cc >> Good afternoon, everyone, and
welcome to the AeroInnovate Technology Showcase Stage.
My name is Meredith Jaeger, and I am the co-founder and director
of AeroInnovate. In this afternoon's session we
have Chip Yates, but before I go into Chip's bio, I'd like to
share just a little bit of information about AeroInnovate
and what we're all about. We are physically located here
in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and we provide resources and services
to entrepreneurs and investors and industry leaders for the
aviation industry to help connect them, educate them,
expose them, and provide a community for them to share
information and resources among themselves as well.
So, with that, I will now introduce our featured guest for
today. Chip Yates is the chief
executive officer and founder of Flight of the Century.
Chip led a team of three volunteer aerospace engineers to
create 258-horsepower electric superbike which he rode at
speeds of over 200 miles per hour to eight official world
land speed records, the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb
World Record, four AMA national records, and four AMA national
championship titles. He currently holds the official
FIM and Guinness Book of World Records titles for the world's
fastest electric motorcycle. He has now installed the same
258-horsepower motor into the world's most powerful electric
aircraft, a Burt Rutan-designed Long-EZ.
Yates is a prolific inventor with more than eight issued
patents, including three on the Jeep Grand Cherokee and more
than 30 consumer products invented and brought to market,
including the trend setting FlipLash flip over toy car.
One week ago, Chip broke the speed record for electric flight
at an amazing 202.6 miles per hour.
It is my pleasure to introduce to you Chip Yates.
[APPLAUSE]
Hello, people. Happy Friday.
A beautiful day. Is it going rain?
So, I have to have a Burt Rutan quote because I have a Burt
Rutan, plagiarized, beautiful Burt Rutan Long-EZ with a
beautiful gas engine in it and turned it into an electric
airplane. For shame.
Burt says, among other things, a true creative researcher has to
have confidence and nonsense. Do you all believe?
Well, the nonsense part I'm referring to is our infinite
range electricity flight. It's a cover of Popular Science
type stuff. How could you possibly have an
electric airplane that flies forever?
And, for my background in building electric vehicles of
the extreme variety, I got into aviation just two or two and a
half months ago and immediately wondered why I couldn't have an
airplane that flew fast and for long durations.
And we all know the answer is batteries.
But you're going to hear in my presentation today about why I
think we can develop a way around that using mechanical
solutions. So, I'll get to that in a little
bit. And the other thing today I want
to do is I want to, I don't know if any of you were at my talk
yesterday or this morning, but we gave some quick video about
setting the world record, and then we gave a little bit of
data, as much as we could in the time frame.
Today, I want today to be a technical sort of interchange.
I want to roll up our sleeves and dig into the technology a
little bit. At the end of my
200-mile-an-hour flight, I lost a battery and I was forced to
make a dead stick landing, my second flight in a canard and
second flight in this aircraft. It's over there and it doesn't
have a scratch on it. Thank you.
But that was more luck than anything else.
But there's some interesting data behind it.
We collect telemetry on board the aircraft, and we have it
matched up with the video so you can see at each stage of the
flight what was happening. So that's going to be the meat
of today's presentation. But I want to, for the benefit
of people who weren't here yesterday, I want to go through
a few pieces of background that explains how we got here.
First of all, standing up here as a proud American.
I think America is a place where innovation needs to happen.
We have all the tools necessary and all the freedoms to do
things that are bold and push us into the next century.
I think electric aviation is the future.
I'm convinced that 100%. I've invested everything I have
into proving that and starting a company, Flight of the Century,
to do that. This is the country where we
need to be taking risks and innovating.
And people ask me, hey, what's the future?
Is it electric or is it not electric?
And the future is direct function of what we do today.
So if we want electric aircraft in the future, we do things
today to make it happen. We don't wait around and we
don't hope that it happens. We have to actually take action.
So, the power train technology that's in the electric aircraft
came from our electric superbike.
And we designed this with three guys in a year, and it is the
world's most powerful electric motorcycle, but, more
importantly, we developed this bike to prove that an electric
vehicle could compete with a gas vehicle on equal footing.
And that's what we did. I like this picture because it's
me leading a Ducati 848 Superbike with a pro rider on it
in an actual road race that was scheduled, it's a gasoline road
race and I entered an electric vehicle into a gas road race.
And we did that in January of 2011, and we got a second place
and a third place in two races that we entered against Hondas,
Suzukis, Yamahas, Kawasakis, and KTMs.
And I was so proud that a couple of guys in their garage could
build a bike that could beat Kawasakis and Yamahas and so
forth. So it got everybody excited, and
Popular Science put it on the cover because they thought it
was hard to believe that an electric vehicle could compete
with gas because what we've seen so far are electric vehicles
that are compromised, generally speaking, compromised across the
board. They're heavier, they're slower,
they're more expensive, they don't go as long, they need a
long time to recharge, and that's inconvenient.
So our philosophy on electric vehicles it you build them and
you implement them in places where they could actually beat
gasoline, at least compete if not beat.
On the electric motor side, the electric motors have gasoline
motors beat already, and I'm a gas motor guy.
When I raced as a professional motorcycle racer, I built all my
own gas engines. 600 CC motors that would rev to
6,000 RPM. I raced in World Superbike
Championship. I'm a motor guy, but I hate to
say it to myself and everybody, electric motors have gas motors
beat completely. This motor that's in our plane,
you can walk up and touch it. It's 11 inches around, 11 inches
long. It makes 258-horsepower, 400
foot pounds of torque, and the torque is instant.
Everybody says it's instant; it really is instant.
We had to write a ton of software to make the bike not
flip over and kill me, and the same with the airplane.
We had to write a bunch of aircraft software to stop the
torque from coming on too soon. It weighs 110 pounds versus a
Chevy 350, 575. It doesn't need a transmission.
