Flying Cars: From Cloud to Cloud

Ernest de Leon:
Hey, did you know that there was a study done and, on average humans accidentally consume several spiders a year while they’re asleep?

Jolie Hales:
That’s like an old wives’ tale, isn’t it?

Ernest de Leon:
Well, every time someone clears it-

Jolie Hales:
Why are you bringing that up?

Ernest de Leon:
Every time I clear my throat, I think about, “did I ingest a spider last night unintentionally?”

Jolie Hales:
Well, now, every time you clear your throat, I’m going to be like, “Spider.”

Ernest de Leon:
I can’t get that spider out.

Jolie Hales:
Hi, everyone. I’m Jolie Hales.

Ernest de Leon:
And I’m Ernest de Leon.

Jolie Hales:
And welcome to the Big Compute Podcast.

Jolie Hales:
Here, we celebrate innovation in a world of virtually unlimited compute. And we do it one important story at a time. We talk about the stories behind scientists and engineers who are embracing the power of high performance computing to better the lives of all of us.

Ernest de Leon:
From the products we used every day to the technology of tomorrow, computational engineering plays a direct role in making it all happen whether people know it or not.

Jolie Hales:
Hey, Ernest.

Ernest de Leon:
What?

Jolie Hales:
What? It sounds like you’re really looking forward to this.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah.

Jolie Hales:
Does the date October 21st, 2015 have any significance for you?

Ernest de Leon:
10-21-2015.

Jolie Hales:
And don’t read ahead in the script.

Ernest de Leon:
No, not really. Not particularly.

Jolie Hales:
Well, maybe this will help you out.

Back to the Future Part II, 1989 :
Hey, Doc. We’d better back up. We don’t have enough road to get up to 88.

Back to the Future Part II, 1989 :
Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

Back to the Future Part II, 1989 :
Say, Marty. Marty, I wanted to show you these new matchbooks for my auto detailing I had printed up.

Back to the Future Part II, 1989 :
A flying DeLorean? What the hell is going on here?

Ernest de Leon:
Wow, such a bad CG.

Jolie Hales:
But now, does it make sense?

Ernest de Leon:
Yep, it does.

Jolie Hales:
Okay, awesome. So October 21st, 2015, as you can see in this clip, was actually celebrated by many in real life as being Back to the Future Day.

News Clip- WNT:
Today is October 21st, 2015, a date significant to fans of the Back to the Future movies.

News Clip- ABC Action News:
You’re probably noticing a lot of references to hoverboards and DeLoreans.

News Clip- HuffPost:
When the clock reads 4:29 p.m. today, the future becomes the present.

Back to the Future Part II, 1989 :
We’re descending toward Hill Valley, California on Wednesday, October 21st, 2015.

Back to the Future Part II, 1989 :
The future. Unbelievable.

News Clip- HuffPost:
Marty McFly and company arrived from the past on this day in Back to the Future 2.

News Clip- WNT:
Michael J. Fox or Marty McFly’s version of the future featured hoverboards and flying cars.

Jolie Hales:
So the first part of the second movie shows a bunch of flying cars. Now, obviously, in reality, October 21st, 2015 came and went. And I don’t know about you, Ernest, but I have yet to ride in a flying car. Let alone see one fly over my head at any point in time.

Jolie Hales:
So, while the movies totally hold up in awesomeness, they didn’t quite ace the tech fortune telling.

News Clip- BBC News:
Now, it’s changed into a hover board. I’m not sure how that works. But that’s just crazy. It’s stupid.

Jolie Hales:
And similar to our AI movies discussion we had recently, although we won’t go into depth with movies today, it’s fascinating to see what filmmakers were envisioning for the year 2015 when it came to vehicles. That said, we do see some innovations today that weren’t put to screen back then like for instance, we have driverless vehicles today. Whereas while cars could fly in Back to the Future, they all still had drivers as far as I can tell.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, it’s pretty funny to see in general. You can go all way back to the 1950s and even before then in ’40s and look at science fiction literature and just see how odd it is that this one area has some hyper unrealistic thing, but at the end of the day, it’s still being constrained by some kind of human limitation.

Jolie Hales:
Right.

Ernest de Leon:
And I too do not own a flying car. However, I frequently got on flying buses-

Jolie Hales:
Wait.

Ernest de Leon:
But-

Jolie Hales:
Flying buses like an airbus? Like a plane?

Ernest de Leon:
Like an airplane.

Jolie Hales:
Are you making a joke?

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, it’s literally a flying bus. That’s what it is.

Jolie Hales:
Got you.

Ernest de Leon:
It’s public transportation. It’s not my own plane.

Jolie Hales:
I was just thinking magic school bus, the bus that actually flies around.

Ernest de Leon:
Oh, yeah, that one.

Jolie Hales:
I was like I want to get on a magical school bus. That sounds like fun. We could sing fun songs and learn about lizards.

Ernest de Leon:
And go inside the human body.

The Magic School Bus: Inside Ralphie:
Can we travel through his bloodstream to get to his throat?

The Magic School Bus: Inside Ralphie:
Absolutely, Dorothy Ann.

Jolie Hales:
So thinking back to Back to the Future 2 makes me ask the question, will cars actually ever fly? And if they do, when? Now, lucky for us, there are people out there working to answer these very questions. Specifically one of these people is-

Madhu Bhabuta:
Madhu Bhabuta.

Jolie Hales:
… who works as the-

Madhu Bhabuta:
Chief information officer for Vertical Aerospace.

News Clip- CNBC:
Vertical Aerospace. And there is a star-studded roster of companies backing this SPAC.

News Clip- Yahoo Finance:
Vertical Aerospace is going public via a $2.2 billion SPAC.

News Clip- CNBC:
Avolon, which is the aircraft-leasing firm, American, Honeywell, Rolls Royce. Virgin Atlantic is also playing a role in this.

Jolie Hales:
They are a UK-based aerospace tech company designing and building that very thing that we’ve been dreaming about since watching the DeLorean hit the skies in the ’80s. Flying cars.

Madhu Bhabuta:
Vertical Aerospace was founded close to four years ago. It was founded by a real visionary. It was founded by Stephen Fitzpatrick who’s passionate about electric, electrifying aerospace, electrifying Formula 1. He had this dream of creating the world’s first air taxis. And it comes from a very deep set belief in his core about having a greener, cleaner world where we are not polluting the planet with gas turbine emissions.

Madhu Bhabuta:
And yet, we’re not bringing the world to a standstill by going back to a very sedentary lifestyle. The fact is that travel is here. It’s here with us to stay. Our roads are congested. We cannot physically build any more roads. People want to travel. They need to get from A to B. How do you do it? And one way of doing it is to use the highways in the sky, to actually create the ability to hop from city to city, to hop from one east to west of a city or from north to south of a city in a clean way.

