How Electric Planes Can Help Stop California’s Wildfires | Brien Seeley

Can California use a better way to fight fires? Fires is one of the biggest problems we face in California and California is the hub for innovation. Today we have Dr. Brian Seeley who's an aviation expert who has come up with a plan to tackle our fires using electric planes. He's also an inventor of one of the first electric cars. There are the enormous savings in not having to rebuild the homes that are burnt down, not having to pay these increased homeowner premiums. The bigger picture that if we can stop these wildfires we can finally curb the climate crisis that is looming ever larger in front of us. I'm Siamak Kourami, welcome to California Insider. Brian, it's great to have you on, welcome. Thank you, I'm glad to be here. You know in California we have these fires, they're becoming more and more devastating, impacting a lot of people, the air quality, also insurance, and people are losing their homes in a lot of cases. You have some interesting ideas how to deal with these fires. You're an inventor, at the same time you're an eye doctor, you're an ophthalmologist, and you have been inventing in the aviation space. Can you tell us what your thoughts are, how we can deal with them? Well, I grew up getting very interested in aviation when I was in medical school. Continuing on with that, I just kept expanding my horizons in aviation by inviting other people to come and show me their airplanes. I got so involved in it that we put on an event in the 2011 NASA Green Flight Challenge, which was the largest ever prize given for an aviation technologic demonstration. And this was 1.65 million dollars given to the winning aircraft that could fly 200 miles on a highly efficient system that would achieve over 100 miles per gallon. The only way to do that was with an electric-powered airplane. We saw the winning airplane as a true breakthrough. NASA announced this as a Lindbergh moment and the dawn of the age of electric flight in 2011. So from then on, we started developing this concept of a mass-scale SkyTaxi transit system using these electric airplanes that could fly at one-fifth the cost of a car. And we were jolted in that development in 2017 when the terrible Tubbs Fire raged through Northern California that caused us to evacuate our home, caused many of my colleagues to lose their homes. It was a jolt that none of us were prepared for. And yet, since then, we've seen fire after fire, the Glass Fire and the Woolsey Fire and all the other ones coming just in our area. And then looking at statistics across Canada, Washington, Oregon, and so forth, it's been reported by the World Resources Institute that the wildfires we have now are going to double by 2050. So this really has to be addressed, not to mention the air quality issue and the toxic waste runoff issue and ecosystem damage, the chronic lung disease that's being induced by this. These compelled me to just have to set aside the notion of mass-scale regional sky transit with sky taxis and pivot and turn that effort into how can we apply this to ending wildfires. So we had a half-day meeting with the chiefs of Cal Fire Aviation at their headquarters, and they delineated for us all of the things that they wish they had to make their aerial firefighting more effective. They needed more pilots. They needed a plane that could fly at night or through smoke. They needed a lower-cost airplane. They needed a plane that didn't burn as much fuel. They needed all of these separate things, and we thought our electric sky taxi would fit that bill. Let's calculate how it would work. So we studied it, calculated it, and we found it really would work. In fact, it could deliver 20 times more liquid per hour than the present system. And moreover, with a ubiquitous array of a landscape peppered with small airports where the sky taxis live, you could reach any wildfire anywhere in California within about 10 minutes. It would be also a tremendous help for California air quality. The smoke from wildfires contains not only CO2, but a whole menu of toxic agents, volatile organic compounds, benzenes, heavy metals, and so on. And this was proven in the Palisades fire recently in LA, when the rain coming after washed all of this material into the ocean, and the ocean samplings showed this terrible toxic runoff from the wildfires. So the benefit of ending wildfires looked to be large. Then we decided to calculate, what about the CO2? What's happening when you destroy a forest? Not just the smoke coming out of the fire, but what about that forest that used to be a heroic capturer of CO2, right out of the air? All of that sequestration of CO2 performed in photosynthesis was lost when the fire burned down the forest. The same is true when it happens in cropland or grassland. So we decided to look at how much CO2 were our vegetation pulling in, that now they no longer pull in. And when you compute this, it's a staggering result. There's a graph slide that depicts this, but basically it averages out over about a 40-year period to about 56 gigatons of CO2 per year that would have been captured by the burned area, but wasn't because it was destroyed by fire. 56 gigatons per year. Now, hold on a minute. The entire global emission of CO2 from fossil fuels is only about 39 gigatons per