what's it like been here on the day of first hot fire for the engine after years and decades for you of matching a system I guess oh I'm I'm not to S level uh SP it to work pass fighter in 3 2 1 yes wow man's age-old dream of flight becomes a reality zero all engine running love the smell of jet fuel my name is Ian Brooke company is astrome mechanica building new supersonic aircraft powered by a new kind of jet engine how many flight hours do you think you have at this oh I mean
you I've got, 1500 hours all right good to go s tower D twin November 63 Golf Hotel to go4 like a straight down Southeast 7 63 Golf Hotel Center powerold shortway 14 three go [Music] when you're up here doing this it's very clear you know there's no like hard lines between anywhere this is all just Earth being up here and seeing this it sort of it puts things in a more correct scale I think you know it's like if if you the screen for too long or just like inside a building for too long this
is a version of touching grass what do you call this like touching the sky it's good good to do good for the [Music] soul I'm Matthew Perkins I lead the electrical engineering and software teams here we're trying to make a new jet engine that enables uh supersonic flight in a sustainable fuel efficient fashion what's unique about our engine is that we're splitting it into basically two parts um one is the compressor and propulsive side of it and one is the like turbine and Generator side of it and the way in which we're coupling them together
is taking two electric motors um the turbine spins one motor acts as a generator the other motor spins the compressor um and we connect the two with basically just like cables and a battery what that enables us to do is run both of those halves in different operating regimes depending on the speed of flight so we can optimize the engine to run at um you know Mach 1 just as well as it runs at like Mach 3 which historically has been kind of the major drawback of SuperSonic flight is that when it's going really fast
it's either really inefficient or if it's efficient when it's going really fast it's horribly inefficient when it's going slow our engines should be efficient across the full operating regime which is the really cool thing about it the way this works we bur fuel in a generator uh that generates the electrical power over here that electrical power is then used in this system so we're just testing the end of things cuz this a really new piece so this is sort of the initial cold mode it behaves just like a turbo fan and then what we're testing
today for the first time is we're going to introduce fuel here at the combuster and that allows the system to behave both as that turbo fan cycle and then wig that to be the jet cycle that combination of low speed and high speed uh capability and efficiency it increases the range pretty dramatically over anything that's existed before so you need an engine to be this efficient to be able to do non-stop transpacific so if you just took like a conard for instance and re-engined it with this sort of architecture you get about 61% more range
uh which isy significant so Conor could more the Atlantic this could be the Pacific when I was 13 I started building model planes and something that was like really clear in that world was the gap between what was technically possible and what was I guess readily available where like it was a really wide Gap and this was like deeply annoying to me and it was just like obvious that you could have an aircraft company making these new better airplanes and so that was always in the back of my mind the stuff that we had with
model aircraft these electric motors they were just way way better but the that sucks that's always and still is a limiting factor but there was something to this of like how much better Electric Systems could be so over time as I of like Advanced as a pilot aircraft Builder got to flying jets I built up like enough tree of knowledge that I had on how to build and design things I could plot a path of how to really solve a bunch of these issues that we had in in Aerospace specifically more the private jet end
of things we started with the engine first I mean planes are built around engines it's what made powered flight possible and so it was only from having an Insight on a new way to advance supersonic propulsion that I consider like actually making suic plane so the first one was I realized a new way to make the turbo electric adaptive engine and that solves efficiency like technical limitations but it doesn't fully solve the economic challenge you know you're still going to consume a lot more energy as you go faster and so the next part of this
should came in from Rockets you know they're all switching from kerosene based fuels which is you know essentially just jet fuel to methane based fuel so you know Rockets use meth loocks and this is actually just you know this is LNG and interestingly you know LNG is a 10th of price of jet fuel one advantage we have in starting on our project now is that uh we don't have a ton of like kind of the Legacy history so when you think about modern day Electronics we have all these cool like gadgets you know your iPhone
