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[MUSIC PLAYING]
ROBERT BOYD: What we're going to talk about at this point
is cargo networks.
Because the world runs on commerce and commerce
runs on movement, being able to move things
from place to place.
And the good news is that in the world today, if you
have to move a box from point A to point B,
no matter where point B is on the whole planet,
you can actually get it there.
So it's not about getting it there.
It's about how much did it cost me, and how easy was it.
How fast did it get there.
How easy was it to make that happen.
And the farther you go from the regular infrastructure,
the more difficult that gets.
Because here in the developed world, we take a lot of stuff
for granted.
But the thing we probably take for granted the most
is the paved road.
Because a paved road is a really important asset for us.
It allows us to get things from place
to place at a very low cost.
Warm, cold, winter, summer, doesn't really matter.
It works all the time.
And it gets things wherever we want to go.
And so in Western Europe and in the US, covered with roads.
Paved roads lead right up to your driveway.
So you can get pretty much wherever you want to go.
And having talked with a few folks who
live in South America, Africa, et cetera, here
at this conference, nod vigorously
when I say that's not the case in other places
around the world.
In fact, if you kind of look at a world
map, and the darker areas are where you really
don't see this kind of infrastructure,
where it's either very rare or nonexistent.
And you'll notice it's interesting.
All around the coasts of the oceans
are relatively well developed.
It's when you leave the ocean that it becomes difficult.
And there's a reason for that.
But right now if you just look at the world, more than 2/3
of the world's surface area, or land area,
and more than half the world's population,
does not have access to a paved road.
So if you don't have access to a paved road,
how can you participate in the global economy.
You're a nation.
You've got people.
You've got hands.
You've got minds.
You've got resources.
You've got the ability to be part of global commerce,
but you can't get there.
And if you can't get there affordably,
the projects don't happen.
If the projects don't happen, you
don't have tax revenues to be able to build
roads and infrastructure.
It's a chicken and the egg problem.
So what can we do about that?
Well first let's take a look at what there is, what there is
or what their isn't in the world.
First, describing transportation,
this chart on the left axis is specific resistance,
which is basically energy it takes
to move something divided by its weight.
And that's a surrogate for cost.
And we measure cost and transport
and cost per ton mile.
So the farther it goes, the more it costs.
The heavier it is, the more it costs.
And on the bottom axis is speed.
And the line that's on there is actually
from Gabrielli Von Karman, who came up
with the same idea in the '30s.
And that's sort of a theoretical limit.
You can't really go much better than that,
no matter what you do.
And if we look at what we've got today, there it is.
So we've got sea modes, lowest price, lowest speed.
We've land modes, trucks, trains, et cetera.
And you've got your air modes, and the air modes there
are the jet transports, propeller transports.
But all of those modes kind of have
something in common, which is they
require some infrastructure.
So if you want to do these things,
you've actually got to have infrastructure.
There is one mode that's not on there that you can actually
do without infrastructure, and that's the helicopter.
Helicopters are great.
You can take off and land just about anywhere.
Problem is, you can only go about 100 to 200 miles.
It starts to get hard after that distance.
And the real problem is this.
If they were on this chart, they would
be about 50 feet above this chart,
because the cost factor is so high
that it blows the rest of the chart out
and you can't see anything.
So the problem with helicopters is
they are staggeringly expensive.
So they can be used to carry emergency medical supplies,
et cetera.
But when you need to move 1,000 tons of cargo,
you're not going to do that with a helicopter.
It's not going to happen.
So what happens is to do these large projects, to build
this commerce, we are building complicated and difficult
modes, trying to use what we've got.
Well you notice there's a little gap in there.
And what we're looking at now is something
we call the hybrid aircraft that fills that gap.
So it's somewhere between a ship and an airplane speed wise,
and a ship and an airplane cost wise.
And it's similar, little bit more,
than trucks and trains, et cetera.
So you think, well why in the world does that matter?
We already have the trucks and trains.
Well, if you're in these places that don't have infrastructure,
the world looks different.
This is what you have.
All of a sudden you see my choices
is, I can bring it in on a boat or I
can put it on a helicopter.
And there's really nothing in between.
And that makes it very difficult to develop commerce.
Because you can't really get very far from the ocean.
So as I said earlier, it's not coincidental
that the infrastructure sort of stops
at the sea, because as you start going in,
it becomes much more expensive to make this happen.
And obviously if you're in areas where it's particularly west,
particularly mountainous and rugged,
this gets even more expensive.
