A Conversation with Faradair’s Neil Cloughley
This article comes from a recent Forbes Futures In Focus podcast interview with Neil Cloughley, CEO and founder of Faradair, a U.K.-based company developing a hybrid electric aircraft concept for sustainable regional flight. He shares his perspectives on the evolving landscape of air travel.
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The dynamics of travel are changing. For instance, we’re seeing that movement around aviation, plus the delivery of low-cost capability with regional capacity using different types of engine systems, opens up the world and changes the way we think about the environmental footprint of travel. How is Faradair, based in the U.K., approaching the shifting nature of air travel?
Neil Cloughley: Throughout aircraft history and aviation history, there have been a number of people who’ve come through the ranks and proposed big ideas. And those who haven’t fulfilled or followed through have had their ideas die. If they’d just taken a slightly more staggered approach and looked at what is it exactly that they’re trying to solve, things could have turned out differently.
lf we look at new technologies that are coming from automotive and aerospace and various other sectors, we can take what has been done before and improve it, make it better. And we have to make it better. I say that because having spent 15-odd years in the commercial aviation market, I think it’s fair to say that about the regional aviation market, the way we get from city to city.
For example, a lot of R&D has been done at Swansea in Wales. In the car, in on-the-ground transport, that’s a five- to six-hour journey, and it’s painful on a train. Yet I’m sitting in an airfield. Why is it that more than 100 years since the Wright brothers flew, I cannot use my regional airfields? I’m not talking about going to major hub airports like JFK or Heathrow or O’Hare. I’m talking about regional airfields that are close to your town, a 15-minute curbside-to-airside experience, no more than 15 minutes to half an hour from your house. That is an infrastructure asset that we simply are not making good enough use of right now.
So having been in that commercial aviation environment, having repossessed lots of regional aircraft and seen what wasn’t working, we combine that with the new technologies that are available. Combine it with our desire and need to do things more sustainably going forward. Then it made sense that we tackled what the core problems are. And the reason we don’t fly regional is down to three simple problems: cost of operation, noise and emissions. These are the three crux problems, with cost of operations probably being the biggest one. We realize that in order to fly people from point A to point B, it is currently an extremely expensive process.
If we can put a major dent in that while not upsetting all the local people who are living in and around these regional airfields, and we can do it more sustainably — that was a light-bulb moment for me. I decided to form Faradair in 2014 with a specific goal of solving those three problems. I wanted to design and come up with an asset solution that would attack those three core problems and go about it with technologies that we knew we could deliver, that we knew we could certify, that we knew we could make safe and grow. All the while, we’re hoping that some of the new technologies that come along are going to be able to improve that model even more.
When considering the list of existing technologies that can be applied — and you talk about the list of technologies that may not necessarily be there yet but could be applied — how are you going to handle that development? This is a unique part of the business, that capacity to synthesize between past and future, and it makes it really intriguing.
Cloughley: Let’s start with commercial aviation. In commercial aviation, less is more. That’s the simple logic. Now, what do I mean by that?
Back in the day, to go transatlantic, to go across the Pacific, we were looking at things like the 747, four-engine 707, etc. Even then, Airbus came forward with the Airbus A380. But what we’ve now discovered is that less is more.
If you can make the same flight distance with two engines, that’s less fuel burn, less cost, less complexity, less maintenance. It makes more sense to be doing that if you can get the regulator comfortable with the fact that now you’ve got two engines instead of four. If one flames out, you’ve now got to be within a certain strike range of putting the aircraft down with one-engine power.
As we improve over time, we try and improve the metric, the economic model. We try and improve the opportunity. And we looked at this from the same perspective, saying, “OK, most regional turboprops are twin-engine aircraft or regional jets. Can we get to the less-is-more approach on this?” Now, if we could go to a single turbine, then we need to get the regulator comfortable enough with “What happens in the event of X?” Because if we can use one turbine, instantly we’re reducing fuel burn compared to what’s out there today. We’re reducing maintenance costs compared to what’s out there today. And we’re obviously reducing emissions.
That is a great way to break that of cost-of-operations problem. But how do you do that? How do you do that sensibly and without of overpromising? We can use new technologies.
This is where the automotive link of comes in. If 10 years ago I had said, “There will be a car that’s going to out-accelerate a Ferrari or a Lamborghini, except you can put four adults in it,” you’d probably say, “That’s nonsense.” However, look at where the industry is today with Tesla. It can be done.
So, basically, what we’ve seen is that new technologies emerge.
I remember talking to the Prodrive guys about why they put solar panels on the roof of the Aston Martin at Le Mans. And it was so that they could take the air-conditioning unit and power it from solar, which meant that they got a little bit more horsepower off the engine, which gave them a little bit more grunt down the Mulsanne Straight.
This is where new technology can come into an existing field and environment and make it better.
