history. And for the past century it has functioned pretty much the same

way. But that could all change.

The advent of lithium ion batteries and electric propulsion technologies

is igniting a revolution in transportation.

Everything from cars to trucks and buses are going electric.

But what about planes?

We call this the third revolution in aviation.

The first was the piston engine that enabled the Wright brothers to fly

their first flight. The second was the jet engine, which only really was

applied to larger planes.

And we think the third revolution is electric propulsion.

CO2 emissions and the environmental impact they pose has moved to the

forefront of public attention and has been one of the driving forces in

leading electric vehicle adoption.

The aviation industry is one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse

gas emissions. And unlike cars, aviation is often excluded from national

climate plans because it operates across borders.

Between flight and commercial, shipping constitutes about 5 percent of our

total CO2 emissions per year.

And these are some of the hardest CO2 to decarbonize.

Aircraft emissions are a real serious problem.

It's projected to be up to 25 percent of the entire global carbon budget

to stay below 1.5

degrees C.

According to a 2018 report on CO2 emissions from commercial aviation,

there was a 32 percent increase in emissions over the five years leading

up to the study. And with the FAA estimating the number of airline

passengers in the U.S.

will surpass one 1.28

billion by 2038, planes will be a big source of pollution for years to

come. Jet fuel is also one of the biggest operating costs for airlines,

and electric motors have fewer parts to repair and maintain, making them a

more economical option as well.

When you look at a jet engine, there's thousands of moving parts.

A turboprop has 7,000 to 10,000 moving parts.

And you have to every 3,000 hours spend hundreds of thousands of dollars

and a lot of time to overhaul them.

There's one moving part in an electric motor in a plane.

An electric propulsion system can reduce cost of ownership or cost of

operation dramatically.

Orders of magnitude 40, 50, 60, 70%.

But not only do you have lower maintenance costs, but you also have lower

costs in terms of actually providing the energy required to go from one

location to another.

With so many benefits, why is it we have yet to see the electric vehicle

movement come to aerospace?

Some fundamental problem with electric aircraft has always been that a

good lithium ion battery cell has one fortieth of the energy content of

the equivalent weight of jet fuel.

And so if you were to take an existing airplane and you take out all the

fuel and you take out the engines and the fuel systems and replace those

with only batteries, then you would only fly one twentieth as far.

While the electrification of aviation has been slow to start, the

technology is starting to look more feasible.

So there's been a significant enough revolution and improvement in the

performance of batteries, which the automotive industry is really driving.

It is extremely promising that one of these battery technologies can be

scaled up for electric flight.

So the real question is, is not when will we have electric airplanes?

It's when will the time come where we can have electric airplanes that fly

far enough to then start replacing conventionally fueled air transport?

The first area to be serviced with electric aircraft will be short

regional flights. But battery electric flight is still in early

development. Some of the planes that have flown have been demonstrated.

They're basically all battery.

They're just carrying their pilot.

And they actually don't even have the weight to carry passengers right

now. But the batteries are going to improve.

Pipistrel is one of the few all electric plane manufacturers actually

building and flying today.

Because of limited range and capacity, they're primarily used as trainer

aircraft. Recently, Harbour Air in Vancouver, Canada, partnered with

MagniX to take its fleet of seaplanes all electric.

It just completed its first successful flight and is beginning the

certification and approval process.

Israeli startup Eviation Aircraft showed off its all electric nine-seat

aircraft in summer 2019 at the Paris Air Show.

The company claims the plane will be capable of flying up to 650 miles and

that customers have placed more than 150 orders.

The startup hopes to begin testing in 2020.

There's companies out there, like Bye Aerospace and Pipistrel, that are

doing, I think, amazing things in the light sport and the trainer aircraft

market, where they could go straight to electric with those vehicles and

the cost of ownership and the operational cost benefits are really, really

compelling. Until battery tech improves, hybrid electric aircraft is what

will be utilized for larger capacity flights going longer distances.

A hybrid electric aircraft would be an aircraft that would leverage an

electric motor and electric propulsion in addition to the traditional fuel

sources that we have today.

So one can imagine, just like you would have a hybrid electric car, you

could have a hybrid electric aircraft.

So what we've done is we've taken a very, very successful Honeywell

helicopter engine and we've mounted it with a special gearbox to two of

our ultra efficient generators.

So in total, this machine generates 400 kilowatts of power, which is

enough to power 40 homes at one time.

Ampaire is one startup working on and testing hybrid electric aircraft.

The first plane that Ampaire flew is our electric eel, and that's a six

seat aircraft, the largest hybrid electric aircraft that's ever flown.

We're already building our second copy of that aircraft, and it's going to

be the first ever to fly on an actual commercial route demoing daily

operations in Hawaii.

The test flights will begin next year in partnership with Mokulele

Airlines, flying on a route based out of Maui.

This project is a stepping stone for worldwide adoption of electric

aircraft. So we've been working in programs from everywhere like Norway,

where Norway is actually aiming to have all flights under 90 minutes go

electric or hybrid electric by 2040.