Jolie Hales:
Well, I don’t know about you, Ernest, but I am sold. Bring these babies to the market today, please.

Ernest de Leon:
Yes, although I will caveat that with one thing. If you’ve seen the typical Bay Area driver, you don’t want them anywhere near a flying car.

Jolie Hales:
But that’s okay, but Vertical has that solved too, as we’ll see in a minute here. But I remember a few years back. So I had a commute that was probably only about 12 miles long, right?. And every time I get home from work, I was always in the worst possible mood because I had been sitting in aggravating Southern California, bumper to bumper traffic for an hour and a half.

Jolie Hales:
Now, remember, it was only a 12-mile commute. I mean, California traffic is just so bad. I mean, I know it’s that way in San Francisco. It’s like that down here at Southern California. So eventually, I ended up moving only four miles closer to the place I worked at one point, and doing that shaved off 45 minutes from my afternoon commute. And that time really adds up.

Jolie Hales:
Getting to work as the crow flies would have been life-changing. You can do a lot with the time that you get back.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah. At that point, I would have just ridden a bike because at least you could just pass up the traffic while it’s sitting there.

Jolie Hales:
The bummer is it’s not a very bike-friendly path either, but yeah.

Ernest de Leon:
That’s true.

Jolie Hales:
I did take a segway once. But the segway took an hour.

Ernest de Leon:
I would love to ride a bike, but again, because of the drivers here, I’m paranoid that I’m going to get hit.

Jolie Hales:
You’re going to hit by a car.

Ernest de Leon:
No one is paying attention to people on a bike.

Jolie Hales:
Exactly. And that’s more of the concern for me too. But I really appreciate the green approach that Vertical Aerospace is going for. Instead of saying, “Okay, all of our travel is polluting the planet, everyone needs to go back to horses and buggies, or trains or something like that.” They’re taking a more forward-thinking approach by saying, “Hey, traditional travel isn’t great for the planet. So let’s come up with a better, cleaner way to travel that doesn’t sacrifice our ability to visit one place or the other.”

Ernest de Leon:
That’s true. And it’s good to see because a lot of people don’t know this, but a lot of locomotives even though they may burn diesel, they’re actually electric motors. The diesel engines are powering generators to move the-

Jolie Hales:
Really?

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, it’s not like a direct transmission like a vehicle. So they pioneered the electric vehicle movement if you want to call it that, and then passenger vehicles Tesla did and of course, now, the other manufacturers are coming on board. But the next frontier on this is cleaning up air travel and that’s one of the biggest polluters out there. So seeing someone say, “Hey, we want to address the problems of traffic and congestion but in a way that isn’t going to add to the problem,” that’s great.

Jolie Hales:
I completely agree. And Vertical Aerospace is actually pretty close to putting flying cars in our skies. In fact, they’ve already produced two different prototypes that have already taken flight. So they really have been in the skies already but they’re coming to the public sky soon. They’re working on their third prototype which will be the precursor to the certified version, the version that will be given the stamp of approval that it’s actually ready for humans.

Madhu Bhabuta:
Our aims are to go into production by 2024, and there is a lot to do before then.

Jolie Hales:
2024. That is just a couple of years away. Can you imagine what it would be like to see flying cars in just a few years?

Ernest de Leon:
I am waiting.

Jolie Hales:
It’d be amazing. And while I tend to lean toward the ultra-scientific term flying car, there’s actually a more official term for these kinds of vehicles. They’re called eVTOLs or E-V-T-O-L, which stands for Electric Vertical Take Off and Landing and they’re really at the cutting edge of the aerospace industry right now.

Jolie Hales:
Two distinguishing capabilities of eVTOLs are for one, being able to take off vertically as their name suggests so they don’t need a runway. And two, being able to transition between vertical and forward flight. So kind of like a helicopter except electric, much quieter and as we’ll talk about more in a bit, apparently much safer as well.

Ernest de Leon:
Right, I mean I think the, I don’t know if it’s the navy … Let’s just say the military has had a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft for a very long time now. But it is powered by fossil fuel. So this is kind of taking that concept and saying, “Hey, let’s make it where it doesn’t impact the planet negatively and also scale it down because I believe the one that the military uses is quite large.

Jolie Hales:
Massive.

Ernest de Leon:
So it seems like it’s a perfect fit for Vertical Aerospace to jump into this market.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah, I think so. And as Vertical Aerospace has been developing the design of their eVTOLs, they’ve gone through a couple of iterations but I want to show you a picture of their latest design and then we can describe what it looks like to our listeners. And for anyone who wants to see a picture themselves, we do have one posted on our episode page on bigcompute.org so you can see it there.

Jolie Hales:
Ernest, here is that latest prototype picture. Okay so, how would you describe it?

Ernest de Leon:
I would describe it as if S.H.I.E.L.D. were to design a small aircraft that could do vertical takeoff and landing that wasn’t the helicarrier thing they have, it would look like this.

Jolie Hales:
Okay, I can see that. I can see S.H.I.E.L.D. flying around in this thing.

Ernest de Leon:
That’s very sleek. The design, obviously aerodynamic but even the tail wing is different from a typical passenger aircraft.

Jolie Hales:
I’ve never seen one like this.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, it’s V-shaped. It almost reminds me a little bit of like whale’s tail.

Jolie:
Yeah!

Ernest de Leon:
And the one thing I would kind of point out here is that the fuselage on this thing looks like it belongs to a helicopter. So it’s like a helicopter with a wing across the top. It’s pretty awesome.

Jolie Hales:
That’s a good way to describe it. So if you can’t see this, it’s a black, kind of almost airplane-looking device, but it’s much more sleek and just as Ernest described, it has a fuselage that looks like a helicopter, like a futuristic helicopter. But then, instead of one rotor on top like a helicopter, it has a kind of airplane wing. But then the airplane wing has eight prop blades on it.

Jolie Hales:
So it’s like a mix of a helicopter and an airplane and a drone and S.H.I.E.L.D. from The Avengers.

Ernest de Leon:
Pretty much. It’s all of the above. I think they should go for a co-branding opportunity with Marvel on this.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah, for real. First of all, it’s an absolutely beautiful machine. It’s super sleek. It looks really futuristic. Bravo to the design team. But the thing that stuck out to me when I first saw it is that ever since I was a kid, I pictured flying cars or air taxis or whatever to look like cars as we know them today. Maybe that’s because of seeing the DeLorean as a kid.

Jolie Hales:
Like, I expected them to be this sleek-looking futuristic car body with maybe wheels that fold up into it or something when it takes off from the road into the air, probably accompanied by some fancy blue hover lights. But when I look at the X4, which is the name of this latest Vertical prototype, it looks more like a small futuristic airplane than an actual car. And as you might imagine, there’s a good reason for that.

