool, you're like, all right, you know, can we do less acronyms? And so, all right, electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle I still don't even know, can we do this in English? And then you're like flying taxi and they're like, okay, all right, well, that's something that I. But that's totally Jetsons, yeah, like George Jetson. And it's like, yeah, well, not really, but kind of.

Speaker 2: 1:37

Anyway, yeah, I think I don't know people seem to understand the concept of the flying car. The other thing I think is most people say, well, that's just a drone and it's like, well, not, not really. Because most drones, typically in in most contexts at least, generate all their lift through via thrust and that's the only way that they really do it. So they, they fly, but they don't. You know, it's hyper inefficient from an energy perspective to to fly using thrust. That's what that's what wings are for, and most drones don't make that transition. They don't, they don't use, you know, a propulsion system for vertical takeoff and landing and then somehow transition that into something for forward flight that generates lifts using wings. So when you know when, when we get asked, well, isn't that just a big drone? It's like, well, kind of, but also not really, so it's sort of.

Speaker 1: 2:31

It's something like sort of a mix between a conventional aircraft and a drone, essentially. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. So, and then walking through the process of just big picture from start to finish, like from from A to B, what the what that vehicle is actually doing, yeah, right.

Speaker 2: 2:51

So the intent is that you know someone let's say that there's an organization that buys a fleet of air taxis and they run those air taxis like he would run a fleet of cars or buses or whatever and there's a specific piece of infrastructure that you know, which is the port, and ideally a network of of of nodes within a certain proximity of each other and the, the. The user would have an app, much like Uber, and you'd. You know you wouldn't summon, but you would, you would book in, I guess, a ride on it and then you'd travel to that place. You know, ideally it wouldn't be far, ideally it'd be nice and close yeah, maybe you could walk or or ride a bike or something to it. And then it flies you from point A to point B and you get out and go on your merry way and it takes the next passenger from that node to wherever they need to go.

Speaker 1: 3:44

And the nodes still require runways, because the thing can take off, yeah.

Speaker 2: 3:47

And it's like a, a network of helipads basically, and the. I think the idea would be that this would be compatible backwards, compatible with existing helipad infrastructure. But I think, you know, there's a fair bit that needs to be resolved around charging, fast charging and and hot swappable batteries and and whatever the method is to maximize the uptime of the vehicle. Because I think it's going to be pretty important to try to get the, the cost per trip down as low as possible and in today's dollar terms, I think for a half an hour trip, that's, you know, maybe a hundred Ks or so, that needs to be sub a hundred dollars. Ideally it'd be something like 50 bucks. That's potentially a little bit too cheap, but I think it's a good target to have. I think the idea of going from here to Brisbane for 50 bucks is pretty compelling in a lot of ways, yeah, and you were.

Speaker 1: 4:40

Yeah, so we've heard talks about, say, autonomous cars. Musk was doing his boring company, trying to go on the ride, etc. Etc. What's different with the EV? Talk as a whole. Obviously, it's flying through the air, but I guess, is it better as a form of transport? Is it better for the environment? Is it part of the same thing, part of the same infrastructure?

Speaker 2: 5:11

I think it's significantly better than what cars are for the moment in terms of contribution to emissions. Obviously because it's electric. I think that also it's probably going to be better than even what EV cars would be considering. It needs significantly less infrastructure to manage. The autopilot piece is again simpler and more proven for aircraft than road vehicles. Are dealing with the plethora of other human-controlled vehicles and pedestrians and the complexity of road networks, even though for an aircraft there's a third axis involved.

Speaker 1: 5:57

You're actually adding other dimensions, etc.

Speaker 2: 5:59

Yeah, and in a lot of ways you could almost say that there's another three, because for a car there's the X and Y and also rotation about Z, because it's returning.

Speaker 2: 6:13

And then for an aircraft, of course, you've got all six degrees of freedom that you now need to manage.

Speaker 2: 6:19

From an infrastructure perspective, and especially from an artificial intelligence perspective, I think probably the air taxis or EV tolls are simpler.

Speaker 2: 6:30

I think the really really hard part about it is the safety aspect in terms of fail safes and catastrophic events. So if you compare even from what I understand, autonomous electric vehicles now, if everybody converted over today, that's going to be significantly safer than having people behind the wheel for the most part. So there'd already be less lives lost through that transition, if it was possible to make it, which it's not, I think. If you then compared that to a fleet of EV tolls, even if we got the failure rate down to one times 10, to the minus nine failures, which is one in a billion yeah, one in a billion, something like that that's per trip and there's going to be a lot of trips and every now and again there's going to be something that doesn't go right, even if you've got ridiculously high levels of safety built into it. And that's where probably parachutes that are coupled to a pyrotechnic charge or something like that, like a lot of what goes on in a lot of general aviation these days.

