Adam Savage Learns About an Electric Flying Vehicle!

hey everybody Adam Savage here in my cave to talk about flying cars because where are the flying cars I've been promised them my whole entire life I want to go from one place in the city to another in the air and it is so close you can taste it but it is still not quite here to solve an engineering challenge this massive is going to take bold ambition iteration and let's face it tons and tons of test flights and there is one company that is on a potential path to get us to the flying car and they're called Archer Aviation they've been developing an e v tall that stands for electric vertical takeoff and Landing aircraft that is optimized for back-to-back 20-mile trips but it has a range of a hundred miles perfect for a city they recently invited us to witness and film a test light of their autonomous electric vertical takeoff and Landing vehicle known as maker so join us as we get under the hood with archer aviations Tom Muniz and bad deal and find out just what it takes to engineer a crap like this tell me about this vehicle here on our left yeah absolutely so this is maker this is Archer's demonstrator aircraft yeah so what we're doing here is building electric vertical takeoff Landing aircraft so if you think about today moving around cities right we both live in the Bay Area in San Francisco you know how traffic can get right so the idea is we're taking technologies that people have developed over the last 15 or 20 years and they've applied them in automotive but we're applying them in Aerospace right so uh maker has 12 propellers 12 electric motors and we've put those together in this unique way to have an aircraft that can take off vertically like a helicopter but then after it takes off it transitions to forward flight and flies like an airplane so it's got the efficiency of an airplane but the vertical takeoff and landing of a helicopter now when it goes from that vertical to that forward motion does it because it's got a wing it gains a whole bunch of efficiency is that right yeah absolutely yeah so um the kind of concept of operations is if you look at the aircraft we've got this row of six propellers in the front so as you see them here they're oriented for forward flight but when the aircraft takes off you can imagine them articulated about 90 degrees they've got it each one of them has a hinge and they can all ice exactly yeah so uh in takeoff they're all pointed up they all provide thrust and then the aircraft gets off the ground as soon as you're clear of obstacles they start to articulate forward towards this configuration and then the aircraft accelerates and once you're above stall speed then all the lift you need is generated by the wing and we're just a really Efficient Electric airplane and and while that's a cockpit no one goes in that cockpit is that right correct okay yeah so maker is fully autonomous so we do have a team on the ground that monitors the flights oh so the team on the ground doesn't even fly the thing they just watch what it does yeah so uh maker has pre-programmed flight plans so essentially the pilot on the ground clicks a button to take off and then there's a team of Engineers that monitor the data data but the airplane's executing its Flight Plan by itself and you know it has contingencies baked in if something goes wrong and people on the ground can intervene if they need to but big stop buttons yeah exactly okay you can get in the control room to see the big stop everything button but uh yeah I know it executes the flight plan uh totally by itself and the reason for that is we're we're going fast right we're doing new things so we don't want to take any unnecessary risk right and yeah that's like a cool thing about um technology today right we don't need to put a pilot in the aircraft to do these sorts of things now you have a lot of experience in this space the VTOL space can you tell me about how you got started in this in this area yeah yeah um I was super lucky to get involved in this really early in my career so before joining Archer I worked at another EV tall company that was started in early 2010 so the story of how that happened is I was working as an aircraft designer for a small company up in the Bay Area that was owned by a Stanford professor and Larry Page One of the Google Founders reached out to us and had this idea for electric airplanes so we did some you know back the envelope work for him and we thought hey you know it's it's pretty interesting right might take a while for batteries to get better and motors to get better but here we are you know 12 13 years later and uh what we're what we're doing here is totally possible right it's just a matter of taking these building blocks and putting them together and then bringing in a product to Market so that's what we're focused on here at Archer so have you been all this time you've been designing stuff that will be possible as the motors and batteries improve you're designing for the Improvement um in in some ways yes in some ways no the um the way we think about it is the first product that we bring to Market which is our pilot plus four passenger vehicle called Midnight that'll be like the worst vehicle that we ever bring to Market because batteries are getting better right Power Electronics are getting better Motors are getting better yeah and with each Improvement we just get better and better performance so uh midnight our product aircraft when we bring it to Market we'll have a range of about 100 miles when it's brand new brand new battery pack about 60 65 miles when it's you know batteries on its last legs if you will but if you think five ten years in the future batteries are twice as good now these airplanes can fly not just twice as far but actually more like three times as far because we keep a lot of energy for reserves in the battery pack so it's not like we you know run it down until it's on fumes sure fair enough yeah now given that it's a plane there's tons of redundancy built into this right I I know that plane systems often have two and three versions of every system this is no different yeah exactly that's another one of the really cool advantages of going electric like this is uh if you compare this to say a helicopter right they typically have one or two really big gas turbine engines and say one big main rotor system so what that means is there's hundreds of Parts where if they fail it's a catastrophic event for the vehicle uh but since we can distribute the propulsion and the powertrain around the aircraft we're able to have these really high levels