The Vertical Space

In this episode we speak with Jessica Brightman, Policy & Standards Branch Manager in the UAS & Advanced Technologies Division of the FAA’s Office of Advanced Aviation Technologies, recorded while the final Part 108 BVLOS rule sits in White House review. Most of the conversation was about how the US built a live UTM system without a final rule. Eleven FAA-accepted services now operate across roughly ten states, and from January through September 2026 they deconflicted more than 2.2 million BVLOS flights. Jessica argues the model scales because it requires only the services an operation’s risk calls for.From there we cover her view that every aircraft should be electronically conspicuous, and how that shapes Part 108’s right-of-way construct, one of the proposal’s most debated parts. We also get into the new priority scheme for lifesaving missions, what Part 108 permits mean for small operators, and why tying UTM, air taxi services and ATC together is still an open standards problem. Jessica also makes an interesting argument about operational intents and why some operators have reserved far more airspace than they need.

In this episode we speak with Anders Forslund, founder and CEO of Heart Aerospace, which is building the ES-30, a clean-sheet 30-seat hybrid-electric regional airliner. We recorded two days after Heart flew its X1 demonstrator at Plattsburgh, the largest battery-electric aircraft flown to date, and about a year after the company closed its Swedish operations and consolidated in Los Angeles. Most of the conversation was about whether electrification changes regional economics enough to bring back a market that has been shrinking for forty years. The first flight used 85 kWh, roughly $5 of electricity, and Anders walks through how that scales to a 125 mile leg, why battery amortization is the bigger line item than the energy itself, and why 40% cheaper than a comparable ATR is the threshold where a stagnant market starts growing again.From there we cover what X1 retires and what waits for the pre-production aircraft in 2028, how sensitive the 40% is to jet fuel and cycle life, who funds megawatt charging at regional airports, and what moving from Gothenburg cost in schedule and continuity. Anders walks through the certification plan, the twenty or so requirements unique to this airframe out of roughly 3,000, the not-for-credit testing philosophy he took from SpaceX, and the billion dollars to certification. There is more to come on the independent hybrid, which he was visibly biting his tongue about. Anders also makes an interesting argument about the lost generation, engineers in their forties who have never worked a clean-sheet program, and why reps rather than incumbency are what preserve the ability to build airplanes.

In this episode we speak with Marc Allen, CEO of Electra.aero, which builds the EL9, a nine-passenger hybrid-electric aircraft that takes off and lands in roughly 150 feet using blown lift and distributed electric propulsion. Marc came from Boeing, where he was chief strategy officer and chaired Wisk, and took the CEO seat from founder John Langford in 2024. Most of the conversation was about whether a fixed-wing airplane can really get into helicopter-sized spaces while keeping the cost and reliability of a conventional airplane. Because the EL9 takes off on a wing at a thrust-to-weight ratio near 0.6 rather than lifting straight up, it keeps the payload and range that vertical-lift aircraft give away, at a fraction of their cost.We also get into the harder questions underneath that case. The EL9 flies its approach below its power-off stall speed, which is close to the aerodynamic definition of powered lift, so we spend time on how it certifies as a conventional airplane under Part 23. We talk about how Electra sequences its three markets, with defense as the near-term launchpad ahead of commercial replacement and then direct aviation, and where the fly-by-wire and blown-lift technology still has to prove itself. Marc is candid throughout about what the aircraft is built to do and what it is not, and about how much rides on getting the EL9 from a flying prototype to a certified product.

In this episode we speak with Andrew Clare, CEO of Elroy Air, which builds the Chaparral, an autonomous hybrid-electric VTOL that hauls cargo in detachable pods for middle-mile commercial and defense logistics. Elroy is a 10-year-old company built on three then-unpopular bets: cargo over passengers, hybrid-electric over pure battery, and autonomous over piloted. Andrew, formerly CTO of Nuro, joined to turn that foundation into a scaled business, and the company has since demonstrated its transition flight, signed a US manufacturing deal with Kratos and a $200 million JV with Barq in the UAE, won a slot in the White House eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, and announced plans to go public near a billion-dollar valuation.Most of the conversation was about what it takes to get from a working aircraft to a deployed logistics system, and why Andrew believes autonomous cargo scales well before passenger aviation. He argues one pod-based platform can serve a FedEx milk run, an Army resupply, and an ISR mission, that hybrid-electric is the only way to get useful payload and range without field charging infrastructure, and that defense demand is surging because contested logistics has become a requirement. We pushed on why a clean-sheet VTOL beats autonomy bolted onto a proven Caravan, how the automotive data-flywheel intuition transfers to a domain with far fewer cycles, and where the moat sits once hybrid-electric and autonomy are no longer contrarian. Andrew was most candid about the road ahead, from scaling production to hardening the aircraft for contested, GPS-denied operations alongside the Army.

In this episode we speak with Lauren Flanagan, CEO of Sesame Solar, which builds mobile nanogrids. The product is a self-contained unit that generates its own power from solar, batteries, and stored hydrogen, set up by one person in fifteen minutes. The company started in emergency response and extreme weather, and has moved increasingly into defense. The newer focus, and the one we spent most of the episode on, is using these nanogrids to refuel hydrogen drones in the field.Most of the conversation was about whether that case holds up. Lauren's argument is that contested logistics have changed the math: fuel at the edge can run a thousand dollars a gallon all-in, the resupply convoy is a target, and the real cost is the lives spent guarding it, so making power where you stand becomes a strategic question rather than an efficiency one. We pushed on the parts that are harder to defend, the energy losses on the hydrogen path versus batteries, how thick the market for long-endurance hydrogen-powered flight actually is, and how you get from a fifty-day reserve to a six-month operational promise that's still backed by simulation rather than field data. Lauren was candid about what's proven and what isn't, and about which problems are physics and which are just adoption friction.

