Unlocking the Fourth Wave of High Speed Travel | Richard Kane | TEDxBoston

Summary

In this engaging TEDx talk, Richard Kane, founder of Verajet, takes us on a journey through the evolution of high-speed travel. He discusses the revolutionary potential of his airline, designed to enhance travel speed, safety, and environmental efficiency, through cutting-edge technologies like AI and quantum computing. Kane reflects on the advancements in aviation history, the challenges faced by the current airline industry, and the promising possibilities of future travel with Verajet's innovative solutions. Highlighting the drawbacks of traditional travel hubs, he envisions a world where flying is not only fast and efficient but also joyous and accessible for everyone.

Highlights

• Richard Kane founded Verajet to transform short-haul travel using high-speed, environmentally friendly methods. 🚀🌱
• The airline leverages AI, material science, and quantum computing to achieve unprecedented travel efficiency. 🎉💻
• Verajet envisions seamless, joyful travel experiences, diverging from the current dreary hub and spoke model. 🌟🗺️
• Advanced jets promise quieter, safer, and more efficient flights, reshaping conventional travel norms. ✨✈️
• Kane tackles the 'traveling salesman problem' utilizing futuristic tech innovations to optimize travel routes. 🔍📡
• Quantum computing might soon solve aviation industry challenges, creating smarter travel solutions. 🧠💡
• With underutilized U.S. airports, Verajet sees abundant infrastructure for its aviation revolution. 🌎🏢
• The Miserable Index highlights existing air travel woes, motivating a shift to more efficient systems. 😢➡️😊
• Future jets, like Verajet's, use AI for vast routing solutions, greatly cutting flight inefficiencies. 🤯🛤️
• Innovations in aircraft materials increase safety, eliminating classic issues like metal fatigue. 🔧🛡️

Key Takeaways

• Verajet aims to revolutionize short-haul travel, tripling its speed while reducing environmental impact. 🌍✈️
• Technology convergence, including AI and material science, drives innovation in aviation. 🤖🔬
• Future travel could vastly differ, emphasizing joy and access rather than being a tedious experience. 😄
• Accessible, non-polluting aircraft can redefine how we view travel, connecting us closer to our planet. 🌿🌐
• Modern aviation promises safety and efficiency, changing perspectives on transportation's role. 🛫⭐

Overview

Richard Kane, the visionary behind Verajet, aims to forge the fourth wave of high-speed travel through revolutionary aviation technology. Drawing on AI and quantum computing, his airline promises faster, greener, and safer journeys. Utilizing a network of underutilized airports, Verajet aims to bypass the hassle of traditional air travel hubs, offering passengers efficient and joyful flying experiences like never before.

The talk addresses historical and present challenges in the aviation industry, with Richard Kane elucidating on how Verajet aspires to solve these issues. By implementing innovative solutions in aircraft design and leveraging unexploited airport infrastructure, Verajet intends to unlock economic potential while enhancing travel safety and convenience. With historical anecdotes and personal achievements, Kane highlights the pivotal role of technological advancements in this pursuit.

