I spoke about this trend with the co-founders of Buzz Solutions earlier this year and DroneSeed founder Grant Canary a year ago. Overflights and inspections once done by piloted helicopters and small planes are increasingly done by commercial drones, something I pointed out in my assessments of the EVTOL urban air taxi nonsense (more on that in this piece, of course). Cheap militarized drones are doing amazing things in Ukraine, including being believed to be key to the successful missile attacks that disabled the Russian flagship.īut fixed wing and rotorcraft small drones are quietly cutting the bottom out from under general commercial aviation. In the sexy area, extreme and outdoor sports have become a much greater source of viral and compelling video as semi-autonomous or pilot controlled drones chase highly skilled athletes doing absurdly risky things down mountains, along singletrack, and into the tubes of curling waves. Overlapping into sexy and somewhat with autonomous flight is the entire area of unmanned aerial vehicles. XWing is keeping well out of military aerospace, something I consider a kiss of death for many aerospace startups as they end up having to meet absurd niche requirements of no commercial ability while simultaneously preventing them from working with multiple countries and firms with good commercial demand and putting their intellectual capital at risk. This is a crucial component of regional air mobility maturation, as pilot shortages - limited flight hours, boring routes, low pay, stress and COVID disruptions are factors - are a key blocker of expanding aviation. XWing is making small, pragmatic steps with on-board pilot observers and ground control stations handling air traffic interactions already, and prepping for first cargo flights and FAA certification. I spoke with Kevin Antcliff, product lead for XWing after his NASA career, a few months ago. It is already flying cargo flights in small general aviation scale planes today, and flying autonomous flights in its R&D program constantly. The company I’ll lead with is XWing out of California. I know what a game-changer cheap, high-reliability, high-speed internet will be for populations around the world. My first career was multiple rounds of deploying telecommunications and computer upgrades to 1,400 physical locations across Canada for one of the major banks, and during the … third? fourth? … phase of my career I was working on aspects of Australia’s attempts to wire its Outback.
Some people remain unaware of Starlink, but it’s been delivering satellite-internet around the world for a couple of years, most recently with hundreds of ground stations in Ukraine assisting military and civilian efforts during the failing Russian invasion. It’s absurdly practical too, as SpaceX is delivering supplies and astronauts to the ISS, and satellites to orbits, vastly more cheaply than ever before. SpaceX upcoming rockets will be stainless steel glistening Art Nouveau beasts.
#Nomad of nowhere series
Banks Culture series of books (strongly recommended). And it’s catching them offshore in automated barges named after ships from Iain M. SpaceX isn’t specifically a decarbonization story, although it is entirely possible to fuel rockets with renewably manufactured fuel, and the privately held Musk firm is sending rockets into the sky on a schedule that’s approaching weekly. As always, sexy and practical starts the day. Then it was marine transportation, where my heterodox projections of marine tonnage and market shifts as well as decarbonization profiles have been attracting attention for a while now, with excellent conversations with global innovators helping me hone my assessment.Īnd now onto stuff that goes up, and usually comes back down. I moved on to ground transportation, something I have been assessing and publishing on for about a decade with provincial committee presentations, advisory roles to masters students in the space and the like. I started with electricity and energy storage, a core subject given my projections of grid storage through 2060 and role with Agora Energy Technologies, helping the company get its CO2-based redox flow battery to market.
This is the fourth of perhaps six sexy/unsexy, practical/impractical quadrant charts I’m crafting across the decarbonization domains I work in or pay a lot of attention to. Jet travel these days has become cramped bus routes that happen to not be on the ground.īut there’s still excitement in the space, albeit mostly for the wrong things.
I’ve crossed the equator and international date lines more often than most people leave their country. Part of my past was as a road-warrior for one of the biggest global tech firms. Being an airline pilot used to be a combination of swashbuckler and nomad, with a lover in every (air)port. Aviation and aerospace used to be sexy all the time.
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