Jon GORDON, CO-FOUNDER, UNIVERSAL HYDROGEN
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An unedited transcript is below.
Ali Tabibian:
Welcome, welcome, welcome everyone to this episode of Tech. Cars. Machines. This is your host, Ali Tabibian. As always you’ll find more information about me and this podcast series in the show notes.
This episode is very special, because it’s the first one where we take flight, so to speak. In our last episode, with Amy Davis of Cummins Inc. we talked about the two biggest challenges by far in the world of transportation, the emission of air pollution and greenhouse gases from engines. That conversation was mainly land-based: it was about commercial vehicles, things like Amazon delivery vehicles, buses, and 18 wheelers. However, a portion of the Cummins episode touched on electyrolyzers, which Cummins and others use to convert water to clean-burning hydrogen for fuel. One use-case for this hydrogen fuel is in aircraft, and that is what this episode with Universal Hydrogen is all about. They have some unique solutions for how to shortcut the infrastructure bottleneck for hydrogen delivery, and a very elegant manner for retrofitting the aircraft they serve.
Universal Hydrogen is a bit of an “Airbus” spinoff, with much of the leadership having met at that famed aircraft manufacturer. In that sense, UH2 is differently staffed, if you will, compared to many of the startups we’ve interview for this series. That is, it’s a group of very accomplished, big-company executives giving up some pretty lofty perches to bring forward what we all hope is a greener future. One example, is our guest, Jon Gordon, who is a former executive at Airbus and United Technologies, the famed aero-industrial conglomerate. He is a company co-founder and leads partnerships, government affairs and legal matters for the company.
Without further ado, let’s get to it!
Ali Tabibian:
Our guest today is Jon Gordon with Universal Hydrogen. Jon, welcome.
Jon Gordon: Thank you, Ali. It's great to be here today.
Ali Tabibian: We appreciate your time. Let me ask you, this is one of our podcasts in the era of COVID, where are you normally and where are you today?
Jon Gordon: I am in Brooklyn in the neighborhood of Greenpoint, although we're based in Los Angeles. I've been commuting back and forth.
Ali Tabibian: Okay. And is that commute sort of a permanent fixture of your time with Universal Hydrogen or a COVID driven one?
Jon Gordon: Well, not to jump into the biographical, but I first started working with Paul Eremenko, our CEO, when he founded a cube in Silicon valley and I was living in Brooklyn at the time. There was a brief period of time where we were both at United Technologies and in the same city. Now we're split again. I'm pretty loyal to Brooklyn. My son's in school here, so I'll be here for the time being. But most of my role at Universal Hydrogen will have me traveling quite a bit and I'm always happy to get out to the west coast. I'm from Seattle, so it's always nice to be back on the west coast.
Ali Tabibian: Okay. Well look, I mean, your ability to do your work in a geographically dispersed manner is kind of a nice place to segue into, just what does Universal Hydrogen do? I know the name gives it, the hydrogen part probably gives us a clue, maybe the universal part that gives us a clue, but just give us the elevator pitch, if you will of what the company is all about?
Jon Gordon: Well, we have a very simple goal, which is to completely transform aviation and take meaningful, significant steps towards reducing aviation's impact on climate change. That's where we started as a company. We're all former big aerospace people with time at at Airbus and United Technologies and other air aerospace companies. And we have a shared frustration with of lack of progress Our industry is making to combat climate change.
Our industry, we're supposed to be the rocket scientist. We're supposed to be aerospace engineers that solve hard problems. We were all very frustrated. We spent a lot of time as a team and individually trying to change the industry from within. Paul did a lot of work at Airbus to push it towards cleaner fuels, as well as towards the electric aviation, such as the program which was with the largest demonstrator of electric plane to date.
And when we left UTC in connection with Raytheon merger, we set about to create a company that would really address aviation's impact on climate change in a real meaningful way. So I want to start with that because that's our goal. That's everything we're trying to accomplish. We came to the idea of hydrogen as a clean fuel for aviation. We weren't hydrogen people. There are people that have been doing hydrogen for a long time. In fact, hydrogen has been part of aviation since the fifties and the Russians flew a hydrogen plane in the eighties. It's true. Our former sister company Pratt was working on a hydrogen engine in the fifties. I think it's the fifties, you might want to check me on that. It might've been early sixties and the Russians flew the Tupolev in the eighties.