of redundancy and no uh what are called critical Parts like the parts where if they fail it's just game over uh so maker has 12 propellers uh 12 electric motors any of those can fail on the aircraft still flies totally fine like full capabilities we actually have six batteries as well any of those can fail aircraft still flies normally so really it's the electric propulsion that lets us get the safety up to a place in line with commercial airliners right which is what we think is required to really launch a product like this right and get public acceptance do you get uh do you get noise reduction out of the increased number of propellers so not quite we have designed our vehicles to be very quiet it's not not So Much from the number of propellers as much as the design of the propellers like if you think about helicopters today in many ways they can fly the same missions that we're flying go why don't they because nobody wants helicopter to land in their backyard well I want a helicopter to land in my bedroom but I am unique yeah my my neighbors uh what you're seeing here with this little curve is both a feature to increase performance but also to reduce noise if you imagine what these propellers are doing when they're spinning they're basically like little wings right yeah and they're just generating lift like a wingwood and so every wing that's moving through uh the air generates a Vortex right off the tip of the propeller where the air is spinning around from the high pressure side to the low pressure side generating this like tornado right that comes off so if you imagine that happening in a propeller right it's like this Helix that's formed coming off the propeller tips so there's a wake Shed from this blade and you know this Blade's kind of spinning forward so they interact so hits the Vortex from the exactly preceding blade exactly so if you imagine this like he likes of wakes right so what this geometry does essentially moves The Vortex from this forward blade a little further Downstream from this blade and that both reduces the kind of load the impulse that this blade sees to reduce noise but also to increase efficiency I I feel like I knew intellectually how much Wing design had to do with fluid dynamics but I wasn't until this moment that I kind of groked just how much that's amazing and then so when we were talking about low noise the other thing we do and probably the most important thing is we spin the propellers more slowly than say a helicopter main rotor because uh you know if you imagine the speeds at which this uh like tip of the propeller blade is traveling could be very high right and as you get closer and closer to the speed of sound you get like local areas where this flow is supersonic potentially right and that's like super loud right all the shock waves that are generated so we keep the propeller tip speed very low and that keeps the sound so that it's not like the whop of a helicopter but more just the air rushing uh refreshing over the surface wow I'm curious how ready the public is to jump in these you must be talking to people and finding out their appetite I've always wanted flying cars I'm so excited that they're almost here what is the Public's appetite for autonomous robotic flying vehicles yeah so um that's a great question and I think nobody really knows the answer but I'll tell you a tweet what we think right so the first piece is we don't actually think it's autonomous to start makers on autonomous aircraft but uh it's almost impossible to certify an autonomous aircraft for operations in the US today and even if you could public acceptance would be kind of tough right here go sit in this robot airplane it'll be fine we've tested a lot I mean maybe right like you and I might do it but maybe like my parents wouldn't do it right so the product that we're bringing to Market midnight is a piloted aircraft so it'll have a pilot up front and then two rows of two seats in it yeah we think having a pilot is a important factor in making people comfortable but also we have a partner ship with United Airlines where they're interested in connecting their passengers to long-haul flights with vehicles like this if you imagine like um you're in the city right downtown San Francisco you've got to fly out of SFO how cool would it be to check in down by the marina and ZIP down to SFO and then hop on your flight to DC or wherever you're going so we are literally designing to the same safety standards as a commercial airliner and the safety standards of a commercial airliner are insane I mean I I just remember sitting having been up close and personal and so you guys are holding to every last bit of that level of strength and deflection and flexibility yeah and so to put numbers around it what we're designing too is all of our critical systems Can't Fail more often than one in a billion flight hours so this is a product this is a product to supply a service and it's a service that at this point is a very small niche market but you guys are looking to expand it is that correct yeah I guess um the way we think about it is there's this really great opportunity to get people like out of cars and off the ground and into the air to relieve congestion and just make it easier to move around I love that out of cars the next thing is into the air because that's where my brain goes yeah no but seriously I mean if you're sitting in like a traffic jam on the highway right and you look up in the sky if you're near a big city you might see like one or two airliners but there's really a lot of space there right yeah and with uh you know technology today and the ability to really safely control and automate Vehicles like this right if you think about go down to the local electronics store you buy a drone right and it's amazing how capable they are right the the idea is wow how could we again leverage these advancements in electric propulsion apply them to a new sort of vehicle make uh I know people be able to move around much more quickly safely effectively through the sky so are you also modeling how that service would be rolled out how people would actually execute that service yeah great question we spend a lot of time on that and that's really kind of the backbone of uh the whole company and how we chose the aircraft that we're developing so we started with uh looking at how people move around cities today we used publicly available cell phone tracking data that shows where people are going what time of day Etc and then we looked at hey which of those trips could we potentially address with the vehicle and if so what sort of vehicle