And you're looking at the U.K.,

Scotland initiatives going on right now to have electric and hybrid

electric aircraft. Airlines historically have struggled to make money on

shorter regional flights, but hybrid planes could change that.

In a hybrid, we're reducing fuel burn by up to 75 percent.

That is transformational for the economics of airlines.

There's this whole segment of the market, about 40 billion dollars of

revenue that has now been eliminated from airlines' balance sheets because

they just couldn't fly those routes profitably.

We're going to enable them to fly those routes again.

Utilizing hybrid engines in regional aircraft could also make flight more

common in daily life.

I think everybody knows how expensive it is to fly regionally.

And part of the reason that this is the case is that small turbine engines

are very inefficient.

Electricity from renewable sources can be very cheap.

And in parts of the country it's ridiculously cheap, like the Pacific

Northwest, compared to jet fuel flying will be will be a bargain.

It's also going to enable is things like regional commuting that you have

these super-commuters in places like Los Angeles and the Bay Area that are

going to be able to do things like fly daily, air-pooling.

So when could we see larger commercial airliners go electric?

It could be some time.

I think there's a lot of years, if not decades, before hybrid electric and

fully electric propulsion is going to be viable in that space.

And it's unknown when battery technology will be sufficient for those

longer missions. In the take-off, the amount of power that is required is

specifically related to its weight.

Even to have a small passenger plane, maybe three or four people, go for

several hundred miles, you need a battery that is two to three times more

powerful than it is today.

It's more likely that these larger aircraft will convert to hybrid

technology until batteries are capable of supporting longer flights.

When you talk to a Boeing or you talk to an Airbus about a really big

airplane, the conversations in the present tend to be around how do you

make the airplane more electric versus fully electric?

And that does take loads off of the engines and help reduce the fuel burn

of those aircraft and make those aircraft more efficient.

Electric technology also opens up a host of new efficient designs for

future aircraft. There's kind of a cascade of benefits.

You produce less heat, so it's easier to cool your system and your cooling

drag goes down. You can design the plane differently.

The electric motors are tiny compared to an engine.

You can put them in different places.

So it just opens up an entire new design space.

You compare the amount of energy per weight that you could put in a

battery versus amount of energy per weight that's in a gallon of gasoline,

it's enormously different.

And what that forces you to do is to design very, very efficient

airplanes. These efficiencies in combination with the advantages of

electric propulsion, enable an entirely new type of flight: air taxis or

urban air mobility.

Urban air mobility is really a new mode of transportation.

I would actually call it a new era in aviation.

And that revolution is really to overcome the traffic problem we're seeing

around big cities. Perhaps you're 30 miles away from your closest airport.

So you could potentially get into one of these urban air mobility vehicles

and fly that short distance that might take you an hour in traffic, but

maybe fifteen minutes in one of these urban air mobility vehicles.

This new segment of transportation has attracted the attention of Uber,

which is hoping to bring its experience as a rideshare company to flight.

We know that congestion is getting worse and there's limits to what you

can do on the ground. Let's move transportation out of the 2D grid into

the third dimension.

Uber is creating the technology that will help run the logistical

operations of such a service and partnering with manufacturers to provide

the aircraft. When you select Uber Air, we'll get you a car.

You'll take that to the sky port.

We'll walk you through the seamless, minimal time transition into the

aircraft, which will then take off fly to the closest remote skyport to

your destination, where a car will meet you just in time for you to get to

your final destination. Urban air mobility could surpass ground-based

services in investor interest and funding.

Morgan Stanley estimates the market could reach $1.5

trillion by 2040.

The evolution has been like nothing I've ever seen.

I've been in aerospace for decades and there's been an influx of capital

at each end of the value chain, from the vehicle manufacturers to the

technology to the infrastructure to the regulatory environment.

Hundreds of startups have recently entered the space, all working to

develop their own aircraft.

Vahana is developing a short range vertical takeoff and landing vehicle

funded by Airbus. Joby Aviation is backed by JetBlue Airways and Google's

Larry Page is an investor in two startups as well.

Traditionally, only a few hundred planes are manufactured a year.

The advent of urban air mobility could change that and have a big impact

on the automotive industry.

The volumes are gonna be like nothing we've ever seen.

In a traditional aerospace market, five hundred airplanes a year, six

hundred airplanes a year, those are a record-setting numbers of airplanes

and for urban air mobility, could be tens of thousands of vehicles per

year. And quite frankly, the traditional aerospace industry isn't equipped

to support those volumes.

Anticipating this convergence of aerospace and automotive led Honeywell to

partner with Denso, one of the world's largest automotive suppliers.

We talk about urban air mobility, not as a replacement for an airplane,

but as a replacement for a car.

And so you have a lot of automotive companies that are very, very

interested in participating in the market.

We build millions of motors and inverters.

And when we bring that kind of technology and manufacturing know-how to

our aerospace customers, it's seen as really, really monumental because

they are used to building in such low quantities.

Air taxis are only just starting to enter testing.

But how soon could we potentially see them out in the world?

We do see some urban air mobility operations using conventional

helicopters today. But when are we going to actually see these electric