Let’s think about an electric motor. This is a no-brainer, a single moving part. Let’s compare it to a turboprop. You buy a new turboprop for over a million dollars, for 1,800 hours of use, and you’re going to do a hot-section inspection, which is about $40,000 or $50,000. Then you’re going to do an overhaul after 2,000 hours. And that’s going to cost you about half a million, to do that overhaul.
You’re then going to do that three times before you do a heavy overhaul for about $800,000. So, over the period of 30,000 hours of use, you’re going to spend 7 to 8 million just in maintenance costs alone on that turboprop engine — and on a two-turboprop engine, that’s $16 million spent just in maintenance.
Consider the same 30,000-hour period with the electric motor. You don’t have to crack the case open, because you have that single moving part. It gets inspected at 30,000 hours, and you have no cost in that period. That’s putting a huge dent into that cost-of-operation model.
Let’s look at electric cars that are now becoming more common. Can you talk through why or why not that can be leveraged in an airplane?
Cloughley: First, automotive batteries are built for production volume and cost. The safety standards required for aircraft are significantly higher than for automotive, for obvious reasons. If something happens in a vehicle, you smell smoke or whatever else, you can pull over and can be out of the car within seconds. If you’re at 10,000 feet and something goes wrong and smoke starts pouring out, you’re in real trouble.
It is absolutely imperative that when it comes to transporting people in a commercial environment, it has got to be as safe as possible. Therefore, there have got to be certain technologies that reach a higher level, a higher capability than what we’re using in in cars. So these technologies have got a little way to go yet in order to reach that standard in terms of power, density, weight, range, capability, etc., for us to mimic in aviation what has been done so incredibly successfully in automotive.
So, then, how do we power those electric motors? As discussed, it’s a low-cost way of propelling the asset through the air compared to using a single turbine, which is used every day of the week in commercial jets today. Some background: When you start up a big commercial aircraft, you plug it into the terminal in order to get the power to fire up these engines.
If you don’t have a ground power connection — for example, you’re parked out on a stand on the apron — then you have a thing in the tail cone called an APU, an auxiliary power unit. It’s a mini jet turbine, and all it does is turn on and create electrical power. It’s a generator. That allows you to fire up your big engines. And once they are running, you can turn the APU off.
So what we decided was, well, what we need is a little turbine generator. We need something that doesn’t handle the entire flight cycle. It doesn’t do the takeoff, the landing or that big fuel burn. It just turns on and creates power at a reduced fuel burn rate for the entire flight cycle. We do not have a flight cycle (a cycle is a takeoff and landing), to add to the maintenance mix. It’s literally just our usage alone.
If we can use that to power the electric motors in a hybrid electric configuration while the technology is becoming mature — be it all battery or hydrogen fuel cell or ammonia fuel cell — then this is the starting point. This enables us to reduce fuel burn. We’re definitely reducing maintenance costs. We’re definitely reducing emissions.
This is a more sustainable starting point. And as these technologies mature, we start introducing them. And so what we see in our turbine generators (for example the Honeywell APU that sits in the tail cone of an Airbus A350 today), when future technologies are available we can simply take out one box of power, replace it with a different box of power and our aircraft still remains an electric aircraft.
The Faradair BEHA is an electric airplane. But today, we use a jet fuel power generator, which could use sustainable aviation fuel to reduce the emissions footprint even further. And then, at a point in the future, we take that box out, put a different box in and the aircraft carries on as a full net-zero asset in the future. That’s our rationale. That’s our logic to how we’re approaching things.
It’s sort of similar in some ways to Formula One and Formula E: The basic construct is to use compatible technologies from the past but change out the power units over time, when those power units are able to deliver the appropriate performance level.
Let’s revisit the economics of the regional airports.
Cloughley: There are something like 5,700-odd regional airfields in the U.S., of which I think only about 570 have got scheduled daily services. Now, out of those 570 airfields — basically 10% — you’re looking at $134 billion, if I recall, of economic activity value from just that group of airfields.
We’re talking about cargo as well. We live in an age in which online demand means I order something today and I want it tomorrow. Well, the fairy godmother doesn’t bring it to your front doorstep. There is aircraft involved, generally, when something is on the far side of a country. And it will then have to go to a major airport or a major cargo logistics hub, and then it gets put onto a great big truck and taken out to regional distribution centers and blah, blah, blah.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if we could use an aircraft asset — and what we’ve done with our aircraft is make it utility–passenger capable, so you can fly passengers by day and then take the seats out and fly cargo by night. So what you’re doing is driving up the utilization of the asset, which increases the economic model of the asset and makes it more viable to use. It means that people will be getting their product faster from their regional environment.