year. We were astonished at this. So you can see why we became so excited about this. And we thought, we need to find a way to demonstrate, build a prototype, show that it can accomplish this, and then proliferate that into mass production and cost somewhere between $250,000 or $300,000. So each one of them would cost that little? Yes. And they would run on electricity. They would carry no flammable fuel. They would have zero tailpipe emissions. They could carry anywhere from two to six people. They lift off practically silently. Their noisy emission is only 40 decibels at the perimeter fence of the three-acre air park. They fit into neighborhoods without complaint. They can operate day or night. And just as you can pass your hand over a candle flame without getting burned, these airplanes without flammable fuel can fly right through towering flames on their way to putting out fires. This is a new capability. And this really gives you the ability to stop the other would-be megafire that is a lightning strike at 2 a.m. in the middle of the Mendocino forest that otherwise is just neglected until 9 a.m. the next morning when ground crews and manned aircraft can attack it. Instead, it's attacked within 10 or 15 minutes of ignition. And this is the magic of how you treat. The idea of dropping something on a fire and then not dropping anything else until 20 minutes have passed is a losing proposition. Because if you make your big drop and then you wait 20 minutes before the next one can arrive because you've only got three tankers, the fire rages back and destroys your head start because you weren't on top of it dropping and dropping and dropping in sequence. And they would be tailored exactly to the tasks both for sky transit and for firefighting. Now, the happy news is if you implement them for sky transit, you can project out a $1 billion net profit each year from the mass scale transit system. So you see, instead of spending money to put out fires and having no money coming back, having sky transit, sky taxis that are convertible to firefighting, and when they're not firefighting, they're earning money is a good payback system. And that doesn't even take into account the tremendous payback of ending the CO2 emissions because the United States EPA has published a value, a so-called social cost of carbon of $190 billion per gigaton of CO2. Well, if you calculate that for how much CO2 is put off by the smoke and the vegetation damage of wildfires in California, you get a tremendously large number. And if you project it out globally, it comes to over $10 trillion per year in savings if you don't allow wildfires. So the takeaway message is basically we can't afford not to do this with the climate emergencies we're facing, the hottest years ever recorded being 2023 and 2024. We've got to do something. These airplanes are capable of safely flying without collision. Each of the airplanes is equipped with a ballistic parachute in case it does need to come down safely. The landing of the airplane is in a sequence of a touchdown every 10 seconds. The airplane comes to a dock. At the dock, there's an automated robot that reaches in and pulls out the spent battery pack, puts in a fresh battery pack within 20 seconds. Similarly, the roll-in autonomous cart that carries the 150-gallon tank of water will roll out the back of the fuselage and a fresh full tank will be rolled in again within 20 seconds. So the time from final approach to landing, taxi, refill, recharge, taxi out and take off is under two minutes per airplane. So you have this machine, this conveyor belt of water delivery that is unlike anything we've had before. How much of this technology exists right now, Brian? Well, all the pieces already exist. We already have wheel motors, we already have robotic battery swap, we already have sensor thermographic cameras that are exquisitely talented, we already have the three-dimensional location system so that satellites can tell you the location of what they see. We already have extremely good motors for propulsion, we have extremely good low-quiet noise propellers. We just need to put them all together into a prototype. When we think about things flying in the air and fighting fire, the assumption comes it could be like drones. This is different than drones. Can you tell us what's the difference? The word drone can be applied widely. Some apply drone to mean only vertical quadcopter or octocopter type vehicles. But drone in a general sense can even include fixed-wing airplanes like military weaponized airplanes. I prefer to use the term a fixed-wing aircraft, a pilotless or so-called autonomous fixed-wing aircraft to describe what these e-tankers would be. They deliberately are not vertical takeoff because there's too much noise and inefficiency involved in vertical takeoff vehicles, including all the interference drag from all the multiple rotors, and it would not be tolerable to residential neighborhoods to have all those noisy vertical lift devices taking off, plus the extra energy they consume in lifting themselves is subtracted right out of their range in going to a remote fire. So you need a long range to reach fires from the airpark locations. So there's a huge advantage, about three and a half time improvement in efficiency for the fixed-wing airplane compared to the electric