Kane envisions a future where travel transcends conventional boundaries, becoming an enjoyable and accessible part of life. His narrative weaves together the promise of non-polluting, efficient aircraft and the joyful everyday utility of air travel. By transforming the travel experience, Verajet seeks not just to elevate passengers to the skies but also to dissolve global boundaries, connecting us all as stewards of the planet.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Intro and Company Vision Verajet was founded to transform the airline industry by tripling the speed of short-haul travel, ensuring perfect safety, and reducing carbon and noise footprints. It achieves this through the convergence of artificial intelligence, material science, and metallurgy, advancements that were not possible five years prior.
• 00:30 - 02:00: Historical Context and Inspiration The chapter discusses the historical context and inspiration behind technological advancements and projects, specifically highlighting the impact of convergence in technology. It opens with the enactment of a significant project on January 1st, 2020, exemplifying the modern era of rapid technological progress, as articulated by Peter Diamandis, founder of XPrize.
• 02:00 - 04:00: Technological Innovations in Aviation The chapter "Technological Innovations in Aviation" describes the involvement of the speaker in the original X Prize, aimed at advancing commercial space travel. The speaker mentions the achievement of displaying a spaceship in the Air and Space Museum's Milestones of Flight gallery, drawing a parallel to Charles Lindbergh's legendary Spirit of St Louis flight, which transformed aviation from barnstorming and daredevil theatrics to a more structured environment with pilots and passengers.
• 04:00 - 10:00: Challenges and Solutions in Modern Aviation The chapter titled 'Challenges and Solutions in Modern Aviation' highlights significant milestones and innovations in aviation history. It mentions the creation of a trillion-dollar transportation industry and features iconic aircraft such as the Bell X-1, the first plane to break the sound barrier, the X-15, the first plane to reach Mach 2, and the Apollo 11 capsule. These achievements are part of an exhibit at the Air and Space Museum, symbolizing human advancement in aeronautics. The chapter captures the essence of feeling inspired and empowered by these technological breakthroughs, illustrating how past successes in aviation can fuel new ventures, such as starting an airline, indicating a theme of continuous innovation and progress in the field of aviation.
• 10:00 - 15:00: Future of Aviation and Personal Freedom Chapter Title: Future of Aviation and Personal Freedom Chapter Summary: This chapter discusses the transformative event of the launch of Virgin Galactic in Las Cruces, marking a milestone in commercial space travel. It highlights the personal journey of Sir Richard Branson as he ventures into suborbital space on the descendant of Spaceship One, reflecting on the growth of a new industry over 17 years. The narrative conveys the empowering potential of commercial space travel and how long-term vision can lead to significant changes in the aviation industry.
• 15:00 - 18:00: Vision for Pilots and Passengers The chapter titled 'Vision for Pilots and Passengers' discusses the future of technology. Quoting XPRIZE, the chapter suggests that predicting the future involves creating it. The speaker shares personal experiences, emphasizing the need to understand technology trends. They ran a company managing an enormous volume of phone calls, demonstrating the impact of Moore's Law on computing and storage costs.
• 18:00 - 19:30: Conclusion and Invitation The chapter discusses the significant impact of cellular adoption on transaction rates, leading to the formation of a highly profitable company with 68% EBITDA. The speaker emphasizes their unique capability to transfer technology from the telecom industry to other sectors. They also highlight their approach to solving the traveling salesman problem, which involves using a brute force method rather than computational techniques, and suggests further exploration for those deeply interested in the topic.

