YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Groden

lines on the record: 60
first: 2024-05-21
most recent: 2024-05-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“What's interesting is the answer to the why, the second or third why, helped me a bit. And sometimes the answer to why you're passionate about something may not be obvious. But if you're really centered and you're really in tune with what that thing is, and it's coming from a place within and not because of some societal pressure or something that's happening in the world around you, but it's truly coming from inside you. And it's something that you identify with and you care about. And I call it your truth, then when you start to ask those why questions and really think about it and think about where you've been in the course of your life journey and how you've changed or the experiences you've had, it oftentimes becomes quite obvious.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot about the fundamentals of how to speak. I think it boils down to knowing what you want to say and having clear intention with the statement before you begin it. And it's interesting because I naturally think a lot before I speak, but I also have this ability to, which is kind of brought out of me, to take things up to a much higher level, like 10,000 feet and just say what I want to say as opposed to here's all the details inside of it. And I think if I were to try and identify one thing, that's probably it. And the ability to show people my passion was really hard for me when I first started putting those two things together. I think he saw the passion on the inside, but I struggled to share it with people in a way that they could understand. I think it actually extends beyond speaking. It extends to this is the thing that I want to do with my life. This is what I'm putting all my life force into. And he helped me find the words to express that to other people. And this helped me in every single respect in the business, whether it's hiring people or raising capital or just building relationships. That ability to articulate why this matters so deeply to me.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a coach at the beginning of the company that I was 26 and a PhD in engineering, right? So not necessarily any good at communicating. So good at writing an equation on the board, pretty good at solving it. But communicating why that mattered and what it meant to the world was obviously not the thing I'd been trained on. And all parts of what I was bringing to the table, I was trying to improve it. So I was seeking out somebody to help me with speaking. And I was really fortunate to get introduced to someone who was way outside of what I could afford. And obviously he knew that when he took the call, I didn't. And he offered to coach me basically for free for years and has become a close friend since. At the time, I didn't realize the level of gift he was giving me when I met him. But since then, without that type of guidance, I don't think I would be.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things that was super important to me, especially as introspective as I am, is giving myself the space or the ability to process so that I could be growing. And that's taken a lot of different forms over the years. I think that's incredibly important. The other thing that I think is hard sometimes for the people around me to understand is it's not work. It's literally an expression of who I am and I love it to the core. There's nothing that matters to me more in life than getting to deliver this future to everyone and changing the safety for this industry and connecting more people.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What may seem like it directly contributes to Skyrise in the moment actually helps my mind defocus and sometimes that lack of focus actually creates the insight or helps me see what the next step is on the roadmap. So sailing is something that I did when I was a little kid. And there's something just so peaceful about it. I like to do that every now and again just to clear my mind. And I have some other meditative activities, sometimes just meditation.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question. I guess at a high level, you hit the nail on the head. My whole life is orchestrated around delivering this future. And after my grandfather died and I decided this is what I was going to do, it's just everything came into such clarity. And then everything gets passed through this filter. Does this add value to Skyrise and the mission that we have as a company to drive deaths to zero or does it not? And the challenge for me is I'm such a regimented person most of the time the answer is no as compared to the average person. And therefore, my life gets very narrow, very focused, and highly concentrated, which has helped the company be successful. So I've traded literally everything in my life to push this as far as fast as I possibly can. And I've given it everything. What's taken me years to figure out though is sometimes the experiences outside of”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the flying machine to the vehicle probably with wheels. So I think it's a really interesting future. And I actually don't think it's that far away because again, once everybody got their hands on a Model T, it was not long until the highway system followed.