You can use one. It doesn't need one.
We use a jack shaft on the motorcycle, and we used a prop
speed reduction unit on the aircraft.
But it's a steady gear reduction.
On the aircraft it's 2.1 to 1 gear reduction.
So when the prop is designed to go 250 miles an hour at 3100
RPM, and that puts the motor at 6,000 RPM.
And it's a good place for the motor to be.
Well in the power ban. The motor will actually rev up
to 8,500 RPM, but we don't need that much.
The electric motor is 92% efficient, and that's true.
It's the motor and the controller combined as a unit
only put off about 7% or 8% waste heat from the horsepower
they're producing. So the radiators on our
motorcycle, if you look, this motorcycle is more powerful than
a Grand Prix MotoGP bike, and it had two tiny little radiators
from a Honda dirt bike. It really is not rejecting any
heat at all. And the maintenance, there's no
maintenance required. Literally, no maintenance at
all. We've had that motor for two
years. There's nothing to be done.
It works or it doesn't. And the batteries we all know.
I don't like hearing doom and gloom about batteries.
Batteries, I brought one with me here today, and this is the
latest and greatest lithium ion polymer pouch cell.
Okay, this battery, to me, represents an incredible piece
of technology. As small as it is here, it
weighs just under two pounds. We have 102 of these in the
motorcycle, and the first flight on the aircraft we used the same
pack, 102. This battery, when fully
charged, is 4.2 volts. So it's about 428 volts that I
have in the airplane. That's a lot of voltage.
The amazing thing about this battery is it can put out 600
amps, and it can put out 600 amps continuously.
So, if you think about your household outlets, 15 amps, you
plug in your toaster, this is 600 amps.
If you short these terminals together, don't do what I'm
doing, it will pull 3,600 amps before it destroys itself.
So, you look at this battery and we complain my car doesn't go
far enough, I wish they'd do better.
These guys are doing an amazing job, the battery guys.
And they don't pay me to say that.
We get their batteries and we tear them up.
But the problem is, as consumers we're comparing electric
vehicles to gas vehicles. Well, that's apples and oranges.
Electric vehicles and batteries are not going to equal the
stored energy capacity of gasoline.
They're not even close. High level, this is about 86
times worse than gasoline in terms of stored energy.
We validate, this cell right is about the best you can get for
high performance applications. 145 watt hours per kilogram.
Gasoline is 12,000 watt hours per kilogram.
So don't compare them. Use electric vehicles in
applications where it makes sense; use gasoline vehicles
where it makes sense. I don't believe electric
vehicles are going to whip gasoline vehicles out.
They co-exist. Let me go back.
So the pack we had in the aircraft and the motorcycle
could put out 600 amps. It was 12.4 kilowatt hours,
which is three times more stored energy than a Toyota Prius.
It's a 31-amp-hour pack. 453 volts was the Bonneville
pack. The one in the airplane is 428
volts. Something to remember is this
critical low voltage, 291. We'll get to that, and that will
be part of the story as to why I had a forced landing in the
electric airplane. So, I have this frustration that
I want to fly an electric airplane, I want to fly long
distances. In fact, I want to fly one over
the Atlantic. I want to fly Charles
Lindbergh's route in an electric airplane.
And we can't get airplanes to fly 200 or 300 miles right now,
so what do we do? So after I retired the electric
motorcycle, I brought my guys together, smart guys, and said,
hey, guys, I want to fly an electric airplane the Lindbergh
route over the Atlantic. Get out your pencils.
Is it possible? And they came back, said
absolutely not, you're totally crazy.
That's 3,600 miles. You're way out there.
So we started inventing and brainstorming because I want to
do it anyway, and we came up with a couple ideas.
One was dropping batteries as you fly.
If you heard my talk yesterday, we talked about this where a
gasoline airplane has way more stored energy in gas and it
burns it so it gets lighter as it flies.
And the electric airplane has way less and it holds on to dead
batteries as it flies. Doesn't seem fair.
So our first idea was we'll drop batteries as we use them.
We'll make a battery pack in two, and halfway over a certain
route we'll drop half of it. And how much would that help?
And the answer is it would help around 40%.
You could get about 40% range extension if you did a huge
drop. That doesn't get us anywhere
near over the Atlantic, but we thought it was interesting.
And we did this all in lab and have a bunch of models about
where is this optimized. What we came up with is if you
take that same battery pack and you break it into 10 pieces and
you consume each one, so each one is a full voltage, you
consume each one in series, and as each one is done then you
drop it. That's a lot better.
That's around 92% if you did 10 drops, but it means you're in an
electric airplane, you're flying over a known route, there's a
collection centers. It's kind of a lot to get your
head around, but it means that that's a worthwhile way to think
is let's get rid of this weight. So 10 drops, 90%, so you
basically doubled your range. Still didn't get me over the
Atlantic. So, we're thinking as we drop
these batteries we don't want to drop them.
They're expensive and it's environmentally unfriendly.
So we'll pick them up and we'll recharge them.
Maybe we'll drop them on parachutes, or maybe we'll put
wings on them and they can glide left, glide right, land, and we
pick them up at our collection centers.
So we had battery packs with wings, and we think, well, if
they have wings, just put a propeller on it.
It could fly back up and meet you.
And so you're deep into the realm of the completely
ridiculous, but as time passed and we started socializing this
idea with people and started talking about whether it was
possible or not, we ended up with it actually is possible.
Now, there are challenges, which we'll go through, but the
concept of having an electric mother ship that flies a heavy
payload at a legitimate speed either across the United States
or over an ocean, for starters how about LA to San Francisco or
something like that. Maybe it starts and it's just
carrying the mail, but along the route, it's a known route,
you've got an infrastructure and you've got UAVs that fly up and
they tether connect and they recharge and they go down and
the next one comes up later in the route.
