stuart8ol

5 ms·

1.
by stuart8ol 3y ago
That is out of our scope as a business but it is something we have found we have to address head on with our customers and airport partners. They want to understand the whole logistics and associated safety from green H2 production to airc
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by stuart8ol 3y ago
Sorry - fixed now. Thanks for pointing that out.
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by stuart8ol 3y ago
Thanks - will definitely take a look.
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by stuart8ol 3y ago
They are aiming to be the propulsion system supplier for future aircraft but crucially the are also targeting developing systems for a family of aircraft starting small and are working towards aircraft upwards of 200 seats. Our premise is t
5.
by stuart8ol 3y ago
We were so close to buying an old Nomad for our tech demo! But we thought if we took it to an airshow, it would only get a small sub-set of attendees excited, compared to a Bonanza, which people seem to love. We would really love to do it
6.
by stuart8ol 3y ago
The air needed for the chemical reaction is pretty small, but we will also be drawing in some air for cooling and that will be around the same order of air that is used by a turbine engine. We will not have an APU per se, but we will have a
7.
by stuart8ol 3y ago
The lowest hanging fruit is the current 50-80 seat turboprop market. Next would be the regional jet market and lastly we want to capture a sizeable portion of the single -aisle market. The reason we want to compete with/capture traffic
8.
by stuart8ol 3y ago
No that wouldn't have been us. Hope the feedback they received was "Australian aerospace company - great idea!" though.
9.
by stuart8ol 3y ago
My pleasure! Yeah working with the H3X team has been great. We are going to have them out at the airport before the end of the year, letting them run some tests on our set up. Will be fun.
10.
by stuart8ol 3y ago
Yeah even with today's batteries there is a business case for battery electric flight. Trainers, short hops across water and intracity + eVTOLs of course all make sense to tackle with battery. This is because the efficiency is good, th
11.
by stuart8ol 3y ago
One thing we have learned on this journey is how much low noise is to our customers and the wider community - we have yet to really put this under test and try and get a cost number against it i.e. how much more would you pay for a quieter
12.
by stuart8ol 3y ago
I think I would be hard pressed to say maintenance free but definitely significantly lower maintenance costs. Turbine blades are intrinsically expensive, made of titanium and operate at high temperatures under high loads. Electric motors ha
13.
by stuart8ol 3y ago
We are not really targeting the private or business jet market (though if someone wanted one for this purpose we wouldn't turn them away!). There is another impressive YC company that is that you should check out, Beyond Aero https:&#
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by stuart8ol 3y ago
I think that is a fair statement. You also have to factor in the capital costs, the aircraft purchase price per seat typically increases with aircraft size so it comes down to the balance there, between that cost increasing and other costs
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by stuart8ol 3y ago
Thank you, I can confirm it is the coolest job I have had so far, and I have done quite a few cool things. I can also tell you, as someone who studied physics, I have only really spent about 10% of my time in the last year doing any physics
16.
by stuart8ol 3y ago
Yeah the compressor load goes up with power - we have a 27 kW compressor for our 120kW PEM fuel cell here in the lab (this isn't what is going on the aircraft). This is one of the issues we are tackling with our unique system architect
17.
by stuart8ol 3y ago
We would love to do the analysis you are describing in detail. I'm thinking getting people movement data from google maps or something, using that to figure out where people are traveling to. Then use that to determine what traffic nee
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by stuart8ol 3y ago
We think for a high proportion of routes 50 seats for hydrogen electric propulsion. We heard from a major airline that their network planners always want a smaller plane, for flexibility and a high load factor and the fleet planners always
19.
by stuart8ol 3y ago
We can't share too much detail but it has higher operating temperatures (180C) than the standard PEM fuel cells that are typically used in automotive. This is key to a good aircraft solution.
20.
by stuart8ol 3y ago
Not this time around! We have selected H3X as our supplier for the motor for our tech demo and have signed an LOI for them to supply motors for our B1900D-HE retrofit aircraft. I would say that magniX has a more mature product and is furthe
21.
by stuart8ol 3y ago
Thanks - I hear you, safety around hydrogen is always a big concern. We do address it head on often but it will always come up in any conversation about it. The "why not batteries? question is audience dependent - some people have give
22.
by stuart8ol 3y ago
Did someone say autonomous flight?? only kidding, we are not pursuing autonomous flight in the near future. It is something we hear a lot about too, especially after COVID. I am not sure what the answer is here but we do see it as a tempora
23.
by stuart8ol 3y ago
It is definitely a design constraint that we have to consider but at the same time the relatively small change in weight during the flight is also good for our balance, given we won't be putting the fuel in the wings. All in all, the s
24.
by stuart8ol 3y ago
We watch H2fly in very carefully! They are a really impressive company and their recent flight with liquid hydrogen is inspirational, and really motivates us. I believe we have some different fuel cell technology but the main difference is
25.
by stuart8ol 3y ago
We will be basing our requirements broadly on the current Dash8-300, so we are targeting around 4000ft for the SA-1, but we still have a lot of work before that is validated. It is desirable for us to go with smaller planes as it is faster
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by stuart8ol 3y ago
Yeah there will be some slot constrained routes that will certainly need to stick to the larger aircraft sizes, but many that can benefit from the flexibility of a smaller aircraft size if the operating cost was low enough. There are second
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by stuart8ol 3y ago
There is definitely advantages of both. Direct combustion gets you a much greater specific power of propulsion, and the technology for turbine engines is so optimised that it sounds like a really attractive option. We expect we can get high
28.
by stuart8ol 3y ago
Thank you! If batteries were 10X lighter than they are today, then we would definitely prefer them.
29.
by stuart8ol 3y ago
Exactly! We will be flying "Bonnie" our Beechcraft Bonanza on an experimental ticket next year. We will then do the same for each of other programs. This helps us get the hours and data to support our certification process.
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by stuart8ol 3y ago
Yeah certification is one of our biggest risks. Luckily for us there are already a few other companies that are breaking the ground here and the certification path is becoming less opaque. There is a lot of scrutiny for new propulsion types

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