So, how can you do this without having
to have that infrastructure?
That's a key aspect of what we're trying to do.
So let's look at aviation.
Now I come from Skunk Works where we make airplanes.
Right, so it's aviation.
You knew it was going to be an aviation topic.
So first let's talk about lift.
Where do we get lift from?
So there's three methods of generating lift.
Well there's a fourth one, but I can't really
talk about the anti-gravity thing.
So let's just leave that one off the table.
So the three that we can talk about
is aerodynamic, which we know all about.
Most of flew here on an airplane that's got a wing.
Generate aerodynamic lift, it's great.
We're very comfortable with that.
It's high speed, fairly efficient.
Good news is that we can get lift
to drag ratio, which is an efficiency measure of about 15,
on a good plane.
But we have to these things called runways.
That's not so good.
I mean, we're used to it, but still, they
are very expensive to build and especially in the developing
world that's a prohibitive cost.
And they also, when an airplane goes down, it's usually bad.
Something bad happens going at high speeds.
It's not a good situation.
But we've sort of gotten used to that.
And the way we have solved that problem is by being very, very
particular about the way we build and operate them.
So we've driven a very high safety standard,
which has eliminated some of those risks,
but that costs something.
So that drives up the cost.
So we've got that aspect.
Second aspect which is fairly common,
helicopter I talked about, is direct lift.
This is where we point thrusts straight down,
whether it's a rotor blade or whether it's
an engine like an F35.
It doesn't matter, pointing thrust straight down.
It's great.
It's powerful, very easy to control.
You can point it around, go the direction you want to.
Go straight up and down, this is great.
Except the lift to drag ratio is less than 1.
So the problem is you chew up a lot of fuel, a lot of energy
to make this happen, a huge amount of energy,
very expensive power trains, very expensive maintenance.
So that's what drives up the cost
of things like helicopters, and helicopter related things.
Third method is the method that was the original method,
if you go way back, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 300
years ago when people were actually flying.
And they were using buoyant lift.
And we don't use it so much anymore.
Right now what we use buoyant lift for basically
is to carry around advertising signs at football
games and a few passenger flights,
but not much, just tourism, just a little bit.
So in reality it's not very well used?
Well why is it not used?
Well people think it's not used because it's an old technology.
No, it's not used because it hasn't found the right niche.
And the niche is to understand, what do you do with it?
Well the good thing about buoyant technology
is you can get very, very efficient operating systems.
So we can build an airship that will have a [? lower D ?] far
above 50, even above 100 or 200 at low speeds.
So you're far more efficient than any sort of fixed wing
platform can ever be, or a direct left.
Well that's good.
It has this other interesting aspect
that they're really inexpensive to manufacture.
You don't have to build a large three dimensional structure.
You can actually build them in the flat and inflate them.
So they're very low cost to build.
They can be transported easily.
And then there's this really interesting aspect,
which is when an airship goes down,
generally things don't go bad.
It floats down to the ground.
Usually people get out and walk around,
and say, well that was kind of bad.
And then they pull it down off the trees,
fold it up, take it back, put it back together again,
and then fly it again.
And most airships actually go down, actually go back up again
within a month, even when they've
had a terrible accident.
So it's amazing we don't know this.
Because all we see is the picture of the air ship
stuck on the trees or hanging off the building or whatever.
But the reality of it is that nothing bad happens.
It's really not that big of a deal,
compared to other things from the sky coming down,
where things go badly.
I recall the recent movie "Zero Dark Thirty"
where they get in the helicopter,
and the sergeant says, so anybody here
been in a helicopter crash.
And they all raise their hands.
Because anybody that's been in helicopters a lot,
sooner or later you've been in a helicopter crash.
So it's not a particularly good situation.
But there are downsides.
Buoyant lift has a problem, which
is, you can't turn it off.
Which initially you think, well that's not a problem.
Well no, it's a problem.
Because if you can't turn it off,
when you're loading and unloading cargo,
you have to figure out how to deal with that.
So it's one of the issues that we work on a great deal.
They are also really big, because air is not very dense.
So they're really big.
So you end up with ships that are really large physical size.
And they can't go very fast.
Because if you go fast, you start to lose efficiency.
If you lose the efficiency, we're back to the airplane,
and why would anybody want it?
Then it just becomes a really slow airplane,
and who wants that?
So you've got to keep the speed down to the point where you're
efficient, many times cheaper than what you've got today
but at the same time fast enough to be useful.
So put all these things together,
what does it look like?
