'Wonderment' defined
UP.Summit showcases mobility advancements
With an underlying theme that “humanity is in desperate need of wonderment,” the annual UP.Summit played out in Bentonville, Arkansas, this week. Indeed, the two-day, invitation-only event delivered plenty to wonder about and inspired many with its showcasing of ways to more efficiently “move atoms,” whether via land, air, sea, or space.
Often billed as the “Davos of mobility,” the event, created by UP.Partners, brings together only a couple of hundred entrepreneurs and investors seeking new opportunities.
While laminar flow has been achieved on certain wing designs for decades, no one has produced an airplane with such high levels of laminar flow across so much of the entire airplane. Honda Aircraft Co. achieved high levels of laminar flow across its wings and parts of the cockpit area on the HondaJet, but Phantom goes even further, according to Touw. The high level of laminar flow can be achieved today because of advanced levels of fluid dynamic analysis made possible with super computers, which helps to design new types of highly precise manufacturing processes. Some of the materials and techniques were pioneered on stealth military aircraft, Touw said.
The interior of the aircraft will feature an array of high-definition video screens along each side of the cabin instead of windows. The move improves laminar flow and reduces structural challenges. The displays will be fed by outside cameras. Systems on the airplane will be conventional, including already certified avionics and the Williams International FJ44 engines common on other business jets. As a result, Otto plans to make the Phantom's first flight in 2027, with certification in late 2029. The company is building a new factory near Jacksonville, Florida. Flexjet announced in late September that it has placed an order for 300 of the airplanes.
Tom O’Leary updated the UP.Summit audience on another unusually shaped airplane, his blended wing airliner from JetZero. The 250-passenger airliner promises 30-percent better efficiency than a similarly sized conventional airliner. The company has racked up orders from Alaska Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines. Among its partners is Siemens, which is using its software prowess to help design not only the airplane, but also the factory to produce it, according to Del Costy, president and managing director of Siemens Digital Industries in the Americas. North Carolina has provided some $4 billion in incentives to JetZero to build its factory there.
When it comes to moving things—especially the last mile—drones are proving to be the new frontier. Numerous drone manufacturers presented at the summit.
Adam Woodworth, CEO of Wing, reported that last-mile deliveries will be a $2 trillion market by the end of the decade. His company has made some 110,000 deliveries in the last 90 days in just two metro markets—Dallas and Charlotte, North Carolina. He announced that a newly expanded relationship with Walmart will open up more than 100 new locations across five new metro areas in the next year. In case you were wondering, Blue Bell ice cream is the most often delivered product via drones, according to Greg Cathey of Walmart. With average delivery times of less than 10 minutes, it doesn’t melt.
Drone deliveries are all about efficiency and convenience. Rather than getting in your 2,000-pound car and driving to the store to pick up a forgotten grocery item, you can have it delivered in minutes by a drone weighing only a few pounds. Cyrus Sigari, one of the founders of UP.Summit, noted that it takes “less energy to deliver a box of pasta than it does to boil the water to cook it.”
Zipline is another drone manufacturer focused on retail deliveries, making a delivery about every 60 seconds somewhere in the world, with 1.6 million made already. Its early focus was and continues to be on health care product deliveries, especially in remote parts of the world. Caitlin Burton, CEO of Zipline Africa, estimates the company has saved 16,000 lives in Rwanda and nearby African countries because of its ability to deliver needed medical supplies, including blood, within about 18 minutes to 500 health care facilities.
Drone manufacturer Skydio started out producing what might be called “vanity drones,” recreational aircraft designed to follow a biker or runner along a path—even through wooded areas—all in the quest for clever TikTok videos. While it still focuses on the recreational market, Skydio has expanded its product line to include units used in law enforcement, military, and firefighting. “We put sensors where they need to be,” said CEO Adam Bry. The company is launching a new, even smaller drone, the R10, designed to fly in highly confined spaces, detecting threats in mine shafts and ventilation systems, for example. A larger fixed-wing model is in development for longer range missions. Dubbed RTOL for robotic takeoff and landing, the new model is launched from a robotic arm. Customer flights of the RTOL model are expected to begin next year.
Enlarge some of these quadcopter and fixed-wing drones and you will enter the urban air mobility market. UAM manufacturers also showed up in droves to update the summit audiences. Among the early developers of UAM aircraft was Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer. The company spun its Eve Air Mobility project off into a sister organization, which is now run by CEO Johann Bordais. Eve showed its cabin mockup at the event. The aircraft will be flown by one pilot and carry four passengers. It features eight propellers for vertical flight and one pusher prop for cruise. According to Bordais, the aircraft will be able to charge at a rate of about one minute per flight minute. In other words, after a 15-minute flight, the craft can be fully charged in about 15 minutes. The company has 2,800 orders and expects entry into service in 2027.