Madhu Bhabuta:
The reason you have a winged aircraft is because it’s a lot more efficient in its battery usage.

Jolie Hales:
And I can only assume that efficient battery usage is a huge plus here. For example, I have a couple of DGI camera drones that I use for various film projects, and they are a few years old now so I imagined that the newer models have improved on this. But basically, the bulk of each of the drones is the battery.

Video Clip, woman’s voice:
Critically low battery.

Jolie Hales:
The batteries are really big. They take a while to charge. And that wouldn’t be much of an issue really except that each battery only gives you about 15 minutes of good flight time before you have the land the drone and then swap out for another battery, which is honestly kind of a pain when you’re trying to get a great cinematic shot because you have to keep resetting.

Jolie Hales:
So when thinking about a flying car, although they would be obviously quite different from a drone in many ways, it wouldn’t work at all to have a battery that only lasts 15 minutes or 30 minutes or even an hour is really not enough time. I think Tesla batteries give you 250 miles or something, which would be what? Like four plus hours at an average speed of driving 60 miles per hour or so.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, I’m trying to think of what our Tesla gives us, but it’s around that. On the one hand, yes, 15 minutes is too short, maybe even 30 minutes. But it’s one of those things where you’re now moving as the crow flies as opposed to being bound by roads that have congestion and have to take roundabout ways to get places. So if you’re cutting down the total distance, then it might be possible that maybe an hour is enough time for most use cases.

Ernest de Leon:
Obviously, if you’re trying to go farther than that, then things change. So I guess the question is, where is the cutoff? Do you want to go from San Francisco to San Jose? Or do you want to go from San Francisco to LA? That’s kind of two different things there.

Jolie Hales:
And I think what you’re saying makes perfect sense. I think it’s more of the safety aspect, like knowing that the battery only lasts 60 minutes. I don’t know that I want to get into a machine knowing that because if there’s anything that delays your ability to land, it’s terrifying. Even when flying the drones, when I first had these drones, they were expensive drones. And this short amount of battery terrified me, because what if I had the drone way too far away at the point that I needed it to land? I’d never find it again or maybe it would just fly off into who knows what land … You know what I mean? There’s all these nightmare scenarios that were in my mind because of the short battery usage.

Jolie Hales:
If I had to get inside of a vehicle, then I would want that battery to have a big buffer on it so that if, for instance, you want to land on a certain helipad and there’s already another vehicle there and you have to circle around for a little bit that somebody deciding to take a long coffee break on the ground or something isn’t going to cause us to fall to our deaths or something.

Jolie Hales:
I’m being super dramatic and I know Vertical has thought of all these things and it’s not really applicable to them, but that’s what I think of when I think of the battery usage.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, it reminds of like, have you ever flown on those small puddle hopper planes between islands in Hawaii?

Jolie Hales:
I thought I was going to die. I flew one in Guatemala and I was like, “Well, this is how I go down.”

Ernest de Leon:
It always cracks me up when they come ask you like, “How much do you weigh?” And you’re like, “Why does that matter?” And they’re like, “Well, we have to figure out how much fuel to put in the plane?” And so my answer is going to be like, “I weigh 800 pounds, fill her up.” That’s going to be my answer because I don’t want to run the risk of you put just enough in to get there and then something happens.

Jolie Hales:
Or you undersell your weight because that’s what humans do and then it ends up not quite making it there, because you had some vanity problem.

Ernest de Leon:
Right.

Jolie Hales:
So the battery power is important here, but I did think this was kind of interesting. So Madhu mentioned earlier that they’re working on their third flying prototype right now, the X4, which we saw in the picture with wings and we talked about it. But here, Ernest, I’ve got a clip here for you to take a look at. This is a video of what the X2 looks like which is an earlier prototype from 2019.

Ernest de Leon:
Interesting. This is more like just a typical camera’s drone because it doesn’t have a tail?

Jolie Hales:
Exactly. Yeah, the X2 doesn’t have wings on it like the X4. It looks more like a mix between a futuristic helicopter and a drone, like a camera drone to me. Instead, it has a main body or fuselage where the people would sit and then it’s surrounded by propellers all around, above it on like six different arms that jut out. So the design and the body of Vertical’s eVTOL as they say have definitely evolved over time as we can see.

Jolie Hales:
So in this case, the design went from looking more like a drone to pretty much sprouting wings and looking more like an airplane. And that’s because in just a short amount of time, engineers at Vertical Aerospace have been able to perform a large number of … Care to guess?

Ernest de Leon:
Simulations.

Jolie Hales:
Yes, simulations. In fact, Vertical is especially interesting to us at Big Compute because they run their simulations 100% in the cloud which, as we know, allows them to get results as quickly as necessary and iterate very quickly as well. Because remember, Vertical Aerospace was only founded in 2016 and they’re already working on their third flying prototype which I think is pretty impressive.

Jolie Hales:
If all goes according to plan, their beautiful eVTOLs will be in the skies in less than a decade after the company was first founded. Kind of funny to think about when you compare that to the slow development of something like Concorde, the supersonic jet that took years to come up with, the design for a single aircraft because they had to do so much testing and wind tunnels as opposed to having access to good computational simulation.

Ernest de Leon:
Right. Yeah. The important thing to point out here is that simulation, it isn’t so much like the simulation is going to tell you what exactly to do. It’s more like the simulation is going to tell you what not to do. And then it narrows down the band or the area of focus. You have to create actual prototypes out of it. And yeah, before simulations like this, manufacturers literally had to make prototypes of every single component: wings, engines and everything every time and then run them to failure and then iterate on that design.

Ernest de Leon:
So, this is a much faster and much cheaper way of doing it.

Jolie Hales:
Perfectly said, and we’ll talk more about computational simulation’s role at Vertical Aerospace in just a few minutes. But first, let’s talk more about why the Vertical prototype went from no wings to wings.

Madhu Bhabuta:
You can use the power of air itself, so the air flow and the air currents, to guide the aircraft. To actually allow it to cruise, basically. So that’s why the wings are so important because they help lift the aircraft. So if you didn’t have wings, there would be a lot of reliance on having the rotors continuously going at a very high speed to keep the aircraft both in alignment and flying.

Madhu Bhabuta:
With wings, you can use the power of the drafts of the air itself to reduce the amount of battery drain.

Ernest de Leon:
We’ve all flown in a plane, right?. When they take off, they have to generate an immense amount of thrust to get that thing moving because it weighs so much. But once it generates lift, and it can get into the air, they throttle back on the engines because they don’t need that much anymore and they’re moving forward. They’re not solely counteracting gravity.