vertical lift airplane that you might be thinking of as a drone. Brian, something like this, it could have a lot of benefit for the state, but there is a cost that comes to this. What are your thoughts on that? Have you guys done any numbers? We have and the numbers in very round numbers, a total program implementation over 15 years of about 30 billion dollars, about 2 billion per year. Now it would take about five years to complete the building of the airparks and the aircraft to get it started. It would depend upon having mass production because you're going to need, just for California, you're going to need 33,000 of these aircraft. Globally, you would need 9 million of these aircraft. The cost of having to spend 2 billion dollars per year has to be weighed compared to other metrics such as the 260 billion dollar a year state budget, the one plus billion per year spent for CAL FIRE to put out fires without any incoming revenue, the prospect for California as a broker agency to extend this kind of firefighting capability as a boilerplate example into Oregon, Washington, and so on with a licensing arrangement that would bring revenue to the state. There are then, of course, the enormous savings in not having to rebuild the homes that are burnt down, not having to pay what amounts to essentially $1,250 per year from every household owner in California to pay these increased PG&E bills and these increased homeowner premiums. So the money side of it doesn't look like the impediment. The impediment is the commitment. This project needs a champion who sees it as the winning ticket, who can get behind it, can convince others, and we think concomitantly we have to generate a grassroots movement who sees the bigger picture that if we can stop these wildfires, we can finally curb the climate crisis that is looming ever larger in front of us. And you got into the aviation. How did you get into aviation? I got into aviation because my high school sweetheart and I went for my first airplane ride with her father flying his airplane, a beautiful Piper Comanche 400, and I was so exhilarated by taking off and seeing that we could fly this airplane and we could tour all around the Bay Area and safely land. And you were 18 or 17? I was 18 at the time. It just opened my eyes to this whole world of possibility, and I became really intrigued with reading about it, working on airplanes, helping my father-in-law work on the airplane and build the kit built airplanes. And actually, I have to give a plug here. The National Experimental Aircraft Association, or EAA, which puts on the largest air show in the world every summer in July back at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Tom Poverezny and now Jack Pelton have stewarded that organization to be an inspiration to so many people that, yes, you can fly. You can learn to fly. You can build your own airplane. You can go where you want when you're flying your plane. It's so inspirational. It was a major factor in me sustaining this interest in aviation. And you actually built your own car at some point. Can you tell us about that? Well, I did. I got enthused about trying to avoid the gas lines at the gas stations during the Carter years of gas rationing. And so I asked my father-in-law who had a racing car building shop, do you think we could build an electric car? And he said, sure, you could do that. So we got an old steel ladder frame from a junkyard, and we began hanging onto it some new suspension arms and some steering wheels and rack and pinion steering and turn signals and headlights and decided to make it an electric car. So we wanted it to be a sporty car. So we put the motor in the back and we put the batteries everywhere that we could find space for them and ended up with a freeway legal state-licensed electric car in 1973 when Elon Musk was one and a half years old. And it was a delight because I was able to drive it to the hospital as an intern. I was a medical student at the time, but it was also a tremendous learning experience. The great Roland Armour, a late departed engineer at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, was hugely instrumental in helping me do that. He provided the motor and the circuit diagrams and all of the things that taught me how to build it. But it was a delightful car and I enjoyed it. What was the range on that and could you plug it in to charge it? We built a self-homemade charger that was just a giant variac to set the voltage and we charged the 168 volt system that consisted of 14 big 30 sh golf cart batteries and with all of that thousand pounds of battery it could only go 30 miles. So I had to be careful where I drove it, but it was a novelty and a great deal of fun. How did you get into this place of building things that are kind of outside of your field because you're a physician, right? I just was fascinated with the idea that you could take a piece of steel and cut it out and weld it together and turn it into a suspension arm or you know a chassis device or something. I just got fascinated with the idea of building things with my hands using good tools and I think it's a kind of a catharsis to do that kind of work. I found that that's what I wanted to do on weekends instead of study medical books. And what's the benefit of that to build things with your hands? It's a satisfaction