So hydrogen is not new to aviation. But we embraced it because we think it's the only real fuel that can significantly reduce aviation's impact on climate change. So, what are we doing then? That was a bit of verbiage. What are we actually trying to do? It ends up being quite simple. The first thing we're trying to do is we're trying to make a commercially relevant aircraft that that flies zero carbon using the hydrogen electric powertrain and that's using existing off the shelf technology. We settled on the regional turboprop as the biggest plane that we could do to have a meaningful impact on aviation. And that's the dash eight made by the Canadian coming De Havilland or the ATR 72 made by a JV between Airbus and the Italian company Leonardo.
So that's part one of what we're trying to do, is to get a meaningful hydrogen powered, zero carbon plane in the air. And the second part of what we're trying to do is to make it a feasible alternative for airlines. What that means is that just like Tesla, we had to solve the infrastructure problem. And we do that with, we think a fairly simple solution though, the execution is quite complicated and the engineering is quite complicated. We've made the hydrogen modular. So we've designed a capsule system that pops into the airplane. Paul likes to analogize it to an espresso. I think soda stream might a better analogy because the soda stream bottle is reused unlike an espresso capsules. But we've designed a very lightweight, simple container system where we can fill up the capsules offsite at a source of green hydrogen. We can ship them by using just the regular storage containers and deliver them to airports all over the globe, so that our planes can fly, can land, can refuel. The capsules can go back and be refilled.
So what we've done is we've taken a holistic approach to the problem, essentially to remove the hydrogen aviation. There needs to be infrastructure, there needs to be pipelines, there needs to be storage vehicles, the airports need to dramatically change. All that's removed with us. We've taken care of the end to end logistics of hydrogen aviation. So that's why we call ourselves Universal Hydrogen, because we're not just focused on the plane itself, we want to be a logistics provider as well.
Ali Tabibian: Interesting. That's very interesting. For our listeners who for example, the last couple of episodes before the publication of this one will be focused on trucking and in the trucking commercial vehicle transport, people tend to think of the displacement of the engine as one way of the classification of that field. So sub two and a half liter would be classes one through three, which is kind of the pickup market. And then the 10.5, 15 liter engines would be class eight, which is the sort of the 18 wheelers or the semis on a north American highway. Nobody else really has something that big. Help us classify the aviation market. You mentioned a turboprop, is it by gross takeoff weight, number of passenger seats? How do you segment that market?
Jon Gordon: Yeah, I would divide it into three. General aviation, your smaller planes. 10 seaters, around that. Distances of 250 to 500 on a call, sometimes longer. The regional turboprop market is sort of in the center of that. You're talking about around 1,000 nautical miles for most routes and a passenger load of around 40 passengers, 40 to 60 passengers. And then you have the single aisle segment, which is your large jet engines that are traveling across the country and transatlantic and whatnot.
So we're focused right in the middle of the aviation segment in what is a fairly big and important market for a lot of countries that have dispersed populations. And so in the US, the regional turboprop market exists in Alaska, in Washington state line from, in Europe, you see it in Norway and Iceland you see it in New Zealand. So really, really dispersed populations flying 40 passengers and sometimes cargo as well.
It's a great segment for us because it's a large plane. It's kind of right below the single aisle, which is your typical commercial traffic plane and because of its global reach, it allows us to demonstrate hydrogen's efficiency for aircraft globally at scale. And we think that creates a great message to the single aisle manufacturers, Boeing and Airbus, that hydrogen is feasible, that people will fly it, that the logistics can be worked out.
Ali Tabibian: I see. I see. So that's really interesting that your first point of attack, although a sub of primarily passenger aircraft market is global in nature. That you can go to any continent, remote regions of a continent, major airports that are on any continent, and there will be aircraft of this type flying in and out on a regular basis.
Jon Gordon: Yeah, exactly.
