Our goal at Impossible is to build the highest performance
unmanned aircraft that can possibly be built with electric propulsion.
Spencer Gore and his team at Impossible Aerospace want to
make air travel all electric and do away with polluting jet fuel.
For the time being, it's focused on completely rethinking
drone design and built a battery in the shape of the
drone's fuselage, therefore maximizing flight time.
Gore was inspired in large part by his time as a battery
engineer at Tesla, where he lived in an RV in the parking lot when he started.
If you think about the two things that stress people out in
Silicon Valley the most, it's commuting and paying rent.
If you don't have to do those two things, life is pretty good.
I can't imagine a better place to have learned really
important lessons about shipping products and building
functional teams and getting through difficult times than
that team at that time.
Gore has come a long way since then.
Impossible Aerospace has raised more than $11 million from
investors like Airbus, Bessemer Venture Partners and an
ex-Tesla executive from Eclipse Ventures to rethink
aviation. Where I think Impossible and Tesla similar is
that we both started with some pretty fundamental math that
showed that if you want to make a compelling and useful
vehicle, you need a pretty big battery pack.
And I think that what most automakers have done with their
electric cars and what most drone companies have done with
their electric drones is to start by designing the car and
designing a drone before they think about the battery.
Typically, that leads to too small of a percentage of the
vehicle's weight and volume being being made of a battery.
Your iPhone is basically a battery of the screen on it.
A MacBook is basically a battery and a keyboard and a
screen. Model S, X, 3, they are batteries with seats on
them and you know, some cosmetic stuff attached.
Our drone is a battery with propellers on it.
Its first product, US-1, can fly for up to two hours on a single charge.
Just as Tesla had rethought how cars should be built from
the ground up based on the physics, so had we for aircraft.
Quite a bit more than half the aircraft mass is made of
battery cells and in fact, the entire structure is one battery pack.
US-1 is now available to first responders.
It can fly in certain configurations up two hours on a battery charge.
And we also offer a configuration for first responders
today that has a flight time of about an hour and 20
minutes that contains a ruggedized tactical enclosure, dual
optical and thermal cameras.
Drones have become a valuable tool for first responders,
aiding police and firefighters with aerial operations.
Within minutes, they can be launched to help law enforcement
with situational awareness.
Fight fires and aid in search and rescue operations.
Drones are quickly replacing helicopters to do these tasks.
There are 18,000 municipal police departments across the
country and I think 32,000 fire departments across the
country. And about 60 municipalities have access to a
helicopter. And part of the reason for that is that police
helicopters can cost $5 million.
And what we've all realized is that a drone can provide
about half of the utility of a helicopter at less than 1 percent of the price.
And that's a really big deal.
The problem is that with most drones that are out there
today, you have a flight time with cameras that's on the order of about 25 minutes.
What we're able to do is offer the endurance of a
helicopter, but with the convenience and cost of a drone.
But the company's ambitions stretch far beyond drones for first responders.
It is hoping to take the same engineering approach used for
US-1 and apply it to aircraft.
These drones are the world's first production electric
aircraft, and they are direct predecessors to the aircraft
that I think we'll be flying on in the future.
Electricity from renewable sources can be very cheap, and
in parts of the country it's ridiculously cheap, like the Pacific Northwest.
Compared to jet fuel, flying will be a bargain.
There are some really exciting options, I mean we're really
just scratching the surface with what is possible with this
new this new propulsion paradigm.
There are other companies working towards electric airplanes like Pipistrel and Eviation.
But Gore says Impossible Aerospace plans to completely
redesign the airplane.
Are you building a battery that's flying or are you trying
to put batteries where they really don't belong?
And it's no different than what the early automakers did.
By taking cars that were built for gas engines, taking out
the engines and putting in batteries, and you end up with
something that drives for 60 to 80 miles.
Compared to what Tesla did, of building a battery pack that
was shaped like a car, and then putting a car around it.
And I think that Impossible's contribution is to really push
the envelope of what is possible from a performance
standpoint with electric propulsion.
To build battery electric aircraft that can compete with
and substitute for conventionally fueled aircraft.
The aircraft that need to be flying 30 years from now need
to be in development today, and and so it's really
important we get started.
We're not going to stop until it's possible to travel
anywhere in the world emissions free.
It has to be done.