at completing something that is either useful or enjoyable or intriguing or something that involves a repair, repairing my own car. I had a Lotus Europa that I transplanted a different engine into and that was a learning project and it became a really wonderful autocross car. So you could take it on weekends to the autocross track and enjoy it. It just is a sort of a fulfilling effort. Now Brian, you have this big proposal. It's like two billion dollars a year for the state and you want to solve the fire problem in California. This is a big task. What you did with your hands and building those cars, does that help you in coming up with proposals like this? Oh absolutely. I think I should add it's been carried to the point we have a design already for the SkyTaxi airplane that would convert in only five minutes to become a fire bomber. It's a highly efficient design. It's inspired by the Green Flight Challenge design. It's got a very high aspect ratio wing. It has wheel motor landing gear. It has super silent propellers and it's coupled with this quick change docking system so that when it backs up to the dock and opens its rear hatch, the cart with the spent retardant rolls out and a full cart rolls in and it closes the hatch and away it goes. The system's been worked out in detail and we've gone so far as to go to the California aerospace community, meet with the CEOs of several companies that make propellers and they make motors and they make landing gear and so on and ask them would you like to participate in this mass project of building thousands of these type vehicles and they all are enthusiastic about it. I mean I think it would be eagerly adopted by the California aerospace community. And you have built similar type planes. Can you tell us about it? The three airplanes that I mostly worked on were the very easy, the Rutan Very Easy, the first one and then a Glass Air, a Tom Hamilton design and that was a more conventional airplane and a very good cross-country airplane for travel. And then concomitantly I worked on a 1966 Mooney aircraft which I owned personally and I decided to take it apart and modify it and put a new nose and a new spinner and a new propeller, new landing gear, a whole new windshield, a whole bunch of modifications to make it go faster and happily it would go 36 miles an hour faster on the same engine as before just from reducing the drag and all these detailed ways that I had read about. So it was very gratifying to modify that airplane and make it an experimental Mooney aircraft, a four-seat aircraft that our family traveled all over the U.S. in. And you made this yourself? You modified it yourself? I modified it myself. And did you feel confident to get on it the first time? What was that like? I did. I should mention one other thing. In 1981 I founded, with a group of experimental aircraft enthusiasts from Santa Rosa, I founded the Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency Foundation and our job was to put on an annual air race in Santa Rosa and we would invite 50 different airplanes to come and race. But the race had a twist. The race was won by the airplane with the highest product of speed times miles per gallon. And we were able to weigh the airplane before and after the flight and determine its miles per gallon. And we were using this as a efficiency race to finally pay attention to how much gas these planes were building. Well, it turned out that this was a very attractive event for America's top airplane designers. And so across America, the very top designers of aircraft would come to Santa Rosa every summer to compete in this event. And I was the chairman president of this organization. So I sort of curated the event and I got to meet and know these bright lights of the aeronautical design world. And it was a great privilege but also an inspiration because they too said, Brian, you can do this yourself. We'll show you how to make the airplane go faster. We'll show you what airfoils to use and so forth. So I had the privilege of working with these greats all along and that evolved also into my connections at NASA with some of the very top people at NASA. So essentially they showed you with the materials on with hand like they showed you this is what you got to do? Yes. And at the race itself, all you had to do was walk through the pit area where the racing planes were parked and you could see the tricks of the trade that were being applied and the every little detail they were using to go faster on less fuel. And that was a great education for me. Before we get to the rest of this interview, this is a time to look at some key headlines in California. In our Epoch Times newspaper this week, California state is passing a law to allow rideshare workers to unionize. Workers who work for Uber and Lyft now they can unionize. Before they couldn't do that because they were not full-time employees and now the requirement has been removed. Governor Newsom is saying he's going to cut funding to universities who comply with Trump administration. Trump administration is asking universities to limit international students, freeze tuition increases for the next three years, and not have preference on gender and race when it comes to admissions and hiring. California state ends Kamala Harris's two-nancy law punishing parents. There