The Allplane Podcast

Omer Bar-Yohay is the president of AutoFlight. AutoFlight is as close as it gets in the eVTOL world to a global company: founded and headquartered in China, where it has its manufacturing facility, its design and development team and some of its major investors are located in Germany and its operational testing grounds in the California. Although, perhaps it hasn’t got, so far, as much press as ot...

Hemant Mistry, our guest today, is the director of energy transition at the world’s top airline industry organisation, IATA, which gathers nearly 300 airlines from all over the world. With Hemant we review the strategy of priorities that IATA has set for its members and the industry’s position in matters such as the sustainable fuel mandates being introduced, for example, by the European Union. Bu...

Ivor von Dartel left the comfort and security of a corporate job at Airbus to develop an all-electric battery-powered aircraft. Munich-based Vaeridion is one of the most promising players in the emerging field of electric aviation. The 9-seater, 500km-range electric aircraft that Ivor’s team is working on is designed to shuttle travellers, carbon-free, across the sort of short to medium range dist...

Gregory Davis heads one of the most talked-about startups of the electric aviation era. In fact, Eviation was already cool when almost no one was talking about electric aircraft and aviation sustainability. The super sleek lines of its Alice commuter aircraft are due to the fact that this truly clean-sheet aircraft has been designed around the batteries, making a truly electric-native aircraft. in...

This is not the first time that Morell Westermann visits this podcast. Those of you that were around in 2020, when we were just taking off, might remember how Morell Westermann and Malik Aziz explained here their record-setting electric flight across the whole length of Germany. Well, Morell is back at record setting, this time, at aeroFriedrichshafen, in Southern Germany. Europe’s largest general...

If you are into sustainable aviation, chances are that you have come across ZeroAvia some way or another. This fast growing startup, which is developing hydrogen fuel-cell powertrains for aircraft, has been making headlines pretty much every other week. From its Californian roots, ZeroAvia is now operating across five separate locations in the US and the UK and has raised funds from some of the mo...

JetBlue Ventures is one of the earliest and most prolific early stage investors in the aviation and travel technology space. It is now common for many large airlines to have their own in-house venture arm, but when it launched, back in 2016, JetBlue Ventures was one of the pioneers in this space, together with Hangar51 (of the IAG Group) and Cockpit Innovation (of El Al). Fast forward to today and...

Patrick Edmond is the managing director of Altair Advisory, a consultancy firm providing expertise and advice to the commercial aviation industry. Patrick has a long and broad experience that encompasses airlines, airports, aircraft leasing, aviation tech and, of course, consulting services, which gives him a great vantage point on the industry. I had been following Patrick for quite some time, si...

LanzaJet is the sustainable aviation fuel spin-off of the almost eponymous LanzaTech, an American firm that is developing and deploying technologies to turn different sorts of feedstock and waste, into biofuels. Of the different processes and pathways available to make sustainable aviation fuel, LanzaJet is focusing on the Alcohol-to-Jet one, which uses ethanol previously produced from organic fee...

Michael Barnard is one of the most outspoken experts in the field of renewable energy and decarbonization technologies and, as it couldn’t be otherwise, has also had a close look at the different projects that are claiming to take aviation towards the path of sustainability. In this long and gripping conversation, Michael doesn’t mince words when talking about some of the trends and themes that ar...

Today’s podcast guest is leading a firm that is truly unique in the aviation world. Tom Grundy, CEO of Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) will possibly chastise me for talking about the airship comeback. The Airlander, the world’s largest aircraft by some measures, may look, from the outside, like one of those classical airships of the pre-War era, however, as listeners of this episode shall soon learn, it...

We are living through an almost unprecedented wave of aerospace innovation. From eVTOLs to new propulsion technologies, the world is awash with new projects, designs and concepts. How many of them will pass the certification process? This is a question that I’ve been pondering for a while and this is the reason I welcomed the chance to do this episode in partnership with AFuzion, a leading boutiqu...

Alon’s career spans several decades in, both, military and civilian aviation. He’s been at the helm of all sorts of aircraft, from F-16s to the Dreamliners, which he currently flies for Israeli airline El Al. But, while Alon’s flying career could surely provide material for several episodes, the reason he’s here today on the podcast is the Simplifly App, a tool he and his partners have developed i...

The recent covid pandemic has exposed how fragile the aviation and, more generally, the travel sector are to external shocks. What’s more, things get particularly messy when each country starts implementing its own measures and health requirements. The confusion and uncertainty resulting from this maze of regulations is often more damaging than the measures themselves. This is why some in the avia...

When British airline Flybe folded during the covid pandemic, Josef Mouris had the chance to devote 100% of his energies to the project that had been long time in his mind. This former Dash Q400 pilot founded Electron, an electric flight startup. Although at first Josef was looking at the actual flying-operational part of the business, he soon realized that the hardware wasn’t quite there yet. So,...

Addison Schonland is the co-founder and manager of AirInsight, a digital platform that tracks the commercial aviation industry through a combination of media content and analytical tools. Addison is one of the most knowledgeable people I know about the state of the aviation industry and he was also one of the very first guests of this podcast when I was just getting it off the ground. It’s been a...

Felipe Varon started thinking about drones more than 20 years ago when it was far from being a fashionable topic. A lot has changed since then and nowadays there is no shortage of startups working in the field of advanced air mobility (AAM). While there is no shortage of startups designing new cool eVTOL aircraft, Varon, the firm that Felipe leads, is looking at the broader picture. In its holisti...

In addition to being a long-time aviation executive and entrepreneur, Paul Perera is, perhaps, one of the most prolific experts out there when it comes to disseminating interesting insights and relevant stories in the domain of aviation sustainability. Paul is active in the field of hydrogen aviation through, Fluxart, a UK-based startup he co-founded to develop cryogenic motor technology which can...

In the fourth and last episode of this airlines and software cycle, produced in collaboration with SITA for Aircraft, we present you a comprehensive, holistic view of how digital, data-driven tools have become increasingly important to get further efficiency improvements out of airline operations. Sometimes it’s a relatively small thing, such as not having to carry several kilograms of paper in a...

Simon I. Briceno is the chief commercial officer at Jaunt Air Mobility, an interesting advanced air mobility startup with a rather unique approach: a hybrid eVTOL with fixed wing and a rotorcraft. Why this unusual configuration? Simon shares some details about the advantages of this approach and how Jaunt’s engineers aim to get the best of both worlds, fixed wing and helicopters, and 100% electric...

Keith Mason heads the Centre for Air Transport Management at Cranfield University, in the UK, one of the world’s top, if not THE top, education centers for aviation studies. Professionals from all over the world head to this educational establishment in the middle of England to learn, research and breathe aviation. Cranfield University offers graduate degrees covering both the technical and busine...

Australian startup Avation H2 is working on an ammonia-powered aircraft. On this episode of the podcast, its co-founder and director, Helmut Mayer, joins us to share the details of this project and discuss the prospects of ammonia as a potential aviation fuel of the future!

TIACA is the International Air Cargo Association, an organization that gathers many of the global players in this industry. We are talking, literally, about keeping the world’s economy running, no small feat at a time, like now, of severe supply chain constraints. This is no excuse, however, for the industry to shy away from meeting certain environmental and social standards that can help make the...

Did you know that the first NFT airline ticket ever minted attracted bids worth over $1M at auction? This was a special ticket minted for Air Europa, a Spanish airline that is issuing 10 special NFTickets to fly people from Madrid to Art Miami this coming Autumn. But besides the hype and the catchy headlines, blockchain technology has several potentially disruptive uses in the air travel sector, o...