EP42 – Lilium Going Public? Elbit UAVs & Can Agile Engineering Work for the EVTOL Infrastructure?
Lilium's CEO has publicly declared the desire to go public in the near future - but will it work? Can certification really be attained in just a few years? Elbit creates UAVs and their new models are garnering attention. And, a great article on agile engineering discussed its application to the EVTOL market and whether or not the approach can work. This and more on the Struck Aerospace Engineering Podcast EP42. Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverter strips. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! EP42 - Lilium Going Public? Elbit UAVs & Can Agile Engineering Work for the EVTOL Infrastructure? you're listening to the struck podcast i'm Dan Blewett i'm Allen Hall and here on struck we talk about everything aviation aerospace engineering and lightning protection welcome back to the struck podcast i'm your co-host Dan Blewett on today's show uh number one we're going to talk about oxford university has a interesting report out says they can make jet fuel from atmospheric co2 so really interesting development we'll chat a little bit about a little bit about that the cessna citation is now 50 years old coming up this year in 2021 so we'll talk about why that's important with this monumental little plane we'll talk about venus does lightning strike on venus these are good questions um in our engineering segment today we'll talk about while agile engineering uh which is obviously a sort of a mainstay in silicon valley you know move fast develop your prototypes you know the those the saying move fast and break stuff does that really apply to maybe the evtol market and uh air travel in general probably not and then lastly in our evtol segment we're going to talk about Elbit and a bunch about Lilium which a lot of really interesting news uh in the in the news cycle recently with them so al first let's start with oxford university so they said they can use iron to turn carbon dioxide into jet fuel what's your take on this well there's been a number of different ways to make fuels from and you see some of this on television where they've used algae to make hydrocarbons or catalysts like in this oxford study it was a catalyst to create jet fuel so there's a number of different ways to create hydrocarbons the question is what is it cost effective or not and at this point the catalyst method hasn't been very cost effective or has used some rare earth metals like cobalt to do it this uses a obviously a lot cheaper materials to do it but there's still it's an energy-intensive process is it cheaper to do it this way or is it cheaper to refine petroleums to get to the jet fuel it's going to take time on both sides i know there's a big push in europe to make quote-unquote cleaner fuels this wouldn't necessarily be cleaner but the carbon dioxide that goes into it is the carbon dioxide comes out of it so i guess it's carbon dioxide neutral if that's an advantage but what's the cost right airlines spend so much money on fuel right now if you doubled or tripled that you would put airlines out of business a number of them would go out of business can't afford it so there's a lot of more work to do there it it is a good sign but i always when i see these i always always think all right this got to get some scale to it and see if you can drive down the cost just like tesla's doing on like the gigafactory for the for the batteries they're going to drive down the cost we're going to produce them in massive scales this hasn't been scaled up yet they're still in the laboratory so you're at least five to ten years away from having something real and then another couple of years away before the certification authorities would even let you use it uh so yeah so it'd be it would take a while and is that going to be chased out of the equation by electric power by hydrogen obviously we talked a bunch about hydrogen fuel cell technol...