Unlocking the Fourth Wave of High Speed Travel | Richard Kane | TEDxBoston Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 i founded verajet to be the best airline on and for the planet to triple the speed of short haul travel to do that in perfect safety with reduced carbon and noise footprint vera jet is the convergence of artificial intelligence material science metallurgy it simply wouldn't have been possible five years ago
• 00:30 - 01:00 the last piece of this project went into effect january 1st of 2020 this is truly convergence technological progress pictured as peter diamandis founder of xprize we're sitting at the air and space museum the spaceship there 328 kilo foxtrot is spaceship one when my daughter was two months old i was at the launch of spaceship one it went up it went up again within 10 days to show reusability and access to space
• 01:00 - 01:30 xprize is something i was privileged to be a part of to help create the original x prize with the intent of opening commercial space and we put a spaceship in the milestones of flight gallery in the air and space museum so off my right shoulder is the spirit of st louis charles lindbergh flew this before that flight we were barnstormers and daredevils and after that flight we were pilots and passengers and everywhere he landed they
• 01:30 - 02:00 built an airport and he created the trillion dollar transportation industry to have put a space plane in the air and space museum next to the bell x-1 the first plane to go supersonic the x-15 the first plane to go mach 2 the apollo 11 capsule it's an unbelievable experience and when you've done that you feel empowered to start an airline my i recently with allison attended the
• 02:00 - 02:30 launch of virgin galactic in las cruces and we saw sir richard branson go into suborbital space on the descendant of spaceship one my daughter is two months old when this thing launched and 17 years later you can now buy a ticket to commercial space we created an entire industry i just don't have the words to express how powerful that is i run in glacial time it takes me 25 years to change an industry you have to have a vision of where
• 02:30 - 03:00 technology will be going and to quote xprize the easiest way to predict the future is to create it and and i've learned to do that i'm going to share some of that with you today first you need to understand the technology curves where things are going i had a company routing 100 million phone calls an hour 14 billion calls a month for some of the largest telcos software as a service basis and i could see you all know moore's law that the cost of compute and storage was dropping
• 03:00 - 03:30 and with the adoption of cellular we would double the transaction rate you just had to look around to understand this in the space between these two divergent curves i built a 68 ebitda company and i had the freedom to take technology from this industry from telecom and apply it elsewhere so the problem i'm cracking here is the traveling salesman problem it's not anything you compute an answer to it's something you tackle with brute force if you have deep interest in this topic
• 03:30 - 04:00 google variage at ibm you'll see the work we're doing in quantum computing that may actually finally crack this problem i'm an aviator i hold seven world speed records and i've done a single engine transatlantic crossing last saturday we set the world efficiency record in jets and the world distance record in jets that distance record closed course was last set in 1960 uh in i believe italy by a fighter trainer these are historical records i'm all
• 04:00 - 04:30 into aviation i live in an airport this is 4 000 foot runway 240 foot homes we have hangers instead of you know car garages and i want you to think about what it means to live in an airport and i want you to sit with this for the next part of my presentation so yesterday morning i boarded this airplane i flew over three cities in six minutes picked up one of my investors and
• 04:30 - 05:00 brought him to beverly massachusetts that's an hour and a half drive overflying the carnage that is interstate 95 in south florida tremendously safer it used it was 18 gallons it's not terrible remember this is the world efficiency record holder in jets not yet certified so hold that idea what it's like to have transportation at your fingertips nasa does anyone know what the a stands for it's aeronautics nasa starts as naca
• 05:00 - 05:30 there's no space when nasa starts vera jet my project my last three decades is the culmination of a journey with nasa the small aircraft transportation system this is a nasa slide this is about unlocking the fourth wave of high-speed travel so we went from horses to cars and got 75 miles an hour and we went from cars to propeller planes and achieved 200 miles an hour and we went from propeller
• 05:30 - 06:00 planes to jets 500 miles an hour and you know the rest hub and spoke airline deregulation tsa 911 we're back down to effective travel speeds 75 miles an hour door to door even less if you're connecting we took a miracle of technology and shackled it there should have been a fourth wave of high-speed travel so nasa set out to create that the jet pictured here is the v-jet it's about 20 years old funded by nasa and
• 06:00 - 06:30 williams to demonstrate the utility of a single-engine deck optimized for single pilot land at slow speeds use any airports what's at stake here as every time you double the speed of travel you change out the underlying technology it's exactly eight years from the first car to the last horse in manhattan that's the revolution we're talking about has anyone ever seen this before this is the misery index and obviously it's the hub airports okay
• 06:30 - 07:00 and it's always red and you know yesterday american canceled 1400 flights it's just devastating to be flying and why do you want to fly through these congested hubs by the way when you go there they make serpentine paths to increase the display space for your shopping they've turned transportation into a shopping experience my personal mission is to get rid of that and here's how you do it in the united states we have 5 400 airports that our planes can use 98 of us are 20 miles from one or more
• 07:00 - 07:30 of these 300 miles an hour door to door that's what we're talking about this infrastructure is amazing it's unparalleled in the world and it's less than one percent utilized so that's the game here this is ford versus ferrari this is airbus versus boeing this is the a380 a super jumbo designed to take you to a hub of misery versus the 787 dreamliner which is carbon fiber has better atmospherics you
• 07:30 - 08:00 feel more rested because we have higher pressures it's got bigger windows but more to the point it takes you exactly close to where you want to go instead of the hubs our machine is carbon fiber it has a lot in common with the 787 part of what powers this is an ai that routinely looks at 16 quintillion routing solutions that's a 16 with 18 zeros and the best floating fleet operators in the us have been running this for a decade my industry was flying 40 empty
• 08:00 - 08:30 we weren't using our machines very well the companies on my ai are now 20 empty it saves 800 000 metric tons of carbon every month and that doesn't mean anything to anybody that's enough energy to charge 98 billion cell phones that's taking 173 000 cars off the road and and we're just scratching the service with quantum we'll do even better for people watching this in video pause it here it's just a brain dump of