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People look at how much we all use. Same is true here. And then the other thing, which I don't think is necessary, but will come into play just like the car when the car arrived, we had zero infrastructure. And the infrastructure investment to make the car what it is today is astronomical. We've never made that type of investment since into a transportation system as we did many decades ago. Well, fortunately for us, flight doesn't require a sizable investment and infrastructure like it did in the car because you can have a couple miles of airports around the country servicing tens of thousands, millions of air miles available. But I think what you'll see are better integration of flight into the fabric of our day-to-day lives. And this doesn't mean putting an air taxi vertiport on every street corner. I think it's actually quite the contrary. I think it's about really thoughtful architectures of our city and our urban to suburban environments positioning air transportation in the right locations with the right multimodal infrastructure to be able to take people.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And maybe you're flying yourself because you're trained on how to fly the operating system and you fly yourself to San Francisco and it's an hour or two trip depending on how fast your plane is. You get in a car that's waiting right there for you and it drives you to your final destination. I mean, it could be completely seamless and at a cost that's very attainable for everyone. And I think that if that happens and transportation starts to become more accessible to us like that, that multimodal regional trip, which could be across states, the same trip that I experienced as a kid, what we've seen in the past for transportation is the more accessible it is, the more it's consumed. And that's when that flywheel really starts to spin. That Uber in the early days was forced to compare itself to taxis and everybody's like, well, that market's tiny. And they spend a lot of cycles explaining, don't compare us to the taxi compare us to other forms of transportation. And then this very point, which is if you can make ride hailing or taxis more accessible, more available to”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple decades, I think everyone should wake up in the morning and have a trip that they want to go on. And it's a question of whether you want to fly or you want to drive. Air transportation should be that integrated into our day-to-day lives, and the cost should be no different between the different modes. The fundamental physics of flight points to that, and we can already realize that cost on a seat mile basis, assuming there's folks in the seats that rivals the automobile. So that's right there. That's right in front of us. That doesn't require some heroic future technology or some future energy storage device. That's around the corner. And once that starts to happen, then it's not that flight is going to take over all the other modes. You still need multimodality in order to go places. But you could imagine waking up and saying, we're based in LA. You wake up in Los Angeles and say, oh, I want to go to San Francisco later today to see your friend. Great. You get an Uber and the Uber. It takes you to the airplane and you go straight from the Uber door closing to the small airplane.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I found at the company, the answer would have been very different than it is today. There were a lot of things that we had of conviction in, but we hadn't yet proven in terms of the technology's ability to deliver everything that now we know it can and has. So at this point, the technology's done. The product is done. And that's only true now like in the last 12 months. And our target is next year to be able to give somebody the keys to an aircraft.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back to well, who wants to put their life on the line while they're engaging in transportation? No one. So people will spend outsized check size to get a safer vehicle.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be in service for 30 years, sometimes longer. There's general aviation, air points out there for 50 years. So the OEMs are incentivized to create the largest install base accumulated, greatest number of flight hours they can because the more flight hours flown, obviously, the more spare parts are necessary and the greater that revenue stream. And our incentives in that respect are completely aligned because the safer and easier it is to fly, the more people are going to fly, therefore the more spare parts, OEM needs to ship and the more vehicles they get to service. So that's all positive. And then the safety element can't go understated. Every time there's an accident in this industry, it hurts everyone. It shakes the confidence that people have of engaging in flight and whoever the OEM was, of course, people assume it's the aircraft. And so that's not good for anybody's bottom line. And what we've seen generally, and I think it's really positive is safety enhancing technology gets 100% market adoption fairly rapidly. And it just goes.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's interesting though is, at least in general aviation, what we've learned over the years is that these OEMs would love to be able to ship better airports than helicopters, but they aren't in the business of building actuation. They're not in the business of building automation systems. They're certainly not in the business of writing software and writing an operating system. That's just not their skill set. So if you can come along and give them a whole new set of technology that enhances the safety of their vehicles, then that has tremendous value proposition to them. And it's in their best interest because they want to move more metal. And for them, a lot of their revenue stream and also their margin comes from servicing that install base. So for an OEM, they want the biggest fleet they can have because their upcharging on all spares and all the overhauls and all the maintenance. And that's actually where they make most of their money. So many times the margin on shipping a new vehicle is actually very low. Single digit percents. And then, okay, the vehicle is going to.