Founder of an airline updates us on the future of travel | Richard Kane | TEDxBoston

Summary

Highlights

• Richard Kane wants to bring us a step closer to a Jetsons-like world of flying cars 🌌.
• He criticizes the existing hub-and-spoke model, urging for more direct and personal flights 🚀.
• The average door-to-door speed in US air travel is just 75 mph, due to airport and TSA delays 😅.
• Kane emphasizes the need for smaller, fuel-efficient aircraft for short trips ✈️.
• His vision includes utilizing green technology like biofuels to reduce aviation's carbon footprint 🌍.
• The future of air travel is not only about speed but also about accessibility and sustainability 🌟.
• Kane uses advanced tech such as AI and quantum computing to optimize routing and flight safety 🤖.
• Autonomous flying and quieter jets are on the horizon as part of this aviation revolution 🤫.
• By focusing on local airports, travelers save time and enjoy more direct routes 🛫.
• Kane highlights how innovation in aircraft technology can lead to significant environmental benefits 🌱.

Key Takeaways

• The future of air travel will resemble "The Jetsons" world, with a focus on local and direct flights 🚀.
• Efficient travel doesn't just mean speed; it's about smart routing and minimizing airport and TSA hassles ✈️.
• We need to move away from heavy jets for short hops and focus on efficient, smaller aircraft 🌍.
• Advanced technologies like AI and quantum computing are key to improving flight efficiency and safety 🤖.
• Green aviation technology, such as biofuels, aims to reduce the environmental impact of flying 🌱.
• Richard Kane envisions flying as a personal, efficient, and environmentally friendly mode of travel in the near future 🔮.

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 03:00: Introduction to High-Speed Personal Aviation The chapter begins with the narrator, an airline founder, who discusses the evolution and future of high-speed personal aviation. The conversation touches upon the popular culture reference of George Jetson, a character known for futuristic transportation methods, emphasizing how close the real world is getting to such innovations. The reference to George Jetson serves as a metaphorical bridge to discuss advancements in transportation technology and its implications for climate and society.
• 03:00 - 06:00: Challenges of Current Air Travel Systems The chapter explores the future and challenges of modern air travel systems, focusing on a vision where flying cars are commonplace and safe for family travel. It highlights the extensive efforts required over multiple generations to transform this vision into reality, beginning with innovations in the transportation systems spearheaded by NASA.
• 06:00 - 09:00: Vision for Local, Direct Flights The chapter discusses the evolution of travel over a span of approximately 30 years, highlighting the shift from horses to cars, then to propeller planes, and finally to jets. However, it points out the absence of a subsequent wave of high-speed travel, resulting in reliance on the airline hub-and-spoke system, TSA protocols, and impacts of events like 9/11. The narrative suggests a sense of relief in moving beyond the stress associated with these systems, as indicated by George's smile.
• 09:00 - 12:00: Efficiency and Environmental Concerns The chapter "Efficiency and Environmental Concerns" discusses the personal and direct nature of aviation, contrasting it with the chaotic and impersonal experiences often portrayed in media, such as missed connections and altercations at airports. It highlights the inefficiencies in travel, noting that the average speed in the U.S., considering all the frictions inherent in air travel, is only 75 miles per hour door-to-door. The chapter implies that technological advancements are necessary every time the speed of travel doubles, hinting at the need for innovation to improve efficiency and perhaps address environmental concerns as well.
• 12:00 - 15:00: Innovations in Aviation Technology The chapter discusses the advancements in aviation technology, focusing on the potential for dramatic change akin to the last horse leaving Manhattan. NASA's concept of the 'fourth wave' of high-speed travel is introduced as a transformative force. The misery index, reflecting the delays at major hubs, is highlighted, questioning the preference for connecting flights due to these inconveniences, compounded by TSA-related delays. The chapter emphasizes a need for improved access and more efficient travel experiences.
• 15:00 - 18:00: The Future of Aviation and Quantum Computing In this chapter, the discussion centers on the future possibilities in aviation and quantum computing, highlighting a shift towards more efficient travel experiences. The chapter focuses on the current challenges faced by travelers, such as the lengthy process of driving to major hub airports, connecting through another hub, and the resulting slow overall travel speed of around 75 miles per hour. It advocates for the use of local airports, which could significantly reduce drive times and streamline the boarding process, leading to faster and more direct flights to destinations. This represents a potential transformation in air travel efficiency.
• 18:00 - 20:00: Conclusion and Vision for Future Flight The chapter envisions the future of flight where travel is more direct, with minimum speeds reaching three or four hundred miles per hour, allowing passengers to bypass hubs and fly straight to their destinations.