Speaker 1: 7:50

You're talking about the parachutes that are installed on light, very light aircraft. Realistic parachutes, that's right.

Speaker 2: 7:58

Yeah, one of the things I think about an aircraft that is fixed wing as well is that if there is, for whatever reason, a power outage, it still has the ability to be able to glide. True, whereas a traditional drone, whereby all the lift is generated by the thrust no thrust is no, lift equals, and then you've got no control. Whereas if you've got either altitude and or forward airspeed, then, generally speaking, you can do something the same as with a helicopter They'll auto rotate and flare out when they get to the ground, but the fact that they've got altitude and they've got a rotor, that's turning.

Speaker 1: 8:41

Yep, they can auto-drive it and sort of glide down to earth.

Speaker 2: 8:47

Yeah. So I think that trying to find good alternatives for those one in a billion cases is still going to be really important, because for a car, those one in a billion cases will still happen, but they're just often less critical. A brake failure, whilst it could be catastrophic, could still potentially not mean death of occupant because there's not an altitude involved. The speeds are generally sub 100 kilometres an hour, whereas for this we're talking ideally over 250 kilometres an hour. So I think there's a few things that need to be resolved there and that's where, both from a regulatory and a social acceptance piece, that starts becoming pretty difficult, because these EV tolls with their size are going to be thought of synonymously with general aviation aircraft, and that's probably still the right thing to do, because that's the best analogy that we have.

Speaker 2: 9:41

But I think it's a little bit. It's a little bit like comparing a very mature technology like internal combustion engines with electric vehicles and the argument around EVs being worse for the environment somehow, because battery technology, in terms of recycling, isn't at a good level yet. But you're comparing a technology that's more than 100 or 100 years old, or whatever it is now, to something that's really only a decade or so old and, of course, has an awful long way to go, and I think it would really be a similar thing for EV-tiles and air taxis. Once you get adoption at scale, the progression of that technology in the areas where it's potentially not as strong as it could be would be pretty swift.

Speaker 1: 10:24

Yeah, so what? You're saying? That with previous technologies, like your internal combustion engines, etc. You've had a long time to invest both expertise and resources. How it's been. It's got to this level right now, but your EV industry is still at its infancy, really Correct, and it's only by getting into it now that we're going to be able to reach that. Yeah, correct, even the point at some point. Yep.

Speaker 2: 10:48

Ideally, the business case for it would make itself where there is increasing appetite for it. I think different countries will have different appetites for it. Australia being such a big country with a low population density, infrastructure for us is really expensive because we have to build a lot of infrastructure per kilometer per head of population. Relative to somewhere like the Netherlands, which is the infrastructure per population is really low in comparison, they get really good return on their invested infrastructure. So something like EV-tiles just probably wouldn't make as much sense over there in the Netherlands.

Speaker 2: 11:29

Yeah, like the train systems are great. They've got a great culture around cycling. They don't use a lot of cars anyway, and when they do, the infrastructure is generally really good, whereas we're in a pretty different situation here. There's an awful lot of urban sprawl, people spend an inordinate amount of time stuck in traffic or just traveling generally, and even just looking at our attempts to get high speed rail up here onto the Sunshine Coast, it's been difficult and even the high speed rail is still only going to be maybe 160 kilometers an hour or something like that, probably if we're lucky, and it's going to cost billions and billions and, like I don't know what $12 billion, $20 billion, something like that and you still need the massive infrastructure for the rails.

Speaker 1: 12:23

Because the last time you were mentioning something that I found really interesting, that I didn't think about before, was that, with regards to the environment, a lot of the costs associated with carbon emissions, a lot of the costs, actually comes from the infrastructure rather than the actual vehicle emissions themselves.

Speaker 2: 12:41

I don't know if those numbers I gave were 100%, but I remember reading about it. I can't remember what it was exactly, but I mean, I know that concrete produces 8% of global CO2 emissions every year just by itself. I don't know exactly what it is for asphalt and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2: 13:00

But if you think about how much has to go into the building of infrastructure, the idea of having a set of nodes that are equipped to handle vehicles like air taxis. The infrastructure cost of that is just what fractions of a percent relative to the infrastructure you would need for rail or for road, especially if you start talking about boring. And don't get me wrong the technology that Musk's brought up is phenomenal between SpaceX and Tesla and Borenco and Neuralink, and let's not talk about X, because that's not going to work well for anybody, I was waiting for that one, yeah.

