Hello, and welcome to the Raven – a journey into aviation, environmentalism, and my attempts to figure out if a zero-emissions aircraft might be possible. In this opening edition, I’m going to try and explain why I’m starting this newsletter, the sorts of topics I’d like to cover, and directions this may go in future.
An investigation
I’m not an aviation expert, far from it, so why am I starting a newsletter about developing zero-emissions aircraft? The easiest way to answer that question is to tell the story of how this project started. I come from a software engineering background, but at the start of 2019, decided to step away from tech to look at climate change, both as a search for more meaning in my work, and as a route away from the (for me) frustration of the tech industry and startups.
Like many starting on their climate journeys, I began by trying to understand the climate crisis. An immediate realisation was that my software skills were not going to be directly useful – we’re not going to decarbonise the world through an app (*caveats apply here, but I digress)! I decided to focus my research by writing some deep-dives for my climate newsletter (if you’ve found this from Forge the Future, hi, and welcome!), exploring various industries and sectors from the ground-up. They say you don’t truly know an area until you’ve had to try and teach it, so approaching learning with the explicit goal of passing on that knowledge seemed like a double win – I gain more understanding, and can pass what I know onto others.
The first area I chose to look at was aviation – it always comes high on lists of ‘hard to decarbonise’ industries, and I’ve been a life-long aviation and engineering nerd – it seemed a perfect fit! And the more I looked at the aviation industry, the more I felt captivated by it. Aviation has significant environmental impact, is growing rapidly (at least before COVID struck), and lacks clear, technologically mature solutions. Was there any way, even as an amateur, that I could help identify some route forward?
The Innovation Dilemma
The early days of aviation were wild. I'm a big fan of the /r/weirdwings subreddit – a showcase of often bizarre aircraft designs from across the decades. One thing it drives home is just how many different approaches there are to flight, and how many distinct designs proliferated, particularly in the beginning. As with any nascent technology, it was not fully understood, and many different folks tried their hand with greater or less success.
However, as usually happens, the industry swiftly began to coalesce, shaped by the requirements of those that needed it – the military, private aviation, cargo, then in the 50s onwards, widespread passenger travel – driving a need for larger, faster, safer aircraft.
Today we have a trillion-dollar industry extremely well adapted to making aircraft that fit those same forces – the demand for cheap, fast and reliable mass air travel. Everything, from airlines and airports to manufacturers to the regulators and the aircraft certification process is shaped around supporting a very specific kind of aircraft, one that has been iterated and optimised upon over decades.
<Enter Climate Change, Stage Left>
However, we now have a new disruptive influence at play. As with every major polluting industry, aviation’s impact on the environment is coming under the spotlight, and there’s a pressing need to address this problem, and fast. The aviation sector, adapted for the status quo, has struggled to respond to this new threat. For a long while, airlines and manufacturers have kicked the can down the road, but now there is little alternative but to act. However, the options they propose are limited – incremental efficiency increases, and a push towards alternative fuels – a solution that conveniently requires minimal change on their part.
This isn’t just an aversion to change. For the big firms, the risks are enormous. Take Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner program, which it embarked upon in 2003. This was a fresh, ‘clean-sheet’ design, using novel composites for much of the structure, and increased electrification versus existing aircraft. Despite these innovations, in overall design it looked like any other airliner – a streamlined tube with swept wings and two large turbofan engines. The program ran three years over schedule, and purportedly cost over $32 bn, with some suggesting that the program will never make a profit. If conventional aircraft are this expensive, just imagine the risk and cost to develop a truly novel design!
Both Boeing and Airbus plough millions into research on novel technologies, but they rarely see the light of day, ultimately due to risk. When a single new aircraft can make or break a company, the incentive to take large risks on that aircraft are small. The big firms are stuck, unable to innovate.
This is not a new story, of course. History is littered with incumbent firms who failed to react to a changing world. In recent history, the recent startup boom is built on new firms moving in where the market leaders could not. A similar story is playing out in the EV world, with a host of new firms racing to grab market share from the inflexible giants of decades past. So, what role are startups playing in the aviation arena?
Disruption, but not too much disruption
There are plenty of new players in aviation too, seeking to adapt where the big players cannot. However, aviation is a hard industry to enter. Building a business that manufactures immensely complex flying machines that pass stringent safety requirements is really hard. Industry insiders regularly quote 10+ years and a billion or more dollars to certify a new aircraft, let alone manufacture it. There’s not room for many new firms in that sort of market, and the costs and timelines make entering risky even without significant innovation. A startup has more freedom than an incumbent to innovate, but the commercial and certification pressures mean anything too radical is immediately off the cards.
This is not unique to aviation, even if aviation is a particularly focused example of this dynamic. What sets the industry apart is that it has both huge commercial barriers to entry and a large amount of technological development required. There is no drop-in solution to aviation’s impact, and startups face the daunting task of trying to succeed in a massively difficult industry and developing the technology necessary for clean aviation. In short, there’s a significant gap between promising but immature solutions, and the technological readiness needed for a commercial entity to exploit them.
This is traditionally where government research efforts contribute. Indeed, various such efforts (most notably from NASA) are responsible for much of the pioneering aerospace research of the past 40+ years. However, whilst new efforts are forming around the environmental impact of aviation, they feel too slow. The clamouring urgency of the climate crisis suggests we cannot wait a decade or more for new technology to be gradually proven out. So how do we speed up this process?
Focused Innovation
As I mentioned earlier, my technical background is in software, and I’ve spent my career working in small startups. The software startup world in particular thrives on speed, and has a roster of tools for rapidly developing and testing ideas – iterative development, A/B testing and more. Few are unique to the software industry, but it has honed them to a fine edge in its relentless pursuit of speed and growth. Those ideas are less often applied to larger projects in the physical realm, but why not? The ongoing SpaceX Starship program shows that even vast, ambitious aerospace projects can benefit from such an approach.
There are more than a handful of technologies that show high promise for decarbonising aviation, but that have never made it past theoretical studies and analyses. Taken together, they offer an opportunity to massively reduce the environmental impact of aviation, and maybe even enable low or zero emission flight over long distances. However, they are currently too far down the technology readiness curve to truly tell whether they are game-changers, or simply dead ends. My hope is that, even as an aviation amateur, I may be able to close the gap between theory and reality, by taking a software-inspired approach and keeping a sharp focus on the ultimate goal – decarbonisation.
I’m just one person, and I’ll be learning as I go, but I hope to share what I find, from dives into the industry itself, current and future aviation technologies, as well as aspects of aircraft design, and how I’m tackling this problem from the ground up. Wanted to understand the ins and outs of hydrogen? Unsure how eVTOLs fit into the aviation landscape? Curious about the role aviation should play in a decarbonised world? These are all topics I hope to cover as part of this project. If that sounds like you, please consider signing up and following along! And if you’ve any thoughts, suggestions or feedback, then leave a comment or reach out!
Oli