The engineers: Flying at the edge

Summary

The Documentary Podcast: "The Engineers – Flying at the Edge"

BBC World Service | August 5, 2026
Host: Caroline Steele
Guests:

• Kelly Latimer – Experimental Test Pilot (NASA, Boeing, Virgin Galactic), President of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots
• Daniel Mochidlova – President & CEO, EmbraerX (Aircraft Innovation, Brazil)
• Rob Miller – Director, Whittle Laboratory & Professor of Aerothermal Technology, University of Cambridge

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Episode Overview

This live panel event explores aviation at its technological frontiers: sustainable flight, electric flying taxis, and hypersonic travel. Set at London’s Royal Geographical Society, host Caroline Steele questions three engineering leaders tackling tomorrow’s air travel—from sustainability breakthroughs to airspace congestion, radical new vehicle designs, and the looming reality of pilotless planes.

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Main Themes and Topics

1. The Role of Innovation and Disruption in Aviation

• All three panelists emphasize the necessity of innovation to address the aviation sector’s stubborn challenges—carbon emissions, congestion, and efficiency.
• Quote:
  • “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” – Kelly Latimer on the limits of engineering models and the test pilot’s role in validation (03:35)
• Disruption as Survival:
  • Daniel Mochidlova discusses founding EmbraerX to “prefer not to be the victim of a disruption”—actively reshaping the industry before being outpaced by newcomers. (05:04)

2. Experimental Test Pilots—the Bridge Between Theory and Reality

• Test pilots are described as the “operational end of engineering”—providing critical real-world data to refine and validate complex models and designs.
• Latimer shares the visceral experience (and risks) of flying novel aircraft and spacecraft before they are certified as safe.
• Memorable Moment:
  • Kelly’s account of dropping a spacecraft from a “mothership” at 40,000 ft, experiencing 3.5 G’s as the engine ignites, and then feathering for reentry is riveting and illustrative (07:55–10:59).

3. Electric Flying Taxis (EVTOLs): The Future of Urban Mobility

• Daniel explains why EVTOLs are superior to helicopters: more efficient, quieter, more affordable, and better for urban environments. (11:23–13:03)
• Redundancy through “eight rotor lifters” gives EVTOLs enhanced safety and smooth transition to “wing-borne flight” for quiet, efficient cruising. Software and fly-by-wire controls are essential for safe operation.
• Quote:
  • “The EVTOL is already something pretty different… and what other configurations may come up from the brilliant minds of young engineers?” – Daniel Mochidlova (43:43)

4. Jet Engines: Tiny Tweaks, Huge Impacts

• Rob Miller describes how optimizing the 0.5mm leading edges of jet engine blades reduced losses by 30%, saving $220 million in fuel and pioneering efficiency leaps in aviation and power generation. (13:35–15:45)
• “Hard engineering problems on conventional technology can really make these nonlinear gains.” – Rob Miller (15:45)

5. Cryogenic Jet Engines & Hydrogen: Toward Zero-Carbon Flight

• Miller introduces a major breakthrough: “cryogenic” jet engines using liquid hydrogen or methane, achieving up to 30% less energy required per flight. (21:19–22:44)
• Building the new Whittle Laboratory (28:32) allows design/testing speeds “at least 100x quicker than anywhere else”—modelled on Formula 1 innovation cycles.

6. Infrastructure: The Bottleneck for Revolutionary Tech

• Both cryogenic aviation fuel and urban air mobility require infrastructure changes—fueling hubs for hydrogen, “vertiports” and city air traffic management for EVTOLs. (29:05–32:26)
• Focusing on the world’s 20 biggest hub airports (29:23) leverages the fact that they account for half of aviation fuel burn.
• Policy and scaling—taxing “dinosaur juice” (fossil jet fuel) and incentivizing early adopters—are crucial.

7. Hypersonic and Suborbital Flight—Engineering Extremes

• Latimer explains the concept: using suborbital “point to point” rocket flights to connect continents ultra-fast (e.g., London-Sydney in under two hours), with hypersonic and glider landing technologies. (33:22–36:08)

8. Contrails and Climate: The Unseen Problem

• Miller highlights that aviation contrails (“1 in 20 flights”) can cause as much warming in hours as all the CO2 those planes emit in 100 years—yet “rerouting” by 1-2% extra fuel can mitigate this immediately. (36:28–38:45)
• Quote:
  • “There’s only two ways to cool a planet. One is to capture CO2… The other is to stop making the clouds from planes tomorrow.” – Rob Miller (38:30)

9. Realistic Futures: What Will Aviation Look Like in 2050–2060?

• Sustainable Aviation Fuel is only transitional—hydrogen or green methane are seen as required for true zero-carbon aviation.
• Passenger expectations may shift: blended-wing “flying triangles,” supersonic and hypersonic flights, and the normalization of autonomous (pilotless) aircraft.
• Quote:
  • “The future is this question about automation… artificial intelligence, co-pilots. That’s the future.” – Kelly Latimer (50:50)<<

10. Socioeconomic Hurdles to Adoption

• Aviation’s thin profit margins mean radical new tech is only adopted if it beats incumbent economics by 10% or more. All net zero pathways are currently 30% more expensive, barring a promising “green methane” route enabled by cross-industry synergies. (47:30–49:14)
• Carbon pricing and government intervention will be needed to close the gap.

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Audience Q&A Highlights

Kelly’s Scariest Moment as a Test Pilot (23:12)

• Facing a flight control failure that risked an emergency landing—relying on ground engineering teams and “non-standard procedures” to regain control.