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You look at general aviation, there's not that many OEMs. There's a handful of OEMs, and these folks buy engines, they buy avionics, they buy seats, and they rivet wings into those aircraft or they put composite wing on and they integrate all the pieces together. What's really interesting is that the tier one suppliers really have tremendous leverage for better or worse over these integrators. So the honey walls of the world that are providing the PAR 25 airline, if that box is not working in that avionics bay, the airplane's not dispatching. And so Honeywell's got a life cycle contract with that airliner. And that box is going to see a spare very quickly, and they probably already have provisioned spares. By the way, the cost of the spare is usually 3x with the cost of the initial unit was. And there's 80% gross margin, and they're locked in because the airframe has been certified with that technology. And therefore, if you're Boeing and your Delta and you want to field that airplane today, thou must have the honeywell box.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's such a difficult industry to break into because of the regulatory challenge and then obviously inherent with the engineering challenge of building these systems that to your point there really is a duopoly on aircraft integrators for Part 25. You have the Embraer, which is number three on that list.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Orientation, and that's really unsafe for the dispatch. But you could see a day in the future where if that helicopter or that airplane was equipped with our technology, then that aircraft could be flown optionally piloted on a mission that it otherwise wouldn't have dispatched. And so I think the same could be said for going back to your question, not just a commercial market for unmanned flight, but also the military. And the military has already made that decision a number of times over. I think it'd be really compelling for them if they could have the same asset, have a person on board in one moment, and then the next jump out, and then the aircraft is doing some type of logistics mission or other for them. And I think there may be opportunity for our technology to support that.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's fascinating because obviously the technology being fielded there is far more advanced than the commercial space. And I mentioned earlier that the military has had unmanned aircraft for many, many decades. What I think is interesting is it's the overlap of a willingness to field revolutionary technology that doesn't necessarily have the ability to be certified in the commercial market, but it's also the hardest mission profile set because you're flying and obviously GPS denied environments. You're flying against adversaries. You have people trying to shoot you out of the sky. So it is fertile ground for deploying new cool advanced technologies that otherwise really wouldn't have a home or a market fit. And so simple example would be US Coast Guard helicopters generally do not dispatch if it's not a full moon or they have no moon whatsoever, I should say, because I can't tell the difference between the sea and the sky. And that leads to spatial disorder.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're a teenager, you get a driver's license and a flyer's license, and from a complexity standpoint, the technology already makes it easier to fly than it is to drive. I totally think that's the future. I think take a couple decades to get there. I do think one of the things that we have the benefit of, though, is all of our children, they all are playing with technology. And when they imagine what a flying machine looks like, they imagine it to look like what we've created. I can't tell you how many people, we show them our cockpit and show them our operating system. They go, isn't that how it works? No, not at all. Take a look at what it looks like today. And it looks like it belongs in World War II. And they're like, oh, I thought that you guys are building is already real and realized.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And not to distant future, and not to mention as a pilot now, you should be able to fly more aircraft types. So if you're sitting there with a pilot's license and you can now fly 99% of weather days or whatever it is, you know, much better than 75, and I can also fly as a pilot, any type of airplane or helicopter. Well, that has a lot more utility for more missions. So we see it as rising tide, elevating the pilot to be more capable and drive more value. When you look at it even further out, let's say even beyond that, humans are incredible at high level decision making. We're really good at ascertaining all kinds of different things and thinking about what our intentions are and the intentions of the people that are with us and then changing the state of our decision based upon an evolving environment. And that's why you see the most advanced pilots in the world. That's all they do. They're mission commanders. They're thinking about what they want that mission to look like and how they want to carry it out. They're not in the weeds on the detailed systems and their management.