do we want how far does it need to go how fast does it need to go because end of the day the the name of the game is saving people time right it takes you longer to fly somewhere in one of these it's probably not likely that you're going to take it but if it saves you time and it's accessible and it's affordable which again it can be because of the electric powertrain and City then it's like a really compelling compelling product right so some people think like oh are you talking about the Jetsons right we get that a lot and I mean who knows right if you think far enough into the future maybe it is something like that but if you're more like pragmatic and think more near-term it's um in many ways it's just like a helicopter 2.0 right except it's lower cost it's much safer and it's much quieter right well I you know I'm coming down here I know that I'm talking to folks who built an airplane from scratch and uh it's a it's a product it's a new object but I hadn't thought that you were also building a whole service industry also from scratch yeah in order to to utilize this that's amazing yeah there's a whole other side of the business on that as well right so I focus mostly on developing the aircraft and Manufacturing the aircraft but our mission is to both sell vehicles right but also operate them ourselves right so you could imagine a future where you get out your phone and you book yourself a trip from downtown San Francisco to San Jose for a meeting or whatever it is or to SFO to get your flight so yeah in the same so in the same way that like some of the mapping software which began as scrappy little folks trying to get you where you want to go as fast as you can now have to accommodate for their own traffic they're generating with their software you guys are thinking of a future way past just like a few of these in the city but how they interact when there's multiple product lines multiple hundreds of people using these hopefully yeah absolutely and it'll be a phased phased approach right sure so you know we're going to Market with a piloted aircraft it'll be flown just like a helicopter or another airplane is still in today the pilots will call ATC right if they need to to land at the airport uh but you know if this takes off in the market materializes like we think then uh yeah it's pretty interesting think about lots of autonomous versions of these right end of the decade or next decade and them coordinating to do these like really complex uh networks right to really get the utilization up so maker here is a prototype yes uh but eventually you guys want to make thousands tens of thousands of these I'm assuming what does that pipeline look like for manufacturing yeah yeah that's a great question um again we're trying to be really pragmatic about that so going back to the FAA and kind of uh partnership there we don't want to push the envelope too hard on manufacturing too soon so we don't want to take too much risk so uh maker our prototype here uses tons of traditional Aerospace materials uh traditional Aerospace manufacturing processes and that works great we're going to carry a lot of those forward into midnight first product but yeah like you're saying a lot of that doesn't scale to producing thousands or even more aircraft per year so uh one of our partners is stellantis which is the new name for the merger of Fiat Chrysler and and pujo so one of the world's largest auto manufacturers and if you think about you know for successful and the market materializes here in many ways manufacturing should look more Automotive than Aerospace so we work with them quite a bit on design for manufacturing setting up bar factory layout for this aircraft production right industrial engineering those things that they're really skilled at to set ourselves up to be really successful to ramp up manufacturing uh long term amazing so bringing the the safety factors of aerospace engineering but the the cost-effective factors of Auto Engineering yeah exactly and um you know it's interesting in airspace the volumes are just traditionally low and that just drives you to like different techniques right you do a lot of inspection of everything right in automotive you make so many it's just like not possible so you need to design the processes to have like inherent quality inside them right and moving towards that in a very incremental but Safe Way is a super cool challenge that uh we're focused on what's fascinating about it to me is it's so much more than just designing a simple product you're also having to design its market and its manufacturing neither none of those exist yet so it's all coming out of whole cloth absolutely and I'm an airplane guy so I love the airplane part but honestly it's almost the easier part right we'll be rolling out to the pad doing another envelope expansion test today so we're right in the middle of our forward speed flight envelope test so when I say flight envelope what I mean is um there's a certain range of conditions that we know how the aircraft performs because we have test data there right right I mean I know this is your job and you guys are spinning this up all the time to gather this data but it must be a thrill every time you spin it up yeah absolutely this is uh this is the sixth full-scale aircraft like this that I've worked on but it's like just as exciting every time really like the first flights are just as exciting every time I come down here and get to see one it's I'm like an airplane guy right right I just love it right it's so awesome to see these things fly [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] how amazing your software is for designing stuff or how great your engineers are you still have to test stuff and that's what we just witnessed maker just uh ran through a seven minute flight test it rose up to 80 feet flew out half a mile turned around came back and then landed and uh there's some very small perturbations we saw coming back that was actually all part of the test uh what blows me away is so just you can kind of tell there's no pilot there it just Rises up and its stability is just something I mean watching it rise off was very precise it was neat to watch I think we're about a thousand feet from there impressively quiet for four for what we just witnessed all right Matt we just saw this thing fly for the first time but you watch this happen like every single day it's true and you've seen hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these you could you could say hundreds hundred thousands maybe not thousands okay I is it still exciting to watch it take off every