Ernest de Leon:
Whereas a helicopter has the opposite problem. Not only does it have to generate life to get off the ground, but the higher it goes, the thinner the atmosphere is, it has to generate that much power and even increase it over time. So they just burn a lot of energy, whatever kind it is, whether it’s fuel or battery. So drones like you and I think of, these little ones with cameras with four propellers, they have very short flight spans.

Ernest de Leon:
And a military drone, which is a winged aircraft, some of those can fly for 24 hours on one fueling, whatever type of fuel that you use. So, the efficiency is just much, much better.

Jolie Hales:
And going back to the flying DeLorean. Well filmmakers across time have had their own unique talents and skills. Engineers, they are not. For example, and this will come as an epic surprise, I’m sure. But I looked up all the flying cars I could find in movies across time. And only three of the flying cars out of the 13 that I found had wings. And we won’t spend a lot of time on this, but do you want to hear the full list?

Ernest de Leon:
Sure.

Jolie Hales:
So the movies that showed flying cars with wings were Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in 1968.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang- 1968:
You’re a genius.

Jolie Hales:
James Bond’s The Man with the Golden Gun in 1974.

The Man with the Golden Gun- 1974:
Ain’t none of you pointy heads ever seen an airplane before?

Jolie Hales:
And Spaceballs in 1987, if you remember the-

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah. It was the flying Winnebago. That thing was awesome.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah.

Spaceballs:
Bob. Oh, this is what I mean.

Ernest de Leon:
Spaceballs was a parody movie, right? It was making fun of Star Wars. But I think Bond is a little bit different in that, and I realized this is a stretch here, but they’re trying to be a little bit more realistic about their designs as opposed to just straight up Star Trek and then Star Wars, which are like, “Okay, we’re just going to bend the laws of physics because it’s a movie and no one is going to care.”

Jolie Hales:
Right. And to your point, the James Bond car that flies, it looks more like a full-on airplane with huge wings and then there’s just kind of a car attached underneath it. And I can actually see somebody trying to build and fly that. And then the movies that showed flying cars without wings were The Absent-Minded Professor in 1961.

The Absent-Minded Professor- 1961:
An unidentified flying object is over the city. The flying object-

The Absent-Minded Professor- 1961:
I don’t see anything. Do you?

The Absent-Minded Professor- 1961:
No.

Jolie Hales:
Grease in 1978, because I don’t know if you remember this but the car flies away in the final scene for who knows what reason? So I counted that.

Ernest de Leon:
I’ve seen it, but I don’t remember it. It’s been a while since I’ve seen that movie.

Jolie Hales:
The ending is so stupid.

Grease- 1978:
(singing)

Jolie Hales:
Also Blade Runner in 1982, which was also on our AI list.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah.

Blade Runner- 1982:
Over the landing threshold.

Jolie Hales:
And obviously, the Back to the Future movies in the ’80s.

Back to the Future Part II, 1989 :
Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

Jolie Hales:
The Jetsons movie in 1990.

Jetsons: The Movie-1990:
Meet George Jetson.

Jolie Hales:
Judge Dredd in 1995.

Judge Dredd- 1995:
Step out of the car, please.

Jolie Hales:
The Fifth Element in 1997.

The Fifth Element- 1997:
If they don’t chase you after a mile, they don’t chase you.

Jolie Hales:
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in 2002.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets- 2002:
Now, all we need to do is catch up with the train.

Jolie Hales:
2012’s Total Recall.

Total Recall- 2012:
Get in, now.

Jolie Hales:
And then Blade Runner 2049, which was the sequel of course that came out in 2017.

Blade Runner 2049- 2017:
Where are we going?

Blade Runner 2049- 2017:
Home.

Jolie Hales:
And that list actually feels too small. I swear I must be missing some. I mean, if you counted movies where cars, of course, were launched off of ramps or bridges, or something like that and they temporarily flew through the air during a car chase or some explosion, then the list would be ginormous. But I didn’t count any of those.

Ernest de Leon:
Movies themselves, this list might be comprehensive, but I think that if you start taking into account like TV series and whatnot, you’ll find that there’s a lot more of these flying cars. And like you said, they almost all kind of share two different things in common. One of them is that they take a literal car and make it fly by some kind of magic.

Ernest de Leon:
Or the other one is like the Star Trek thing where they just take this boxy thing, put a window in front of it, and it just flies around. There’s plenty of shows I can think of where your flying transportation did not at all look like a car.

Jolie Hales:
From supersonic jets to personalized medicine, industry leaders are turning to Rescale to power science and engineering breakthroughs. Rescale is a full stack automation solution for hybrid cloud that helps IT and HPC leaders deliver intelligent computing as a service and enables the enterprise transformation to digital R&D.

Jolie Hales:
As a proud sponsor of the Big Compute Podcast, Rescale would especially like to say thank you to all the scientists and engineers out there who are working to make a difference for all of us.

Jolie Hales:
Rescale, intelligent computing for digital R&D. Learn more at rescale.com/bcpodcast.

Jolie Hales:
Even though I didn’t see as many flying car movies as I’ve seen AI movies at this point, it’s clear that pop culture is interested in flying cars. But not only is pop culture is interested, actual companies across the globe these days are very interested as well.

Madhu Bhabuta:
We have already sold 1,300 aircraft off plan, so we are one of the most successful electric VTOL companies on the planet today.

Jolie Hales:
1,300 aircraft orders already in and that’s from a range of different kinds of companies. From, and I’m going to slaughter this name, is it Marubeni?

Ernest de Leon:
I think so.

Video clip, Marubeni:
From Marubeni.

Jolie Hales:
…Corporation in Japan to American Airlines. And it seems to be a range of companies that are jumping on board because there’s a range of ways that these flying cars could be used.

Madhu Bhabuta:
Airports, who need to shuttle people from one side to another side or to bring passengers to the airport who then go on to long haul flights.

Jolie Hales:
Which for anyone who has ever had to drive to LAX during the holidays or really any days, that is a big deal. Once, I remember it took us two hours to go one mile around the airport, one mile. It was insane. I was going crazy. It’s a good thing we left our house like four hours early or else we would have missed our international flight.

Jolie Hales:
So obviously, I’m in favor of this. And at first, electric aircraft like those at Vertical will best be served for short distance trips like a trip to the airport or so.

