Volume 01 | Issue 22 | November 2, 2020
Volocopter VoloIQ, University Hypersonics, Palantir's Future in Defense

Welcome back to the Future of Aerospace, where each week we dive into a few of the trends rapidly defining the next generation of aircraft and aerial markets.

Third quarter earnings results by major aviation companies are showing how the impact of COVID-19 continues to pound away at the industry's ability to operate and recover from the reduction in commercial flight operations.

Through the first nine months of the year, Airbus saw its consolidated revenues decrease to ?30.2 billion, compared to ?46.2 billion during the same time period a year ago. Between July and September, Boeing reported a net loss of $466 million compared to a net income of $1.2 billion during the same three months in 2019.

Boeing also expects its 737 MAX to receive final regulatory re-certification and resume deliveries in the fourth quarter of this year.

Elsewhere in the industry, SpaceX is starting to roll out public beta testing for its Starlink satellite internet service. More on that here.


THIS WEEK: By selecting Microsoft Azure as its core digital urban air mobility (UAM) operations cloud computing infrastructure, Volocopter has given its new VoloIQ platform the ability to establish low altitude electric air taxi and drone traffic management services globally. We explain why. (Electrification and Sustainability)

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is partnering with Purdue University and the University of Notre Dame to conduct hypersonic research in key areas including the transition from laminar to turbulent flow, predicting the heating of turbulent flow, systems engineering, and propulsion, Jonathan Poggie, a professor in the school of aeronautics and astronautics at Purdue University and leader of the hypersonics program, told Aviation Today.(Longshots)

Denver-based Palantir Technologies, Inc. forecasts a major increase in the company’s share of DoD, intelligence community, and other federal software business, as the company seeks to become the “central operating system for all U.S. defense programs,” per last month’s prospectus for the company’s initial public offering (IPO). (Autonomy & AI)

Thanks for reading.

—The Future of Aerospace Team
How Microsoft Azure Will Enable Volocopter's VoloIQ to Launch UAM Operations Globally
Image: Volocopter

By selecting Microsoft Azure as its core digital urban air mobility (UAM) operations cloud computing infrastructure, Volocopter has given its new VoloIQ platform the ability to establish low altitude electric air taxi and drone traffic management services globally, here's why.

Volocopter's Oct. 28 selection of Microsoft Azure to power VoloIQ – along with a Lufthansa Industry partnership – was one of a number of new customers in recent months added to what has become the world's cloud computing network. During the third quarter of 2020, Microsoft reported a 48 percent growth in its Azure cloud computing services network revenue.

How will the Microsoft Azure cloud computing network enable future UAM operations on VoloIQ?
  • Azure functions a worldwide cloud computing network with artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other digital applications available to customers like Volocopter in an advanced evolution of the mobile app store style business models used by Apple and Google on their mobile device operating systems.

  • Volocopter's goal with VoloIQ is to effectively create a new low altitude air traffic management system capable of interfacing air taxi and drone position updates to individual UAM operators, air navigation service providers and regulators as well as regional and local businesses, transportation authorities, and even residents of communities and regions that will change as a result of the future UAM concept of operations envisioned by Volocopter.

  • Azure’s massive global cloud computing platform includes more than 160 physical data centers, organized into regions where Microsoft has geographically located “latency defined perimeters,” according to their website.

  • The world computer is also powered by more than 100,000 miles of fiber optic and sub-sea scale cabling and 150 edge locations on the ground that currently serve more than 20 million companies globally.

  • Microsoft's business model for Azure employs service level agreements that give companies like Volocopter the ability to run their native business Information Technology (IT) systems, services, and applications on Azure's virtual machines, edge computing servers and machine learning algorithms.

  • Some of the UAM stakeholders VoloIQ will digitally interface with including smart cities, existing mobility providers, public transportation and ride-hailing, flight and ground operations, as well as customer-facing services.

  • Volcopter representative’s emailed statement: "In order to offer a fully integrated product with a seamless user experience, our systems need to be talking to other systems our customers use. On the most basic level, VoloIQ will offer an API to connect their services with ours. The customer-facing portal will be our Volocopter app.”
Artificial intelligence and machine learning applications in the Azure cloud store that will see adoption by Volocopter include those that can help the manufacturer to understand and predict demand for their services, improve fleet availability, routing, and mission planning. Those digital workloads will occur on the Azure platform that has now ingested nearly 1 million SQL databases and processes more than 1.4 trillion queries daily, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on growth of Azure: “We’re building Azure as the world’s computer with more data center regions than any other provider, now 66, including new regions in Austria, Brazil, Greece, and Taiwan. We’re expanding our hybrid capabilities so that organizations can seamlessly build, manage, and deploy their applications anywhere. With Azure SQL Edge, we’re bringing SQL data engine to IoT devices for the first time. And with Azure Space, we’re partnering with SpaceX and SES to bring Azure compute to anywhere on the planet.”