“For a while, we were unsure if we were going to be able to come back and land... But with all the engineer support, we reset some computers, and as soon as we were good, we were like, landing!” – Kelly Latimer (23:12)

Solar Aviation’s Limits (44:38)

• Solar can power high-altitude platforms, but not mainstream aircraft—“the power density is just not sufficient.” (44:38–45:50)

Pilotless Planes—How Soon? (50:41)

• “Sadly, yes.” Automation is inevitable: the tech is mature for cargo/small passenger, and will expand to larger passenger fleets.
• “For the EV [EVTOL], part of the design is for autonomy… all players are assuming it will be autonomous.” – Daniel Mochidlova (51:16–51:31)

High-G Flights for Regular Passengers (49:38)

• Current suborbital flights hit 3.5–4 G’s, requiring passenger training. Future commercial profiles would need to be “toned down” for mass market. (49:38–50:24)

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Notable Quotes

• “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” – Kelly Latimer (03:35)
• “We prefer not to be the victim of a disruption… that’s why we started EmbraerX.” – Daniel Mochidlova (05:04)
• “Hard engineering problems on conventional technology can really make these non linear gains.” – Rob Miller (15:45)
• “The blended wing body is another example… The Evtol is already something pretty different.” – Daniel Mochidlova (43:43)
• “There’s only two ways to cool a planet… The other is to stop making the clouds from planes tomorrow.” – Rob Miller (38:30)
• “The future is more automation, more autonomy… you may just have one person, but that's the future.” – Kelly Latimer (50:50)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:43 – Show open & guest introductions
• 03:35 – What is an experimental test pilot?
• 04:57 – Being a disruptor: Why Embraer started EmbraerX
• 06:15 – Lab innovation: Whittle Laboratory’s disruptive focus
• 07:55–10:59 – How the Virgin Galactic mothership and suborbital flight works
• 11:23–13:03 – EVTOL vs. helicopter: efficiency, noise, affordability
• 13:35–15:45 – Tiny blades, huge savings: Jet engine efficiency breakthrough
• 21:19–22:44 – Cryogenic engines: The future of zero-carbon propulsion
• 23:12 – Scariest test pilot moments
• 26:01 – Second half: The future & infrastructure
• 29:23 – Airport infrastructure for cryogenic fuels
• 32:26 – How EVTOLs will enter urban areas
• 33:22–36:08 – Hypersonic flight for passenger travel
• 36:28–38:45 – Contrails, climate, and immediate mitigation
• 39:25–43:43 – What will be possible (and realistic) by 2060
• 44:38–45:50 – Why solar power can’t scale to mainstream passenger aviation
• 47:30–49:14 – Economics: Why new tech must be both green and cheap
• 49:38–50:24 – Passenger limits: G-force and the commercial market
• 50:41–51:51 – Will we see fully pilotless planes?
• 52:32 – Episode close

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Closing Thoughts

Flying at the edge is a story of bold technological bets—and equally bold systemic challenges. Hydrogen propulsion and EVTOLs are likely, perhaps even inevitable, but only if infrastructure, policy, economics, and public perceptions adapt in step. If the next three decades see as much change as this panel predicts, we may soon look up and see not just tubes with wings, but flying triangles, rocket planes, and a quieter, cleaner sky—sometimes with no pilot up front at all.

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For more information and to hear the full episode, search "The Engineers: Flying at the Edge" from The Documentary Podcast (BBC World Service).

Transcript

[Rob Miller]

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[Caroline Steele]

I'm Caroline Steele. Welcome to the Engineers Flying at the Edge. Cryogenic jet engines for sustainable travel, vertical takeoff, taxis for congested cities, hypersonic flights that could get you from London to Sydney in under two hours. Flight is being reimagined for our changing planet. I'm at the Royal Geographical Society in London with a live audience and three world leading engineers at the forefront of making that change. They're here thanks to our partners, the Royal Commission 1851, a charity that supports research in engineering. Now let me introduce our engineers. Kelly Latimer is from the us. She's been on the front line of aeronautical engineering as an experimental test pilot for NASA and Boeing and also as Director of Flight Test at Virgin Galactic. And she is now President of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots. Daniel Mochidlova is from Brazil. He started his career as a chemical engineer but has since become president and CEO of EmbraerX, which is the innovation arm of of the world's third largest aircraft manufacturer. And Rob Miller is from here in the uk. He's Director of the Whittle Laboratory and Professor of Aerothermal Technology at the University of Cambridge. He is also Director of the Rolls Royce Whittle University Technology Center. Please join me in welcoming them all. So Kelly My first question is for you. In your work as a test pilot, you've flown fighter jets, 747 spacecraft, but you trained as an aeronautical engineer. So what exactly is an experimental test pilot and how does it tie into engineering?

[Kelly Latimer]

So I think of the experimental test pilot as kind of your operational end of engineering. So we're sort of a jack of all trades, but master of none, where we understand a lot of different areas. So if you think about a new aircraft, you know, comes off the line and the engineering team has a number of models, right? They model how it's going to perform, how it's going to climb, how much thrust there is, how much drag. So as the test pilot, we work with the engineers on, they have all these models. And we have a saying where all models are wrong, but some are useful because in the end, no model is perfect, right? There's just no way you're going to have a perfect model. And so as the test pilot, our job is to go out there, take the airplane, maneuver through certain, through certain maneuvers, through certain areas of airspace, through certain altitude airspeed regimes, and get the data so they can go back and validate their models.

[Caroline Steele]

Daniel, your career began as a chemical engineer. You've also worked in software development, and now you're working in aviation engineering. So a huge range is a sort of core principle or philosophy that underlies all of your engineering work.

[Daniel Mochidlova]

Even though I started my career in a totally different field, but pretty much all of the projects I had the privilege to work on were related to the edge of technology and innovation and trying to understand how can we improve what's next.

[Caroline Steele]

And you've described your company Embraerx, as a disruptor. What do you mean by that?

[Daniel Mochidlova]

It's a great question. Typically, the incumbent companies in a certain market, and this theory works for any given market, the companies that are already established, successful, have access to talents, to capital, sales channels, they have everything. For some reason, those companies, they stop to innovate or they keep innovating incrementally. The breakthrough does not come from the incumbent company. Typically, the big game changer comes from a newcomer. We decided we prefer not to be the victim of a disruption. And that's when we started Embryx to try and come up with the new ideas or the new innovation that could redefine the way we think about aviation.

[Caroline Steele]

Thank you, Daniel. Rob, your lab is named after Frank Whittle, who was a British engineer who invented the jet engine nearly 100 years ago. He was definitely a disruptor, would you say? Your lab follows a similar philosophy to Daniels or do you do it differently?

