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Courtesy of Surf Air Mobility
Meet Surf Air Mobility, the Startup Trying To Electrify Air Travel
Samson Amore
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
The airline industry is a notoriously terrible polluter, with large carriers struggling to find ways to limit the more than 915 million tons of carbon emissions produced by their industry each year.
Yet some startups, like Hawthorne-based Surf Air Mobility, are looking to the electrification of air travel as a possible solution. On Wednesday, Surf Air announced it will go public by merging with blank-check company Tuscan Holdings Corp and Florida-based commuter airline Southern Airways, in a deal that values the combined company at $1.42 billion. The transaction is expected to raise up to $467 million, giving Surf Air much-needed capital to expand its vision for a fully electric airline.
Co-founded by CEO Sudhin Shahani and Chief Brand Officer Liam Fayed in 2012, Surf Air is a charter flight service with an electrified twist. Its single-engine, eight-seater Pilatus PC-12 aircraft is capable of a 2,150-mile flight range and a max speed of 330 miles. While that’s not as long nor as fast as most major commercial airplanes, it suits the carrier’s regional flights between local airports across the country, which are available to members who pay a starting rate of $199 per month.
Surf Air has stacked a notable slate of investors and advisors in recent years. Chairman Carl Albert is an airline industry veteran; he was CEO of turboprop charter airline Wings West before it was acquired by American Airlines and also ran manufacturing outfit Fairchild Aircraft for a decade. Other notable investors include billionaire businessman and Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, banking heir Alexandre de Rothschild and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, as well as local venture firms M13, Plus Capital and TenOneTen Ventures.
Though Surf Air has been eyeing an IPO since 2020, Shahani told Bloomberg that the startup’s business really took off during the pandemic, when many travelers who could afford charter flights were eager to skip larger, more crowded planes and airports. The newly merged company expects to generate roughly $100 million in revenue across all of its business units in 2022, it said Wednesday. “We’ve grown 50% last year to this year,” Shahani told Bloomberg.
The company aims to electrify all of its regional flights through the development of both an original hybrid and electric powertrain, which it can use to retrofit turboprop aircraft like its fleet of Cessna Grand Caravans and create fully electric planes. It also hopes to expand to more terminals—something that will be aided by the merger with Southern Airways, which serviced 39 cities and 300,000 customers last year.
Surf Air says that if it achieves that vision, it’ll be able to completely neutralize its emissions while reducing operating costs by half. Right now, Surf Air says its hybrid planes in action are producing half the emissions of a standard flight while saving about a quarter of the cost. The company doesn’t have a deadline on when its fully electric powertrain will be ready, but announced a deal Thursday with aircraft developer AeroTEC and propulsion firm Magnix to make more hybrid electric powertrains for its Cessnas, which could speed up the timeline.
Surf Air’s competitors in the realm of flight electrification include Textron, Cape Air and NASA, which started testing electric planes two years ago. Another airline, Hawaiian Air, is invested in a company that makes electric sea gliders, while Boeing is also testing electric planes. According to a recent report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, there are 170 similar projects underway.
“We believe deploying hybrid electric propulsion technology on existing aircraft at scale will be the most significant step we can take toward decarbonization of aviation in this decade,” Shahani said in a statement Wednesday. “We’re at a moment when the increasing consumer demand for faster, affordable, and cleaner regional travel will be met with [Surf Air]’s electrification ecosystem to accelerate the industry’s adoption of green flying.”
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Samson Amore
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
https://twitter.com/samsonamore
samsonamore@dot.la
Fist Bumps, Hand Sanitizer and Pitch Sessions at the 2020 Montgomery Summit
08:06 AM | March 06, 2020
Ben Bergman
Everyone from financier Michael Milken to bankers and venture capitalists had an opinion about the market-rattling coronavirus at the annual Montgomery Summit in Santa Monica that gathered top-flight investors and entrepreneurs. "Some of you made a tough decision by coming here," conference organizer Jamie Montgomery told a lunchtime crowd. "I'll breath easy the next couple weeks if nothing happens."