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about it like empowering pilots because part of the problem today is that not only is there a very small community of people who can safely fly these machines, but they're restricted on when they can fly because this category of aircraft just doesn't have very high reliability of dispatch. So if it's cloudy outside, oftentimes they're not going and in LA, it's sufficiently cloudy so as to not be able to fly about a quarter of the time. So if you think about that, that means the top line revenue coming in to pay the pilots and pay for these aircraft, right? It's taking a really significant hit. It shouldn't even be thought of as 25%. If you're running a transportation system, it's down 25% of the time. It's not a transportation system at all, right? You can't rely upon it. We would abandon it as a society. If you're a pilot, though, and now you can fly 99% of the time, that completely changes the utility of the vehicle that you're flying and therefore drives more people to use it. The utilization goes up. And then I actually think pilots will end up getting paid more, not less.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aircraft and they're in full control from skids up to skids down. And if you compare that to the automobile, I distinctly remember the first time I got in a car. I certainly couldn't park it, let alone barely drive around the parking lot. And here we have people with 15 minutes of training flying a helicopter in full control from takeoff to landing. So I think we've actually realized an easier user interface, an operating system that leverages higher levels of automation than we experienced in the automobile, which we all take for granted is a known and easy quantity.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Closest to the products and knows exactly how they work. And we've encoded it into our operating system. So the computer and our operating system knows exactly what it's going to do in every possible scenario you can encounter. And we can show you if we wrote out the equation and traced it all the way through the trees and the offense statements, what's going to happen. And we believe that's the responsible way of creating a technology like this. So we only picked up the Lego blocks, if you will, that are known and certifiable. And then we assembled them in a way that hasn't been realized before. We wrote an operating system around it, and now we've created this user experience that was the same across all the vehicles. But on a foundational level, it's this deterministic artificial intelligence approach that encodes the entire industry and all of our learnings. We can take people with zero flight experience whatsoever and put them in a simulator for 15 minutes and then put them up in a full scale.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of other things as well, but if you can make all of that accessible to people and basically give them what they need to know when they need to know it, then it becomes that much more intuitive. So we spent a lot of time, you could say, bringing people in of all walks of life. So somebody's never been in an airplane or helicopter before, somebody who's an expert pilot, somebody who's a military pilot who's only flown airplanes, who's only flown helicopters. And we've gotten all of their experience from actually using different variations of the product. And then also effectively interviewing them. Because what our operating system is, is we haven't talked about this publicly at all until this discussion, it is an expert decision, artificial intelligence system. And basically it's a giant equation. And it would fill up the entire room I'm sitting in if we were to write it out. And the expert system that we've devised basically takes the collective expertise of this whole industry and all the people.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, it's been quite this journey. A lot of learnings. I didn't know how to fly a helicopter when I started the company. So that was something that I thought was a good skill to have, something good to know. So I went through that process because I really wanted to better understand what the operating system was required to do and also where the state of the industry is today. As far as the challenges, one of the things that Apple, I think, really discovered was if you can get 90, 95% of the value in terms of what the device can do for you with, in their case, iOS, then people prefer simpler and ultimately they use more of its capability because of the simplicity of accessing all of those different capabilities inherently built in. And the same is true for us. And that's exactly what we did. So we said, okay, we're going to do everything we can to maintain the capability. And I actually believe in a lot of respects we've enhanced the capability of the vehicle. For example, now for the first time, a light utility helicopter can fly through a cloud once our SkyOS technology is certified.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Communicating with City block in New York City has more complexity than an entire cross country trip of an airplane. The number of things that you could encounter and the number of edge cases. And so it is a far more reasonable application of advanced automation to bring us closer to high-level decision making and capturing the intention of the human. And so that's one other reasons why I had such high conviction when I founded the company. I understood that we could take this technology and repol a lot of the economic benefit.