I chose to leave my homeland and
emigrate to America and what attracted
me to this country was this pioneer
spirit the collective freedoms I thought
to myself back then no other country in
the world has this much of a focus on
the future or a new technology it was
that feeling that I felt very strongly a
couple of years ago during my
citizenship ceremony I felt it’s so
strong it made me cry twice and I feel
like today sometimes when it comes to
transportation we’ve lost that pioneer
spirit we sometimes travel like we’re in
sardine cans and we’re so focused on
getting to the destination that we’ve
put aside the joy in the journey we’ve
even found sardine cans for our
long-distance trips but the future of
air transportation is personal we’re
really moving in that direction
and before you think that seems like a
far-off future this is just one of the
prototype designs that’s being developed
around the world and there have never
been more engineers in this country
working on personal air transportation
and these flying cars William Gibson
once said and I’m reminded to say thank
you to WGBH for hosting us he said it
first on public broadcasting the future
is already here it’s just not evenly
distributed and any technology like
personal air transportation seems like
this really rare thing think about the
airports
that you can fly into you can buy a
ticket on the airlines and fly into an
airport there are six of them they’re
hard to see on the slide but there are
six of them between Boston and Albany
but let me show you all the airports
that you could fly into yourself there
are 200 of them and this isn’t there is
a massive magnitude more of heliports
this is only airports with runways now I
used to think that getting an airplane
that you could practically fly from
Boston to California and who is really
the domain of the very rich and I mean
literally the Jet Set right until one
day I came across this magazine article
and wired 45 miles per gallon at over
200 miles per hour that’s crazy
if you if you take into consideration
that it can fly in a straight line
rather than curvy roads especially more
fuel-efficient than the most
fuel-efficient car in the world the
Toyota Prius eco so I started thinking
wow maybe it’s actually possible to do
personal air transportation now if you
think that that previous plane looks a
little strange you’d be right it’s not
available from a factory it’s only
available as an experimental airplane
and this isn’t some crazy far-off thing
there are people all over America
building experimental adlink it’s in
their garage and when I say garage I
literally mean this is a kit that you
can get shipped to your garage with
every single part that you need to build
an experimental plane except for the
engine but including all the nuts and
bolts and you can pick up a used model
of the model you saw on the last slide
the long easy for $30,000 but it’s not
just a few Mavericks in a few garetty’s
around America every year the
Experimental Aircraft Association
hosts a fly-in show in Oshkosh Wisconsin
and 600,000 people people who really
love aviation what’s even more amazing
is that 10,000 of them fly in in their
own planes all the planes you see in the
bottom right hand corner and the tiny
dots in the top left-hand corner those
are all planes that flew in and half of
them experimental so it’s really
widespread so there I was a couple years
ago walking around the show grounds
looking at different experimental
airplanes trying to figure out which
design would get me to California
efficiently and reasonably quickly and I
realized that fuel efficiency and speed
don’t really go together unless the
plane is really streamlined so I had to
look for the most streamlined and I
found that the most streamlined was the
Burcu it’s pretty skinny it was this
it’s based on a design by Burt Rutan
Burt is this legendary airplane designer
come up with these crazy looking new
futuristic designs that are radically
fuel efficient and fast
in fact he designed the first plane ever
to fly around the world non stop non
refueled now the Burke hoot is a unique
combination of not just fuel efficient
while fast 250 miles per hour and also
fun it’s capable of full military
aerobatic and can pull more G’s than an
f-16 fighter jet now I don’t have the
skills to build one of these from
scratch so I went out and found an
almost built one and we took this thing
and trucked it to my friend’s garage in
Texas where he worked on it for two
years ripping out all of the interior
systems and replacing them with new ones
and the one thing that I got to design
from scratch is the panel
I wanted it to have no old-fashioned
gauges only modern touchscreen glass and
I wanted it to be tactile the control
stick on the right
I had machined from a solid piece of
wood and it’s unvarnished so all I’m
feeling in my hand is natural material
and I was able to take my flight’s into
my own hands after going through the
test-flying process at the FAA makes us