Between pitch sessions from companies as varied as 3D rocket-maker Relativity Space to interactive game publisher Scopely, attendees sipped matcha lattes, pumped hand sanitizer and talked deals.
The normal routine of handshaking was out, replaced by somewhat awkward fist bumping. Attendees lingered longer than usual at bathroom sinks, making sure to vigorously wash their hands, and constantly pumped hand sanitizer from one of several germ eradication stations set-up at the Fairmont Hotel.
Montgomery told the crowd to alert him if "anything happened" in the next couple weeks, not the most reassuring thing to hear as people dug into their chicken salads and a discussion about the next decade of artificial intelligence.
The fast-spreading COVID-19 cast a pall over the summit that gathered hundreds as markets continued their roller coaster ride on Thursday.
Meanwhile, people like partner Marko Papic, chief strategist at Clocktower Group, were already predicting a recession.
"The U.S. consumer is 15% of global GDP, that's a large chunk," he told a crowd that had gathered for a pre-lunchtime talk about coronavirus. And warned that an over stimulus response from governments could lead to inflation.
The same day, Congress approved $8.3 billion to fight the virus that's topped 200 cases in the United States. In California, already under a state of emergency, a cruise ship with thousands aboard en route from Hawaii to San Francisco was held in quarantine as officials rushed to test passengers. And around the country signs that the virus would take an economic toll became in sharper focus
Montgomery said he had considered canceling the conference, but was assured by his discussion with health officials that the risk was low.
Then, just as the Montgomery Summit was set to open, Los Angeles County officials declared a health emergency, confirming six new cases of coronavirus, and warning that schools and business may need to be closed if COV1D-19 continues to spread.
Milken tried to temper what he painted as a bit of a frenzy, telling a crowd on Wednesday that he saw this as an opportunity to harness the power of big medical companies like United Health Care and Kaiser Permanente. He predicted in weeks small prototype test kits would be available for the virus. And suggested the medical giants come together to fight the virus, much like big companies did during World War II.
"Science can accomplish in an hour what might have taken in a year," he said. "We should be much better prepared to deal with this issue, once we get the facts."
Ben Bergman contributed reporting
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Rachel Uranga
Rachel Uranga is dot.LA's Managing Editor, News. She is a former Mexico-based market correspondent at Reuters and has worked for several Southern California news outlets, including the Los Angeles Business Journal and the Los Angeles Daily News. She has covered everything from IPOs to immigration. Uranga is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and California State University Northridge. A Los Angeles native, she lives with her husband, son and their felines.
https://twitter.com/racheluranga
rachel@dot.la
In 2022, Get Ready for a Battle of Kitchen Robot Concepts
04:51 PM | December 29, 2021
As Restaurants Scramble for Workers, It's 'Order Up' for Miso Robotics and Its Burger-Flipping Robot
The coming year will be a proving year around all the hype of robotics in food that was created in 2020 and 2021. In 2022, the reality will set in that the labor shortage in restaurants is not a fleeting issue, though it may become less acute than it had been during the height of the pandemic. Restaurants will need to expand their robotics and AI pilots and roll-out new solutions.
The previous three years have felt a little like the 1997-2000 dot-com era for restaurant robotics companies. At that time, everyone knew the web was the future, and money was flooding in, but there weren’t yet any substantial winners and it was hard to predict exactly how the disruption would occur.. 2022 (and 2023) will be when we find out who can actually operationalize their product to solve the massive issues that aren’t going away for the food service industry.
I think that we will actually start seeing brand spec robotics and AI as early as 2022 within their standard new-restaurant package. Moving from proof of concept to industry standard is massive. Big restaurant chains will expand and begin to trust and try a variety of new automation products on the market, rather than just “exploring” individual robots as a kind of one-off approach.’ Artificial intelligence will also develop to a point where even mom-and-pop restaurants will have access to that type of technology to try out.
The tide has turned to food technology. Next year will be the year many realize it’s not going back.
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Jake Brewer
Jake Brewer is chief strategy officer at Miso Robotics, where he focuses on customer expansion, working closely with business and product development teams to meet the demands of a changing industry.
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