And they're just recharged on the ground and relaunched.
And you have to fly the same direction all the time.
Maybe it's good for UPS or FedEx.
But you start looking at it and you go, what are the challenges?
How do you link up and how do you get them up in the air and
stuff? And you break it down but no
part of recharging in air is impossible.
So we look at that and we think, if we do something like that, we
can make it across the Atlantic. We might have to launch one from
the water. That seems like it would be
difficult. So we came up with the criteria
of what would it mean to be successful about going across
the Atlantic. Now, we could have come up with
anything. We could have said if you fly at
80,000 feet, you could do it today.
You could get up in the air in electric something, you could
get blown over there with the jet stream, and that's great,
you get a world record, but that's not going to help all of
us fly in electric airplanes. The thing that's going to help
us fly in electric airplanes is developing an infrastructure
that supports heavy payload, long endurance flight.
And so we came up with criteria and we worked through the
Charles Lindbergh Foundation and Eric Lindbergh and all the
people that are involved in the Lindbergh route and the history
of it, and we were very respectful and we said we want
to do this, what do you guys think?
And we came up with some criteria.
Got to fly the exact route. You've got to be at least as
fast as Lindbergh or faster. It doesn't do us any good if we
creep over there at 20 miles an hour.
The same altitude or lower. Don't get up in the jet stream
and get blown over there. Can't be a balloon.
Can't be a blimp. Has to be manned.
So, we set it up so success would mean you've actually moved
the ball forward. That we figured out a way, as
crazy as it sounds, to fly a big heavy payload.
And I think the aircraft we're designing is over 15,000 pounds
and can fly faster than the Lindbergh on the route,
all-electric, and right now the way we have it is we're using 5
UAVs, which we'll talk about, but if we accomplish this, you
land in Paris, it's not just hey, look at me, it's possible
to do a 3,600-mile flight with an all-electric airplane.
So, we went to NASA, and after they stopped chuckling, they
gave us their OTIS trajectory optimizer software, and we had
our smart guys write a layer on top of that.
And what that does, that's the software that was used for
Apollo all the way up until now, it's sort of a rocket optimizer
and it takes a bunch of scenarios into account.
It's very complicated. And we've actually taken it and
laid it on its side and said how about a flight along the Earth
where each UAV and everything you do has a penalty and a
benefit associated with it. So how many UAVs do I need to
get across the Atlantic? And the optimizer goes, well,
you could use 10 or you could use 5 if you launch them from
here. You could use four, but one has
to be launched from the water. And we say no, we don't want to
do that. So we can strain that out.
Okay, now you're up to five or six.
So that's the way it thinks. There's a penalty for how far a
UAV has to fly before it docks with us because it would consume
half its batteries just getting to us.
So all that logic is in our route optimizer, and the first
route that we've optimized is the Lindbergh route.
So, you see, when I take off from JFK, this is the current
plan and I'm sure it will change, when I take off from JFK
we already have a UAV attached. It's hard-attached to the
aircraft. And we use a ground cart, it's
all electric, and it propels us down the runway, and we get to
take-off speed. We rotate off the cart, and then
our propeller starts turning. We have a really low landing
gear on the Lindbergh plane. We fly the first leg, which is
white, that is using the power from the UAV that was already
attached to us. And we have our own battery pack
in our aircraft. We drop that over Newfoundland.
We pick up number two, all the subsequent docked UAVs that are
recharging us are soft-docked. We're not trying to join planes
in midair or anything like that. The way it works is the UAV is
in front of us, and it has a tether connected at its nose
that is being blown back with a basket behind it.
And the Lindbergh plane comes in with a refueling probe just like
the Air Force uses. You probe the basket, and once a
connection is made, we're charging over a coaxial cable,
the Lindbergh plane overflies the UAV and tows it during the
charging cycle. So this is where the rest of it
is. One comes from Iceland.
Another one takes off from Ireland and comes and meets me.
But over the middle, we're actually running in green.
That means we're running on our own power for a little bit here
over the middle and then near the end.
Now, the US Navy is interested in this.
And they took a look at this and they said, well, would it be
helpful if we launched one over the ocean maybe from a submarine
or a surface ship or an aircraft carrier?
And we said, yeah, absolutely. So stay tuned.
The Navy might be involved in the Lindbergh flight as well.
Okay, so, again, this is what it looks like.
And, again, this is sort of a Popular Science-y image, but the
math is there. We have this designed up in
SolidWorks at the moment. That's the first one that's
hard-docked to us being jettisoned, and the rest are
soft-tethered. And again, this whole idea of an
airport being in the middle of the ocean, this is Popular
Science-y stuff, but you get the idea.
These are going to be flown off land and the US Navy may or may
not help us in the flight. They're very excited.
The other day they sent us a letter of intent.
We're actually in contract negotiations with the China
Lake. All they do is fly UAVs up at
China Lake. F-18s, they do all kinds of
missile tests, and we are next door at Inyokern Airport.
So this is why we picked China Lake and Inyokern.
So we're from Orange County. Our electric vehicle development
site is in Orange County, but we picked Inyokern Airport because
we think this area here could be the next Mohave of innovation.
Inyokern Airport has three beautiful runways.
One is 7100 feet and I needed it when I made my emergency landing
last week. But you take off from there and
then you've got China Lake, the Naval Air Weapons Station,
that's all restricted, but if they like you it's not
restricted. It's funny how it works.
So we sort of fly in there and then they've got a radar
tracking range that they use to track the space shuttle and
SpaceShipOne, and when we did our record, they actually
tracked us and validated it. And I'll tell you, there's some
interesting stuff about that. But the Navy, this is China
Lake, just up in China Lake they do 1.8 billion, they have 7,000
people. They own enough restricted air
space to be Rhode Island, and a lot of what they do is unmanned
stuff. So we went up there with our
story about electric vehicles and unmanned UAVs, and they
jumped on board immediately. This is their tracking range.