Speaker 2: 13:46

So I mean, it's not that it won't work, it's just all right. Well, but what's the cost per kilometer? That is insane and for a city where it's really high density, especially for somewhere like Los Angeles, you probably wouldn't want heaps of air taxis flying around. It's probably not a great idea, I think. For me, I would want to see air taxis used in the right environments as something that complements other forms of transport, so it shouldn't be a direct replacement for any of them.

Speaker 2: 14:20

They all have their purposes, but I think that if you just continue investing in the one mode of transport over and over, you just get diminishing returns on it, because it has its strengths and weaknesses.

Speaker 2: 14:33

And air taxis, ev tells will have their strengths and weaknesses too, and I think that they'll feel a pretty unique gap in what you know particular mission profile, if you like, in terms of transportation, and it'll unload other forms of transportation, and it should do that in a way that is pretty low cost in terms of infrastructure and and like on a per ride basis. So I think when a lot of people think, oh, air taxis, this is the future they think about. Instead of everybody owning a car, they'll own an air taxi and it's certainly in the short term, unless it's like with the technology that we have and can see currently. For me, I don't really see that happening. I see it more as this network of you know helipad type nodes and you know a relatively small number, in the scheme of things, of air taxis flying around. It's not really a, especially to begin with, it wouldn't be a mass transit.

Speaker 1: 15:31

I remember when, when, back when we were still at Heliomods, we were talking even back then, that was like three years ago you were talking about EV tolls. Then, Yep what, when did that idea originate? Did you come out of the womb? Just in, the first word being EV, tall, yeah sure.

Speaker 2: 15:52

Yeah, yeah, 40 something years ago I was thinking about it, I don't know. Like I think you know, we we had so much success recruiting through student teams and we didn't have a student team up here on the sunny coast and we weren't getting many students coming through from sunny coast uni and since starting the MEF and working a lot more with businesses and schools, finding that businesses struggled to get the talent they wanted, and a lot of the talent. When it finished school would leave the area and it would go to Brisbane or ACT or Melbourne or Sydney or whatever for study and that was just fueling a lot of that problem. And any cluster really is predicated on a critical mass of talent and unless we turned that around, you know, it just wasn't we weren't really going to get there. We'd always been missing a pretty key ingredient.

Speaker 1: 16:52

Yeah, well, the whole EV tool thing. When did you start thinking about that? Yeah, I guess it does.

Speaker 2: 16:58

Hmm, what's the best way to answer that? Yeah, so I mean, I started thinking about it, probably about. It was probably about three years ago and you know, as an aeronautical engineer and yourself included, it's probably something that we've all thought about it at some point. I think what was different this time was specifically the student team aspect, like the idea of going out and trying to raise capital against this idea as a commercial venture wasn't really. It's just not really my, it's not how I operate. I really wanted it to be something that had strong education, industry preparation elements to it.

Speaker 2: 17:40

So when we, you know, we did finally convince and when I say we, it was very much a combination of people at the uni and myself convincing the uni to get on board with it when that finally did start getting traction and we started talking about, well, what should it be? And we had a bit of a think about well, you know, what are the skill sets that we have? What's going to be compelling for the students? What's a problem that hasn't been solved yet? What is, you know, and why, not being solved yet? Of course, that implies potential for large, large impact innovation, which is, I think, important we don't want to be shooting for. You know, let's make a new toothbrush. We wanted to be doing something that could probably do with one.

Speaker 2: 18:29

Thank you, yeah, good, yeah, right back at you. That was the best comeback, by the way, yeah, thanks. Well. Youtube, yeah, that's right, yeah. So we wanted a project that ticked all of those boxes and we had a look at solar cars and suborbital sounding rockets and Formula SAE and a lot of those types of things, but the EV toll was the one that seemed to resonate the most for everybody, which was good, and I certainly you know they wanted. The idea was that I would lead the project, and I feel a lot more comfortable doing that with an EV toll than I do with a Mars rover or you know, or a Formula SAE vehicle or anything like that.

