Imagine a world of possibilities where you can fly from Chicago to Paris for $5. How can we make this a reality? One way is to dramatically reduce the cost of airplanes. What follows is an idea of how to do that.
Right now, there are two major players in the aerospace industry. Boeing and Airbus. These two are a duopoly and the price of their aircraft ranges from $50 million to $450 million per plane. These manufacturers are saddled with high labor and benefit costs and outdated manufacturing processes — the plane needs to be reimagined and the factory rebuilt from the ground up. What is needed to reduce the cost of airplanes and increase innovation in the aerospace industry is first principles thinking.
With first principles thinking everything that has come before is garbage and we are only limited by the laws of physics. It is conceivable that a third player could enter the industry and become the Tesla of aerospace. The driving factor is to reduce the price of an airplane to say $10 million per plane.
Most of the world — 80+ percent — have never flown on an airplane. To decrease the price of the airplane we need to scale. If we can produce ten thousand planes a year, we could see a 10x reduction in price through economies of scale. We scale through first principles. What we need to do is reduce labor by seventy percent, increase production by 10x, and decrease materials. We begin by asking what we are trying to do. We are trying to reduce the cost of an airplane to $10 million, no matter the size of the plane.
To do this we need to design an airplane that can be built from the ground up completely automated (within reason) and overlaid with AI and telemetry. What the company would be is an AI data analytics company that just happens to make airplanes. An example of this is SpaceX. SpaceX is not a rocket company. They are a data analysis company that just happens to make rockets. When something goes wrong, they have data to determine exactly what happened and fix it.
Imagine for a moment a factory whose sole purpose is to be designed to enable the building of a lights-out facility. A plant that has been designed to produce airplanes from the ground up with minimal human interaction as efficiently as possible. A company that builds the machines that build the machines. If everything is designed to capture telemetry, every failure turns into data for success.
Imagine new structures and materials that lighten the plane, cabins that detach and safely parachute to the ground in the event of a crash, cabins that can be customized within minutes for people or cargo, more airplane players and reduced prices for consumers. Finally, imagine flying at $5 a ticket to anywhere in the world. Starbucks and Chipotle onboard. Great seats and a tailored environment for you. Refreshed cabins every year or two. Imagine a flying experience so wonderful that it is enjoyable, not the nightmare that it currently is.
Future thoughts are all-electric planes that range from two-seaters to hundreds or thousands based on data. You wake up and decide that you want to fly to Miami. You take out your phone and book the ticket through the app. Multiple people do the same. You go to the nearest airport and thanks to robotaxi and AI, the plane comes out of the hangar and pulls up and the other nineteen people board with you. You bring your own bag. You don’t have to wait in line. You are not invasively scanned at the terminal.
To innovate in the aerospace industry, we need at least a 10x reduction in cost. We need to reduce the cost by eliminating everything that is unnecessary and getting to a world where efficient planes fly us anywhere. It is simple. At some point you book, you fly, and the planes do everything else automatically. Why enter a terminal and check a bag and ticket? Enter the plane, stow your bag, and grab an espresso.
Would you like to see this become a reality? A new entrant who builds alien dreadnought factories based on first principles and uses software, AI, data analytics, robotics, and automation at scale to become the most efficient manufacturer on the planet. This is sustainable abundance.
Pierce Novak