This is the tracking range at China Lake that validated Burt
Rutan's SpaceShipOne that they had successfully put Mike
Melvill into space. And this is also the tracking
range that validated the space shuttle when it would land at
Edwards. All that data came out of China
Lake and not Edwards. So, interesting little piece of
information here. Last week when we flew the world
record flight, China Lake was helping us because we have this
arrangement with them. And they said we'll provide you
radar, video, infrared, all kinds of information back, and
after the flight we landed and they came racing over to our
hanger at Inyokern and their eyes were wide as saucers and
they said, yeah, we're only going to give you the radar
because the infrared was strange.
We have had trouble finding you. So I think they're going to have
another look at that before they release it to the public.
So they were sort of taken aback by here's a fiberglass
Rutan-designed airplane, arguably hard to see on radar,
so they switched to infrared. We'll just pick up the heat.
This is what the bad guys do, right?
They us surface air missiles and pick up your heat.
And they looked at my motor. It's making 250-horsepower.
I'm flying 200 miles an hour directly at restricted air
space, and they're having trouble seeing me.
That's weird. They don't like that.
I got a tiny little radiator pooping out a little bit of
heat, and it doesn't show up on their screens.
And you can see radar dropouts too, actually.
But they got us at 204.4. We got ourselves at 202.6.
So we just went with the lower of the numbers.
But really, really great guys at China Lake.
They're actually, despite being the Navy, very entrepreneurial,
and we're excited to be up there because we can have this back
and forth. This is Inyokern.
The red arrow is runway 33. This is where it took off, and
the red circle over on the right is our hanger.
We have a nice hanger there. It's a beautiful facility.
Brand new runway. 7100 feet.
And I picked that one because we flew in the morning, there was
no wind. You don't want to do world
records in the wind. And I picked this one because I
liked the direction, there was a lot of overrun in case I had a
problem and needed to do an aborted takeoff, but luckily I
didn't. So we picked the long, safe
runway. So, the first flight, this is
the Long-EZ, and this is the relationship of the world record
in the Long-EZ to the Lindbergh plane.
The Lindbergh is a hundred-foot wingspan, all carbon dedicated,
heavy weight plane. The Long-EZ has nothing to do
with the actual flight, but it's an R&D platform.
And the reason we bought it, number one, is because I love
Rutan's designs, but my father-in-law had one and he
built it and I flew about a hundred hours in the backseat,
so I was totally in love with Long-EZs.
But, more practically, with a pusher we can have a recharging
probe sticking out the front. So that's what we're doing.
We have a recharging probe that's being built right now
that mounts on the front, sticks up, out and forward, and then we
have a Cessna 182 that has the battery pack in the backseat and
the tether going out the back. And so the next thing you'll
hear from us is hopefully we made a successful dock midair
and put some level of recharge back in the Long-EZ.
We're going to take this in steps.
But that's the next goal is we use an electromagnetic coupling,
and then we charge through a coaxial cable.
So there's the safety. If anything goes wrong it just
breaks. It's not mechanically coupled.
So, we're building the battery chargers.
They'll sit in the back of the 182.
They're actually able to be jettisoned.
If we have any problems, heat or fire, we can drop them.
It's a 200-amp battery charger, actually.
So we're going to charge at a rate of 200 amps, which is kind
of insane. So we actually charge DC to DC.
So in the 182 is a DC pack just slightly higher voltage than the
pack in the Long-EZ, and we have two parallel hundred-amp
chargers that we have wired up in a clever way we can charge at
200 amps. And so that's our objective is
to put some level, I really want to take off with a certain
amount of charge and land with more than I took off with.
I think that would be awesome. And I think that's the next step
to making the Lindbergh thing happen.
The Lindbergh, it's 2014. We have a road map.
I'm sure we'll make, but this is the next step.
We have to go in steps. So the Long-EZ came along quick.
We bought it in April. It was a gasoline plane.
Had 850 hours on it. It came out of Texas.
Tom Garrison, a mechanical engineer, was the builder.
It had an 02-35 in it, 118-horsepower.
It was flying, airworthy, and had registration and everything.
And we took off the wings in Dallas and towed it home on a
U-Haul and started working on it in May.
And between May and June, in two months, we made it this electric
plane that you see over here. So there's a lot of long nights.
And people know that that was the same two months I got my
pilot's license. So I started my license in May
and finished it and I just got it about two weeks ago.
So it was two months of not sleeping.
But the progression of the Long-EZ was we did a taxi test
on the 14th, and we sort of sped it up to try to get it here to
Oshkosh so we could show you all something because I don't know
about you but I've seen a lot of electric planes and concepts
that are concepts and I want to see stuff that's actually flown
and things that have done something.
And so there was a lot of extra pressure to be able to come here
today and be in the position I'm in now where I'm talking about,
oh my god, it was so cool flying the most powerful electric
airplane. And so we barely squeaked it in
because we did runway tests two days later, first flight two
days after that, and then went up the day after July 19th for
the world record 202 miles an hour.
That was also the same day for the dead stick landing which is
on the video. How many people were in the
presentation the other day and had already seen the video?
So not that many? Okay, so we've got to see the
video. So we did the dead stick landing
on the 19th and then we took the wings off and towed it to
Oshkosh the next day. So this poor thing, so if I
collapse it's understandable, this poor thing hasn't had any
rest. Okay, so the video.
So the video shows we had four cameras on board the airplane,
and then we had a chase. The 182 was our chase plane.
There's the camera angle shot out of that.
The Long-EZ, took out the 118-horsepower gas motor.
It's sitting on the shop floor if anybody wants it or if you
have a boat and you needed an anchor.