Founder of an airline updates us on the future of travel | Richard Kane | TEDxBoston Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 Transcriber: Hiển Long Lê Reviewer: Emma G I'm an airline founder and I'm welcome to speak at climate conferences, which is really different, right? And when I talk about the future of transportation, this is what people think of, they think of George Jetson. Now, George was born July 31st, 2022, about two weeks ago,
• 00:30 - 01:00 and he’s 40 years old in the cartoon. And we've got about 40 years to make this a reality. And in the cartoon, you don’t see the ground, you don’t see the airport. He’s flying his family and his dog and everything is presumed to be safe. And there's a lot that has to happen to make this a reality. This is multiple lifetimes of overlapping effort. So let's go on that journey together. It starts with NASA and the smaller craft transportation system.
• 01:00 - 01:30 It's about a 30 year old project. We go from horses to cars and get 75 miles an hour. And from cars to propeller planes, 200 miles an hour and propeller planes to jets, 500 miles an hour. And there never was a fourth wave of high speed travel. Instead, we have the airline hub and spoke system, we have TSA, we have 9/11. The reason that George is smiling, he doesn’t have the stress of worrying
• 01:30 - 02:00 if he’s going to make his connection. Or the fight yesterday between an airline employee and a passenger at DFW. That’s not in his world. In his world, aviation is personal, direct, local, safe, all right? It turns out, the average door to door speed is 75 miles an hour in the US with all of this friction we put in the air travel experience. Yet, every time you double the speed of travel, you change out the underlying technology. It’s exactly eight years from the first car
• 02:00 - 02:30 to the last horse in Manhattan. That’s the kind of change that we’re talking about. That’s what NASA calls unlocking the fourth wave of high speed travel. So this is the misery index, this is the delays of the major hubs. Why would you ever want to connect through these things? And don’t forget, it’s not just connecting but it’s the TSA experience. These are the TSA delays, and you know, George would not be smiling. What you want to do is access
• 02:30 - 03:00 to 5400 airports in the US that are local, direct. You want to get there and board your plane immediately and you want to fly directly to your destination. So this is what it looks like when you drive to the big hub airport. You have that drive. You then connect through another hub and then you go to your destination and your door to door speed is 75 miles an hour. If you depart from the local airport, this drive time is less.
• 03:00 - 03:30 You fly direct and now your minimum speed is three or 400 miles an hour. So bypass those hubs, fly direct. Now, I do something a little different, I actually already live at an airport. So this is, you know, George Jetson living in the sky pad apartments in Orbit City, right? But we can approximate that. So where we’re sitting, it’s about three miles over to Logan. We know this because we can put in a landmark like the Quinn house, and it's 13 miles over to Norwood.
• 03:30 - 04:00 Tomorrow we’re going to depart out of Norwood, because if I uber over to Logan, I'm going to have a 15 minute walk from where the Uber dropped me. I’m going to have an hour for TSA. I’m going to have 30 minutes potentially sitting on the ramp, waiting to taxi out. If I go to Norwood. I board my plane and go, We have a client who lives in MacArthur. He wanted his flight to leave out of LaGuardia, his demo flight. He didn't know that there were airlines at Islip and Farmingdale.
• 04:00 - 04:30 He literally didn't know they existed. So we need a mechanism to identify by street address, to travel by street address, to identify where you’re going by the end location. Now, resistance goes up with the square of speed, and we don't need to be faster than a commercial airline. We need to depart locally, fly direct to land at the closest intended destination. Slowing this process down actually gives you greater efficiency, it reduces friction and I’m talking about the friction of a government agency
• 04:30 - 05:00 like TSA in the boarding process. But I'm also talking about the friction of the Earth's atmosphere. Half the Earth’s atmosphere is below 18,000 feet. Jets are not able to use the speed and the efficiency and the machines that are tuned to go high and fast. They burn most of their fuel as they’re climbing through that 18,000 feet. And if you talk about small hops, they don’t have the ability to climb above that 18,000. So an actual flight from Santa Monica to Las Vegas,
• 05:00 - 05:30 we were there with 26 celebrities and their managers and sport-stars and their managers and I did exactly this presentation. And a Challenger 604 landed and one person got on and went to Las Vegas and burned 300 gallons. And the machines we fly would burn 60 gallons. So it’s five times the footprint. It’s, you know, five more tons of carbon. It's the wrong use for a machine. This aviation needs to be local and on these short hops,
• 05:30 - 06:00 it needs to be efficient. So the average speed of travel on short haul is 243 knots. With the density of the Earth’s atmosphere and the speed limits, you can have a machine that’s nearly supersonic, but down low it’s still 243 knots. So we don’t give up anything on speed. And then our average passenger count is 1.8 people and perhaps a dog. So you don't need the big heavy metal plane to do the short hops. And speaking of the dog,
• 06:00 - 06:30 (Laughter) the pilot is there to feed the dog and the dog is there to bite the pilot, if he touches anything. The machines we fly are autonomous. You can land them at the press of a button. They actually don’t need the pilot and the AI and the level of sophistication will increase that safety to make this personal and local, remember George is smiling and he’s got his family. And the machines we fly, you know, taking this back to the Jetsons, what has to happen to make all of this reality?