[Rob Miller]

I think that's a really good question. I mean, we are in an age of disruption and it's really important for those leading labs to really embrace that. And I think to understand that, you've got to think about Frank Whittle. I mean, Frank Whittle was somebody who was an apprentice who then, from an apprentice, went on to officer training. He then went to Cambridge and that he actually founded the company PowerJets that ran the first jet engine. Taking a Cambridge bunch of graduates. They ran the first engine in 37. But what we started to realize over the last decade was that we'd become more and more supportive of the incumbent industries working on their next product. And it's really, really important that you do that, that the majority of your work really embeds in the truth and the reality of those incumbent industries. But we needed to spend more time on those disruptive tech. So we are launching the new Whittle Laboratory. And the new Whittle Laboratory is going to include a lab called the Bennett Innovation Lab. And the aim of that Is to launch 20 to 30 missions over a decade. In each aimed to win a new industry for the uk.

[Caroline Steele]

Wow. Okay, well, we'll keep my eyes peeled for that. Kelly, we need to talk about spaceflight. So you joined Virgin Galactic in 2014 and they have a really unique way of launching spacecraft. So there's a mothership which to me basically looks like two planes sort of stuck together with their wingtips stuck together and then sitting in between them is a spacecraft that somehow gets launched into space. How does that work?

[Kelly Latimer]

Yeah, so the mothership E basically is two fuselages. And everybody always asks, do the pilots sit in different fuselages?

[Caroline Steele]

And.

[Kelly Latimer]

No, we all sit in the right fuselage. So the left fuselage is basically empty. It's just there for aerodynamic and mass symmetry. So everything is in pretty much the right fuselage. So there's two pilots up there, the spaceship is hooked in between. So it's basically a three point connection. The mothership takes off from a Runway. So that was one of the really cool concepts of this, was you can make this operation anywhere you want in the world. You don't have to build a vertical launch, you don't have to have any of that infrastructure. You can just do it off of a Runway. So anyways, the mothership takes off from the Runway, climbs up to about 40,000ft, pretty much heads in towards the landing Runway, just drops the spaceship straight down. In this point, the spaceship is about Half the way to the mothership. So from the. I flew the mothership too. From dropping the spaceship, it's as soon as you let it go, you immediately get a 2G jump in the air in the mothership. It is awesome. There's this big thing and you turn off to the side, the spaceship drops. So the pilot goes full forward just to get a good separation. We come back and then you say fire. And the pilot in the right seat fires the rocket motor. And it is the most absolutely insane acceleration. It is £70,000 of thrust within about a second.

[Caroline Steele]

Wow.

[Kelly Latimer]

So, you know, one G is like the force of gravity sitting here. It's three and a half G's acceleration that way.

[Caroline Steele]

So you may feel like you're sort of being pressed.

[Kelly Latimer]

Exactly. Crazy acceleration. The vehicle accelerates, basically goes transonic supersonic. Just on the other side of the supersonic, we run the stabilators, pull the aircraft straight up 80, 90 degrees. The rocket motor is still burning. We're still 70,000 pounds of thrust going straight up. And as we're burning fuel, we're getting lighter. So our acceleration is increasing. So it is like being shot out of a car out of the atmosphere. So you're just accelerating all the way up. The whole world just goes to black, black void. Then after one minute, the rocket motor only burns for one minute. But that's all you need. That's enough to get you well out of the atmosphere and up to about 55 miles. The rocket motor sets off, it goes zero gravity. Everybody in the back unstraps, there's windows all across the top. And then the pilots up front, we do what's called we feather the vehicle. So essentially we fold those booms so the vehicle kind of folds into a 90 degree. So the, the two booms in the back fold up 90 degrees. And when that happens, the vehicle rotates around and you get the full view of the planet coming into view through the overhead windows. And it's absolutely stunning. And so that lasts about three minutes or so. And this whole time, the vehicle is a projectile. It's still going up. And as it begins to come down close to the atmosphere, we have a counter. We'll rotate the vehicle back around and we'll have the passengers get back in their seats, everybody straps in. And then you really feel the reentry because suddenly you're back in the atmosphere. So the G's come back on. And then once we get low enough or we have enough atmosphere to fly, we de feather, pull the aircraft out of a dive, and then it's a glider. And we simply just do this circular, like any glider, a circular descending pattern over the Runway, and you land right back on the same Runway that you took off from.

[Caroline Steele]

Thanks, Kelly. So, Daniel, we're going to go from space to much, much closer to home.

[Daniel Mochidlova]

Low altitude.

[Caroline Steele]

Low altitude. Exactly. So I'm sure many listeners in our audience here in the room will agree, traffic in cities can be a real problem. Your solution to that is the electric flying taxi, or an evtol, which stands for Electric Vertical Takeoff and landing.

[Daniel Mochidlova]

Exactly.

[Caroline Steele]

Some people might say, well, we have helicopters. What is it that evtols can do that helicopters can't?

[Daniel Mochidlova]

Helicopters, they can perform the mission, but they have a few shortcomings. Number one, they are very, very inefficient for, from a power energy consumption perspective. So it takes a huge energy just to keep a helicopter hovering in the skies. So you add energy costs, maintenance costs. It becomes a very, very costly solution. Besides, it's very, very noisy.

[Caroline Steele]

Yes.

[Daniel Mochidlova]

So when we launched at Embryo X, that was one of the first problems that we dedicated our attention to. Exactly. Because urban population is increasing all over the world, so traffic is becoming a terrible problem. So why not explore the third dimension, this low altitude economy? Could there be an answer there? And if we could come up with a design that is quiet enough to operate in an urban environment that is not going to contribute to more carbon emissions, that will be sustainable, that will be efficient, so that if it's lower cost to operate, lower complexity, and lower cost to maintain, it's affordable. People who can today afford a ground taxi ride, like a premium taxi ride, maybe for the same level of price, they could afford a shared ride in a. In a flying.

[Caroline Steele]

That would be great. Okay. So they hopefully will be cheaper than a helicopter, quieter than a helicopter, better for the environment than a helicopter. Thank you, Daniel. So, Rob, back to you. The basic principle, the kind of the engineering behind the jet engine hasn't changed much in the last hundred years. But you've managed to significantly increase its efficiency by having a look at the tiny rotating blades that sit inside the engine. Can you talk us through what you've changed there? How did you make a difference?