No, it's a good motor. But we took that out and at the
end of the day with the battery pack in there, we used the
battery pack from out motorcycle, which was old.
It's from 2009 and so we had put a lot of abuse on that at
Bonneville and racing gas bikes and stuff.
So that battery pack admittedly was a little long in the tooth.
So maybe I shouldn't have done it, but if I had built a new
pack I wouldn't have made it for Oshkosh.
So there's a lot of tradeoffs to consider.
But we put the old battery pack in there.
So you're talking about an airplane that's lighter than a
normal Long-EZ with that pack in it.
It was 1240 pounds with me in it ready to fly.
CG of 102. So it was nicely in Rutan's CG.
Nice and safe. Good weight and balance.
Everything signed off and then we did the flight.
So you're talking about an airplane lighter than a Long-EZ
with twice the horsepower. So what we found was something
quite interesting. We took off and climbed at 35%
throttle. And I'll show you that on the
data. It was amazing when I first flew
the thing. You wind on the throttle.
I didn't know how much to do. I didn't want to floor it and
have some failure, battery failure or something, so we
wound on the throttle maybe 50% in the first flight.
And the thing rotates, immediately starts climbing out
like this, and I look down at my air speed indicator is climbing
at 120 knots or something like that.
And I go, I don't want to do that because I want to save my
batteries and do a nice slow climb and use the least amount
of energy possible for the flight so I can extend it out
and see what we have. So I'm in the climb and I'm
rotating back to power in the full climb, and I thought that
was really surreal. From flight training you're in
the 172 and you're trying to push it further from the
firewall, if anything. So it's got tons of power.
So in the video that we'll show you with the record flight, we
climbed out 87 knots, 650 feet per minute to 2,000 AGL.
So we took off from Inyokern, which is 2500, the runway is
2500 MSL. So we got up to 4,500 MSL and we
leveled off. And we leveled off an I wanted
to go sort as slowly as possible to get away from Inyokern so I
could turn and do the high speed run.
So we level off 4,500 and I roll the throttle back and I'm at 20%
throttle, 100 miles an hour. It's pulling 45 amps out of a
dead pack which there's a lot of impedance in our pack right now
so it probably would have done better.
We're pulling 45 amps and it sagged down to 370 volts, which
is not the greatest. It started out at 424 volts that
particular day. So I noticed right away at level
flight that I was going to have some issues with battery sag,
and when the batteries sag, you lose horsepower, and if they go
too low under their critical voltage, they reverse and you
have a problem, and that's what happened to us.
So, we get out there at 4500, we do a 180 turn, and head right
back towards China Lake's restricted airspace.
I tell the 182, see you guys later, and roll on the throttle.
As I roll on the throttle, I see the battery sag.
I've got a dashboard in there. When you look at the airplane
you can see it's a formula one dashboard made by MoTec.
We have a MoTec computer in there.
I roll on the throttle and I see the voltage drop down below 370,
and it continues to drop down. So, I take, actually, quite a
long time building up to speed because I'm trying not to slam
the batteries. So I get up to 170-180, even get
to 190. So I'm sitting there 190 miles
an hour and the battery sag is really close.
It's like 290 or 300. We'll see on the data.
And if it gets to 270 you're in trouble.
So I'm there at 190 miles an hour, and I'm getting red lights
on my dashboard. Hey, man, you're pulling the
batteries down too far. Stop doing that.
So that's where I had a choice to make, and it was do you roll
off the throttle at 190 and be done?
That battery pack I think was toast anyway.
It had two years of abuse on it. Or do you just punch through and
go to 100% throttle and try to go over 200?
So, we all know what I did right?
Sorry. So, if you can glide to the
field, go ahead. So I went to 100%.
So you see in the data there's just a very brief period of 100%
throttle where that was sort of me trying to punch it through.
And we punched to 200 but that was it.
The battery sagged to 270, and I held 200 miles an hour or better
for about 15 seconds, enough for China Lake to go we got you
level flight, we get it, slow down.
And then I rolled it off and I turned back towards the airport,
and I had my warning lights still but I still have power.
It feels okay. I'm not sure if I have all of
it. But the plan was to just fly by
the tower. Not a Tom Cruise fly-by,
negative, Ghostrider, just a regular fly-by.
We had some state Assembly woman, some people, dignitaries
and stuff, so I was going to fly by and then get in the pattern
and land. So I started to do that because
I still had power, and so I'm halfway over the runway at a
thousand feet, halfway down the runway, and I lost all power.
And so then it's too late. You're not going to go down a
thousand feet right there on that runway.
So then I executed sort of a swooping 180 and landed and
didn't get to do my fly-by but got to do emergency landing.
So that was fun. So that's what happened.
And then, when you watch on the video, I set it up to glide, I
think it was around 80 knots, and I got a good glide, the
Rutan plane saved me. It wasn't me, it was the Rutan
plane. It just handled beautifully.
I'm trying to make it to the runway.
I'm misaligned with the runway all the way to the very last
minute. Right when the wheels touch is
the first time I've become aligned with the runway.
And as I'm becoming aligned with the runway trying to make it,
I'm using a little bit more back elevator, a little bit more, a
little bit more, and pretty soon I run out of back elevator, and
then the plane falls out of the sky but it's about a foot.
So it's like clunk, and then I bounce the nose wheel, which is
ever so embarrassing, but got on the ground safely.
So that's what you'll see is take off from Inyokern runway 33
heading towards restricted airspace, that's China Lake
beyond, turn, climb, and I climb really slow.
So in the video, once I start climbing we cut it out because
it takes forever. Climb, climb, climb.
Then I tell the 182 I'm doing a 180, and that red mark is when I
start accelerating, but I start accelerating very slow, like
30%-40% throttle. So we cut all that out of the
video to get it down to six or seven minutes, and then we bring
it back when I'm at 190 and I punch through 200 at the end.