Ali Tabibian: Okay. That's-
Jon Gordon: Every single continent. Which is, so we can have a global impact immediately. And a lot of these routes can't be served by other aircraft or other means. You're talking about flying to, I'm going to butcher the name though, Scotch fans have to forgive me, but Icely, an island off the coast of Scotland or a remote destination in Alaska where you can't leave the train tracks or something like that. It's not feasible. So it's a very steady market and it's a market that is, I don't know the right word for it. I want to call it domestic. In that, if you look at an airline, like Vitaro in Norway, they're domestic flights are regional. So we can go to a country like Norway and say, "We have the ability to take your domestic airline, your domestic flights that make them zero carbon." We can say that to Alaska or to Washington state.
And not only that, through hydrogen production, instead of importing jet fuel, they're going to be creating the means of energy within their own country. So this has the ability to transform countries and create a new kind of economy. And of course, with our modular system, we hope to eventually be able to fuel other vehicles as well. Heavy trucking, maritime, rail, certainly smaller aircraft EVTOL, so-called air taxis. We've already had a number of transportation providers reach out to us because we're able to take their vehicle and provide the infrastructure for it to work.
Which again that was the big challenge of electric cars that Tesla needed to solve. And we're trying to solve that, not just for the regional turboprop market, but for all hydrogen vehicles. That's where you get the Universal Hydrogen. We want to be a universal provider.
Ali Tabibian: What are the alternatives for fueling aircraft? Is it either fossil based versus hydrogen, or is there any other or for example, like the other environments, is there a direct battery solution as well?
Jon Gordon: Yeah, I mean, hydrogen ends up being kind of the aviation ends up being sort of the killer app for aviation. When we were raising funds, investors always asked us, why can't it just be batteries?
Ali Tabibian: Right.
Jon Gordon: And so JP Clark, our CTO did the math of what the battery would look like, and to me, it's like, you'd have to have the plane and then another plane with the battery in it. I mean, these are so big and so heavy, and maybe the technology, I hope the technology improves over time. Some people think that and I'm not an engineer. Some people think that the physics just doesn't work for aviation because there's so much power needed, but even so, you're talking about decades from now.
And I don't know if I said this at the onset, but our plan is to be in commercial service in 2025. If we're going to meet the Paris Agreement targets, we've got to start now. This is the problem we face when we we're in big aerospace. You can't just keep kicking this down the road. What works now, and where can we make a meaningful difference? And the only real solution for aviation is hydrogen. Other than smaller planes, EVTOLs and whatnot, but there's a very strong argument that hydrogen is the right solution for EVTOLs and smaller planes as well. Because of the cost, because it's purely green and because you get fast turn around times, right?
I used to be the general counsel of an on-demand helicopter service. And when we thought about putting in our market, it seemed like a fiction because there we were on top of a building in the middle of Sao Paolo. And how do you recharge and EVTOL quickly on top of the building? But with hydrogen, you can just pop in a capsule and you can have a very quick turnaround time. So that's not to say that the battery can't power EVTOLs, it's not an effective solution. It might be. But if you're talking about large aircraft, it's hard for us to believe there's any other credible solution in the next couple of decades.
Ali Tabibian: Interesting. Interesting. Let me ask you the the following you mentioned infrastructure a number of times, and take me through the process. How long did it take for you to come to the conclusion that you want it to be capsule based, as opposed to being able to retrofit a plane, yes, but have a typical fuel delivery infrastructure. A pipeline or a fuel delivery vehicle deliver the hydrogen in bulk and have the plane fuel up using traditional fuel tanks, retrofitted, presumably because of the pressure. To what extent was it like, okay, we're going for capsules versus everything else that you might be able to do to build it around hydrogen for some subset of the aviation market?
Jon Gordon: Well, we knew we had to solve the infrastructure problem at the same time. In discussions we had former lives, former careers that was always the excuse to hydrogen. There was no infrastructure. And the related point to that is, it's going to take so much time, money, and effort to build a proper infrastructure for hydrogen. And it's going to have to be a government level led or at least related effort. There are something like 17,000 airports, commercial airports and to link all of those at least in proximity to pipelines, you're talking about a trillion dollar effort, that takes decades. And this has been not the goal, we're going to do this, this has been the excuse. So we had to remove the excuse.