[Rob Miller]

Back in about 2004, Rolls Royce were considering an engine called the Trenta Thousand, which would power the new Boeing Dreamliner. And they were looking to get the efficiencies up on that aircraft. And in a jet engine, you have a compressor that compresses the air up to about 50 times atmospheric pressure, and that's made up of rows and rows of rotating and stationary blades, these little blades about 20, 30 millimeters long, about 6,000 of them, raising the pressure up. And when they were manufacturing these blades, they were. You imagine each blade is like a wing of a plane, a small wing of a plane, and the leading edge is about 0.5 millimeters. And they were hand grinding these leading edges. So the question was, are the leading edges good enough? And we did some fundamental experiments in the Whittle lab that showed that by changing this little bit of the leading edge, the loss of the blade could change by 30%. Effectively what was happening is there's the little layer on the surface called the boundary layer, starts off laminar, very smooth and low loss, and then trips to turbulent and becomes high loss. And these leading edges were tripping the flow early. And so from these experiments we then went and worked with a team at Rolls Royce. And in tests, when the actual aircraft were fitted with these leading edges, as they put the new blades into the stationary blade rows, suddenly the performance jumped. And in the first five years, this was estimated to save about $220 million worth of fuel.

[Caroline Steele]

Wow.

[Rob Miller]

And the CO2 savings are about 20 times the entire CO2 emissions of Cambridge University every year. And I think this is really important to understand that hard engineering problems on conventional technology can really make these non linear gains in the world.

[Caroline Steele]

And I guess you can make a small change, but it can have such a big impact because, you know, aviation costs so much money and uses so much carbon that a small change can have a kind of profound effect.

[Rob Miller]

That's absolutely right. And that then scales from plane engines to power stations. Gas based power stations use the same technologies.

[Caroline Steele]

Amazing. Thank you so much, Rob. So, so, Daniel, back to your EVTOLs. So they don't use jet engines, but instead you have sort of eight horizontally rotating blades which lift the vehicle and then one vertically rotating blade which drives the vehicle forward. Why did you go for that design?

[Daniel Mochidlova]

And the wings? And the wings, don't forget the wings,

[Caroline Steele]

because they are key, otherwise it might go down. Yes, yes, you can tell I don't design them.

[Daniel Mochidlova]

They are key to beat the helicopter, as I was explaining before. So the eight rotor lifters, they will allow us to take off in a very similar way, exploring the same phenomena that would lift a helicopter. But because it's a multicopter, we have the redundancy, so the level of safety is much, much higher. And then when we get to the cruise altitude, only by then we'll turn on the pusher, the horizontal roar that will start pushing the Aircraft forward.

[Caroline Steele]

And by redundancy you mean if one of the engine fails, you've got built in sort of back.

[Daniel Mochidlova]

Exactly. Going back to the wings. Right. When we turn on the pusher, it will start pushing the vehicle forward. And as it accelerates and gains more speed, there will be a transition to what we call the wing sustained flight, the wing borne flight. And then we turn off the eight lifters because they are no longer needed.

[Caroline Steele]

I mean, I'm just picturing trying to.

[Daniel Mochidlova]

The helicopter becomes a fixed wing aircraft at that moment.

[Caroline Steele]

But how do you not. So you're say, I'm the pilot, you're going up, you've got your eight rotating horizontal blades. You have to turn them off. I guess they need to stop in an exact formation, otherwise it's going to be quite chaotic. Then you have to turn on your forward driving blade. How do you not stall? I'm sure I would instantly stall.

[Daniel Mochidlova]

It is a great question. And the only reason we can do it in a very safe and smooth manner is the latest generation full fly by wire technology. So it's a computer and software. We have all those electronic controls in place that will take care of all of that complexity so that the pilot will be left with a very simple interaction. And the system will then make a very smooth transition to get to the point where, as I said, the lifters will be turned off, only the pusher will be on. And then it's no longer a multicopter. Now it is a fixed wing aircraft that will benefit from the very high efficiency that the aerodynamics of the wings can provide, which is what makes it so much quieter and so much more energy efficient than the helicopter.

[Caroline Steele]

Thank you. So Kelly, back to your work as a test pilot. So another incredible thing that you've done is you've flown a 747 with a rocket strapped under its wing full of satellites that was then launched into space. So what were the engineering challenges there? I imagine a fair few. It sounds like science fiction.

[Kelly Latimer]

No, it was. I mean, so we came up with a 747 and we ended up modifying the left wing to carry this liquid fueled rocket. So the rocket weighed about 60,000 pounds. And so the original concept too was just to drop it straight and level like we did with the spaceship. And then just with our pilot exchange experience, we got talking with the launch team. We're like, well, wouldn't you rather us launch it at some type of an attitude? And they're like, oh, that would be way better. Because then we have an upturned Trajectory. Because if you think about a rocket, you know it's eventually going to go straight up or pretty much straight up. So if you drop it, it has to accelerate forward and then use a lot of its thrust to turn the corner. And that's all payload. That's more fuel that's needed, bigger rocket. So we took the best model of the aerodynamics with the rocket on board, and also the added mass went to a NASA simulator. But as you pull a large aircraft up to 35 degrees nose high, you start running out of airspeed very fast. So even though the trajectory is going up, you're slowly building angle of attack. And so to drop the rocket, there is this combination of altitude, airspeed, pitch angle and angle of attack that was optimum. So we basically gave them this whole matrix. They ran it through all their simulations for the rocket, and we came up with what we called our launch maneuver. So it's 30,000ft, 0.85 Mach, full power, a 2G pull. We get the 747. About 35 degrees nose high.

[Caroline Steele]

35 degrees.

[Kelly Latimer]

35 degrees nose high. It is impressive.

[Caroline Steele]

When you take off at an airport, how many degrees is.

[Kelly Latimer]

12.

[Caroline Steele]

12. So I mean, that. Yeah, you must feel like absolutely strapped

[Rob Miller]

to the back of seat.

[Kelly Latimer]

Yeah, that is.