Madhu Bhabuta:
But what we can do is reduce dramatically the emissions of people getting to these points of confluence like airports, like railway stations.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah. It will kind of be like the first and last mile vehicle of transportation, where it takes you to a larger form of transportation that moves many people and then when you get to the destination of that thing, then it takes you to your last hop which could be your home, your hotel or wherever you’re staying.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah, it sounds exactly like that. At least at first, because these vehicles will be new. And I’m guessing things like battery life and infrastructure development probably really play into that. But if we embrace the technology early, maybe that evolution can be fast. In fact, as I spoke to Madhu, I just kept thinking that rideshare companies, for instance, like Uber and Lift, really need to jump onboard so that I can page a rideshare and then have an eVTOL land on my driveway. Oh, my gosh, that would be so cool.

Jolie Hales:
And then I did a little bit of research online and apparently, Uber is already planning to use eVTOLs in its future and they’ve partnered with an eVTOL in their development. In fact, there are a number of eVTOL companies working in parallel to come up with the best designs to land the most solid contracts, and Vertical is ranked as one of the best. So I, for one, am excited to see where they land. No pun intended. Hahaha.

Ernest de Leon:
That was so bad.

Jolie Hales:
I know, it was like an Ernest joke, you should have said that joke.

Ernest de Leon:
I know, it should have been mine.

Jolie Hales:
You’re rubbing off on me, Ernest. Also, one thing that sets eVTOLs apart from a drone per se is that eVTOLs in the near future will have pilots. Pilots actually onboard. So, a person will control them from inside the vehicle as opposed to being remote-controlled like a drone is.

Jolie Hales:
And that’s not because of the technology available …

Madhu Bhabuta:
There may come a time when there is enough public acceptance of being able to travel in a drone. I think we’re very, very far off from that. So even if it is possible technically, I think a droned aircraft in which people would be willing to sit, it’s going to take some time to get there.

Jolie Hales:
So, pilots first and then when everybody is maybe a bit more comfortable with seeing these puppies in the sky, and maybe when driverless cars on the ground are more trusted, then people will be willing to hop in a remote controlled air vehicle.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, I think that’s the key here right, because I have a Tesla and it essentially drives itself. Now, it’s not fully autonomous. I don’t want to misrepresent it. But I trust it, for the most part. It would be a little bit more difficult to trust a flying vehicle just because, if the Tesla autopilot stops functioning for some reason, it cedes control back to me as the driver.

Jolie Hales:
That’s a good point.

Ernest de Leon:
And I know how to drive. I don’t know how to fly. If that thing, something happens to it and it turns control over to me, I’m not going to know what to do with it. That’s why you want the pilot at least in the beginning. At a certain point, the AI will become so good that even if there’s a failure, it will, I don’t know, throw a parachute up and land gently somewhere. That’s fine. I’m okay with that once that’s been proven. But a car and a flying object are just kind of different in terms of what you’re capable of controlling if something goes wrong.

Ernest de Leon:
But, you know, just look at commercial airlines. So, most large commercial aircraft today, most, not every single one, they auto-takeoff and land and they autopilot. The pilots do take over at a certain point, but the thing is for 90% plus of your flight, the pilot is just an insurance policy if something goes wrong. The plane can fly itself. So, same thing, people are not going to be comfortable if they get in and like there is no cockpit. It’s just a computer doing everything. Right now, they will be uncomfortable with that.

Jolie Hales:
But down the line …

Ernest de Leon:
… 20, 30 years from now, yeah, they’ll realize, “Hey, nothing against the pilots but when a machine is trained to think of every situation in a fraction of a second, it’s going to make better decisions than a pilot every single time. But, we’re just not there yet. The technology is not there yet.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah. I think that’s very well put. And as far as Vertical’s latest prototype is concerned, it will basically be big enough to fit a pilot, four passengers and luggage. So again, comparable to an Uber except the driver is a pilot, not just somebody like us. And the vehicle flies, so maybe I shouldn’t compare this to an Uber. Maybe I should compare it more with a helicopter.

Jolie Hales:
In fact, the X4 is designed to be small enough to easily utilize heliports normally constructed for helicopters, so easy landing and takeoff points are already available around the globe. So that’s nice. It makes the infrastructure a little bit easier, at least for the beginning. But an eVTOL like the X4 is much different than a helicopter in many ways, not just in the fact that they’re electric.

Jolie Hales:
In fact, I’m curious Ernest, have you ever ridden in a helicopter?

Ernest de Leon:
I did one time, but it was like one of those, you pay for a tour and they kind of fly you around to take photographs. I’ve done it one time but I’ve never flown and like, “Hey, I’m taking a helicopter to get from my house to the airport.” Some people are able to do that. I’ve never done that.

Jolie Hales:
I have never done that either. I think I’ve flown in a helicopter a couple times exactly like you. I was totally that tourist in Hawaii. So, I have ridden in them for recreation but not so much for travel; not to get from point A to point B. My point A is my point B every time I’ve taken one.

Jolie Hales:
But one thing that I remember is that helicopters are just incredibly loud. They’re obviously loud for anyone they fly by on the ground. We all know that when there’s a helicopter nearby, we can hear it. We know it’s there. It’s very obvious. But they’re also super loud for someone inside the helicopter as well to the point where at least in my experience, everyone had to wear these big headphone things with this little microphone so that we could talk to each other through the communication system because there was just no way you could hear the person sitting right next to you otherwise, and it probably, I don’t know, maybe it does hearing damage without those things as well. That’s how loud it is.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, I’m pretty sure it does because you got to think: the way the helicopter is generating thrust is pushing it straight down where you are so that wind has to break over the top of the fuselage that you’re sitting in, and you’re going to hear that. And for the same reason, I’m sure that airline pilots wear the headphones upfront because the wind is breaking on the front of the aircraft.

Ernest de Leon:
But we all know how loud it is no matter where you sit in the fuselage, right? It’s still loud and super annoying. Hopefully in the case of these eVTOLs, they’ve got a better solution in terms of the sound dampening.

Jolie Hales:
And apparently, they do. EVTOLs are supposed to be significantly quieter, and I couldn’t find the sound of one of Vertical’s prototypes online. I looked around, I probably just missed it. But I imagine it just sounds like a big drone because instead of just having the one rotor that’s pushing down on the fuselage, they have multiple rotors across a wing that are much smaller.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, they’re off to the side.

Jolie Hales:
So maybe passengers could actually carry on a conversation inside the fuselage without these mega headphones. I’d be really curious to see if that’s the case.

Ernest de Leon:
Well, I could see like if it was your own family. But if it’s in the context of like a shared thing like an Uber, I would prefer that it make a lot of noise so I don’t have to hear anybody.

Jolie Hales:
Antisocial.

Ernest de Leon:
Nothing makes me madder than when you get on an airplane and you put on your headphones …

Jolie Hales:
And somebody just keeps talking to you.

Ernest de Leon:
Somebody just keeps talking to you and you’re like, “I clearly have these things on for a reason, like I don’t want to talk to you.”