And then you'll see me come back, initiate the fly-by, and
then abort the fly-by and do the emergency landing.
So I got, because I used to be a car racer and a motorcycle
racer, I have a Nomex fire suit. It's not a proper flight suit.
It's a race car driver suit. And then I have a parachute that
was giving to me by National Parachutes.
So we built a canopy jettison system.
So if I pull a ripcord in the Long-EZ, the canopy flies off,
and I've got my parachute. But for this run I was only
2,000 feet AGL, so probably not that great of parachuting
weather. And this video is just under
seven minutes. >> Inyokern traffic,
experimental electric 89 Charlie Yankee is departing 33 for light
traffic, departure to the south Inyokern.
Okay, so this is 35% power setting.
My power is just a little rotary knob.
You can see it when you look in there.
It's just a little zero or 258-horsepower, whichever you
want.
It's got a lot of elevator trim in there.
The canard folks told me to do that.
They said the canard will fly and then the main wheels stay on
the ground a while. So don't worry, it will fly.
So this is the second ever flight of this airplane.
So you've got to turn before you get into China Lake there.
China Lake, experimental electric.
89 Charlie Yankee is airborne for world record speed run.
So I was reporting into China Lake that we're going to do the
run, make sure that they could see me.
So this is from the 182 chase plane, of course.
Say again. >> Your performance is cleaner
than our performance. >> Roger that.
23 Alpha, 180 turn to the left.
Go ahead. You're clear left.
So we're going to make that 180 and start slowly
accelerating.
Roll on the power. Watch the batteries.
Okay, see you guys later. >> Roger that.
That's kind of cocky, huh? See you guys later.
We're going to outrun the 182. It's not very nice.
All right, so now we're at 190 right here.
A little vibration in the cockpit.
We'll sort that out when we get home.
200 miles an hour. 201 miles an hour for 89 Charlie
Yankee. >> Yee-haw, --
See the red lights in the cockpit?
4,600 feet, 202 miles an hour.
I'm going to shut it down. >> So the red lights mean you
pulled the voltage below 290, and 270 is where stuff goes bad.
89 Charlie Yankee, I think I'm going to damage the battery
so I'm going to get in the pattern and land this thing.
Roger that. We still have you in sight.
You're about a half mile ahead. We'll follow you.
Roger that. Inyokern traffic, experimental
89 Charlie Yankee electric is going to enter the pattern for
landing 33 Inyokern.
So I still had power up until that point.
I was going to do the fly-by, but now I lost all power.
I'm having issues with my battery so I'm going to get in
the pattern and land this thing. >> Roger that.
So now I'm turning away from the runway to do the 180.
And you hear the whine but it's the propeller spinning.
No power at all. >> Runway 33 Inyokern.
So there's gear down. And then I was close to the
runway so I did deploy the speed brake which, once you watch my
landing... >> Inyokern traffic,
experimental electric 89 Charlie Yankee priority landing 33
Inyokern. >> Okay, so that's priority
landing, that's emergency landing.
But I deployed the speed brake because I was right over the
runway, but, in retrospect, I shouldn't have done that because
I actually have trouble making the runway.
I didn't want to make a sharp, steep turn.
Gear down. I lost power so I'm going to
glide it in. >> Roger that.
We'll follow you. >> A full glide here.
And I did a very luxurious turn so I wouldn't stall it, but it
was too luxurious. I shouldn't have used the speed
brake.
It gets a little scary here.
Look at my elevator. Done.
Little bounce. And here's the overhead view of
that from the 182. Just trying to get aligned.
I like this better because you don't see the bounce.
Makes it look good. >> Holy crap.
Inyokern traffic, 89 Charlie Yankee safely on the ground.
Complete lack of power. I'll have to get towed back in
here, Inyokern. >> Inyokern traffic, sky lane 23
Alpha on the upwind runway 33, close traffic Inyokern.
Ridiculous. [APPLAUSE]
What's wrong with you people? You don't applaud crash
landings. So there was some media there,
and there's four pictures they took of the landing.
I don't know why they're overexposed like that.
There's one. Two.
Three. Four.
And the bush hides the bounce landing gear and makes it looks
like a pretty good landing. Okay, so what the hell went
wrong with that? Well, I'm going to use show you
the MoTec data. We're going to animate this.
I'm going to show you the take-off, and I'm going to show
you what's sort of going through my head.
Why do we only go 200 miles an hour?
The battery pack had so much internal impedance that when I
put a load on it, it will only put out 400 amps.
It was done. So we need 600 amps to make our
full horsepower. So I was going 202 miles an
hour. And that's right where that blue
vertical bar there, wherever you move that is what it will read
for you. So right there I'm at 279 volts.
That's terrible. 270 even is where everything
vents and opens up and you've destroyed everything.
So we basically blew up the pack to set the record.
The motor is spinning at 5400 at the shaft, 2500 at the prop, but
with not enough power to really engage it.
It's sitting there sort of cavitating.
Let me talk about this real quick before we look at the
telemetry data. The way electric motors work is
you get horsepower that's commensurate with voltage, and
so we put 400, for the Bonneville bike we had 450.
We had a little booster pack. For the airplane we had 428.
So at 428 volts all the way down to 380 volts, which is the green
line, the top line, you have 4-whatever, 450, 420, you can
put a load on it and it can sag down, all the way down to 380
and you'll still make full horsepower.
And when we were racing the electric bike, that's what
happened. That's what happens with a fresh
pack. When the voltage drops down
to 340, that's the yellow line, your power gets de-rated by how
much voltage you can keep on the bus under load.
So then you get down to 240 and you're making 150 horsepower.
So we were somewhere in between there, probably making about
170-180 horsepower with the voltage sag as bad as it was.