do to make sure this isn’t going to
crash into a random house but being able
to take my flights into my own hands was
this incredible eye opener these are the
flights I was able to take in the Burcu
instead of the airlines in just two
years all over the country including ten
trips to California and back and it’s
really more like a flying motorcycle
than a flying car that has some
advantages you can taxi around the
airport with the canopies up it’s kind
of like driving a convertible I got to
do that at Chicago O’Hare once and I got
a lot of very strange looks from the big
airline drivers and it also this
incredible visibility you can look all
around you and even down on both sides
and see what the ground right beneath
you but it has drawbacks too it’s not
pressurized so any long distance flight
I’m breathing oxygen from a cannula
stuffed up my nose and because the
engines on the back that makes it more
efficient but it also means there’s no
cabin heat and the coldest I’ve seen the
outside air coming in to small leaks is
minus 40 degrees so it’s not always the
most comfortable but I wouldn’t trade
that I wouldn’t trade that for the
experience of being a driver and not a
when I have a trip from Boston to
California coming up I spend the whole
week before looking forward to the
flight and I realized that while
aviation and Technology attracted me to
America
now it’s aviation that has allowed me to
meet America as I journey across her
it’s totally different you’re a half the
distance from the earth that you are in
the airlines and you’re able to look all
around you and even down at the ground
right underneath you and I also realized
that in addition to the collective
freedoms we have this personal air
vehicle has given me personal feeling of
freedom I feel it every time I leave the
ground and when I arrive at the opposite
coast here with the San Francisco Bay
Bridge right in front of me but my
biggest lesson from this journey is that
it’s not about me it’s about all of us
stop and think about the fact that the
Wright brothers were amateur
experimenters they received no
government funding no one gave them a
grant and think about any advanced
technology of the future that you’re
excited about whether it’s a personal
brain computer interface that we just
heard about or it’s a home robot or
personalized medicine or even a personal
flying car just look around because the
personal technology of tomorrow is
already here if you seek out the
amateurs the experimenters [Applause]
emigrate to America and what attracted
me to this country was this pioneer
spirit the collective freedoms I thought
to myself back then no other country in
the world has this much of a focus on
the future or a new technology it was
that feeling that I felt very strongly a
couple of years ago during my
citizenship ceremony I felt it’s so
strong it made me cry twice and I feel
like today sometimes when it comes to
transportation we’ve lost that pioneer
spirit we sometimes travel like we’re in
sardine cans and we’re so focused on
getting to the destination that we’ve
put aside the joy in the journey we’ve
even found sardine cans for our
long-distance trips but the future of
air transportation is personal we’re
really moving in that direction
and before you think that seems like a
far-off future this is just one of the
prototype designs that’s being developed
around the world and there have never
been more engineers in this country
working on personal air transportation
and these flying cars William Gibson
once said and I’m reminded to say thank
you to WGBH for hosting us he said it
first on public broadcasting the future
is already here it’s just not evenly
distributed and any technology like
personal air transportation seems like
this really rare thing think about the
airports
that you can fly into you can buy a
ticket on the airlines and fly into an
airport there are six of them they’re
hard to see on the slide but there are
six of them between Boston and Albany
but let me show you all the airports
that you could fly into yourself there
are 200 of them and this isn’t there is
a massive magnitude more of heliports
this is only airports with runways now I
used to think that getting an airplane
that you could practically fly from
Boston to California and who is really
the domain of the very rich and I mean
literally the Jet Set right until one
day I came across this magazine article
and wired 45 miles per gallon at over
200 miles per hour that’s crazy
if you if you take into consideration
that it can fly in a straight line
rather than curvy roads especially more
fuel-efficient than the most
fuel-efficient car in the world the
Toyota Prius eco so I started thinking
wow maybe it’s actually possible to do
personal air transportation now if you
think that that previous plane looks a
little strange you’d be right it’s not
available from a factory it’s only
available as an experimental airplane
and this isn’t some crazy far-off thing
there are people all over America