time sometimes yeah what are the delineating factors uh it depends on what we're doing when we're doing something new it's always fun how long have you been with this project I started at the beginning of the maker program in January of 2020. wow wow and uh tell me how that came about tell me how this group of Engineers got together and started putting this on paper yeah so a bunch of us came from a different evil company as a program by Airbus called vahana that program ended in late 2019 and this was just getting started so a bunch of us came over and we wanted to keep working together so joined up on the next thing yep oh faster so at the very beginning of something like this I always loved thinking about the stretch of time like I look at this and I know that it is the result of literally millions of tiny decisions but at the very beginning are you working with just a blank piece of paper and arguing over how many rotors pretty much wow that's the fun thing about a clean sheet design we start with literally a clean sheet and we start tackling the problem making those little decisions one at a time to come up with eventually the full system here so what is the next phase of testing you guys are doing these small flights uh what is the next development stage yeah so we're doing what we call envelope expansion so we're starting from hover we just hover in place and you know do some things around the taxiway here but what you just saw was part of our speed envelope expansion so we're incrementally going faster and faster and faster and a lot of things are happening as we do that so you notice the tilts we take off with the Tilt vertical and as we get faster they come down the blades the pitch of the blades coarsens so that's why we take it off piece by piece so that any anything doesn't look right we'd always come back to a slower speed and keep the aircraft safe and with each of these tests every time you're adding an increment you are monitoring all the systems really carefully to see if anything's different or changing that's right and before we even get there we simulate it right so we we know what we think we're going to see and we know what we saw at the previous speed yeah so we expect to see the behavior pretty similar and if anything looks off we knock it off come back home have you had some spectacular differences between the simulated test and the actual test I wouldn't say spectacular okay good it is a good thing but there are definitely differences it's you know order of magnitudes of oscillations or things like that it's pretty much what you expect right between simulation and the real world I mean within normal Aerospace development there's always a combination for a thing for the vibrations and the all of that kind of expansions the temperature stuff right that's all sort of built into the the whole industry exactly yep and that's why we test um do you have like when if you when you bring your family by do you have a part of this you like I just got to show you this is my favorite part uh I do you can't really see it so the inside of these uh forward hubs yeah there's the variable pitch mechanism it's for the for the blades that's right it's beautiful really what makes it beautiful that's a very simplistic design with very little mechanical slop um and it does it does it adjust the pitch on all of them simultaneously all these blades yes and so can you describe it to me I want to see if I can understand it in my head I might have to cut it later for the secret sauce oh sure I don't want to give away any of this oh so it's your proprietary design for the pitch adjustment oh that's neat oh that's really cool so it is and it's very little slop that's right which is shocking given how much force it's exactly and that's hugely important because all of our models at about how much thrust we're producing rely on very accurate knowledge of the pitch of those blades and reducing slop I mean the temperature is going to change too at speed and the neural sorts of different circumstances sure there's that there's a lot oh that's cool I hope we I hope we can keep this in the video because I love this kind of talk uh so how close is the next iteration midnight which is already being developed yes that's right uh how how closer am I to being able to be a passenger in Midnight well before you can be a passenger we need to get type certified 2024 for type certification and at that point we'll start entry into operations it'll be pretty low rate but somewhere in the 2024 2025 time frame wow so even when when I think your definition of fast is different than my definition of fast because that seems like a long timeline but I realize for a piece of aircraft that cannot fall out of the sky that is probably an incredibly timeline that's right tell me about this this V tail so this accomplishes the functions of both the vertical tail and the horizontal stabilizer that you may see in other more common general aviation aircraft but it's the same idea what we're looking at here too we have three independent Renovators so that's the rudder and the elevator combined with one control surface and we have three of them for redundancy so we could lose one they're all independently actuated lose one or it could be stuck hard over and we'd still be able to control the aircraft adequately does the increased number of them give you extra like if they're all working does that give you extra control options not really not with this aircraft anyway so we use them all together so they're all you know they normally function together but the whole goal is redundant redundant redundant that's right that so much of this can fail and it still stays exactly that's amazing I hate to say for me just watching that first hover and then literally how it just literally stops in the air I found it it made my took my breath away great Matt thank you so much man that's a beautiful machine thanks thanks again to Archer Aviation for making this video possible it was thrilling to watch their machine fly and even more thrilling to think about the future that it portends I mean I've been promised a flying car for almost my entire life so to see one it is easy to get lost in the excitement and think there is the future but I talked to the teams and I am reminded that it's all about people people not just making a flying vehicle they are also building a market and a manufacturing system for being able to make this thing at scale that's all really exciting to me the personal element so thanks for bringing me out Archer and I can't wait to like it take a flying car foreign [Music]