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“themselves. When you think about the car, I think a lot of the reason why people go to full autonomy in the car is because we've already driven the cost all the way down and everybody on the planet can already drive a vehicle. And so the only thing left is to take the human completely out of the loop. But it is the hardest application of this type of technology that exists today. And I believe someday we'll get there, but we're still a ways away. And part of the proof of that is when I started the company, I would always explain to people we've had unmanned aircraft breaking the sound barrier more than 50 years ago. And people would look at me like I was crazy. And then they'd google it. And sure enough, they would find that to be the case. And the thing about flying is it's incredibly infrastructure dependent environment. You're not going to ride your bicycle up into the sky. There's no fire hydrant versus dog versus something else that you have to identify and instantly react to. There's really, by and large, there's nothing out there. And anything meaningful up there is highly regulated and community.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, like saying if you want to go drive around in a car, you need max for sappen with you. You need a Formula One driver to hop in the vehicle with you. That's the level of skill and the scarcity of those people right now. Well, imagine if any one of us could hop into a helicopter or small airplane and fly ourselves safely. Now it's no longer max or stappin driven ride. It's driven by us and we're commanding the vehicle and we're making the decision making and it's totally accessible to us. And that's been a necessary ingredient to get widespread adoption of the automobile because we can all drive ourselves without drivers sitting up in the front seat. And so when we think about flight, we think about highly automated and how do we make it so that you don't need one of those 20,000 or 1,000 people in the front of that cockpit as a seat that isn't actually there for the trip. That drives an incredible change to the unity economics because now each seat is occupied by somebody that actually is paying passenger. They want to go on this trip and go through this journey and they're capable of doing it.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On when I started the company, a lot of people thought, oh, we really need autonomous aircraft. And the definition of autonomy has a lot of different ways of looking at it. And one of the things that we came to understand very rapidly is you don't need full quote unquote autonomy. In fact, there is no truly autonomous transportation vehicle that I know of that's used at any reasonable scale. It's about coupling the human intention with the machine and leveraging high levels of automation in the machine to capture the human intention and then go and carry it out. And when you apply this to flight, a lot of people are saying, oh, we need to make the aircraft fully autonomous. That's the only way to realize this future. And the reality is, no, there's actually a number of steps before that that drives almost all of the economic value that you would get from quote unquote autonomy. Namely, right now the number of pilots specifically for helicopters is about 20,000 helicopter pilots in all the United States and maybe 1,000 of them that we would suggest you get into a helicopter with.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are no train tracks delay. The train tracks are fly these GPS points through the airspace, and there's no environmental impact on more flight hours being accumulated or flying more air miles because you don't have a highway system to maintain. So people will talk about this a bit, but I don't think it is well enough understood. The throughput of our airspace is almost infinite relative to where we are today because you have those three dimensions and you can do very simple rule-based system like a four way stop sign system where people can de-conflict across the airspace and you can drive a tremendous amount of throughput without a huge ground impact.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technology can do a lot to change the noise of these vehicles are creating, but you can imagine if they're not as safe as they could be today, noise is way down the list of things as an industry we're working to solve. So the first is we have the infrastructure. The second is using the infrastructure that we have. We can define flight routes and corridors that minimize the presence of these aircraft. And once you get over a couple thousand feet, which is the normal flying altitude for these aircraft, most of the time it's imperceptible. And you can do a lot to make it almost invisible to the naked eye and also the ear, especially flying over population centers. The other thing that I would say is if you believe in that future, you probably also would then believe that there would be technology on board these machines. And that technology can help coordinate when they're taking off, when they're landing, how they're sequenced, and then obviously those flight paths, those highways in the sky, quote unquote, which leads to another interesting point, which is that not only are the subway stations built,”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would start by saying the infrastructure necessary to support this future is largely already in place. There are thousands of general aviation airports around the country that were built 50 plus years ago, and most people live within 20 minutes of a general aviation airport. So the quote unquote subway stations for the sky are already there. They already exist. They're just for the most part very underutilized. There are a few that are way overutilized, but by and large, they're underutilized because there's not a lot of people flying general aviation aircraft. And so then if you're using hubs like this, then it establishes more natural flight paths and corridors. And if you're thoughtful about how people fly through the air, you can make the impact on the surrounding environment very minimal. And that comes by way of steep climbouts. So get away from the ground. Don't fly low to the ground for long. And then certain procedures that reduce the noise impact of the aircraft.