• 08:30 - 09:00 a slide but let me summarize it for you one engine one pilot carbon fiber versus two two and metal radical gains and efficiency particularly for the short hops that we do no metal fatigue no corrosion and i need to make it visceral this is what metal fatigue is this is a loss of life accident it's serious i'm not making light of this you inflate a cabin you deflate a cabin the metal flexes this is horrific imagine sitting there and there's no more fuselage
• 09:00 - 09:30 this beautiful airplane is the de havilland comet it's art deco i love it i think it's gorgeous it had square windows the stress of inflating and deflating concentrated in the corners every three months it would blow apart with the loss of all on board this is why boeing and lockheed are here in the u.s instead of to have wind in the uk making airliners we had round windows i don't know if that's chance or design but that's the impact of metal fatigue carbon fiber we eliminate all that these
• 09:30 - 10:00 are our machines they're radically quiet we flew two over a crowd in pensacola at a thousand feet they were inaudible on the ground they're radically efficient they should have the world record for jet efficiency they're fast for what they do mach .53 a little bit more than half the speed of sound 56 gallons an hour cruise lower environmental impact than anything else this is the safest best quietest jet ever built more importantly though when people fly it they say i've never felt as safe in
• 10:00 - 10:30 an airplane i've never been in a smooth an airplane and have never had such good visibility it's that feedback from the passengers that changed the whole travel experience what i'm actually here to do is change the way you perceive travel to turn it back to something joyous as opposed to the greyhound bus ride so this machine has won two academy awards for safety they're called collier trophies one of them is being awarded tonight in rest in virginia that's for the ability to land the airplane the
• 10:30 - 11:00 passengers can land it at the touch of a button you press a button the ai takes over lands the airplane no pilot required the other is for the parachute system safe return pull a parachute parachute lands the whole airplane to the ground it works that's already saved many lives fantastic technology there's no difference in this plane between a pilot or a passenger pulling that handle hence the faa gave us airline national status to fly this aircraft single pilot single engine something that's not done been done before in a jet this is something new in
• 11:00 - 11:30 the world the machine itself has the engine tucked behind the nacelle at low air speeds birds can't get into the engine the body physically blocks it at high air speeds air acts as an inertial separator so i know the miracle on the hudson flight crew i know you all know that story what you probably don't know is spirit airlines ingested two canadian geese about a week ago the engine blew up they had an emergency landing was on fire this is not the airline experience you
• 11:30 - 12:00 want i want you to recast all those twin engine metal jets with big engines designed to go high and fast as giant bird vacuum cleaners all right so um i'm an airline ceo that can actually speak at climate conferences and and i'm happy to throw shade as necessary um the bottom strikes on this it's active turbulent suppression the whole time the computers are doing this it's like roll control on a boat so that it's radically
• 12:00 - 12:30 better safer more convenient all these things it's it's again something that's not been here in the world you've been mulling over what it would be like to live in an airport imagine if this was a very jet vertiport and on top there was a charging station and i'll go ahead and name it the beta alia we intend to be one of the passenger carrying entities on the beta and imagine it's less expensive than uber and maybe imagine it takes 45 dollars of electricity to charge it and maybe imagine that its motors are more like a
• 12:30 - 13:00 tesla model 3 and don't need maintenance it's now cheap enough to fly to work and i want you to think about being anywhere in your region in two hours you know i wake up if it's sunny in the bahamas i can go to the bahamas for cheeseburger if it's not i can go to naples and get stone crabs i can go where it's sunny it's like eternal spring that's a freedom that first of all we never really had but second once you have it there's no going back now think about my continent in two hours so i called the ceo of boom supersonic a
• 13:00 - 13:30 few years ago and i said my daughter was in utero on one of the last concord flights and then they abandoned the concord and i was saddened that we took a step back my daughter can no longer go higher and faster or at least as high and fast as i want you're in the concord you're at 60 000 feet you see the curvature of the earth and and we take this giant step backwards well you know where this is going very boom two hours anywhere in the continent and then my planet anywhere in two hours
• 13:30 - 14:00 remember i started with a suborbital space plane so if spaceship three had a little flatter trajectory it would be anywhere on the planet in two hours a 747 flying from la to sydney expends more energy than it would take to go into orbit and once you're in subway orbital there's no more air resistance it's like free rides until you decelerate and come back down so this is where it's going i i
• 14:00 - 14:30 two hours to anywhere on the planet two hours to anywhere on your continent right now two hours to anywhere in your region that's very jet and fly to work and and i'll tell you once you live at an airport there's no going back so the last bit of this is that it's kind of pointless if we don't bring everyone along for the journey airline pilots have a pretty tough life lots of long hours lots of different time zones high divorce rate it's just not a good place to be
• 14:30 - 15:00 and our pilots are out in the field and we connect them we use vr remember we're a technology company masquerading as an airline we give them a sense of community they can see and hear each other they hear left right they talk in my industry we're forced to retire at a calendar age you hit 65 you're done and i want that to be a biological age and so these are sea changes in law and the faa and this is an uphill battle but again it takes me 10 to 25 years to do anything that's what we're fighting
• 15:00 - 15:30 i want to restore joy and dignity to travel not just for the passengers but for the flight crew when we show up in this intimate cabin with a happy engaged pilot who shares their joy of aviation it's fundamentally altering to anyone who flies with us the last thought i'll leave you with 80 percent of the world's population has never been above ground level so for us taking a suborbital space plane you see the earth from orbit you have that overall effect it changes your
• 15:30 - 16:00 idea of country boundaries it changes your stewardship of the earth well imagine if you've never been agl period that's 80 of the population we have the ability to do that now in a non-polluting way with the next generation of eb talls so this is ted and design we have the designer of our badass paint scheme here allison please interview her about the design elements that went into the paint scheme but also we brought a jet i'm a terrible speaker but we brought jets right
• 16:00 - 16:30 and so you can fly with us tomorrow allison will configure those demonstrations and and thank you for your time today [Applause]