building experimental adlink it’s in
their garage and when I say garage I
literally mean this is a kit that you
can get shipped to your garage with
every single part that you need to build
an experimental plane except for the
engine but including all the nuts and
bolts and you can pick up a used model
of the model you saw on the last slide
the long easy for $30,000 but it’s not
just a few Mavericks in a few garetty’s
around America every year the
Experimental Aircraft Association
hosts a fly-in show in Oshkosh Wisconsin
and 600,000 people people who really
love aviation what’s even more amazing
is that 10,000 of them fly in in their
own planes all the planes you see in the
bottom right hand corner and the tiny
dots in the top left-hand corner those
are all planes that flew in and half of
them experimental so it’s really
widespread so there I was a couple years
ago walking around the show grounds
looking at different experimental
airplanes trying to figure out which
design would get me to California
efficiently and reasonably quickly and I
realized that fuel efficiency and speed
don’t really go together unless the
plane is really streamlined so I had to
look for the most streamlined and I
found that the most streamlined was the
Burcu it’s pretty skinny it was this
it’s based on a design by Burt Rutan
Burt is this legendary airplane designer
come up with these crazy looking new
futuristic designs that are radically
fuel efficient and fast
in fact he designed the first plane ever
to fly around the world non stop non
refueled now the Burke hoot is a unique
combination of not just fuel efficient
while fast 250 miles per hour and also
fun it’s capable of full military
aerobatic and can pull more G’s than an
f-16 fighter jet now I don’t have the
skills to build one of these from
scratch so I went out and found an
almost built one and we took this thing
and trucked it to my friend’s garage in
Texas where he worked on it for two
years ripping out all of the interior
systems and replacing them with new ones
and the one thing that I got to design
from scratch is the panel
I wanted it to have no old-fashioned
gauges only modern touchscreen glass and
I wanted it to be tactile the control
stick on the right
I had machined from a solid piece of
wood and it’s unvarnished so all I’m
feeling in my hand is natural material
and I was able to take my flight’s into
my own hands after going through the
test-flying process at the FAA makes us
do to make sure this isn’t going to
crash into a random house but being able
to take my flights into my own hands was
this incredible eye opener these are the
flights I was able to take in the Burcu
instead of the airlines in just two
years all over the country including ten
trips to California and back and it’s
really more like a flying motorcycle
than a flying car that has some
advantages you can taxi around the
airport with the canopies up it’s kind
of like driving a convertible I got to
do that at Chicago O’Hare once and I got
a lot of very strange looks from the big
airline drivers and it also this
incredible visibility you can look all
around you and even down on both sides
and see what the ground right beneath
you but it has drawbacks too it’s not
pressurized so any long distance flight
I’m breathing oxygen from a cannula
stuffed up my nose and because the
engines on the back that makes it more
efficient but it also means there’s no
cabin heat and the coldest I’ve seen the
outside air coming in to small leaks is
minus 40 degrees so it’s not always the
most comfortable but I wouldn’t trade
that I wouldn’t trade that for the
experience of being a driver and not a
when I have a trip from Boston to
California coming up I spend the whole
week before looking forward to the
flight and I realized that while
aviation and Technology attracted me to
America
now it’s aviation that has allowed me to
meet America as I journey across her
it’s totally different you’re a half the
distance from the earth that you are in
the airlines and you’re able to look all
around you and even down at the ground
right underneath you and I also realized
that in addition to the collective
freedoms we have this personal air
vehicle has given me personal feeling of
freedom I feel it every time I leave the
ground and when I arrive at the opposite
coast here with the San Francisco Bay
Bridge right in front of me but my
biggest lesson from this journey is that
it’s not about me it’s about all of us
stop and think about the fact that the
Wright brothers were amateur
experimenters they received no
government funding no one gave them a
grant and think about any advanced
technology of the future that you’re
excited about whether it’s a personal
brain computer interface that we just
heard about or it’s a home robot or
personalized medicine or even a personal
flying car just look around because the
personal technology of tomorrow is
already here if you seek out the
amateurs the experimenters [Applause]
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