It sits in the middle.
What it looks like is that.
So we've been working on this for almost two decades now.
And we've come up with a solution
that looks a lot like this.
It's a hybrid aircraft.
It has a lift generating hull.
We actually built a demonstrator.
What you're seeing here is we actually
flew and built a demonstrator.
There's two guys in that.
So it's a piloted demonstrator.
Lift generating hull, curved shape, so it is a wing.
It's multi-lobed.
So it's more efficient than a single lobed hull.
It has thrust vector and propulsion systems for control
and also to augment lift.
And the really interesting part is
the air cushioned landing system.
So it's like a hovercraft.
It actually hovers over the ground.
It doesn't actually touch the ground when it's taxiing.
It's about an inch or so above the ground.
And what that allows you to do is take off
and land from really literally anywhere.
We can land on sand, snow, ice, open water.
So if you've got a lake, a river, or an ocean,
you can land on that.
And so you can actually go amphibious.
Go from land to water.
So you can go back and forth.
And you just park on the ground.
And the really interesting part that we demonstrate in this
is that when you stop to park, those same hover pads
stick to the ground.
They become grip surfaces.
So you don't actually have to tie it down.
You don't have to have a mass truck.
You can literally just land, park, grip.
You're done.
Load the cargo, unload the cargo, and off you go.
So it's a completely different way
of thinking about building out infrastructure.
Because we can build these things
that carry tons and tons and tons of cargo,
not just a few hundred pounds, not just a little bit of cargo
but many, many tons of cargo.
So it's interesting that we built this,
and of course no one knew.
We didn't tell anybody.
And we really didn't make publicity about this.
We flew this in 2006.
So this technology is ready to go.
So what's the issue?
Well the issue is growing the world,
growing the world to be ready to expect this kind of a change.
Because this is a big change.
The world of the transportation business
has been the same for many centuries.
We've pretty much used ships.
Then we sort of moved to land modes.
And really pretty much the same, we
used to have horses and carts, and now we have trucks,
but they're the same idea.
So it's really difficult to add a new piece of equipment
into that infrastructure, especially one that's
kind of radically different.
So what's going to happen when we actually apply this.
First, the most hungry, if you will, group out there for cargo
is resource developers.
So you're looking at oil and gas, mining.
In these remote areas, they have these resources.
The challenge is getting them out.
The challenge is getting the supplies in
and getting the resources out.
So initially with the smaller scales,
you'll start to see that kind of develop.
You'll also get a very interesting aspect of safety
when you're flying out back from oil rigs, et cetera,
helicopters are very dangerous.
You can actually do that with a much safer platform.
You can go much longer distances.
You can carry things like large wind turbine blades, which
right now can't be carried very easily.
You have to reconfigure roads in order to get the turbine
blades up to where they need to go.
And most wind turbines are actually not
built where they'd like to be, because you can't get them
there.
So there's much better wind farms up in the hills,
up in the passes, but you can't get
the turbines up there affordable.
So this allows you to change that kind of mentality
as to how you think about things.
As you get bigger, bigger scales, grow bigger,
now you actually can start to build out cargo networks.
So now in Africa, in South America, in Asia,
in areas where you don't have paved roads,
you start to build an infrastructure that
starts to look like paved roads and highways.
But you're just building it with airships.
And eventually, as time goes on, tax revenues grow.
You'll start to build the roads in.
But to start off, you don't have to have
the huge resources, the billions of dollars,
to build a road before you start the commerce.
It enables nations to jump start, if you will,
their movement into the developed world.
Finally, and this is the big scale, at the biggest scale,
we're looking at an aircraft that
will carry 500 tons, a million pounds, much larger
than any other flying device.
And you can actually create a port, a seaport, inland.
So imagine a seaport in Kansas, a seaport
in the middle of a country that right now doesn't have access
to that.
And so instead of having right now to stop at the ocean,
you cannot take advantage of the curvature of the earth.
You can fly over the poles.
Fly areas where you can actually take shorter distances
and actually save money in actually building out
this network.
So we think the technology is there,
but it takes a step to get this into the real world.
It takes growth.
It takes vision to move this technology out into world.
Grow the scale.
These things get very large.
The largest scale vehicle is about the size of a stadium.
So you can imagine how big that's going to be flying away.
But when you get it together, you can actually
create a network where for us at Skunk Works
working on this type of stuff, our x is hybrid aircraft,
we grow from 20 tons up to 500 tons.
And for us, without the road, the road not needed
can actually make all the difference.