Jolie Hales:
“How dare you be friendly?”

Ernest de Leon:
I know. And it’s always like that same person, they have like no technology. They have a book, like a dead tree in their hands.

Jolie Hales:
Who reads?

Ernest de Leon:
They want to keep talking and I’m like, I really don’t care.

Jolie Hales:
So sad.

Ernest de Leon:
I have a million things I have to get done, even if it’s just listening to music in my case, because that’s mainly what I do.

Jolie Hales:
I have a million songs I need to listen to.

Ernest de Leon:
I’m just relaxing. In that particular scenario, I would not mind if the thing was noisy and I couldn’t hear what anybody was saying.

Jolie Hales:
Note to self, if I ever fly in a plane with you, talk the whole time. Okay. I’m glad we covered that. But in the case of eVTOLs, they’re not just quieter than a helicopter. Stephen Fitzpatrick, who is the founder and CEO of Vertical Aerospace, has described their eVTOLs as being 100 times safer. For one …

Madhu Bhabuta:
But neither can a helicopter. You can see that they have a single point of failure. That single point of failure is it has just one rotor. Our aircraft is going to have eight rotors.

Jolie Hales:
Additionally, since the X4 has wings, it also has the ability to glide. And beyond that …

Madhu Bhabuta:
The rest of it all comes from the IT. It comes from understanding the data. It comes from a very simple aircraft. You want to build aircraft that are not hideously complicated. When things are very, very complicated, that’s where errors arise. You want to have a very cleanly designed and built aircraft, which is very easy to troubleshoot and super easy to maintain.

Madhu Bhabuta:
It also sends live information into our systems about performance, so you’re able to actually monitor it all the time. It’s got its live support connected into the Vertical cloud and we’re able to see at any point in time, any aircraft, how it’s performing, any issues whatsoever, what needs to be maintained and keep these aircraft at their very best at all times.

Jolie Hales:
Did you hear that, Ernest? They basically have a digital twin.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah. Where have we heard that term before?

Jolie Hales:
Like every day. And we’ve already established that eVTOLs like Vertical’s X4 are pretty awesome. I would totally ride in one. But to be honest, I assumed straight up when I saw this technology, that it was going to be more like space technology in terms of who would actually be able to take advantage of it. In other words, I couldn’t help picture CEOs and Hollywood elites and senators flying around the sky while the rest of us average Joes drove around on the ground like suckers. But it turns out that will not be the case with Vertical.

Madhu Bhabuta:
Stephen, and we all share his view, is that this aircraft really have to be accessible to all. They can’t be the mainstay of just a particular demographic, especially if you’re serious about climate change, if we really want to make a difference.

Jolie Hales:
She has a point. If rich people are the only ones in eVTOLs while the rest of us are flying in regular airplanes and driving our old pickup trucks, that’s not going to have much of an impact on the environment. So, their goal is to let everyone fly in eVTOLs. But a few things do have to happen first.

Madhu Bhabuta:
This is going to be as pervasive as the infrastructure would allow it to be. So I think the only thing that will determine who gets to sit in this aircraft is how quickly our infrastructure can be built, and that’s the defining factor.

Jolie Hales:
For example, if the government only gives permission for these vehicles to fly like say from the financial district to downtown Manhattan in New York or something, and then they don’t allow for more universal infrastructure across other states and cities, then clearly, only those Richie riches from Wall Street are really going to be able to take advantage.

Jolie Hales:
But if the planning is done and permissions are considered now, then the potential of this technology really taking off for all of us, again no pun intended, is so much higher.

Madhu Bhabuta:
The rest of it is up to the take from authorities and foresight for town, city planners. Businesses will see this opportunity and will grab it.

Jolie Hales:
For example, maybe it starts out that large companies start utilizing these eVTOLs to pick up travelers from the airport and take them to their different campuses or something. But eventually, maybe we start paging our own eVTOLs to come to our homes and take us to grandma’s house. Madhu didn’t use that last one as an example, but I really want to be picked up in one of these from my driveway, so I’m going to keep my fingers crossed for that.

Jolie Hales:
But in order for that to actually be a reality someday, people around the world really do need to be planning ahead now.

Madhu Bhabuta:
Everybody needs to be onboard because it isn’t about creating an electric car for which there are roads and you can go from A to B. This is about genuinely transforming air travel. We know that with even the best battery technology, you can do 60, 70 kilometers today.

Madhu Bhabuta:
And so the city planners, the town planners, the regional planners, I think we all need to rally around this concept and look at how our cities are going to perform in the future and how we have connected travel so that people are very much less reliant on their cars or on things that pollute than they are today.

Madhu Bhabuta:
So, I think everybody needs to start waking up to a new technology that’s emerging in their backyard and thinking, “Wow, what would be a really powerful route for me to do? Where can I use a bicycle, where can I use my legs, where can I use my electric car and where can I use an electric air taxi?”

Ernest de Leon:
So, Tesla is an excellent example if you want to look at the model of how this works. But they have the advantage of having roads already in place. So, a key part of their infrastructure was already there. My wife owns a Tesla, so a little bit biased here.

Ernest de Leon:
But several years ago when we first looking into Teslas, one of the reasons we didn’t buy one was because the areas to charge them were not as abundant and the available charging points that were owned by enterprises, third party, were very slow to charge. Over that time, Tesla made an aggressive push to get supercharger locations all over the country mainly along highly trafficked corridors.

Ernest de Leon:
So now, it turns out we have a Target about a mile or so from our house. The Target has a Tesla supercharger network there and actually most Targets here in the Bay Area have Tesla superchargers now. So, it’s gotten to the point where like there’s two things that have to happen. There’s the funding and then there’s the infrastructure. And those two have to align or the technology will not take off, which is one of the reasons the big auto manufacturers like Ford and Chevy, they kind of stayed back until they saw Tesla prove the model. Now, they all want in on it because there’s a massive lucrative market.

Jolie Hales:
So, it’s like Vertical is the Tesla of the skies, eh?

Ernest de Leon:
Pretty good.

Jolie Hales:
So, let’s go back to talking about just how quickly Vertical’s innovative technology has evolved and what actually makes it possible.

Madhu Bhabuta:
Simulation is really super, super important. It’s probably one of the key cornerstones of everything we do, really.

Jolie Hales:
Enter cloud high-performance computing.

Madhu Bhabuta:
Simulation enables us to understand various different aspects of all the components. The battery, the wing and the computation of fluid dynamics, forces that act upon the wing, the tail design, the rotor design. Literally, everything is simulated component by component to understand how things work and they’re simulated together to understand the effects on the actuators…

Jolie Hales:
I mean, think about all the technology that has been developed before simulation tools like this were available. We mentioned Concorde, but also just think of the original automobile. The first car was patented in 1886, and then it went through basically public iterations starting with this tricycle-looking thing with a gas-powered engine. And then a double pivot steering system was added in 1893. And then the contra engine came along in 1897 and I don’t know what any of this means. I read it online.