Our work though, and we haven't talked much, I don't think we've talked much publicly about how our thinking evolved on the aircraft in the system. But we started with the aircraft and we started with the problem that hydrogen is incredibly powerful, but it's also incredibly large. So we had to get it down to fit into the plane. And we thought about every configuration you could think of, of where to put the hydrogen, how to make it more compact. And it was really JP Clark who thought more and more about the the storage containment and having the storage container have a very high mass fraction height, be both lightweight and take a very high pressure of hydrogen as well as be able to do cryo so-called liquid hydrogen as well.
There was some magic moment, and I don't quite recall where it was, maybe one of my co-founders remember where we realized that we had made the perfect container on the plane and that we could fill that container up. In fact, we should fill that container up at the source of production, right? Because you don't have energy loss, you don't have pressure loss. You don't have the difficulty of transferring pressurized hydrogen from one vessel to another, to another. When we figured that out, it was one of those brilliant moments you have as an entrepreneur, that this is actually our business. It wasn't what we were thinking of, which was the aircraft. It was this idea of the modular delivery of hydrogen. And then all of the benefits of that kind of flowed.
We could source green hydrogen at off peak hours in locations far from the airport. We could take advantage of cheap power coming off dams out on Christmas Eve, these sorts of things. We could also be a containment, a storage vessel for excess capacity of hydrogen, right? Because you're producing hydrogen when there's sun, when there's wind, where does that energy go? Where does that hydrogen go? Our storage would be onsite and capture all of that.
And then we realized we could make the capsule foreign factor of size and dimensions that it could fit in a standard container as well as in the plane and could be moved efficiently because of the similarities in size in the inter modal network and then be put on the plane. That was the evolution of the thinking. It started from the practical problem of how do we fit the hydrogen on the plane and how do we get the hydrogen to the plane? And in one moment we realized that we had the answer for both.
Ali Tabibian: Yeah. I'm sure that was a great moment. Quite a relief, probably at that point. Let me ask you, Jon, if you don't mind, let's follow the hydrogen as a way for people to understand the material flow to maybe a little bit more in a granular fashion, understand what Universal Hydrogen is doing. So let's say we're sitting here, let's just say San Francisco airport, where is the hydrogen production facility in your mind? Where would it be? Or do you have an actual example you could give us?
Jon Gordon: Yeah. I always like to take Washington state because there is a regional network up there and it's maybe more illustrative of the complexity. So if you let me switch locations-
Ali Tabibian: Not at all.
Jon Gordon: No, I know I'm from Seattle, so it seems biased.
Ali Tabibian: I went to high school in Lake Oswego, Oregon, so it's a good spot for me to go too.
Jon Gordon: Fantastic. Fantastic. So you'll be familiar with this and I just think it's a really clear example. So, there's a regional operator in Washington for, I think it's called Horizon, it's a subsidiary of Alaska and they fly from Seattle to 30 or 40 different cities across the Pacific Northwest. And they're not large cities. It's and Portland is probably the one most listeners have heard of but Walla Walla, exactly. Maybe Boise, is a little bit of, one of the further out ones, but it's a lot of these small small towns and then you go north up to Vancouver as well.
So you look at this, you look at this maybe in your mind, you can visualize the map of Seattle at the sort of the hub of this network and 40 different spokes radiating out across Washington and the Pacific Northwest. Then these planes need to get out and back and they have to move on from spoke to spoke as well. So you really end up needing to have the capsules or fueling stations or a fueling option at each one of these points. Right across a very diverse network, a lot of different terrain, a lot of different power capacities at the airports. And it's true, Seattle, might be able to host electrolysis the creation of hydrogen, but for a lot of these airports, it's not going to be practical. It's not going to make sense from a cost perspective to make 40 hydrogen production stations across Washington state.
So instead, what I envision is you need to look for in the region where the green energy production is. In Washington, you've got the Grand Coulee dam, tremendous hydro-power plant. So one of our production partners, we don't plan to produce the hydrogen, but to partner with people that do, but our production partner could set up an electrolyzer there at Grand Coulee dam, and they basically need two inputs, electricity that comes from the queen source and water. Grand Coulee dam has both. We can set up a production facility right next to them, and we can fill up our storage containers, and then we can put them on electric or hydrogen powered vehicles or trains to deliver all across the network so that when the planes fly, they arrive in , they arrive in Wenatchee. They arrive in Portland.