[Caroline Steele]

Yeah.

[Kelly Latimer]

There you go.

[Caroline Steele]

Incredible piece of engineering. Thanks, Kelly. Now, Rob, you're working on a cryogenic jet engine, which sounds super cool. Thank you. Can you walk us through it? What exactly is it?

[Rob Miller]

So you may have heard that people talking about cryogenic hydrogen. So by cryogenic, I mean you cool it down to the point where it actually becomes a liquid, and then you store it on board the plane as a liquid. Equally, you could have cryogenic natural gas. You cool that down until it becomes a liquid. But what we started to realize just around the start of COVID was that as you liquefy these gases, effectively, what you do is you store energy in them like a battery. And there's a new type of jet engine, really the first shift since Frank Whittle's original engine, which allows you to extract this as you expand it back out in the engine. And we calculated at the time, I remember we did a first analysis, the engine, and we got about 10% improvement. That's 10% less energy to fly than any jet engine has flown before. And then we worked out, theoretically 30% was possible, which is like just an incredible number. 30% less energy to fly than any aircraft engine that has ever flown before. And we approached the UK government about setting up a mission team and the Team's been working for about a year and a half, two years, and there's now nine patents. It's an incredibly exciting piece of technology.

[Caroline Steele]

That's incredible. We'll talk more about it in a moment. Thank you so much, Rob. This is the engineers flying at the Edge from the BBC World Service. We'll be talking more about the future of flight later. But first it's our audience's turn. Has anyone got a question about anything we've talked about so far? Hands went straight up. Could we start with the woman in the front here? Kelly, I was wondering what has been your scariest moment as a test pilot? Oh, that's such a good question.

[Kelly Latimer]

So I guess it would be a flight control problem I had on one of the aircraft that I was testing. And for a while it was a little bit unsure if we were going to be able to come back and land. So basically we were out testing something, flight control issue. So we spent. The good thing was we had a lot of time and fuel and everything. And because it was a test mission, we have a whole control room which they're calling everybody in and working through it. And we had to go through some pretty non standard procedures of like circuit breakers. I mean, you talk about the software and the automation and all of that. Of course this is developmental tests and so you do expect some things to go wrong. But. But that would be one for a while. We're all like, we may actually be in a scenario where we're not sure if we're going to be able to control this down to the Runway. So that would be up there.

[Caroline Steele]

Gosh.

[Kelly Latimer]

But in the end we had all the engineer support and everything and they basically had us run through some things, reset some computers and then as soon as we were good, we're like landing.

[Caroline Steele]

We're coming down.

[Kelly Latimer]

But to the question before, but what that brings up is our software in the loop. Testing for software changes and stuff got a lot more vigorous after that.

[Caroline Steele]

I'm amazed you got back in a plane again, to be honest. If that happened to me, I'd be like, I'm staying on the ground. Thank you so much for your question. We now need to take a short pause and we'll be back very soon to find out more about pioneering aviation. Thank you.

[Kelly Latimer]

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[Caroline Steele]

You're listening to the BBC World Service. I'm Caroline Steele and this is the Engineers Flying at the Edge. I'm with three world leaders in the field of aviation engineering. Daniel Mocci d' Alova is President and CEO of the Aircraft Innovators Embraer X. Rob Miller is a sustainable flight pioneer and director of the Whittle Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. And. And Kelly Latimer has been an experimental test pilot for NASA, Boeing and Virgin Galactic and she's now president of the Society for Experimental Test Pilots. Everyone, please welcome back your engineers. So we're going to look ahead now. Rob, let's talk a bit more about your cryogenic engine. So the tech is there, you've got the patents. What next? I'm thinking, what infrastructural changes will we need to see?

[Rob Miller]

So it really was brought home to me about 10 years ago. I was actually in the pub in Cambridge with a friend of mine who worked at Rebel Formula One and he asked me what we were working on and I talked about a new technology for a blade and he said to me, when will it make engine? When would it fly? And I said, oh, four to six years. And I said, what were you doing today, Tony? And they'd seen an adaption on the Ferrari rear wing and they tested 20 rear wings that day and they fitted a computer surface.

[Caroline Steele]

You're talking about car motor racing here.

[Rob Miller]

Yeah, car motor racing, Formula One. They'd seen the Ferrari rear wing and they'd seen an adaption and Red bull had tested 20 wings that day and they fitted a curve through the results. They predicted the best, they tested it, built it, tested it, it was the best. And they then sent that to track and it was on the car the next day. The adaption. Now, Formula one is easier than aerospace.

[Caroline Steele]

Yes, two dimensions rather than three, but

[Rob Miller]

not that much easier. And it took us nine months to get Tony out of Red Bull and everything changed in the Whittle app. And by using AI and augmented design, sort of running lots of computer simulations with the human interacting in a more sort of organic way, we managed to cut the design system, the design time down from about 100 days to one day.

[Caroline Steele]

And this is with the help of Tony, who you took from Formula One.

[Rob Miller]

Yeah, that's right.

[Caroline Steele]

Good work.

[Rob Miller]

And we can now take a technology. We did a formal trial actually with the UK government in about 2018 and the aim was to take four technologies around this loop. And in 2005 it had taken two years to take two technologies around this loop and we did it in around a week. And basically the new Whittle Laboratory is scaling that capability. We have a big new 4 megawatt facility. It's going to create a Formula 1 type capability which will be at least 100x quicker than anywhere else in the world.

[Caroline Steele]

And if you think about rolling out planes with cryogenic engines in airports like say, Heathrow in London, how would Heathrow need to change? Because you've got to be able to get this fuel down to an incredibly low temperature. What kind of changes would you need to make?

[Rob Miller]

So the really important thing here is a decision about what is practical in infrastructure change for a cost in the minimum amount of time. And there are a few solutions here. So. So what is amazing about aviation is the 20 largest hub airports in the world are responsible for half of aviation's fuel burn. Now, changing 20 structures in the world compared to changing all the airports in the world is doable. So you could decide if you took strategic hubs and you converted those to cryogenic systems. You could. I think that's probably the fastest way of making that conversion happen. I think the second thing to think about is political, because you have to have one political entity that would enforce the rules to force people. Because as Daniel's been saying beforehand, the first time you build these, they will be more expensive. And so unless you politically restrict the operation, and probably the EU and the UK together is a good zone in which you could start to, maybe not the long haul, but you could take the medium haul flights across Europe and you could tax effectively the jet fuel flights to make this more economic.