We can take trucks off the road, because what would have been done by a great big articulated lorry can now potentially be distributed locally by a regional electric van from the local distribution hub. As long as you’ve got a 500-meter lot — and we’re saying 300 meters or less, for a short takeoff and landing and runway requirement, which is very short on all surfaces — then we can start using those regional environments for the movement of both people and of goods. But we can do it quietly, sustainably.
Quietly indeed, like electric cars.
Cloughley: A funny story: As one of the instructors for AMG Mercedes, I was in an electric smart car conducting a corporate demonstration. There are people in the road ahead of you, and you’re moving from one point to another. And nobody could hear this thing, it was so quiet.
I’m leaning my head out the window and saying, “Excuse me, can you just step out of the way? We need to come through.” Of course, with an ordinary vehicle, they would normally hear you coming.
It would be nice if we can get to that point in aerospace as well. For places like Santa Monica, where you have such a huge furor over the aircraft noise for local residents, there’s that constant battle between aircraft owners and people who use airports and the local environment. If we can remove some of that, where people get the benefit because the service is cost-effective enough for everybody to use, then we are going to see a monumental boom in aviation and aircraft usage in the regional environment.
Going back to the numbers, you talk about the 30,000-mile usage as the starting point for understanding OpEx. And you look at regional or the lack of use of regional airlines for various reasons. Step forward 10 years from now — and, obviously, be pragmatic. Because remember, a number of companies have [said], “Yeah, yeah, we’re going to travel everybody by zeppelin. More than 20,000 at your local airfield in the next two years. Yeah, yeah, we’re looking to that.”
But let’s say it’s 2033. How might this conversation be different? What might have changed around us if we head toward the landscape you envision?
Cloughley: Probably one of the biggest and most interesting aspects is the integration of technology into our lives. Let’s take a really extreme example: COVID. Video conferencing has been around for many years. Yet in the space of six months to a year, everybody from a four-year-old to a 94-year-old suddenly had to get their heads around videoconferencing as a means to speak to loved ones, carry on business, etc. It was a forced technology push on people of a technology that had been around for a long time.
Aviation’s been around for a long time. Regional flight’s been around for a long time. Say you have a meeting coming up or realize you haven’t seen family members in a while. Imagine that, via the use of smartphone apps, you decide to make a spontaneous visit. It could be a very simple process: You can just pull up the app, look at the schedule and decide, “OK, there’s a flight leaving at 5:30. It’s going to go from here to here, and it’s going to cost me $30 to jump on it. Great.” And you give your mates a call.
Or you fancy visiting an event. Yep, it looks like there are six seats available. Great. Let’s book it and jump on that and go.
It may become as easy as taking a bus. There are set schedules, running every hour between point A, point B, etc. And as the network grows, it becomes a standard form of transport.
We may look back and wonder, “You drove in a car in congested traffic for five hours? What were you doing with your life?” It’s like when you talk to people now about what it was like to dial up to the internet on a Spectrum 48K computer back in the day.
We are going to have to become far more collective in how we use our transport. I think it’s just going to be a different environment. We’ve seen that in science-fiction films. When you look back at the film Blade Runner with its scenes of aircraft with vertical takeoff and landing all around cities, we are heading there now.
What a fantastic thing it will be if we can go between cities from regional airfields, journeys that would ordinarily take three hours to drive, and we simply do it in half an hour.
Cloughley: Yes. When we’re looking at this issue of operating from regional airfields, we decided to have an asset that’s going to move people as well as cargo and goods, the ability to lift that heavy payload but also handle a range of jobs and opportunities.
For example, if it’s taking a on humanitarian role, going where an earthquake happened or a volcano has erupted and the local regional airfields have been cut off by a lava flow, and now you’ve got a 300-meter piece of tarmac rather than a 600- to 1,000-meter piece of tarmac. Then that short takeoff and landing capability, that super high-lift capability, is really important. This is an aircraft that’s been designed to handle this situation.
It also does not need to be particularly high. We don’t want the cost base of pressurizing the aircraft. It’s beneath pressurization altitudes and goes from point to point in a very effective manner.
We also designed it with noise in mind. If you go with open-propeller architecture, that’s great when you want to go faster than 230-odd knots. But if you’re only going up to 200 or 230 knots, then various university studies have proven that the thrust efficiency is much better with a ducted fan up to those speeds. If you want to go faster, go open prop.
We’ve worked through many design considerations and, yes, it does look different. We’ve had to overcome the naysayers of the world. But we’ve got the evidence that proves what it does. And that’s the core thing. You always have to base whatever you’re doing on surefire evidence.
The final design hasn’t been revealed yet. We hope to do that within the next six months to a year. When people will see it, I think they’re going to be quite surprised.
We’re aerospace guys. We haven’t come from oil and gas or technology or whatever. We’re people who’ve been there and done it within the commercial aviation environment. We understand what the market needs and we understand the difficulty of certifying new assets.
The opportunity, if we get this right, is absolutely enormous.
The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