While Eve has yet to fly an aircraft, other companies at the summit, including Joby Aviation, Beta Technologies, and Archer Aviation have been flying for years.
They all expect to enter service in the next couple of years, perhaps flying you from your office in an urban area to a nearby international airport where you will board a new supersonic airliner, or even a hypersonic one that could whisk you to locations on the other side of the planet in literally minutes.
Andrew Duggleby, cofounder and chief technology officer of Venus Aerospace, says the company’s rotating detonation rocket engine is the most efficient one ever produced. The first customer for the hypersonic engine will be the U.S. military, which has acknowledged it is far behind adversaries in hypersonic technology. However, most expect that one day, such technology will find its way into civilian use as well.
Meanwhile, civilian supersonic flight is back in vogue for the first time since the retirement of Concorde in 2003. Boom Supersonic claims to have solved the boom problem associated with supersonic flight. The company’s XB-1 demonstrator crossed the supersonic barrier to Mach 1.1 six times on two different sorties earlier this year, reported CEO Blake Scholl. While not totally boomless, the booms never reach the ground. The trick is the software that analyzes the atmosphere around the airplane and predicts the conditions where the airplane can fly at supersonic speed without the booms making it to the ground where they can annoy people and potentially cause damage. The software then commands the autopilot to make adjustments during flight to stay in the safe zone. Test data from the XB-1 will be used to continue development of Boom’s Overture airliner, which will be able to fly from New York to San Francisco in about 3.5 hours, about half the time of a conventional airliner. Overture will be powered by a new 40,000-pound-thrust engine dubbed Symphony and designed by Boom. The company already has built a 108,000-square-foot factory in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Not all of the news at UP.Summit came from young whiz-bang companies. Fifty-year-old Robinson Helicopter continues to progress and find new markets and new propulsion systems for its product line. CEO David Smith reports that the company’s R22 trainer and R44 continue to set production records, as does the turbine R66. The company announced a new R88 at Verticon earlier this year. The larger turbine R88 is designed for emergency medical and firefighting operations. Smith said work continues on electric versions of the craft for short-duration missions and a hydrogen-powered version for missions of up to 200 miles, with certification expected by the end of the decade.
Smith noted that the company’s purchase of drone manufacturer Ascent AeroSystems last year opens up new possibilities, including the ability for a helicopter to act as a launch system for the drones. The concept is that the drones will hitch a ride on the helicopter until near a threat area—maybe a forest fire or active crime scene. Multiple Ascent drones then can peel away from the helicopter and go on autonomous scouting missions, providing aerial imagery to ground crews.
Perhaps the biggest buzz of the show was even more down-to-earth, or really, down to water. Cofounder and CEO Billy Thalheimer updated the crowd on the progress his company, Regent, has made on its Viceroy Seaglider. Like last year at the summit, the company showcased its 12-passenger cabin mockup for the all-electric craft that floats, foils, and flies. The craft can float like a boat into a marina. It then climbs up on a foil just above the water for taxi out of the confined area before lifting off the surface onto its wing for flight in “water effect” up to about 5 feet above the surface at speeds of about 165 knots on flights of about an hour. At the summit this year, Thalheimer noted that the great interest for military applications has caused him to create a sister company called Regent Defense to continue development of such ideas. The prototype craft has been up on its foil since last year and will fly in the next couple of months. The company has garnered some $10 billion in commercial orders, according to Thalheimer, who notes that 40 percent of the world’s population lives in coastal areas, which creates a large market for such a vehicle. Regent is building a factory near its current headquarters in Rhode Island.
In a more out-of-this world development, Vast Inc. was on site with a mockup of its civilian space station. Jim Martz, senior vice president of engineering for the California-based company, noted that the 25-year-old International Space Station is set to be retired in 2030 and then de-orbited. NASA is seeking private companies to build a new generation of space stations to continue orbital science projects and ultimately orbital manufacturing for specialty products. Vast plans to launch its four-person station called Haven-1 next year, with the first four astronauts expected to arrive a few months later for a two-week stay. The station will be launched by a SpaceX Falcon rocket and the astronauts delivered later in a SpaceX Dragon capsule. Haven-1 will have about 45 square meters of habitable space. The first section of the larger and modular Haven-2 will become operational in 2028 and will be fully built out with multiple sections by 2032 to replace ISS, Martz said. With nine linked modules, Haven-2 will encompass about 610 square meters of habitable space.
The Sunday before the UP.Summit, some 20,000 local residents came to the show’s location at Bentonville Municipal/Louise M. Thaden Field in Bentonville, home to primary sponsor Walmart, for a public day. In advance of the event, UP.Ventures distributed tens of thousands of balloon-powered helicopters to children throughout Northwest Arkansas. Additional kits were distributed on-site, leading to many helicopter launches. Children of all ages were amazed by the futuristic aircraft, electric cars and trucks, and the accompanying airshow, undoubtedly instilling a bit of wonderment in all.
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