[Caroline Steele]

Thank you, Rob. So Daniel, if your EVtols get to the point where the tech is 100% there, they're ready to go. Cities aren't built for them at the moment. Right. So you're also going to have to think about infrastructure changes. How will cities need to change to incorporate EVTOLs?

[Daniel Mochidlova]

Absolutely. The good news for the start of operations is that the EVTOLs can start operating from existing heliports, helipads, airports. It's going to be a limited operation, not as many routes, but that's a good way to get started. As we progress, what we will need is to convert more locations to vertiports, which means bring the electrical infrastructure, the fast charges. The other major challenge is related to the air traffic management. We've put in a lot of investment on that aspect because this will really make the difference to allow that ecosystem to scale in the big cities. One big advantage that we have is the knowledge of operating the current airspace on top of city of Sao Paulo. I'll mention Sao Paulo because it's the most tolerant city in the world to number of helicopters flying simultaneously. The traffic is so bad and it's a noisy city, it's a loud city, so people accept those four to five helicopters. Today is the most tolerant environment which creates, I would dare to say the most complex airspace to be managed around the globe today.

[Caroline Steele]

Do you think it's likely EVTOLs will be used to say shuttle people from a city center out to an airport

[Daniel Mochidlova]

to an international airport? That's one of the very first use cases that we see. All the use cases are like air ambulances or taking care of medical emergencies where the time you will save may imply in saving lives as well. So we'll start with few cities, few routes and we're talking three, four years from now. It's not a distant future.

[Caroline Steele]

Great, thank you, Daniel. So Kelly, back to you. You have been incredibly important in super high speed suborbital flight. And we're now hearing conversations about hypersonic passenger flights where people might be able to go from London to Sydney in under two hours. I mean that sounds almost impossible. What's the idea behind it? What's the, what's the engineering?

[Kelly Latimer]

Well, I mean, so one thing is you do a suborbital flight, because Virgin Galactic had talked about that, where instead of the sub orbital flight going straight up and down, you basically do it point to point. But if you think about it, every, you know, the vehicles we have now even hypersonic vehicles after they do a test, or space vehicles, when they come back in, they're essentially projectile. So when you come back in and reenter, there isn't an engine, there's no holding pattern, there's no waiting for the Runway to clear. I mean, you're coming down and you're not going to stop. So. And so if it's vertical, one challenge is, you know, I mean, starship would be capable of that. Right? But you need to have the whole landing and the catching mechanism and that type stuff. Or if, like, we come back in like a glider, it's not going to be at Chicago o'. Hare. You're not going to come in, like, clear the Runway. Everybody stand by. We got to land. But you certainly could do it. So we flew out of Spaceport America, so it's Las Cruces, so it's kind of out there. So if you pick a spot that's in the middle of nowhere and then you combine it with evtol, you can actually have those fast flights land someplace. But to have the technology to still have an engine that can go from the ground to hypersonic, back down to subsonic and land again is really, really challenging.

[Caroline Steele]

So hypersonic is moving at faster than the speed of sound, Subsonic is slower. Slower than the speed of sound, yeah.

[Kelly Latimer]

The average passenger hypersonic is very fast. So supersonic is, you know, up to about Mach 3 or so. And then hypersonic is when you're above Mach 3, Mach 5, and Mach 3

[Caroline Steele]

is three times higher than the speed of sound. And an average passenger jet is that. Is that like 0.8, 0.8? Yeah, about 0.8 speed of sound. Okay. So this is, you know, a hugely different way of traveling, but there's a world in which you could go up, go sort of do a quick suborbital flight, come down, land maybe in the middle of an Australian desert, jump on one of Daniel's EVTOLs, go to the center of Sydney, and maybe do that in four hours.

[Kelly Latimer]

Yeah, see that? And it actually is possible to do it with and not have to be like a vertical, where you could actually have a Runway, and do it where you come in as a glider. Because there's other companies developing suborbital vehicles that take off from the Runway, get up, and come back in. So it's possible. It's just a matter of weaving it in with current traffic and having some places a little bit outside of where all the congestion is for air traffic.

[Caroline Steele]

And I guess one of the key things that might make this possible is that at higher altitudes the air is thinner, there's less resistance, you can travel faster, you can use less fuel. Is that right?

[Kelly Latimer]

Yeah, because once you have enough, it's all about getting the energy to get you out of the atmosphere. Then once you're out, it's pretty much a free ride, you know. But how far you're going dictates how much energy and how much thrust you need to get there. So it all comes down to whether you're taking off from the ground, whether you're being air launched and then how far you want to go.

[Caroline Steele]

So might be a good option for London to Sydney, but would be totally pointless for like London to Berlin, for example.

[Kelly Latimer]

Yes, yes.

[Caroline Steele]

You need to be open.

[Kelly Latimer]

It'd be really fun. Probably not economically efficient. Yeah.

[Caroline Steele]

So, Rob, your lab defines itself as a global center for net zero aviation and energy cryogenic engines. Super exciting. We're not quite there yet. They haven't been rolled out yet. Is there anything that airlines or passengers could do right now to reduce the environmental impact of flying?

[Rob Miller]

Yes. I think what a lot of people don't understand is that half the climate impact of aviation is not the burning of the fuel, it's the clouds, the contrails that form. So basically, 1 in 20, the white lines behind planes don't do any damage. But one in 20 flights travels through an area of airspace called ice supersaturated, about to grow a cloud. That cloud grows, it lasts for sort of six, nine hours. And we know, you know, that at night, if it's cloudy, it feels warmer, and if it's clear sky, it feels colder. And that's because the cloud's like a blanket, keeping in the heat to the earth. And Those clouds, that 1 in 20 flight, the cloud over 6 to 9 hours, does the same warming of the planet. We think that the uncertainty is relatively high as the CO2 from all 20 flights do over 100 years.