Speaker 1: 19:17

Yeah, just because of your aeronautical background. Yeah, just because of the background. Yeah, and what's? Talk a bit about your background. I know you've worked with the GSF. You've worked in a couple of different places, haven't you?

Speaker 2: 19:28

Yeah, yeah. So I was very lucky when I graduated, the Joint Strike Fighter program was going and a bunch of other programs are going, so there was really a bit of a worldwide shortage of aeronautical engineers. So that was how some of that work managed to trickle its way down to Australia, because often it won't, it'll stay in America and Europe. And then through that program, I got sent to Los Angeles and Nashville and I worked on the Sikorsky CH53K for a while and then went to Germany and the Netherlands and worked on the Airbus A350, before coming back here to work with the good self-dealing mods and then finished up there in mid-2020 and started the manufacturing excellence form, where we roped you in again successfully. Yeah, keep coming back. Got in for punishment.

Speaker 1: 20:14

And I met some of the mentors in there, dylan being one of them, anthony being the other one. My understanding that Dylan and yourself have worked together at Tom Point and Anthony and yourself have worked together at Tom Point also, so you're trying to source I guess there's mentors and all those industry partners within industry, with people that you work with or Let people that are within the industry.

Speaker 2: 20:43

Yeah, that's right. I mean I think I've been very lucky to work with a lot of, you know, very talented and very intelligent and and just good humans generally over the years, and I'll look back to just accept you. Yeah, thank you Well, I mean, I was thinking about it, but I didn't want to throw you under the bus in public. Also for a change. I was gonna be the first time.

Speaker 2: 21:01

Yeah, that's right, and one of the good things about that is that you meet a bunch of people with a whole bunch of different skill sets.

Speaker 2: 21:07

Hmm, and of course, like any, any program or any organization, it really needs a lot of good people with complementary skill sets, leveraging their skill sets in a complementary manner. So not trying to compete with each other but genuinely, ashley, trying to. You know, put the in this case the vehicle as the, the head priority for them to make a difference on. And, and you know, there is, to be fair, the response has been really good. Like we had, I know, 50 something students, pretty 60% from the uni and 40% from local high schools. And then, you know, we've got the better part of 20 mentors and, to be fair, I haven't found, like it's very early days, but we haven't really helped all of the mentors to engage to their full Ability or capacity yet, but that'll come, you know, I think we've got to start somewhere. So, you know, starting with yourself and Anthony and Jake and Dylan and Tyler worked really really well At the first session, which was great.

Speaker 1: 22:09

Yeah, how was? How did that session go, by the way? Had had to talk about it yet. So he's, you set up the EVTOL student team and sort of invited everyone to that first session as the uni SC. Yeah, and we were all in a room there and then you sort of walked us through what, what the hell we're there for. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 22:28

And obviously there were a lot of people just thinking what even is this thing and how is this gonna work? And hopefully, coming out of it. You get a lot of looks at the start, people kind of like there wasn't too much skepticism, there was optimism, yeah, there was, there was curiosity. Everyone Unfortunately felt left feeling a little bit I'm not prepared for this.

Speaker 1: 22:50

Which is, by the way, experience. You get that regular when you work with him. Kelly, that's not the intent. Butting off a little bit more of can chew, yeah, that's okay.

Speaker 2: 23:04

Then you just chew like hell. It's fine, it's normal. And so a lot of the students were, you know, they had eyes like sources in the session, at least from what I could see. But speaking with a lot of them and and their teachers or their parents or whatever after it, and they're like, yeah, they, you know it, it's not freaked them out isn't the right way to say it. They felt a little bit overwhelmed, but they're also really excited by it. I think that's probably the right response. I think that means that on the most part, we've probably, we probably got it, we probably hit it at the right level, because if it was too gently, gently and they were like, well, you know, is that it is out of, is that all there is, didn't really want to be underwhelmed. They, they need to have something to grow into.

Speaker 1: 23:48

I feel like they were at the right level of weld. Yeah, good Having work with you previously.

Speaker 2: 23:55

Yeah, good, good, excellent, and obviously it's gonna be. You know, this is a 10-something gear program, so for everybody that comes in subsequently, there will be all of this history Now for them to be able to start digesting, and there'll be heaps of people that they can ask around. You know how does it work and what do I do now, and you know I want to help with this thing. How would I do that? There should be a lot, though there will be an awful lot more guidance and direction around that, not just from me, but from really from what we've developed in terms of systems, but also all of the great people that are part of it too. They trying to get the culture right from day one is really, really important too, and make sure that, making sure that.