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 186,056

Keywords: tested, adam savage, adam savage tested, archer aviation, archer aviation maker, evtol aircraft, evtol flying car, evtol air taxi, electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, archer aviation test flight, matt deal archer, Tom Muniz, tom muniz, tom muniz archer, vtol vs helicopter, evtol vs helicopter, future of flying cars, future flying vehicles, adam savage archer aviation, archer evtol test flight, evtol test flight, flying car

Id: JSa45VmL6yg

Length: 26min 45sec (1605 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 22 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Recoil42]

Really interesting to see that they're doing their testing autonomously. Test pilot safety is a huge problem in aerospace engineering programs, and requires a lot of extra engineering effort and care. They've basically sidestepped the issue entirely so they can focus on powertrain development, which is absolutely fascinating. Excellent MVP'ing here, honestly.

[u/lafeber]

Top comment:

I’m a huge aviation fan, I love aircraft, I love engineering and pushing the boundaries of craft. That said…its hard to imagine air taxi’s as a viable, mass market resource. For one, congestion is still primarily solved by mass transport not a different form of individual transport. For two, even cheap cheap cheap new aircraft is like buying a Lamborghini, and maintaining it? A whole different story. This isn’t niche because not a lot of people wouldn’t want it, its niche because it’ll be freaking expensive, millions of dollars IF it was from an established manufacturer. From a start up?

[u/notyourvader]

Flying vehicle? You mean a plane?

[u/NerdBergRing]

Soooo who can afford this? I’m not really interested in rich people’s toys.