[Caroline Steele]

What? Okay, wait, so in that very short time period, you're having the same effect as all of those flights over 100 years?

[Rob Miller]

Yeah, but now this is a real benefit because the areas that form those clouds are like thin pancakes. And therefore, if you knew you were in one and you changed the altitude of the plane, you could switch off that cloud formation. And so this is something that we think you could tackle relatively simply. We think that manoeuvre is probably a 1 to 2% extra fuel burn, but the savings are huge. Hopefully you will see in the next year or so the first large scale trials going off and hopefully, the UK will be leading those trials. But this is a real opportunity over the next five to 10 years to have a big impact.

[Caroline Steele]

Because am I right in thinking that the impact on climate change from clouds formed through planes is higher than from the fuel burnt? Which is wild.

[Rob Miller]

It's amazing. So I think what's really interesting about it is there's only two ways to cool a planet. One way is to capture CO2 from the atmosphere and store it underground. The other way is to stop making the clouds from planes tomorrow.

[Caroline Steele]

Sounds slightly more doable.

[Rob Miller]

Well, and by 2050, we estimate that this cloud formation will be worth 0.1 degrees of world warming.

[Caroline Steele]

Wow.

[Rob Miller]

Now, with the climate agreement of 1.52 degrees, 0.1 degrees is a large amount of chunk.

[Caroline Steele]

Yeah. My final question, which is for all of you. So we've talked about suborbital flight, EVTOLs, cryogenic jet engines, all really exciting, but can we just be realistic for a moment? So if you think about the future of flight in the next 30 or 40 years, what do you realistically think it will look like? What changes do you think we will actually see? So, yeah, let's start with you, Rob.

[Rob Miller]

Okay, so the big challenge over 30 to 40 years is that at the moment, the way we're decarbonizing flight is we're talking about sustainable aviation fuel. And sustainable aviation fuel is making a replacement from jet fuel out of, effectively, waste biomass. Now, if you scale that up to 20, 50, 60, you're pretty much using half of the world's waste biomass for aviation. It just becomes an unsustainable problem. And therefore, if we're going to decarbonize aviation, not thinking about the difficulty in the shorter term, if you're thinking about 2050 to 2060, you have to get carbon out of the cycle. And really, hydrogen is one way of doing that. There are other ways of doing that. But you cannot imagine a world of aviation in 2060 plus where carbon is still in the system. There just isn't enough biomass on the planet and the collecting of it will become too extreme. The demands on the planet will become too extreme. So sustainable aviation fuel is a good transition, but the end state has to be different.

[Caroline Steele]

And, Kelly, what do you think? What do you think we're going to see in our skies in 30 to 40 years?

[Kelly Latimer]

So I think. I think in the near future, we're going to see the return of supersonic commercial flights. I think there's a big push for that now. NASA has a program with the quiet boom x59 so they're demonstrating quiet boom technology. FAA due to this is going back and kind of look at those changes. So I think that's one thing that we're going to see as far as getting faster. We're going to see that jump back

[Caroline Steele]

into supersonic commercial passenger jets being able to go faster than the speed of sound like the Concorde used to.

[Kelly Latimer]

Yeah, and I think we'll see that. And it used to be just over water, but I think we'll actually see that change and be over land as well, which is a huge opening to the market. There's other technologies out there. Like flying wing has been there for a long time and there's actually a companies that are involved in doing that. NASA's looking at a potential X plane for that.

[Caroline Steele]

But so that sort of looks like it's just a giant wing and people sitting inside the wings. There's no kind of tube with wings. It's just a big flying triangle.

[Kelly Latimer]

Yep, exactly. And it's about, about 30% more efficient than you know, with the fuselage wing. So new interior though, so you're going to have some like, you know, little cameras are just showing a picture of stuff and not actually looking out the window.

[Caroline Steele]

And Daniel, what about you? What do you think? 30 to 40 years, what we realistically going to see in our skies.

[Daniel Mochidlova]

You know, when we launched EVE Airmobility, which is the spin off company working with the evtol, one of the things that I think really got us excited is that we see it as challenging as it is as a first step in the long journey. The EVTOL has been teaching us how to deal with high voltage systems on both the aircraft battery systems, battery management systems. It's a whole new world that is opening up, but still is the first step. What we see in the timeframe that you described is for shorter haul. I mean the EVTOL will cover a very short distance inside the city, but maybe connecting cities that are not that far from each other. We'll start seeing hybrid electric solutions or hydrogen fuel cell will eventually get to hydrogen being burned in the turbine. We'll have to see sustainable aviation fuel as a transition. We agree with that. Brazil, for example, has a very successful biofuel programs for decades. We can run our entire automobile fleet 100% ethanol. If we electrify that fleet, maybe we'll have a lot of ethanol available ready to go to a route that we call ATJ Alco 2 jets.

[Caroline Steele]

Probably looks like he wants to jump in briefly. Yeah, go for it.

[Rob Miller]

So I think one certainty over the next 20, 20, 30 years is. It's going to be an incredibly exciting.

[Daniel Mochidlova]

Oh, that's for sure.

[Rob Miller]

Work in. And I wish I was younger.

[Daniel Mochidlova]

Well said. Extremely well said. And the configurations that Kelly mentioned, the blended wing body and other examples, for very, very long time we've been used to think of an airplane as the tube and the wings.

[Caroline Steele]

Yes. It's hard to picture a flying triangle.

[Daniel Mochidlova]

Picture something different. Right.

[Caroline Steele]

Yeah.

[Daniel Mochidlova]

The Evtol is already something pretty different. Pretty different. The blended wing body is another example. What other examples of configurations, Novell configurations may come up from the brilliant minds of the young engineers who are still about to join our industry and that are probably more welcome to do so right now than in any other time in the last decade. So it will be indeed a very exciting time.

[Caroline Steele]

Thank you. This is the engineers flying at the Edge from the BBC World Service. It's the turn of our audience again. Who has a question for our panelists. If we go to, I think the person who's directly in front of you there. And then if we come to the person here. Thank you. Hello, my name's Sandy Millen. You mentioned quite a few different fuel sources, but nobody said anything about solar. Will solar have any role in the future of aviation at all? Good question. Rob, do you want to take this one?