So that makes sense for 200 miles an hour.
It's about right. I'm going to switch over to the
MoTec data here. So on board we had an ECU made
by MoTec. It's out of a Formula One car.
Actually, we bought it from a Lama team.
And we write all our software, and this MoTec ECU is about a
$10,000 thing. It goes on race cars.
It's what controls the race car. We've completely customized that
to control our electric airplane power train.
It also stores I think a gigabyte of data.
Many channels. We store 150 channels.
We have a pitch, yaw, and roll. We have everything you can
imagine that we're logging. So, we can display all that.
We can actually send it over telemetry from the air, and then
when we get down on the ground we download it over ethernet.
And we opened up MoTec's i2 Pro software, and you can do
analysis. So what we've got here is we've
got a full length video with our speed, my throttle position, the
red is voltage, and the higher the better.
I love that sound. And the blue is amps.
So remember this, we're just doing our taxi here.
Inyokern traffic, experimental electric 89 Charlie
Yankee, taxiway Bravo, Inyokern. >> So we're taxiing along seven
miles an hour. The gauge is here.
Whatever it's reading is here. It'll read in the middle of the
actual values, high and low. So I'm using 13% throttle for
the taxi here at this moment. Voltage, see the voltage looks
great. So you go, hey, I'm going to
take off, I'm going to go 250 miles an hour at this voltage.
This is fantastic. Amps, pulling 20 amps taxiing
along. So you can move the bar anywhere
on the flight and see all the data live.
Inyokern traffic, experimental electric 89 Charlie
Yankee is departing 33 for light traffic, departure to the south
Inyokern. >> So let's go to...
Kind of want to look at the climb real quick and then we'll
go to the 200 miles an hour. You see altitude here, we're at
pattern at the runway altitude still.
See my throttle position in green here?
35%. How many of you guys take off an
airplane at 35% throttle? I'm trying to go as slow as I
can, remember. So my speed there, you can see
my speed at the top, that's in miles per hour on this software.
Climb out at 80-some miles an hour.
I'm using 37% throttle. But see my voltage has already
sagged. 370 volts.
When I looked down at that I thought, ick, I'm not sure how
well this is going to work. This battery pack is pretty old.
Pulling 150 amps for the climb there.
Okay, so then let's go to the fun part here.
So we're flying along. How fast am I going?
190, see. I got to 190, I look at my
voltage. 280.
So in the cockpit, anything below 290 I'm getting red
lights. So this is the decision point.
You see my throttle position? 78?
You see that green trace up there?
Look what's coming. Boom.
This guy goes to 100% throttle just to try to get the record
there. And so there you see.
200 miles an hour. 201 miles an hour for 89 Charlie
Yankee. >> Right as I broke through...
Yee-haw. >> It lit up on the dash.
I knew I had it. >> 4,600 feet, 202 miles an
hour. I'm going to shut it down.
So I hold it up at 200 for 15 seconds, and then see the
voltage come back when I take the load off of it?
The voltage recovers. Look, now up to 300-some volts
just because I took the load off of it.
89 Charlie Yankee, I think I might have damaged some
batteries so I'm going to get in the pattern and land this thing.
Roger that. We've still got you in sight.
You're about a half mile ahead. We'll follow you in.
Roger that. Inyokern traffic...
All right. That's pretty cool though.
We used that in racing when I was racing world superbikes and
stuff. So I'd come back into the pits
after racing, I'd tell my crew chief, man, I was 100% throttle,
it was so extreme, man, I was like there's no more speed to be
had from this bike. And they're like really?
Huh, 70% throttle, huh? Wimpy, wimpy, wimpy.
So the battery pack that we used, it performed perfectly up
until Bonneville. And Bonneville we thought we'd
be able to go about 220 or something.
It went 201 so it was a little disappointing.
It was enough for the records and everything, so we go hey, we
got the record but internally we were a little disappointed.
The battery pack, we had built up too much impedance in the
pack by the time we got the Bonneville.
And so we can show you that too. And the way it manifests itself,
the way you get de-rated is when I open the throttle, or on the
aircraft when I rotate the knob, it goes into our computer in the
MoTec and then it sends a command back to the motor
controller. And it says Yates wants so much
torque. We send torque commands to the
motor, and the motor outputs the torque.
And the motor sends back a signal over CAN, we communicate,
we have two CAN networks on board the airplane.
And the motor, I'll say I want 200 meters of torque and it says
you got it. What happens when I'm getting
de-rated because my voltage is, at the very top, see this circle
there? You got a green line and a red
line. The green line is called
requested torque. That's what I'm asking.
It's going over CAN. Please give me full power.
I'm at Bonneville. I need to set some records.
The red is coming back from the thing saying I cannot.
I do not have enough voltage on the bus to give you that level
of torque. When you see a gap like that it
means you're not getting what you're asking for, you're being
de-rated.
This is a video from Bonneville that shows the same thing.
This is a camera facing backwards.
You can see the salt. We're on the salt flats of
Bonneville. And then one looking at my ugly
face. So you can see here, this is
battery state of charge. Fully charged battery.
Has nothing to do with the battery being empty.
Voltage, started with 450. We're at 330 right now.
That's a function of high battery impedance.
Horsepower, thing makes 258 horsepower.
Makes it all day long when I'm road racing.
By the time I get to Bonneville, I'm in the flying mile speed
trap right now. My ground speed, about 200 miles
an hour. 195.
Horsepower, 190 horsepower. I've been de-rated from 258 to
190. Got a little wobble there.
Not proud of it. So that's sort of the world we
live in when we build extreme performance electric vehicles is
taking a motor and pushing it to the limits.
That motor and controller are being customized for us.
It's a 600-amp controller. All the safety software has been
removed because they know I'm crazy, and I want to be able to
push the limits. The batteries, we got the latest
and greatest. We abuse them.
