"It's very clear that we're going to go into third-dimension mobility, by definition.”

Flying, really flying through the air, is an experience everyone thinks about, according to Rani Plaut, co-founder and CEO of AIR. And with the congestion we already have on the ground, personal air mobility will become an important option in the near future. He says that ensuring people feel comfortable and safe flying a vehicle is the major hurdle AIR is working to overcome. While government regulations will also play a role, Plaut is less worried about that being an obstacle. He expects the regulations to adjust to meet the market in Israel, the U.S., and Europe. He also shares that striving for perfection can be a problem. For example, at AIR, they are putting more focus on vehicles that are easy to use and handle even if that means giving up some flight range. He says that often, a perfect solution to a single problem overall will be imperfect at other levels.

 

 

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You're the co-founder and CEO of AIR, a relatively new company working in the air mobility space. Tell me about your background and what led you to this idea.

My background is physics and mathematics. I never graduated, actually. I did two years in university when I was very young. All my life I have been working with tangible things. I work a lot in the fields of AI and computer vision. But my passion is with tangible things: physics, materials, things that move, mechanics, and so forth. I think that air mobility is the future. As EVs were 10 years ago, it's about air EVs now. The slogan that I coined in the company and all of our presentations is "Everybody wants to fly," which is not about flying as a pilot, but really flying. Peter Pan flies, Falkor flies. Being in the air. Everybody thinks about it. I think it's natural.

Tell me about where we're at today in terms of air mobility as a source of mobility for the future.

Mobility in general is crowded. Congestion is a problem that everybody faces on a daily basis. Generally people are going to move and keep moving for the rest of humanity's future. We have to find ways to do it better. We have to find other means and other ways: to go up and down. The Boring Company is going underground. The rest is air.

Volume is, by definition, greater than area. Two-dimensional and three-dimensional are very different. I think it's very clear that we're going to go into third-dimension mobility, by definition. As humanity goes to sustainable energy, it has to go hand in hand. There is no point in burning fossil fuels over air mobility, at least for the shorter ranges.

Why is now the right time to build a startup in this space?

We started four years ago. A lot of people started even earlier. There are a few reasons. I think the key reason is that there is an inflection point where enough technologies are commoditized in a practical way to be used. I'm not comparing AIR to Apple, but if you look at the iPhone, there was no technological breakthrough there. It's a pure and perfect integration of very advanced technologies at the right point in time. There is a point where enough of the technologies are matured enough and integratable enough in order to create something which is an inflection point.

I think that the same happens now in air mobility. People have been flying since 1903. A lot of things have advanced. The inflection point happened in recent years because of a few industries. One of them is drones. A lot of things came to be mature enough in order to be used by people.

Where are you today after a few years working on this? What is the vision of this company?

The company was initiated by Chen Rosen. Basically, he started developing,building and testing things. We have built six substantial prototypes up to full scale. I can show you our shop floor. We have been flying those large things based on a very unique and patented aerodynamic topology combined with a very unique and proprietary flight control system, both hardware and software, to enable what we call "personal air mobility."

We are different from others in the field. We believe that it's more about the people, the user, rather than the technology. People tend to think that we are used to being in the air because we fly Airbus A380s. But we are very isolated from the experience. The only people that feel the flight are the aviators. Most people are not used to gliding or having real interaction with the air. This is why we called ourselves AIR.

We think that the major hurdle or the first hoop to jump through is making people sure enough or trusting enough in order to get up in the air. For that to happen, they need to have assurance that the instrument will take care of most problems. We're trying to create a vehicle which is about you taking it up in the sky and feeling trustworthy enough to be safe. That's the whole essence of AIR.

We have a very cool design. We're designing the aircraft on automotive-based technologies and techniques. I can assure you it's the coolest thing you've ever seen. It doesn't look like an airplane.

I'm thinking of many more hurdles: governmental, assurances, flight controls, stuff like that. How big of a part do those play in your roadmap?

If you map it out, there aren't so many hurdles. I don't remember who said it, but in most cases "time takes care of most things.” I remember a lecture in the 1980s, people said that the personal computer won't come about because people don't know how to type.

I can say that the Israeli government and the US government and also in Europe, they look at the market. If the market wants things to fly, overtime regulation takes care of it. We are working closely, for example, with the FAA. I can tell you that they are very open. It's not that they are very easy. They don't just say, "Go fly." But we have a very open and constructive conversation with them. There are some emerging certification basises for eVTOL that we use. In addition, sport aviation is relevant for areas "G" and "E" in the US, which is a huge portion of the area excluding cities, excluding airports - flying there is much easier and around the corner.

How do you envision AIR as a part of this new world? Is this something that people will have in their backyard?

Our target price is targeting the level of a high priced car when scaling to high quantities, not the high volume of consumer automotive volumes. A race car sells 10,000 units per year. If you go to the commodities, like the Golf or Prius, you're talking about hundreds of thousands or up to a million in a year per model. We think that many, many thousands of units per year sold is something which is completely conceivable. Again, if it's affordable, easy to handle, and easy to certify.

What really fascinated you as a kid?

I guess I was a weird kid, I was and I still am a physicist and an artist. There is always magic in the combination of art and sciences and I always look for the beauty in things, I look for equilibriums. I look for places where I can bring something to a very stable situation, flight actually is one of those things. This is my passion. It may sound weird but a good painting and a good physics equation are, for me, the same.

Where do you really draw your inspiration from today?

I try to have as little regrets as possible and also to bring things to the right position - this is very different from perfectionism. I think that perfectionism for the sake of perfectionism is wrong. It's better to look at the system. I'm trying to get to a balanced situation, which is the right level of compromises in order to get to the right end result at the system level. At the end, it should be perfect as a solution. Each part of the equation is not the perfect solution for the micro problem, but at the macro level, you can have a perfect solution. This is what we're trying to get with AIR. It's more important to be usable and easy to handle, rather than to be, for example, aerodynamically efficient. We're trying to get to the right spot.

What are three words you would use to describe yourself?

Physicist, artist, and juggler. It's about holding all the balls in the air.

Michael Matias, Forbes 30 Under 30, is the author of Age is Only an Int: Lessons I Learned as a Young Entrepreneur. He studies Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University, while working as a software engineer at Hippo Insurance and as a Senior Associate at J-Ventures. Matias previously served as an officer in the 8200 unit. 20MinuteLeaders is a tech entrepreneurship interview series featuring one-on-one interviews with fascinating founders, innovators and thought leaders sharing their journeys and experiences.

 

Contributing editors: Michael Matias, Megan Ryan