Our capsules are there and the capsules load on, off the plane with a simple forklift. It does look a lot like an espresso it's designed to be easy and safe, right? I say safe because the hydrogen is contained in a very advanced, very strong capsule. That it's literally bulletproof, it's designed for FAA and department of transportation standards. And so it's in a very safe, contained environment and sophisticated sensors. So we know how it's behaving the entire time.
We're able to take a network and source the hydrogen in the efficient place here in the Grand Coulee dam, but then disperse it across the network. And does that paint the visual picture of how this will work?
Ali Tabibian: Yes, it does. Yes, it does. It absolutely does. I guess the capsules that are being loaded at the dam or being filled at the dam, are the exact same physical capsules that are being inserted into the aircraft.
Jon Gordon: Exactly.
Ali Tabibian: Right. So it's almost like you're a backyard barbecue, where you go to Safeway or wherever you go and swap out the capsule. Right?
Jon Gordon: I mean, it's as simple as that really. It's as simple as that except it's a tank that we've got a couple patents filed on it. It's a multilayer composite tank. It's super light. It's super strong. It's got sensors inside of it, outside of it. It's got there are two capsules on the frame. And so it's an advanced version of a propane tank or hey, how about a keg of beer? Or if you want to go back further in American history, a milk bottle.
Ali Tabibian: There you go. Milk bottle or the cider barrels that go from west to east.
Jon Gordon: Yeah, exactly.
Ali Tabibian: Washington actually. Yeah, exactly.
Jon Gordon: Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best outcomes or ends up being true most of the time.
Ali Tabibian: Right. Right. So, well, let me ask you this, because one thing that our listeners will have heard in my intro is that in addition to being the co- founder of Universal Hydrogen, you're also are the general council and handle government affairs and partnerships. Since we've now visually gotten into the position where you're putting this tank now into an aircraft, tell me what kinds of things the government will care about as well as presumably the passengers will need to be calmed about when this, right.
Jon Gordon: Yeah. So, let me start this way. The most important stakeholder here on certification are the FAA which I think most of your listeners know about and IASA, which is the European version of it. And the key to understand about our approach that's different than I think most approaches with other project of this scope, this transformative for the industry is that we're doing a retrofit of an existing plane. So the plane has already been certified and we're trying to make as few of changes to that plane as possible. So that the FAA doesn't have to look at hydrogen aviation and worry about everything. The wheels, the seats. We're trying to get them focused on the three aspects of our powertrain that are new.
Now, and I just roughly divide those into the electric motor. We're not making our own electric motor. We're working with a Seattle company called Magni 00:30:3000:31:0000:31:3000:32:00inaudible 00:32:2900:32:3000:33:0000:33:3000:34:0000:34:30inaudible 00:34:4700:35:0000:35:3000:36:0000:36:3000:37:0000:37:30nacell 00:37:5800:38:00 engine, the Plug Power fuel cells, and the heat management systems are all in what used to be the gasoline engine.
There was so much space in there once you take everything out. Thankfully the motors are actually quite small, they only take up about maybe less than a quarter of that space. So much of the powertrain is going to be in the nacell. The actual body of the plane won't be changed. What happens to the fuel tanks? The fuel tanks are currently in the wing. You can't put hydrogen in those fuel tanks, you can't get enough in it. And then you have fall back in your infrastructure problem. So we were actually taking those fuel tanks and we're going to keep them as part of the system, but we are going to store the water that comes off the fuel cells in those old fuel tanks.
Because if we're over a neighborhood or we're at an altitude where con trails will form these pretty streaks, they look like clouds, those actually contribute to global warming. They have a greenhouse effect. So the idea is that we will store the water in those tanks until we're able to safely and responsibly discharge the water. So that's the planning. It's actually a very unique and very simple approach. If I can give me one more comment on it.
If you look at the plane from the outside, very little has changed, but if you focused on the nacell, you'll see on the side of the engine, we've added zero drag radiators which is the old Panther T, I forget the number 32 P 52 stingray. It's an old world war II aircraft radiator. So we're history buffs and kind of aviation nerds. So we realized that would be really cool to use as our radiator system. But other than that, it just looks like a typical plane. And, oh, I should say that we took those two rows out and there is going to be a galley, right now at least in the dash, there's two rear facing that nobody likes, right? No one likes to fly backwards. I don't know whose idea that was, but we're going to remove those seats and we're going to put a galley up front so people can still have their pretzels and and gin and tonics while they fly.