is an amazing piece of technology and we're basically planning to leverage that level of technology in our plane so things like when you talk in plane world people are like oh is your engine controller like actually fully digitally controlled which is kind of like almost an insane question in like 2024 so kind of from the ground up building for modern electronics and like modern software practices we're able to utilize like a bunch of the electric motor technology that's getting developed for the EV Market but also for like the EV racing market right so the coolest
part is we have these wild like electric motors right there that are like carbon fiber they're super lightweight they're super high per performance and they're like really Compact and so it's kind of this perfect time to be able to use that we first you know came out showing what we call now our gen one engine and that was proving the especially new part of what we're doing of using electric compression for supersonic propulsion uh you know those generating roughly mock 3 exhaust velocities that was the first thing we then built we call our Gen 2
that was to show all right this is behaving like a very efficient turbo fan cycle electric fan cycle now the thing that we're demoing is Gen 3 this is the to marry those two things it's the efficient supersonic highspeed cycle combined with the high efficiency subsonic cycle into a single engine where it's fully demonstrated the Adaptive capability in one one system next engine is basically the first kind of engine that size that could actually be useful on a plane so it's like a full thing we're going to be trying to test fire and basically demonstrate
the technology um and you know presumably learn a lot along the way today is the first day we're going to be going for hot fire on that engine demonstrating that full full [Music] performance what's it like in here after years and decades for you of Imaging a system I guess oh I'm I'm not too s that one uh it's just sped to work go time we're going do another test we're going to staircase up with the fuel valve and we're not going to light the igniter at all we're not going to you need fullow yeah
[Music] [Music] so we're going to do a cult one cold flow where we sweep through a bunch of differents and have a better sense of how much to open that seros alve and you want to do a same sequence this time of have the igniter go once it's already flowing yeah we are are gearing up for another test trying it at slightly different fuel ramp profile and we're going to throttle up uh a bit more slowly and hit a couple different set points that we think are going to be uh lower power but perhaps a
bit easier to ignite so we'll see [Music] me Canin some racket neighbors are not going to be excited about it nice hey hey con yes you hit the manual board this is a little bit bur always kind of exciting to see that initial didn't blow up so we're at a good starting point uh sometimes uh I don't know there was bets being placed so it's uh it's always nerve-racking I don't want to lose a bet uh I don't have a lot of money so I can't really lose I got to win these beds everything that
we're doing is predicated on the functionality of this engine that it is going to be the new capable thing that it is and that was the very first thing that we set out to prove and what we've done and what we're demonstrating now so now we can go on to the work of building a relatively conventional suponic aircraft as much as that can be a thing because the engine is what had to change really now the path ahead is first prove the engine and when we build this aircraft build an unmanned aircraft then once we
get familiar with this technology we're actually out there you know flying it a thing much like we'll eventually have people then we can go through the very long process of going through fa certification I would say we expect to probably be flying something at most two years to get to this super sonic flight demonstrator and our version of this is going to be pretty pretty big and substantial I'm going to be flying an experimental one of these certainly inside of 5 years when first paying passengers is going to be going on something like this probably
more in the range of seven to 10 years out so from when we get to these first passenger flights that's we're still going to be small this is going to be like tens of flights per day maybe then you go like start to go up the ladder of okay we get a little bit bigger we go for like people paying first class uh you know now you're maybe in the you know the hundreds of flights per day then eventually you scale this up to where you're doing thousands of flights per day that's that's the ultimate
destination and you just keep you have to go bit by bit do you think we're kind of looking through a new Aviation Renaissance with all the new companies in not yet we're close but there hasn't really I mean I think this is the point of my company like we haven't had a catalyst to really change this yet but the future that we'll have really will be it's the one that we're going to bring about um the accessibility none of like flying at this scale this isn't you know a for scalable really it's it's like the
jet level of flying but made personal and and it's it's not this like elitist thing or something like that it's like everybody gets to have that I feel like so much of our existence is defined by sort of time separation it's going to feel like there's just that much more of the world that is accessible to you is requested to the South run of beer area via Alpha time we see you be breaking the sound barrier and our own airplane [Music]