Jolie Hales:
But the inventors were basically building what they thought might work and then testing it out and then rebuilding it a little better and then a little better and so forth for decades.

Ernest de Leon:
That’s pretty much how engineering works. You want to get to a flying car, so you start first by making a skateboard. And then you add a pole to the front of the skateboard with a horizontal pole attached that becomes a steering device and then you can now steer the skateboard. Then you add an engine to it. Now, it becomes an escooter.

Ernest de Leon:
Then you scale that out and put a dome over it and it’s a car. And then you make your way until you get to the flying car, so this is just kind of how we do things in general. So, we have to start somewhere and iterate. And in this case, because this is a company and they’re selling to others, you have to iterate not just based on functionality but based on what the market dictates. Does the market care about this feature or not? And if the market is demanding something, you have to build that feature. That’s how it works.

Jolie Hales:
Yeah. And that makes total sense. I think the difference here though is that before computational simulation, every iteration had to be a physical prototype that was constructed. You know what I mean?

Ernest de Leon:
Yes, it’s true. Yes.

Jolie Hales:
Whereas now, they can run a lot of these iterations and make changes digitally before they actually have to build something which saves a ton of time obviously and of course, it would save a ton of money because you’re not having to build like, what, Vertical is working on their third prototype now? Had they not use computational simulation, how many prototypes would that have taken?

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah. They probably would have been 30, 40 prototypes in at this point to get to where they are.

Jolie Hales:
I would imagine.

Ernest de Leon:
And the cost of at least a couple of million a pop, I’m guessing.

Madhu Bhabuta:
Simulation is absolutely huge. It’s the heart and soul. Especially when you’re trying to build something that’s so expensive, is so mission critical, and is so safety critical, you have to be sure what you’re doing completely on paper. And then of course, test it when it’s built so that you are sure that it is 100 times safer.

Jolie Hales:
And they use a lot of different tools to run those simulations.

Madhu Bhabuta:
We use MATLAB. We use Ansys. We use Altair. We use a number of the best tools available on earth basically for aerospace design. We use a lot of 3D, a lot of CAD design tools. And so there’s a lot …

Jolie Hales:
And …

Madhu Bhabuta:
We also use the power of the cloud. I think that’s one of the key things that’s enabled a very small company to do so much. I’ll give you a for instance: before we use the cloud, we use some really high performance computers that were in-house in our small data center. When I did some trials to move the data into the cloud, this is an absolute statement of fact, we had 40 times, which is 4,000% improvement in the time taken to compute. This is pretty staggering.

Madhu Bhabuta:
That means that that time you’re freeing up from your engineer is not sitting there waiting for the results. They can really get cracking. That means something that takes 40 hours takes one hour. It’s so incredible.

Ernest de Leon:
Amazing.

Jolie Hales:
I’m going to say that again, 4,000% improvement when they moved from their on-prem data center into the cloud.

Ernest de Leon:
And this is a very common theme when we talked about cloud. And it’s a hard lesson to learn. I’ve been in this industry for over 25 years now, and I distinctly remember the point in time where I discovered not just the cloud but there’s the context of cloud-based things, this is before what our modern concept of cloud is, I kept thinking, “there’s no way this is going to work.” And the minute it kind of clicked like a bulb turned on in my head, and then I realized it and said, “You know what? Everything is going to go to the cloud.”

Ernest de Leon:
Now, that’s an exaggeration, but at the end of the day, the vast majority of workloads of any kind are going to go to the cloud. And if you’re in doubt of that, just think about it in a consumer context. There was a time when people used to go out and buy CDs, vinyls, cassette tapes. And I realized there’s still some hipsters out there buying vinyls but the point is it’s all strange to us now. It’s gotten to the point where just about anything can be streamed to you. Microsoft just recently released a service where they will actually stream a Windows computer to you.

Jolie Hales:
Really?

Ernest de Leon:
So, you can go and buy the cheapest computer at Best Buy, $200, and then pay Microsoft for what would be equivalent of a $5,000 workstation and just rent it.

Jolie Hales:
That’s crazy.

Ernest de Leon:
You don’t have to worry about upgrading it or anything like that. So, 4,000% improvement is amazing. But I think the bigger story here is there’s a general movement in this direction and it’s not going to end. At some point, just about every high performance computing or supercomputing workload is going to be in the cloud. I think the writing is on the wall at this point. And if you are currently putting out all of the capital for on-prem, you need to look up and call gone-prem.

Gone-Prem Character Clip:
I’m smart enough to know that like if an arrow space engineer wants to shoot his arrows into space, he’s going to want to do it from the cloud because it’s closer instead of from computers down here on the ground.

Gone-Prem Character Clip:
Call gone-prem. We take all of your troubles. And we get rid of ’em for you.

Madhu Bhabuta:
I think the time is gone for people who still have high performance in-house data centers. I just think that for us, there is no other road but to use cloud high performance compute. And genuinely, you can do so much and so much more.

Jolie Hales:
And you’re never going to guess what Vertical Aerospace uses to run simulations in the cloud.

Madhu Bhabuta:
We are 100% on Rescale.

Jolie Hales:
Ernest, use your trailer voice like you did on the Boom Supersonic episode.

Ernest de Leon:
Boom, Rescale.

Jolie Hales:
Yes! That was perfect.

Madhu Bhabuta:
I think the engineers from Rescale who worked with us, absolutely first class, really extremely well-versed to the cloud, extremely good with people and really understand how to take engineers, some of whom really had grown up in very much a on-premise world, and taking them to cloud in the most gentle way. Such a joy to work with, a really good experience all the way through.

Ernest de Leon:
I think the Rescale team will be very happy to hear that.

Jolie Hales:
Presenting sponsor for the win.

Madhu Bhabuta:
We choose the cloud compute, the characteristics of the cloud because you can choose. You have such a big menu of cloud types that you can go to. So, we go quite often for the cloud that has the most cores available to us and the most amount of memory available to us.

Jolie Hales:
And just as we like to ask all of our guests this question, we asked Madhu how long it would have taken her to run simulations on a single four-core desktop computer.

Madhu Bhabuta:
I don’t want to think about it.

Jolie Hales:
I think it’s safe to say, not a few minutes.

Madhu Bhabuta:
We don’t want to go there. It’s just a terrible thought.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah, it’s night and day massive difference for them computationally and just the time constraint, the time in which teams can get their results back and start parsing the data set and discussing with each other the results of it. It’s just night and day, the difference. It’s all there is to it. It’s incredibly fast.