Ali Tabibian: Critical. That's pretty interesting. And presumably all of this works economically as well for the aircraft. Losing those 20 rows, certainly cheaper than buying carbon offsets for every flight probably.
Jon Gordon: Yeah. I mean, the economic model, it makes a lot of sense for them, for the airlines. The first of all how much is the conversion going to cost? Every five years or so, these planes get new engines. And so we just work into the typical engine replacement cycle and our dream is that we'll be able to finance that conversion. So the airplane won't be out of pocket at all. We want as for the airplane, airline won't be out of pocket at all. We want to make it cost efficient for them. And some airlines would probably just like to handle that themselves with their own people, but we'd like to be able to do it on a financed or a cost basis to encourage adoption.
And as far as the actual cost of flight airlines use something called cost for available seat mile to judge their profitability. And the short of it is that the chasm costs depends on the cost of electricity that goes into the electrolysis. That's the big variable here. And that's why sourcing hydrogen in an efficient manner becomes so responsible because if we can get that cost, I probably going to kind of mess up the dollar amount, but if you're looking at $ 2 per kilogram or less then I think at that level, we're competitive with jet fuel on a cost per available seat mile.
Now, as the cost of electrolyzers go down, it's more hydrogen is being made, we see that going down to $1.50 or $1 in which case, and if you add on the other side of that disincentives to bring jet fuel, like carbon taxes, which makes sense then you're looking at hydrogen being a better deal for airlines than jet fuel. And then you think about some of the other cost savings. We don't really know how much airlines are going to save in maintenance by adopting an electric powertrain, but when you're not burning fuel in a enclosed space, you've seen how Tesla has become I think that the maintenance costs on a Tesla is pretty negligible, and we hope that that airlines are able to have same or better benefits. And then also you don't have to replace the engine after every five years. The plug fuel cells will, I think they also have a life of infinite.
So it makes sense from a cost perspective, we're working with some operators now to understand their routes better and their needs, and really model it responsibly. But I think we're going to find at the end of the day, that it makes sense economically, as well as for the environment. Which is really exciting when that happens, that doesn't always happen.
Ali Tabibian: That's outstanding. That's outstanding. Something you mentioned, I know will have caught the attention of the financial professionals on this podcast. And I mentioned there's quite a few sort of VC, PE partners who are listeners. Three years to certification by the FAA, how do you finance a company like that? What milestones do you put out between now and three years from now against what you'd like to be measured? Because as you know, typically the venture community finances to roughly one year milestones, rather than three-year milestones. It would be actually great to talk about the journey on the financial side.
I know you've got some very impressive and pretty surprising investors. I hadn't expected Cotu to be in the mix here, but just take us through what was attractive, what were some of the hurdles and how did you basically structure around them?
Jon Gordon: Yeah, and I have to correct, I misspoke, it's four years to certification. So it will be certified in 2025. I think of it as in three segments which I won't get into. But it's basically four years. We'll be in service by 2025 is the goal. Yes, as a former private equity and venture capital lawyer, it is hard to go to AVC or even private equity and and say, "We need a couple hundred million dollars before we turn a profit. And we're probably not going to turn a profit, we're not going to have a product for five years and we're going to need hundreds of millions of dollars in that time." It is not the software model. It's kind of a shame though, because Silicon valley was born doing these really expensive, complicated hardware. I mean, that's what Intel was. It wasn't just a software play. It's complicated. They were engineers, non software engineers. And it was hard.
I don't know how many investors we pitched. We are on the roadshow, not the roadshow, but the meetings lasted a year or so. And I think we met with everybody who could. But the people that we have in the round, it's a dream come true. I mean, it's a spectacular round. On the strategic side, we have Airbus, we have Toyota as a leader in the space. We have Jet Blue my favorite airline and a very, very progressive airline. And So Jets in Japan, which is a conglomerate, Fortescue in Australia, my mining company, or the chairman of which has decided to dedicate a portion of his fortune to combating climate change. And then on the financial and investor side, we have Playground and Cotu and a couple of others.