[Rob Miller]

Yeah, I'm happy to say that. So the. The power density involved in solar is just not sufficient to do anything more. You will see solar coming in in what are called HAPs, high altitude vehicles. So you might well get communication systems that can be put up at high altitude or monitoring of ground for environmental reasons. But there isn't just the power density, I'm afraid. Batteries will take you a certain distance, but ultimately some form of fuel, chemical fuel. And really just the one choice in chemical fuel you have to make is jet fuel at the moment, or we know it as dinosaur juice. There is lots of energy, an incredibly complex molecule, and making complex molecules is hard. Really, you want a way of making a simple molecule, CH4, methane or H2. They're the ways we're going to scale fuel production. Scaling. Making dinosaur juice is just really expensive and hardware heavy.

[Caroline Steele]

Great, thank you, Rob. And we had a question over here.

[Rob Miller]

First of all, thank you all very much. It's fascinating.

[Daniel Mochidlova]

I began in the aviation industry in

[Rob Miller]

1969 with BOACC, so I've watched aviation change considerably. The key thing about aviation is that it runs for profit. Allowing for government, war and emergency, it's got to be profitable. This is where the divide between science and technology and socioeconomics comes in, how

[Daniel Mochidlova]

are you going to ensure that your

[Rob Miller]

technology meets, you know, actually goes into service sustainably?

[Caroline Steele]

I think maybe there's one for you. Daniel, you said that you're hoping for the EV tolls to be a similar price to a sort of premium taxi. Could you give me a quick answer to that question?

[Daniel Mochidlova]

Aviation is a very thin margin industry, as you certainly recall. So it's a big challenge when we talk about sustainable aviation fuels, when we talk about even liquefied hydrogen or today, it seems, it seems like very hard to make them comparable on a price basis. But as a society, we need to be asking ourselves the question, how do we price the carbon based fuels, the dinosaur juice, the externalities that are not considered when we make those price assumptions, how do we want to split or share that cost? When we deploy new technology, they start at a higher point and the learning curves and scale will typically bring that cost down. But you need to get started.

[Rob Miller]

So I think you've hit the big problem with transition of technology in aviation. No aircraft ever launched, which isn't at least a 10% better value proposition than the incumbent aircraft has ever succeeded since the start of aviation. And many that are better than a 10% value proposition have failed. Now we've modeled, if you're interested, the Aviation Impact Accelerator, Global Modeling Capability led out of Cambridge, has modeled the costs. And virtually all the routes to net zero are about 30% more expensive. So you've got to tax in some way if you want to get that transition. There is one route which breaks that rule and that is the route to green methane. So if you had an aircraft today that ran on liquid natural gas, it would be cheaper to operate in the United states by about 10% than a current aircraft. Once you've done that, you've got a cryogenic system in operation. And then you would start to scale into green methane. And the green methane is going to be scaled because Musk is scaling green methane in California for the Mars missions. And the reason he's doing that is because CH4 is super easy to make. You know, it's not dinosaur juice, it's cow farts. It's the Sabatier process. And they're going to fly the plants to Mars and build the fuel to come back. So California will be awash with green methane. So there is a route there that is practical and cheaper, but it is the only one. The rest are all more expensive.

[Caroline Steele]

Can I get hands up. Who's got a question for Kelly, the woman in the blue trousers in the middle please. Just that. Hi, my name is Kath and I've got a question about when you're talking about the suborbital flights going up and coming down, does that introduce high GS and is that something the average community needs to get used to or is that something that needs to get overcome before that's realistic?

[Kelly Latimer]

Yeah, yeah. So there is. So the. So basically the poll to go up is on the order of three and a half to four GS and then the reentry is three and a half GS. So yeah, when we have our spaceflight participants come out, we actually give them a week of training. So it actually would be something. Because that's a little bit past what you would normally see. And so we give them some training on how to, how you combat the high GS. It's actually for a short amount of time, but that's something where in designing the vehicle and the profile, if it's going to be a commercial flight, you're not going to have people come out for training. So you would have to actually adjust the profile for that. Anything up to two GS you can do because that's like a 60 degree bank turn. But yeah, great point. That the mission that the profile that we fly would probably not be suitable for just commercial. Anybody jump on or when you buy

[Caroline Steele]

a ticket, you might have to, I don't know, go do a day of training where you sit with an elephant on your chest to get ready. Okay, so we've got time for one more question. Hands up, let's go for this person in the very front. Yeah.

[Rob Miller]

So we've seen driverless cars come onto our streets. Do you think in the future we will see flightless or pilotless aircraft?

[Kelly Latimer]

Sadly, yes.

[Daniel Mochidlova]

Why did we?

[Kelly Latimer]

Yes. Yeah, I would say that there's a huge, I mean we talk about the future. The future is this question about automation. The future is more automation, more autonomy. I mean artificial intelligence, co pilots, I mean that's the future. So yes, I think you would never have a commercial flight with a lot of people without anybody who's monitoring. But it may just be one person, but absolutely, that's the future for the

[Daniel Mochidlova]

EV is part of the design. So we pragmatically believe we'll start operating with the pilot on board. But again, in order to scale up that industry, pretty much all players are assuming it will be autonomous.

[Caroline Steele]

Okay. So you need to get ready for flights without pilots. Sounds absolutely terrifying.

[Daniel Mochidlova]

And I will remind you, for those in this room who are about my age elevators use it to have pilots,

[Caroline Steele]

so it's a good point. There were elevator operators. That's true.

[Daniel Mochidlova]

We're not missing them.

[Caroline Steele]

Yeah. Thank you so much for your questions, everyone. I wish we could take more, but I'm afraid we're out of time. That's it for the engineers flying at the edge. At the Royal Geographical Society in London, I'm Caroline Steele. On behalf of the BBC World Service, our partners the Royal Commission 1851 and my producer, Charlie Taylor, please join me in giving a warm round of applause for our brilliant engineers, Rob Miller. Daniel. Daniel Mochid Lover. And Kelly Latimer. Thank you so much. Thank you. Goodbye.

[Kelly Latimer]

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