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's spot on. I think there's a lot of people that would rather fly places. In fact, through SkyRace, I've learned this is one of the most innate human conditions. And what's keeping us back from engaging with it on a daily basis, I think, really comes down to the safety issue because if you look at the number of people who start learning to fly general aviation airplane or helicopter, the graduation rate is roughly one out of seven people. So six out of seven people are washing out. I don't know very many people who start learning to drive a car and then don't graduate. It's certainly not six out of seven. It's probably 99.9 and some number of nines after that. People graduate and can drive a car. And it's because it's so difficult to fly the aircraft. And oftentimes you're only one mistake away from killing yourself and potentially your entire family someday. There just aren't many weekend activities you can engage in that has that type of situation around it. And so I believe if you can change that paradigm and make it so that it's safe and you're not constantly worried about your proficiency being good enough in order to fly, then we'd start to use it more. And if we use it more, then it becomes more integrated.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That Tesla or choose your automotive company was building the volume of aircraft that we are currently building as a general aviation industry today, those cars would be million dollar plus vehicles, which is actually the cost of the pre-production prototypes. So when I bring folks into the company who are from the automotive space and show them the aircraft, I love opening it up and showing the number of systems and then explaining how much simpler it is as compared to even the most basic car. Take a Ford Fiesta or a Toyota Camry and compare it to even the most kitted out general aviation airplane or helicopter, the amount of compute, the number of systems on boards of these machines, they're not even in the same ballpark. The reason why the automobile is so great is because we're building so many of them.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's right. I don't think we've enjoyed economies of scale in general aviation to date. I do a new employee roundtables with everybody that joins the company. And one of the trivia questions I ask is how many Model Ts were built in 1925 a day? And I don't think I've gotten a guess greater than 1,000 from anyone that's joined the company. And the correct answer is 25,000 units per day. And that, of course, is just the Model T. This doesn't include all the other competitors and all the other make model cars in the industry. And so that's the number of cars that were being built about 100 years ago on a daily basis for that make model. If you compare that to general aviation today, general aviation is about 2,500 new aircraft per year right now. It has historically peaked at about 17,000 in the 1970s and has been a little bit higher, but that's just getting the annual rate to be closer to the daily rate of the Model T a long, long time ago. So if you could imagine.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This industry. So I think the flying car future can actually come. It's not far away. I think with our technology integrated into a helicopter that will offer effectively what everybody's been looking for in the eyes of a flying car, that is an incredibly simple to operate relative today, simple to operate vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that you can fly from A to B at a reasonable cost.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The existing aircraft types, airplanes, helicopters, these form factors fully have the ability to deliver to us as future if you can make it safer, if you can make it easier, and ultimately as a result of those things, make it more accessible. And as more people engage in flight in these existing vehicle types, everything gets better. You get economies of scale for the first time, and you can make meaningful investment in new technologies even beyond safety once you have that, to make them more efficient, to make them quieter. And I don't believe the answer is necessarily go and reinvent because on a fundamental level, these are incredibly efficient platforms that taking stored energy and translating into flight, whether it be with vertical takeoff and landing or from a runway with a wing. We've solved that physics problem and we've done a really good job. The question is, how do we improve upon that leveraging technology today? And the first step to getting there in my mind is building a market. And I think the first step in building a market is solving the safety problem that.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the flying car future, sometimes the problem statement isn't well defined, but I think we all subscribe to this concept of we want to fly to work or fly where we're going as opposed to driving there. And there's been a lot of attempts at delivering that future. And maybe I'll just talk about some of the things I'm very confident and not the answer and then some paths that could be the answer to getting us there. The first one is the concept of a car that flies. That just makes no engineering sense whatsoever. You're trying to make a roadable aircraft, basically. And these are two completely at odds engineering requirement sets that basically makes for a really bad car or a really bad airplane or both. And so that's just a logical. The next is what is holding us back from using existing airplanes and helicopters from delivering to us that future and this concept of being able to fly places. And through the course of skyrise and my journey since I was a little kid, I fundamentally believe.