We have software that saves them, but I have the ability to
override it, which is what I did in the aircraft.
This is a view from inside our battery pack that's on the
plane. This is what happens when you
pull it down below 270 volts. The cell inverts and it goes
reverse polarity. The cell actually expands and
then vents itself, and it emits a distinctive odor and it's not
good. Don't breathe it.
It doesn't catch on fire. It doesn't blow up.
It doesn't do anything like that.
It just vents. The internal pressure builds up
when it's inverted, and it vents.
So we opened the pack when we know that happened.
You can see which ones have vented.
And that's what it looks like. So here's one that's in good
shape, brand new. And there's one that vents right
around the tabs. You've got a positive and
negative tab here. One's aluminum and one's nickel.
So that's how it fails. So in an under-voltage, you can
make these catch on fire but we've never seen anything like
it, in an under-voltage situation, they vent.
So in the aircraft when you saw me go 200 miles an hour and then
shut it down and lose power, it's because one or more cells
reverse polarity and opened up like that.
And, initially, I still had continuity.
There was still some current able to flow through the open
cells, and then they went full open and I got know continuity
anymore. That's when I had to make the
dead stick landing. Now, that happened on the 19th
and we took wings off on the 20th and brought it here, so we
haven't actually opened up the pack and figured out did we
destroy everything or just one. We don't know the answer to that
yet. There's one more video I want to
show you. And this is what builds
impedance in the batteries. This is what we did that damaged
these batteries to where they had high internal impedance that
causes failure and the sag. And this is why I should have
replace them with a fresh pack before the flight.
The reason I didn't, by the way, is they're $40,000.
So I was sort of sitting on the floor and kind of fit in the
back seat of the Long-EZ, and so we kind of went to Home Depot
and got some steal and made them a frame, and you get first
flight. Really, it was.
It's like mild steal. We did it in a hurry.
Because we have the cells to build a proper pack but it will
probably take me about a month to do like a really beautiful
pack to fit the Long-EZ that's the proper pack for the Long-EZ.
And when we do that we expect 250 miles an hour or
thereabouts. So, when we race motorcycles,
the point of the Lindbergh thing is applying a mechanical
solution to this battery problem.
Batteries don't last as long as you want, so we're refueling in
air, we're recharging in air. That's sort of a mechanical way
to get around batteries being not good enough to last as long
as they want. We do the exact same thing with
the motorcycle. When we built the motorcycle, I
said there's one goal, guys: this electric motorcycle will go
as fast around a racetrack as a gas, period.
If we come to a decision point and we're not sure what to do,
you pick the one that makes it go as fast as the gas bike.
Now, that's fine and you do that and you go as fast as a gas
bike, but you wonder, can you finish the race?
And so we invented and patented a kinetic energy recovery
system, a regenerative braking. We're not the inventors of
regenerative braking, but we invented a system for the front
wheel of a motorcycle, because that's where all the braking
energy is, that allows you to recover the kinetic energy from
the front wheel and slam it back into the battery pack.
When you do that, the recharged side, you build impedance in the
cells. The manufacturers of these cells
will tell you, you can recharge these cells at 1C or something
like that. So it's like 30 amps, let's say.
Anything more than 30 amps is sort of off speck sheet.
You're on your own. If you treat this nicely and
recharge it at that level, then it will last a thousand cycles.
And it will. What we did was we took these
batteries and we said okay, we hear you.
It's for a race bike, it doesn't have to last a thousand cycles.
And we took my gas, that's my gas bike there in that picture.
That's at Laguna Seca. And we took the gas bike, we put
data acquisition on it, we road it around a track, brought it
back in on the lap time I wanted, and we converted that to
an electric vehicle. How much power did we need?
How much torque? How many kilowatts would that
have taken to get around the track?
How much was available under braking that we could regen if
we could recover it? And we found that we can regen,
something like 10C was available.
So that's like 300 amps, 30 amp hour.
But 10C is going to destroy the battery.
After one race you'd replace the batteries.
So you don't want to do that. So what we did was in the
software we put a line through there and we truncated it.
We said we're going to put a recharge limit at 5C, okay?
And so, what is that? A couple hundred amps.
It's still pretty good. And so we got video of us at
Auto Club Speedway we didn't get that heavy braking but I put 120
amps into the pack. And by doing that, we were able
to compete and even beat gas bikes, but it damaged the pack
with internal impedance buildup. You'll see this data here in the
video. This is Auto Club Speedway,
California Speedway in California.
It's 150-something miles an hour.
We're going down the back straight.
You can follow the track. Heavy braking.
Watch that. We've got 120 amps in curves.
The green is amps getting recharged, and the red is amps
coming out to make it go. And the blue is the state of
charge of the battery, how much battery you've got left.
What's cool is in some corners you can see me actually
recharging the battery. And then we've got speed.
Now, here's the front straight. 168 or something.
And more curves. I'm braking in the corner and
there goes 60 amps of benefit.
So, I don't know if I've gone over time, but I wanted to tell
you guys, look, I want to share my excitement for the flight we
made. I want to tell you about the
future, and from my vision, from my view the future is fantastic.
We took a couple guys and built and airplane in two months, and
we were able to set a record, and we haven't even started yet,
folks. I'm so excited.
The next thing you're going to hear from is the midair coupling
and recharging We're going to develop that technology with the
Navy, and then we're going to start planning for the Lindbergh
flight. So, I wanted to show you why the
batteries blew up, so to speak, why I had to make the forced
landing, the good stuff, the bad stuff, what we did with the
motorcycle that caused the damage to the batteries so you
can get a complete understanding of the history of the batteries,
the history of our team in building extreme electric
vehicles, and then my vision for the future which, personally,
I'm very, very optimistic. So thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]