was a law that passed in 2011 that punishes parents if their kids are missing 10% of school and the parents could face $2,000 fine or a year in jail and get a misdemeanor for it. The lawmaker mentioned that these policies have failed. If you find these headlines interesting, there is a lot more in our newspaper. Not only California News, National News, International and China and all the stories. We put a lot of effort in making them balance and include different views. Get a subscription today for $1 by clicking the link below and let us know what you think. Now let's go back to the rest of the interview. Do you think we need this kind of education in our school system or in California? I am a great believer in technology prizes having done three of them now for NASA. I think it is inspirational if it's set up right, if the rules are written properly, if the lead time to show up on race day is a long enough time for a good product to be built for the race and if the prize purse is large enough to to warrant a lot of serious effort. Yes, I think this is a inspiring, fulfilling, highly educational way to move things along. Does it increase the confidence if you if you are doing this type of projects? Personal confidence? Oh yes, absolutely. I think now I have a different view. Instead of fixing my own plumbing, I say I'm going to call a plumber because I'm busy working on wildfire designs. So I'm not as hands-on as I was at one time, but there's no question that building it with your own hands is a really fulfilling thing. In fact, that's the motto of our EAA chapter 124. By one's own hand, that's the motto of our experimental aircraft club in Santa Rosa. So Brian, it's still fascinating. You are a physician and you're building electric cars and planes and you're innovating in a completely different space. How did you get inspired to do this type of innovation? Well, it's an interesting story because it started with a girl that I had a crush on in high school who asked me to go to the Turnabout Dance and I discovered when going to the dance with her, her mother wanted to serve dinner before the dance and her father was there and he had this beautiful shop where he built racing cars and I was fascinated at what he was doing. And so as she and I continued dating afterward, I got to know him. He started showing me all the things he had done and explaining to me why they were done this way. He was a really exceptional person. He was very precise. He was highly skilled with his hands. In fact, he himself was an eye surgeon and very much influenced me to go into ophthalmology. He and I together got equally enthused about this idea of building a kit experimental airplane. And so one day after he had given me my first airplane ride, he said, let's go visit the factory where they make these kit airplanes. So we flew from Santa Rosa all the way down to Mojave where Bert Rutan had his Rutan aircraft factory and we got a tour of the factory and we got the great Bert Rutan himself showing us how he built things and what they were like and how they looked when they were finished. And we went home inspired that we should get one of these kits and we should build it in that race car shop. And so we did. And it was an inspired project. What was great about it is that it was really quite doable. You had to be good with a paintbrush. You had to understand how to mix resin and fiberglass. You had to, you know, be careful with a disc grinder and so forth. But you could actually build your own airplane from these materials that Bert Rutan had discovered. And we built it and we flew it. And Dr. Powell licensed it and he flew it all over the United States. And that started this idea that, you know, you really can do just about anything you want if you dedicate yourself to it. There's another ingredient though of inspiration and that is when we started doing the Cafe Efficiency airplane races in Santa Rosa, that group of great aeronautical designers who came to the race, it included the great Roy Lopresti from Mooney Aircraft. It included Nick Jones, a famous air racer. It included Jim Griswold who designed the Quest Air Venture and the Piper Malibu. It included all of these big-name people. And what really was my takeaway lesson from that is, if you read about the celebrities in an area that you're quite interested in, you can reach out to them. You can write them a letter and invite them to come to your event or to speak at your symposium. And lo and behold, they will. And when they do, it'll be one of the best educations you ever got. And so that's often my advice to young people is, don't be afraid to invite people who are famous to come to your event. Dr. Brian Seeley with Autonomous Aerial Firefighting, it was great to have you on California Insider. Hopefully you get this project initiated. It was my pleasure and we hope to make it happen. Let us know what you think of this idea. Can we use electric planes and drones to fight fires? And is it worth the state spending a lot of money to prevent fires than fighting fires? Let us know in the comments. You can always email us at siamahicaliforniansider.com or comment. We read all of your emails and comments. And make sure to consider everyone when you are writing those comments. I'm Siamak Khorrami. This is California Insider. We'll see you next time.