Speaker 2: 24:38

No, we really Now we've, we've outlined the values. Now we just need to just that simple task of living by them, because you know, it's really important how the people in the team treat their peers. That's ultimately going to define what the culture is, and anyway, it should be good. It's off to a good start. It'll keep us off the streets, not a mess chief.

Speaker 1: 25:07

Yeah, and like you were saying, it's a bit like setting up a 70 people organization in one go In one go, and to know that the spread, also with experience, is quite wide, very so. Even in my group, which was the ARI structures group, we had high school students all the way to uni like third year uni students. Yep, yeah, I think it's going to be a good mix in that sense. Before you were talking about connecting students with industry. So I presume you can see quite a few gaps there where students perhaps don't have the level of understanding of what industry is actually about and industry maybe has a gap about they're not connected enough to the students side of things, the new ideas coming in and the guess, the innovations, the fresh minds. Would that be on the right track there?

Speaker 2: 26:05

Yeah, I think it's a good way to put it Like I think industry, industry needs, especially at the moment. You know the quantum, the quantum of people that are needed by industry at the moment is really high, but it's with the right skill sets and that's where a lot of it falls over. So even after you know a whole bunch of study, very often the students still aren't really, you know, match fit for industry. And then industry has to go and either do an awful lot of training or just absorb the cost of somebody not really adding a whole lot of value for a significant period of time. And just business and manufacturing Australia is already pretty hard. I don't think that we need to be doing that kind of thing when there's not really a need to. And it's really hard for education to stay contemporary because often the curriculum cycles are seven years and that's. You know. Sometimes that's optimistic in terms of time frames, so it's not like it's necessarily. I'm not casting that the blame on anybody. I think one of the things that you know, we specifically wanted the student team to be as extra curricular and there has been a lot of push to make it curricular, but then it's just well, no, that, look, that's not the point. The complexity that that adds is enormous. And again, it's a seven year timeframe to do that. And then you've got to start going through education, queensland or whatever other you know bureaucratic systems, and it's not meant to be. You know what we're doing at the moment. It's not really meant for the masses, it's meant for those, you know, kids, students that want to go beyond themselves in a STEM domain and don't have an outlet for it currently. If it becomes something that's for everybody in the future, then that's great, but we don't have the resources to manage that at the moment anyway. So just, you know, we've got to start. We have to start small, really, no matter what it feels like the right way to do it. I think so.

Speaker 2: 27:59

That's, you know, from an industry perspective. Industry really sees it as a talent pipeline for them and I hope, like you know, we've got maybe 10 or something companies engaged with it now, which is great, and through a lot of their engagement they'll start working with students that they'll want to poach and they should. That's the purpose of it. It's kind of like a protracted, you know, low effort interview process where the risk at both sides is really low because you've had a chance to work together for an extended period, and especially if you've got, like some of the kids we've got, you know, in year nine. You know, if they go and do a university degree and they stayed with a student team either full time like the entire time, or on and off or whatever, but they'll come away with a better part of you know eight years of experience through that before they go into university. Or maybe they have three or four years and then they get an internship somewhere, like a permanent internship that you know goes along with a study, or maybe it's working in graded learning or you know. Whatever the case might be. So I think there's an awful lot of potential there.

Speaker 2: 29:11

On the flip side of that, students and parents and educators and even career counselors, especially in the STEM domain they don't really have a good feeling for what industry actually needs at this point and it makes it very difficult for them to start recommending how to do things. And if we want to start helping the top talent that's coming through schools to choose STEM and engineering and manufacturing as their career pathway, then we need to make it tangible and compelling, and we're not doing that. We don't have good mechanisms for that currently. So this is meant to be a mechanism to help to not just educate the kids through the process, but to educate teachers and parents as much as the kids around. This is what industry is actually doing and this is what industry actually wants, and these are the things that you would need to do in order to engage with that. So I don't know. I think I'm really really positive about it. I think it's shaping up really nicely. Couldn't have really asked for it to be any better, to be honest.

Speaker 1: 30:17

Man's takeaway is pleasantly surprised with the level of engagement. Very good, tim. Thank you very much. Thank you Well, this excellent podcast. Thanks, mate, and for the beer Folks, this is all we have time for. If you got something out of this episode, please subscribe, share and review. We are also always keen to hear your thoughts via the details in the description, and do keep an eye out for the next episode. Until then, upwards and onwards.