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where the pilot isn't literally both hands and feet fully occupied basically all the time. then you can make them a heck of a lot safer than they are today. And that's really what a lot of the safety statistics point at. The other thing that I would mention is it is incredibly frequent that we have controlled flight into terrain, which is effectively what happened to Kobe. It was an intact helicopter and a mountain that was there at the beginning of their flight and they got spatially disoriented because they flew into a cloud. So if you have technology that can stabilize the aircraft and tell you where you are in space and not require the pilot to be, again, poking at that ball on top of the bowl, then you can avoid things like that.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, unfortunately And so it doesn't really leave you much left to think, or there's no other extremity. You literally have one hand on one stick and another hand on the other, and then both of your feet on pedals. So if something goes wrong or you have to do something inside the cockpit, there's not a lot of available cognitive load. As to why the helicopter has existed for so long and what type of utility they can have, I think Igor Sikorsky's quote was a great one. He basically said, the airplane can fly over you and drop a life jacket, whereas a helicopter will actually stop and save your life. And so this flying car future a lot of people point to where imagine getting from point A to point B in a more efficient way really can be offered with a helicopter, but it's been held back because it's so hard to fly and because of the complexity of flying, the safety record is what it is. And I would say if you can come up with a way to make the helicopter easier to fly.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Currently, helicopters, as we saw with Kobe, they really struggle to fly through clouds. It's not a very safe thing. In fact, the United States Helicopter Safety Team sites 56 seconds from entering the cloud until on average, it's a fatal accident. And so how do you make it so that not only can the machine fly through a cloud, but how do you make it so it's rated to take off when it's cloudy outside? And if you can do that, you can dramatically change the dispatch reliability. And if you can fly more often through clouds, which is necessary if you want to realize the transportation system, then it also redefines the unit economics.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you can drive any vehicle anywhere in the world. And we all kind of take that for granted, but it's basically a consistent human machine interaction. And the skill that we developed is translatable to all those different vehicles. Today, when you learn how to fly an airplane or helicopter, that cockpit is specific to that make model vehicle and has minimal translation in terms of muscle memory to the next one. And so you see professional pilots with just two types of aircraft that they're rated onto fly. That's what they do for a living. And so one of the design requirements that we had was we want to create not just a first ever operating system for this industry, but we also want to leverage that operating system to create a user interface and a cockpit that is the same, irrespective of the airport or helicopter. And we believe that strongly contributes to safety. And then also the requirements around it needs to be able to fly in all weather conditions, which is one of the other things that I think really holds back this industry, especially when we think of this flying car, flying taxi future.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dozens, if not hundreds of different ways. When you have a fully digital system that is working through a computer, the world is your oyster. You can put whatever you want in there. It could have a thumbstick. It could have two choice sticks. It could have pedals. It could have whatever you want. And it took us a very long time to figure out, well, given we have this human and computer working together, how do we capture the human intent and how do we do it in real time given they can change their mind at any given moment? We're actually on the right path initially, but it's one thing to have a conceptual design of one control stick and two touchscreens, it's a whole other to realize it and then solve for all the edge cases. And then the other layer on top of that is we wanted to create a universal interface across all different airplanes and helicopters. So today when you get into a different helicopter airplane, no two are the same. Unlike the car where you get into a Prius or choose your vehicle forward fusion, it's exactly the same. It's a steering wheel gas pedal, brake pedal.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Loop fundamentally believe in the human plus the machine can do something greater than some of the parts. And that's the same is true of the elevator. It's not reading your brain and figuring out where you want to go. So in the early days, we did have an unmanned helicopter flying around three months after I founded the company and no safety pilot on board, which was a first in a lot of respects. And which also goes to show you, it's not that hard to build an unmanned flying machine. The hard part is taking that technology and graduating it to a very high level of safety and capturing the real time intention and skill of the pilot. That's what's taken us the better part of seven or eight years. And so how do you leverage the best of automation and the best of the human pilot together or aspiring to create the safest mode of transportation? Do we want there to be zero deaths in the industry on an annual basis? So