• 06:30 - 07:00 Well, safe, quiet, efficient, autonomous. You can’t just pull over when you have a problem. You have to manage the airspace, so these machines are radically quiet. They're 50 decibels, quieter than stage four noise requirements. What that means in practical terms, we put two overhead in Pensacola at 8000 feet and no one could hear them on the ground. So as you’re going to these local airports, you don't want to generate noise complaints. More recently, we opened the Blue Angels Air Show
• 07:00 - 07:30 and the Airbus complaint, they said, your jets are too quiet, too cute, they shouldn’t be at an airshow. I mean, that’s what we want, right? And they do have a parachute system. Well, then the whole airplane in case of emergency and they can land themselves. But I think my favorite feature is this, the air over the canopy access, an inertial separator, we don’t ingest birds. So if you've all seen Top Gun Maverick, there’s a crash and this crashes because of a bird strike. This is now in popular culture or the miracle on the Hudson.
• 07:30 - 08:00 This happens all the time and we don’t have this, so it’s one step closer to the Jetsons reality. Even more interesting, this is really a jet glider. It has a 14.7 to 1 glide ratio, I have been towed into the air on an airplane, on a rope, and they cut the rope and you glide back down that didn’t have a 14.7 to 1 glide ratio. When I’m over Nassau, Bahamas at altitude, I can glide to my choice of airports based on fuel price. And this kind of stuff just doesn’t happen before.
• 08:00 - 08:30 And it is official, we have the world efficiency record in jets and the world close course distance record and jets. When I set these records, I was burning 39 gallons an hour. That's more like an SUV than a jet. This is truly something different in the world. And to give you an idea of what this means in the real world, here we’re approaching an airport in South Dakota, it is closed for this tremendous hailstorm. All the other pilots on the radio, you can hear the stress in their voices
• 08:30 - 09:00 as they’re looking for an airport that has a long enough runway for them t land on as they’re diverting, as they’re running out of fuel. I’m first learning to fly this jet. I have an F-16 fighter pilot with me, single engine jet, single engine jet. And we powered back and we had 7 hours and 40 minutes of endurance. We thought it was a mistake. We're at 9000 feet. So we toured Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse in the Crystal Caverns. That’s a picture of Mount Rushmore from the jet, right?
• 09:00 - 09:30 And we saw it 7 hours and everyone else is diverted and we landed in complete safety. This, again, something new in the world. So we're not quite there to the Jetsons yet. But let me update you on the present and the future. Today, we fly these jets around the northeast. This is the actual flight path for a week for one of our jets. The Northeast immediately became our most efficient region. The city pair distances, they’re perfect. It just it works completely. The machines are optimized for these short hops,
• 09:30 - 10:00 low carbon, low noise, perfect safety. But we’re still burning jet fuel. And there are two stigma associated with private travel. One is the environmental aspects and one is the economics. So let’s tackle the environmental aspect first. I serve on the board of the Lindbergh Foundation, which has launched the Forever Flight Alliance. This is about decarbonizing aviation. We’re still burning jet fuel, we need to fix that. So there’s a carbon sequestration XPRIZE.
• 10:00 - 10:30 There are technologies coming out, let me preview two of them. Here, using mirrors to focus heat. They’re cracking water, using the hydrogen to combine with carbon, making jet fuel out of water and sunlight and the carbon out of the atmosphere. And the other technology, this is my favorite, it is blue green algae that is hacked to create a biofuel. This is carbon zero. I’ve actually committed to the Lindbergh Foundation to be carbon negative. But why burn fuel at all?
• 10:30 - 11:00 Now we’re getting closer. Welcome to Sky Powered City and the Jetsons. This machine flew from Burlington, Vermont to Bentonville, Arkansas. That's 1400 miles on $18 of electricity. No fuel, takes off vertically, flies horizontally. This is our trajectory. This is where we're going. And we have a lot of these machines and we need to manage them. Dean came and gave me an elegant way to explain the problem I’ve been tackling.
• 11:00 - 11:30 It’s called the Traveling salesman problem. If you perfectly shuffle a deck of cards, no human being has ever held the same deck. The number of combinations, it’s 52 factorial. 52 times 51 times 50. It's an eight with 67 zeros. And that's just 52 cards. Think of hundreds of airplanes, 5000 airports. Put another way, a typical routing problem that we tackle on a small fleet has 16 quintillion routing solutions.
• 11:30 - 12:00 That’s a 16 with 18 zeros. You’re going through that and tremendous impacts to carbon to dispatch it makes this accessible, you can click and book and fly these things in a way that’s never been done before. But still more machines getting to that Jetsons reality, we need a faster turn time on these models. So we’ve been working with some advanced quantum labs, and there are three problems that will showcase quantum computing. One is protein folding for new medicine discovery,
• 12:00 - 12:30 and the other is catalyst discovery for clean energy. And both of those can be solved today, tackle today with 127 qubits. The Traveling salesman problem with all those zeros is such an enormous brute force compute problem, I have to wait for a thousand qubits and that will happily be available at the end of next year. So as these planes come on line, I know it’s amazing! What we’ll be able to manage them in real time and get to the reality that we want. So the future of flight is local and accessible, it’s efficient routing,
• 12:30 - 13:00 it’s low carbon and noise and AI levels of safety. And I’m thrilled to be able to bring that to you. Thank you. (Applause)