Read more on Volocopter's future VoloIQ UAM ecosystem platform.
AFRL Recruits Purdue and Notre Dame for Hypersonic Research

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is partnering with Purdue University and the University of Notre Dame to conduct hypersonic research in key areas including the transition from laminar to turbulent flow, predicting the heating of turbulent flow, systems engineering, and propulsion, Jonathan Poggie, a professor in the school of aeronautics and astronautics at Purdue University and leader of the hypersonics program, told Aviation Today.

The research will be used for any military vehicle or object flying at hypersonic speeds.

Here is an overview of what aspects of hypersonic flight Purdue and Notre Dame’s experts will be researching:
  • Transition from laminar to turbulent flow: Two of the projects the program is focused on involve the transition from laminar to turbulent flow for next-generation high-speed vehicles capable of flying at Match 5 and beyond.

  • When laminar flow, which is smooth and quarterly in layers, transfers to turbulent flow, which is chaotic, it is very difficult to predict the transfer rates, which can be a factor of 10 higher when in turbulent flow over laminar flow, Poggie explained.

  • Poggie: “We'll be trying to predict those measurements with the best available computer models and see how we can help improve the capability of making this prediction so when designers go to design a hypersonic vehicle, they know the level of heating they can expect from flight. That's important for us to know that and have an error bound on the value because otherwise, they have to use a very conservative design and a conservative thermal protection system is heavy and reduces the vehicle performance.”

  • Earlier this year, Purdue was awarded $5.9 million by the AFRL to develop a Mach 8 wind tunnel, and Northrop Grumman donated a Hypersonic Pulse (HYPULSE) shock tunnel to the university in October.

  • The HYPULSE will allow flight simulations from Mach 5 to Mach 40, which is fast enough to allow a plane traveling from Washington, D.C. to fly to California in just 15 minutes. Purdue is only the second university to have one of these wind tunnels.
Poggie: “A conventional wind tunnel is very noisy, that when it runs you can actually hear the rumbling, and that turbulent flow on the sidewalls of the tunnel contaminates the flow field, creating an unrealistic disturbance environment that's not representative of light. These tunnels [Mach 6] are specially designed to reduce that noise field to a minimum that's very close to what you get when you actually fly through the atmosphere.”

Read more about hypersonics research at Purdue and Notre Dame Universities here.
Palantir Forecasts Major Increase in Its Share of DoD, Other Federal Software Business

Denver-based Palantir Technologies, Inc. forecasts a major increase in the company’s share of DoD, intelligence community, and other federal software business, as the company seeks to become the “central operating system for all U.S. defense programs,” per last month’s prospectus for the company’s initial public offering (IPO).

While the company has been a significant player in the provision of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for the Pentagon, Palantir has also had trouble turning a profit. For example, while Palantir had revenues of nearly $743 million last year–25 percent higher than 2018, it reported net losses of nearly $580 million.

That is starting to change, per Palantir, as it has recently seen a “significant decrease in the time and number of software engineers required to install and deploy” the company’s software.

Who is Palantir and how will they be expanding as a major aerospace and defense supplier to the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)?
  • Co-founded by PayPal entrepreneur Peter Thiel and several colleagues in 2003 “to provide software for use in counterterrorism operations,” per the Palantir prospectus, the company has expanded its footprint to include contracting with the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Special Operations Command, intelligence community, and federal agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security, Centers for Disease Control, Department of Agriculture, Food and Drug Administration and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

  • The big data analytics provided by Palantir may be of particular use in Project Maven, which has looked to develop an artificial intelligence tool to analyze full-motion video (FMV) surveillance footage collected by unmanned aircraft and decrease the workload of intelligence analysts.

  • “Some companies work with the United States as well as its adversaries,” per the Palantir prospectus. “We do not. We believe that our government and commercial customers value this clarity.”

  • The prospectus said that U.S. Army special operations commanders in the Middle East began using Palantir software in 2008 for mission planning and combat and that “every battalion” in the Army “uses our software for intelligence analysis.”

  • 2008 was the year Palantir released its first software platform–Palantir Gotham–for intelligence community users to allow them to identify patterns in such datasets as signals intelligence and confidential informants. DoD then started using Gotham to investigate threats and protect soldiers from improvised explosive devices (IEDs), Palantir said. Allies now deploy Gotham, and Palantir is looking to expand its presence abroad.
Palantir’s prospectus: “We intend to pursue significant expansion of our government work with U.S. allies abroad. Recent expansion with law enforcement agencies in Europe demonstrates our ability to capture these opportunities. When ISIS attacked hundreds of people in 2015 and 2016–in Paris, Brussels, Barcelona, and Berlin–our platforms became a key means of communication and information sharing between European intelligence agencies and the rest of the world.”


Read more about Palantir's future as an aerospace and defense supplier.
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