there were a lot of question marks around what is that optimal human machine interface look like? And we iterated on”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The interesting thing that's remained true the whole time is this deep seated belief that we could leverage today's technology to create safer and easier to fly helicopters and airplanes. The question was how do you best leverage that technology inside of the market and inside of the regulatory landscape in order to ship the best possible technology to deliver on that? And when I started the company, one of the things that I think we did that was pretty valuable at different points is we actually deployed pieces of the technology and operationalized it in the field with real missions like flying first responders to scene some emergencies, real 911 calls coming in and operating an air taxi service, which we didn't los angeles. Experiences like that really helped solidify the product requirements and helped us see what are the key value propositions the technology needs to bring to market in order to be successful. I always believe that the human needed to be in the”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They definitely have control over the attitude of the airplane, but there are safety protections around them as they're doing that. And the way to think about this is as a pilot, you're trained in three categories, aviate, navigate, communicate. And the navigate and communicate, the best pilots in the world are really, really good and way better than your average. The Aviate portion, which is how do you safely hand the airplane and basically manage the joystick, that part has made a lot easier by the advanced automation systems that you find on a part 25 airliner and are completely absent in general aviation today.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, engine failure definitely makes it towards the top of the list, but the number one cause of fatal accidents, and not just helicopters, but all general aviation is loss of control in flight, which is actually wild when you think about it because what that means is you have a perfectly good flying machine, a good flying airplane of effective flying helicopter. And usually the pilot becomes spatially disoriented and no longer is stabilizing the aircraft with the right side up and the other side down and starts putting in the wrong control input. And then that quickly leads to exiting the flight envelope, which is then unrecoverable. Engine failure is definitely up there as well. And in the case of the airplane and the helicopter, you can safely walk away, of course, from an engine failure. And an airplane, because it becomes a glider in the helicopter because of the high rotor inertia of the one large spinning disc that allows you to do the auto rotation. But the same cannot be said true for aircraft that do not have one large spinning rotor.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's the same technology that existed when the Wright brothers first flew. The Wright Brothers called it wing warping, and they had this giant stick that they held onto and they pushed and pulled it left and right. And then on the ends of the stick were the cables and those cables connected to the ends of the wing and it literally warped the wing. Today we have hinges and ailerons, which is the only major difference. But otherwise, it's exactly the same. Helicopter controls also haven't changed since Igor Sikorsky first flew over half a century ago. It's exactly the same mechanical connections.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That it would cost it to stall, and therefore they got a very graceful, gradual descent into the river and settled beautifully and resulted in minimal damage to the aircraft and ultimately no lives lost. If you contrast that with general aviation, that room doesn't exist and it's entirely mechanical, much like a go-kart or your bicycle where the mechanical connection of the human is actually directly coupled to the flight control surface itself. So when you push or pull on the yoke or the stick, whatever exists inside the cockpit of your choice, there's actually a bunch of levers and pulleys or push-pull tubes that connect it directly to the flight control surface. And there's no computer in the loop whatsoever, which means that, yes, you're directly controlling the flight control surface, but there's no intermediate computer. There's nothing helping you. There's nothing supporting you as the pilot to staying inside what we call the safe flight envelope. For example, keeping the airplane from stalling.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so today inside these rooms underneath the cockpit is the whole bunch of processing power that basically translates the pilot's input to the flight control surface output. So when the pilot bowls back on the stick, we all expect the airplane knows to come up. And so right now there's no mechanical connection in most all commercial airliners between the pilot's input and what's actually happening on the back of the jet. Instead, the pilots communicating via copper wires to that room and then the computers are communicating to an actuator that actually changes the pitch of the control surface. And that's ultimately what changes the attitude of the airplane. Because of that computer in the loop, it gives the opportunity for an automation system to provide protection. So for example, when Soley Solenberger landed that airplane on the Hudson River, he had the benefit of this technology. And no matter how hard he pulled back on that stick, the fly-by-wire system and the computers down in that room wouldn't change the pitch of the aircraft to be so much.”
2024-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source