Interviewee
Greg Peterson, Chief Engineer at Airspace Experience Technologies, an aviation technology start-up, re-imagining mobility with the mission to offer the public, logistic companies and first-response teams a cleaner, faster and more affordable transportation alternative.
Transcript
Greg Peterson: Well, thank you for having me. Appreciate the opportunity to share what we're doing at ASX with your community. I started out at Pontiac Product Engineering at General Motors. I was there for almost 20 years. I ended up at Chevrolet Pontiac, Canada, advanced Vehicle Engineering group. And then I left General Motors and started working on an electric vehicle project. So this was in the early nineties, that's gonna date me, but started in on electrics and really liked the potential. And then I ended up working at Daimler Chrysler and their street and racing technology guy. I, I'm high performance type person. So at Pontiac I did high performance powertrains and, and chassis development for cars like the TransAm. And then at Street and Racing Technology, I worked on a lightweight viper program. And then Lotus hired me and I started working on lightweight structures. I led their lightweight structures group and did a lot of carbon fiber work and ended up consulting on a number of airplane projects, including the icon A five, where I led the interior engineering at Lotus. I ended up leading a nationwide study that showed that you could do a 30% lighter vehicle than what was in production at cost parity. And that was a part of the US government 2025 emissions regulations background. So they used our report as a couple others.
So I started working on electric vehicles, like I said, in the early 1990s. And even as late as just a couple years ago before I went to A S X I was working on an electric mid-size van that included the postal service I used to fly. So I love flying, so I'm passionate about aviation. So when the founder of AS S X asked me if I'd be willing to come on board, it sounded like a very interesting project. And so I'm, I'm still here over two and a half years later. First we chose the processes to meet our run rate times, and then we worked with suppliers who could meet those goals and targets.
Elisa Muñoz: And I wanted to ask you, I know that you guys recently announced the future launch of the Sigma Six Cargo Drone. Can you share a little bit about that?
Greg Peterson: Sure. We built our first full scale mule and we're preparing it for unmanned flight. We're using remote piloting. So it's something that the ASX has a background in building drones and creating software to control those drones. So we, our team, think of it as a big drone. It's a 40 foot wingspan. It's a very big drone. And our target is 2000 pounds of cargo capacity. So it's very much a heavy lift vehicle. And at this point we're concentrating on cargo. The barriers to production are much lower with cargo than with passengers. However, we do have a passenger mob design as well as our cargo mob design.
Just to, to give your listeners a little background on the plane. This plane has a cargo container system and a passenger container system that are detached from the aircraft and then delivered into a terminal or a hangar so that the plane itself is basically an equivalent of like a class eight truck that picks up different containers and then takes them to the final destination. So we have many customers that are very interested. We have memorandums of understanding and letters of intent to purchase planes already because these people see basically how efficient this is. And another key factor in our plane design was being quiet.
So if you've ever heard a helicopter coming into land, they're noisy and we wanna be flying in rural areas. Some of our first customers want us to deliver parts from a manufacturing plant to an automotive assembly plant. And it's a three mile run through a city and they have over a hundred trucks, class eight trucks that are going that three mile distance to deliver parts. And it clogs up traffic, it creates emissions that pollute the city. And the drivers are idle most of the time on that journey. They're sitting idling in traffic. So with our plane, we can't carry as much as a Class eight truck of course, but what we can do is carry cargo, go straight up, fly as the crow flies, no stop signs land, drop the parts off in about two minutes and fly back and get the next batch of parts. It's a very, very quiet machine and very versatile. One of the issues with electric vehicles, as you and your readership we'll understand, is that it takes a while to charge these batteries. And so what we did was basically design these containers that are removable to be fully charged when they come to the plane. So we have no downtime for charging with, with our system.
So our team, think of it as a big drone. It's a 40 foot wingspan. It's a very big drone. And our target is 2000 pounds of cargo capacity. It's very much a heavy lift vehicle.
Elisa Muñoz: What would you say it's the main differentiator at ASX?
Greg Peterson: Our main differentiator is that we're automotive guys and, and ladies not, not aviation people. So what drives automotive and, and certainly my background has been manufacturing. So manufacturing is what drove the design of our plane. Our plane isn't fancy, it's not a sleek tapered wing variable section wing, it's a Hershey bar wing is what we call it. But what it allows us to do, because it's a straight section wing, we can, we can build that wing very quickly. Some of the plane companies I've worked with in the past, it would take a week to build a wing and our target is under one hour to build a complete wing.
Elisa Muñoz: Talking about the next steps of the company, are you planning to expand soon?
Greg Peterson: Yes, yes. Yeah. We are out of our funding right now, to produce the production intent plane. Great. So that's where we're at. We've got a mule. It's, we've got a lot of lessons learned and we know what we wanna do for our next plane for the most part. So we are heading for that design that the production design, which will be of course a little different than what we have now. But we learned a tremendous amount with the plane. We built it with a small team in less than two years from basically a blank sheet of paper to a, a, a prototype that's capable of leaving the ground. And we did it on a very, very slim budget.
Elisa Muñoz: Well, congratulations on that. And the last question, where do you think the future of the industry is going?
Greg Peterson: Oh, I think the future of the industry is just extremely bright. These planes are over 400 ev to companies around the world today. The market is just expanding and, and the reason is because of efficiency, they're non polluting for the most part. We intend to be using solar for some of our battery charging. So that's gonna be a part of it. But the fact that you can fly very efficiently at 125 miles an hour, our target fuel economy is near 20 miles per gallon. So extremely efficient for an, for an aircraft.
And because of the low noise of our plane and because of all the congestion, we're eventually gonna be doing passengers. And if you look around, the population of the world is gonna expand by about 25% in the next 30 years. And we have gridlock today in many cities. Try driving in Los Angeles in rush hour or Boston or Chicago. I mean, it's just a mess. And if you're ever in rush hour traffic going zero miles an hour, just look up into the sky and what do you see? Empty space. And that's, that's where we're gonna.
Elisa Muñoz: Thank you so much for being here, and for sharing your experiences!
Greg Peterson: Well thank you very much for the opportunity. I really appreciate it.