Madhu Bhabuta:
Anyone who’s doing simulation would use a fairly beefy 16 or 32-core machine for sure.

Ernest de Leon:
Yeah.

Madhu Bhabuta:
But then when you move to the cloud, you suddenly have access to 128-cores, like whoosh. You submit your task and it’s done.

Jolie Hales:
And Madhu remembers life before cloud.

Madhu Bhabuta:
Before we actually adopted cloud, we did a proof of concept. And we were thinking of queuing, so we were expecting on jobs to queue. And what we were looking for was something that was brokered [inaudible 00:52:23]. So, something where we would queue our tasks and then get the results back, and the most interesting thing about the proof of concept was there’s no queuing.

Madhu Bhabuta:
Why? Because you can submit all your tasks in parallel if you want and get the results almost instantaneously. The concept doesn’t exist. It’s as long as it takes you to do your task. You don’t have to wait in want-ful manner to do one task after another. I think that is another.

Madhu Bhabuta:
It’s not just about one simulation or one problem. It’s about when … As I said, we are looking at an aircraft in all its dimensions, its subsystems, its subcomponent level. And when you were doing simulation in that scale, you have various teams that are working on various parts of the aircraft and you can’t in parallel submit and in parallel get answers back. So, you haven’t tied up your high performance compute because there’s so much of it available.

Jolie Hales:
And I’ve got to say, how cool is it that Vertical Aerospace gets to take their designs from one cloud to the other cloud. Man, I’m on a roll here today.

Ernest de Leon:
Oh, my god.

Jolie Hales:
You get it? From the computer cloud to the sky clouds? I’m a comedic genius.

Ernest de Leon:
Oh, man. This is …

Jolie Hales:
You’re laughing. I hear you laughing.

Ernest de Leon:
I don’t even know what to say at this point. Well, you’ve taken this show to new heights.

Jolie Hales:
New heights!

Ernest de Leon:
Exactly. But this is important to note. They started their migration in 2019, and the amount of work has been massive just like you said. And it’s one of those things where there are kind of two aspects to this. There is the hardware and the software. So, the cloud providers are partners like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, provided all the hardware, provided all the APIs for you to programmatically apply that hardware and perform these high-performance task in the cloud.

Ernest de Leon:
But that’s the “easy” part. The hard part is configuring all of the software that’s being used to run all these simulations in a way that makes it easy for your engineers, research engineers, scientists to run those simulations and get the results back in a timely manner. And that’s really where the power of Rescale comes in, in that they make that so easy for your engineering organization to where your engineering organization can easily say, “You know what? We don’t even have to worry about this. All we need to do is log in, pick the application we need, feed it the data and get our results.”

Jolie Hales:
Right, so they can focus 100% on what they’re actually trying to do which is develop these amazing flying vehicles, instead of having to worry about all those extra things because somebody else is worried about it for them.

Ernest de Leon:
Exactly.

Jolie Hales:
And how cool is it that we started our childhood with flying cars and Back to the Future, and now it’s actually looking more and more like we’re going to see them in reality? Maybe Hollywood can then make Back to the Future part four and then instead of using bad CG for the flying cars, they could use practical effects and use Vertical’s flying cars. Okay, part four is really a bad idea actually. Let’s not ruin a good thing now. The shark does not need to be jumped.

Ernest de Leon:
Nor does the fridge need to be nuked.

Jolie Hales:
Oh, dude, from Indiana Jones. That scene is so horrible.

Indiana Jones 4- 2008:
Three, two, one, zero.

Ernest de Leon:
It’s funny how many people don’t know “jumping the shark” and “nuking the fridge” because they’re the exact same thing, just decades apart because one of them was from, what, Happy Days or something?

Jolie Hales:
Yeah. I think Fonzie, they’re waterskiing or something, and he actually jumps the shark.

Happy Days- 1974:
There we go, Fonz, I’m heading for the ramp.

Happy Days- 1974:
He’s totally going to do it.

Jolie Hales:
It’s just so over the top ridiculous.

Ernest de Leon:
It was so over the top, exactly.

Madhu Bhabuta:
To be able to build something that could be a real game-changer is really, really exciting. It’s really exciting to see the product take shape. It’s really exciting to see the enterprise systems take shape. Literally, everything, our HR systems, our ERP systems, our manufacturing systems, I just can’t wait. I can’t wait to see these planes roll off the production line.

Madhu Bhabuta:
It’s so amazing when you see a wireframe diagram and you see the simulations and you’ve been part of the journey to say, “No, no, no, no, no, don’t do this on these albeit very high-end computers. Use the cloud. Come on, let’s get the results. Let’s see how this looks like. Let’s try and do something different. Let’s try and use the latest technology.” I think nothing can be more exciting than that. And to see it come to fruition in a few years’ time is… There’s nothing like it really.

Jolie Hales:
To learn more about Vertical Aerospace, you can visit verticalaerospace.com. And you can also find them on LinkedIn where they post a lot of their latest news.

Madhu Bhabuta:
We’d also be at COP26 in Glasgow. So if anybody is coming to the Climate Change Conference, you can find us there. You can talk to us there. We’ll have a really powerful presence there. You can also come and experience augmented reality version of our aircraft there. You can come and see a model of what the aircraft looks like. Come and talk us.

Jolie Hales:
You can also check out episode notes on bigcompute.org.

Ernest de Leon:
And if you like what you hear, please tell a friend about us. Post a review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or Google podcasts.

Jolie Hales:
Subscribe, just subscribe.

Ernest de Leon:
… or Spotify, so many now.

Jolie Hales:
It’s like a Bollywood one that I found the other day. I was like, “Oh, let’s get on that.”

Ernest de Leon:
Subscribe on whatever podcasting you’re listening to us on.

Jolie Hales:
Yes, please.

Ernest de Leon:
And don’t forget that you can tweet Jolie and I any show ideas or comments on the show.

Jolie Hales:
I don’t tweet. I don’t tweet. I don’t like Twitter.

Ernest de Leon:
You do tweet because this morning when I got on Twitter, I saw that you had tweeted.

Jolie Hales:
Oh, I guess I did retweet. Fine. But that’s because I posted the original post that I retweet.

Ernest de Leon:
It’s like you retweeted yourself.

Jolie Hales:
I’m Big Compute, so I retweeted myself. Someone has got to retweet Big Compute posts.

Ernest de Leon:
That’s true. All of you listening, retweet our Big Compute Twitter feed.

Jolie Hales:
Yes.

Ernest de Leon:
So anyway, thanks for joining us, everyone. And always remember to use multi-factor authentication and 3-2-1 backup.

Jolie Hales:
Stay safe out there.