Look, I think that these guys are visionaries. Everybody who invested in our round, they see a future of aviation that's hydrogen. They see that as the only way to reduce aviation's impact on climate change. And they think that we've got the way to do it. They believe that we have the right way to accomplish that. And if that's the future and we're the path to it, then this is where you put your money. But it's not, you have to have vision and you have to have, I think the patience. But I think if you look at where this company has come in the last year we're moving at light speed.
I mean, this was an idea. This was an idea a year ago, and now we have a sub-scale powertrain built, it's functioning. You can see it on our website. You can see the engine, the motor work. We've got full-scale versions of our capsules now. They're absolutely incredible. And we've got a workforce that includes people like Mark Cousin, who did the largest STC for Airbus ever, the blue guy. That giant plane that flies other planes inside of it. So we're putting together a team, I would say that, because of what we're working on, we're getting resumes from people in the aviation field that are just phenomenal. Including top people out of programs, out of universities and PhDs, because this is what people want to work on. The big companies got it wrong. Aviation engineers they want to solve this problem, and we're giving everyone the platform to do that.
Ali Tabibian: So, Jon, is that why you went this route as well? Because look, I mean, I'm looking at your background. University of Chicago, couple of different degrees, Airbus, United Technologies, some pretty dazzling IAC on the search side, in the quasi software world, internet world. That's a dazzling background. What brought you and your compatriots, all of whom have fairly similar backgrounds? What brought you to do a startup? Is there no other way of solving the problem? Did you have any concerns that it would just going to be too hard outside of the giant mothership?
Jon Gordon: Yeah, I'm going to tell you two stories.
Ali Tabibian: Sure.
Jon Gordon: Two great stories, I think. The first time I met Paul Eremenko, I had just started doing work for A cubed. I started doing work for A cubed because my buddy from law school was an IP lawyer and he realized they needed a transactional lawyer to help put together their partnerships.
Ali Tabibian: And Jon, what is A cubed, give us the...
Jon Gordon: So A cubed was Airbus's innovation center that Paul Eremenko our CEO started to do experimental aircraft and EVTOLs, and other vehicles. bugles project -Men project there. So an experimental, innovative center for Airbus, for aviation. The first thing that I did was I helped them create a partnership with Uber to fly on-demand helicopters from Salt Lake airport, into Park City. And initially we got a call from Park City saying that we couldn't fly into Park City because they didn't want the helicopters there. So the project manager Ooma Sabrine, and who knows the CEO of Arrow, a terrific private luxury airline that are most well known also used to advise on.
She found a plot of land out in the middle of outside of Park City, and then we were flying in and out of that. And the sheriff came in and threatened to arrest everyone that was involved in the project. And that's when I first met Paul, because I had to explain to him what it meant. And we had to call the Airbus general council together and explain what was going on. Somehow he was able to convince Airbus that it was worth it to take this risk to prove out the project. And that was my first experience with Paul.
My second had to do with the Bahana project, which was the EVTOL that A-CUBED created. It was a rotator wing electric taxi that went from being a sketch on a napkin to something that I was standing in front of in about a year. And that was pretty impressive to me. So I continued to work with Paul and Jason, our COO, and then later with JP at UTC. I never have had any doubt that this team can't do anything that it puts its mind to honestly. When we left UTC, when it merged with Raytheon, I mean, that's what we were freed. We could do as a team whatever we wanted, and we wanted to devote that energy, that sort of history and expertise to really finding the solution for aviation's impact on climate change.
It started with that. It just started with that desire and over the last over six months, we created the bones of the company, and now we have created the bones of the engineering behind it. And it's been a fantastic journey and we're well on our way now. But to think it all started with an idea that we all had when we were at a restaurant in the west village, it's just amazing.
Ali Tabibian: Wow. It sounds like the the most enjoyable love startup journeys, right? When you're doing it with a group of people who were already the team, and you just basically wrapped it in a new corporate structure in several different ways. Right?
Jon Gordon: Exactly. New investors. I mean, but we're fortunate to have the partners Plug and Magni 00:55:3000:56:00X who are likely potential investors and we'll send them your way.
Jon Gordon: Thank you very much.
Ali Tabibian: Thank you. Thank you so much.