Libby Bahat returns to The Vertical Space. Last time we talked to him about building an airspace for drones in peacetime. This time he's the regulator who decides whether a 777 full of people lands in a country under missile fire. As Head of the Aerial Infrastructure Department at the Israel Civil Aviation Authority, Libby is one of a small number of people anywhere who has had to build a quantitative framework, debris models, interception zones, penetration probabilities, that lets a civil aviation authority make its own war risk call. Most regulators don't have to do this. Israel does, and Libby is the guy.We spent most of the conversation not on the war but on the judgment underneath it: where the numbers actually come from, how wide the error bars really are, the levers a CAA actually controls, the friendly-fire failure mode etc. Libby was honest about what he wishes he had ("I wish I had a criteria, like an engineer, very specific numbers") and about what he doesn't get to have. It's a rare look at how a serious regulator reasons when the only data point that would prove him wrong is the one he's organized his entire career to never see.

We sat down with Mike Stengel of AeroDynamic Advisory to discuss what the US-Iran conflict is doing to aviation. The Middle East moves about 20% of global crude, and with the Strait of Hormuz closed and Gulf refining capacity damaged, jet fuel stocks in Asia-Pacific and Europe are drawing down while crack spreads widen in ways hedging contracts don't cover. Mike explains why US shale isn't the easy substitute, why Spirit just liquidated and JetBlue looks fragile, and why Delta's once-mocked Monroe refinery acquisition suddenly looks prescient.The bigger question we get into is whether this is a temporary pricing event or a more permanent regime change? For the first time in decades, commercial, military, and business aviation are all riding supply-constrained tailwinds at once, but the industry spent 30 years optimizing for cheap energy and stable airspace. We dig into what fragility looks like when those assumptions break, aging fleets, narrowing corridors between unusable Middle East and Russian airspace, what the conflict is doing for SAF, and where the next contrarian bet might come from.

Admiral Phil Kenul spent decades flying NOAA aircraft into some of the most dangerous weather on earth, including multiple seasons as a P-3 Orion hurricane hunter, before transitioning into the world of UAS standards, where he now serves as Vice Chair of ASTM Committee F38. That path gives him a perspective on unmanned aviation that most people in the industry don't have. He's been the guy in the cockpit, the program manager trying to replace the cockpit with a Global Hawk, and now the person writing the standards that determine whether any of this scales commercially.His take on the industry is refreshing. Technology, he argues, is no longer what's holding the drone industry back. Operations, regulatory approvals, and integration with legacy airspace systems are. He sees Part 108 as a genuine inflection point, one that will finally let operators fly by regulations and industry consensus standards rather than one-off waivers. But he's equally clear that getting there will take longer and cost more than most people expect, and that when the dust settles, success will go to the best operators, not the best aircraft.

In this episode we sit down with Alex List, CEO and founder of FlyShirley, a startup building an AI copilot for the cockpit. Alex walks through what AI in aviation actually looks like today: the practical reality of a ground-based language model accessed via iPad helping pilots handle strategic, non-time-critical tasks like looking up service bulletins mid-flight, transcribing ATC clearances, finding alternates, and synthesizing information that would otherwise require a pilot to dig through a POH while managing weather and workload. He's candid about where the technology still falls short and articulates a clear architectural thesis: frontier intelligence lives on the ground, state management lives on the device, and a 56-kilobit connection is all you need in between.The conversation broadens into the harder questions facing anyone building in this space: how do you design for pilot augmentation without creating dependency? How do you handle liability for an advisory system that is occasionally wrong? And how do you build a defensible business in a market that is, honestly, pretty small? Alex is refreshingly honest about the GA market math and where the real opportunity lies. The hosts bring their own investor and operator lens to the discussion, flagging the classic failure modes of aviation startups.

In this episode we reconnect with Robert Rose, CEO of Reliable Robotics, fresh off his testimony before Congress on the state of advanced air mobility. Robert shares what most people misunderstand about FAA certification, i.e. that the regulator isn't there to coach you through it, they're just calling balls and strikes. We explore why Reliable has spent eight years building autonomous systems within existing regulations rather than waiting for new rules, how they've convinced the FAA that zero-visibility automated landing standards can scale from wide-body jets down to Cessna Caravans, and why the "cargo first" narrative that dominates autonomy discussions is largely a regulatory myth.We also dig into Reliable's new Pentagon contract to deploy autonomous cargo aircraft for contested logistics in the Indo-Pacific, what the military calls building "conveyor belts in the sky." Robert explains why military logistics actually demands commercial-grade safety in ways most people don't appreciate, how their solid-state radar technology became an unexpected multibillion-dollar opportunity for existing airlines, and what changed at the FAA after years of low morale and congressional scrutiny. It's a grounded, technically rigorous conversation about what it actually takes to certify autonomy, why operational risk assessments don't work for aircraft above a certain weight class, and how Reliable is grinding through hundreds of compliance submissions to prove that autonomy isn't some distant dream but it's ready now.