Chapter 2

“It’s beautiful.” I said sitting in one of the six installed leather seats of my new airplane.

“Herr Barkley, this craft has exceeded all our expectations. The cruise range has tripled, rate of climb has quadrupled, cargo capacity has increased by ten times. It even went supersonic while climbing to altitude, using our existing engines,” the chief engineer in the project explained.

“Please, Nicholas, call me Adam. I’m happy it has turned out so well. Is there a market for a Barkley Paper airframe?”

“Yes, even with an increased pricetag, there is a market for this aircraft.”

“I can replicate this airframe for 450 million, on demand. How many do you want this year?”

“I don’t know, we have been wondering what the charge would be. We believe that the plane will not sell until the total price is under 50 million, we believe at that price a vehicle with this power, range, and capacity would have orders in the dozens per year.”

Our current target for graphene is 10 per sq meter. We expect to reach that target after completing our eighth graphene factory. That’s a graphene cost of 15 million. So the question is, do you design a new airframe for supersonic cruise using graphene, or stay with what you have.”

The engineer paused, and glanced at his partner who was sitting in the other seat facing backwards, towards me. “We are interested in a supersonic version, a PC-48,” he said at a small nod from his partner.

I glanced at Val who had joined me inside the plane, while Nora and Em enjoyed refreshments outside. The helicopter had induced a bit of nausea in five month pregnant Nora, and they were enjoying the sunshine and breeze under a shade tree, it was almost 80 out there. Val reached into her bag and removed two things, a book, and a model the size and shape of a football.

“Have you read the science fiction story ‘The Supersonic Zeppelin?’” I asked as the football popped into the air, coming to rest against the ceiling.

“Is that a dirigible?”

“Yes, made of Barkley Paper, and has the interior evacuated. No lifting gas, just vacuum.”

He stood, and pulled it down from the ceiling. “What is this ring?” He asked, pointing at the structure wrapping the cigar shaped model.

“That’s a Buseman ring wing. It works to cancel the supersonic shockwave, but provides no lift. The vehicle is lighter than air, and you can adjust buoyancy by increasing and decreasing the vacuum in the lift chamber. A 9.5 meter radius sphere has around 3500kg of lift at altitude. String three together, insert passenger seating, add a couple engines, and you have a supersonic vtol passenger aircraft. No fire danger, no ground boom, and speed is limited only by thrust and drag.”

“This is a crazy idea,” he said.

“Yes absolutely insane, and probably not practical. The point is that Barkley Paper and graphene give you the ability to think so far outside the box that you’ll be reminiscing about the good old days when there were corners. The question is, do you want to do what everyone else is doing, or do something uniquely Pilatus?” I finished tossing pictures onto the table between us of the current crop of advertised prototype and mock ups of small supersonic craft.

They looked at the pictures, and saw the prospective dates all hoping to fly the first vehicle by 2022, with production sometime after 2025. I set a supercapacitor onto the table, and asked, “Have you ever considered an all electric aircraft?”

“The range would be measured in meters not kilometers,” was his response.

“Imagine a vehicle we might call the PC-12E with a nose propfan instead of a propeller. Its graphene body has an electric motor. It has an emergency generator with 20 liters of fuel, and 2 megawatt hours of electric storage in each wing. With a recharge time of around 30 minutes, what kind of market would that kind of craft have at 25 million?”

“It would change the small aircraft, and on demand air taxi business permanently,” the associate said.

“With a 25 sq meters of wing plus a 10 meters across the roof, there is room for a 26kw hour solar panel system, to either recharge or power the vehicle while parked.”

“I thought your solar panels were more efficient than that.” the engineer said.

“The panels that get 850 watts a sq meter have to be pointed at the sun, and track it. We’ve developed a non tracking lightweight version, suitable for aircraft, that produces 750 watts per sq meter.”

He did a quick calculation, “That’s a 19 day recharge from empty on eight hours of sun.”

“Add 100 of our 850w panels, and that becomes less than a week, they only take up 5 cubic meters of storage, and weigh 98kg. With a foldable rack you could recharge in 4 and a half days anywhere with 8 hours of sun. Or make it 500 panels and do it in a day.

“I’m mainly thinking about Doctors Without Borders in Africa for this example. But the 4 megawatt battery is sized to provide the same range at the same horsepower engine. That’s a calculation using a craft the same weight as the PC-12, I didn’t calculate any energy efficiency benefit from the lighter weight of a Barkley Paper airframe. A much lighter craft will likely need less battery storage for the same range, reducing price and recharge time.

“That’s also just a rough calculation of equal energy density of fuel used at 30% efficiency compared to a high efficiency electric motor. A simple back of the envelope calculation, I’m not an engineer, I don’t know what kind of speed, power, and rpm efficiencies you’d get out of an aircraft with a super light weight.”

They were both silent, but I could feel their hearts beating in excitement, and see that they were trying hard not grin. “Perhaps we could discuss these figures and opportunities with management on Monday.”

“That would be fine. As I said, you guys are the engineers, I’m just the guy who would like to see my products used as widely as possible. The more I produce to meet the demand, the cheaper it gets. The graphene cost today for the aircraft we are sitting in is about 75% cheaper than the day you came to view it.”

“The numbers you provided of 450 million for future airframes includes this discount?”

“Yes, the laser bonding and welding of Barkley Paper from raw graphene is expensive if I do it on demand as a one off production. But if you had orders of at least 4 per month then an automated factory could produce them at around 10 million over the cost of materials. At 15 to 20 airframes per month, the estimated capacity of a single airframe plant, that would bring the price down to just 2 million over the cost of graphene, which is currently 370 million, and it’s only going to keep falling.”