Podcast: Verijet CEO Lays Out Efficient Solution To Short-Haul Frustration

Verijet CEO Richard Kane sits down with Aviation Week's Matt Orloff to discuss the Cirrus Vision Jet and how his company can provide solutions to gaps in the industry.

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Rush Transcript

Matt Orloff:

Hello and welcome to the BCA Podcast. I'm your host, Matt Orloff, Associate Editor of Business Aviation at Aviation Week, and I'm here with Richard Kane, CEO and President of Verijet. I'm here to discuss quite a few things with Richard about his company that exclusively operates the Cirrus Vision Jet, which in my opinion is a very cool toy. However, it has just come to my attention that Richard has just come off a red-eye as we record this podcast this morning with a particular budget airline, and I don't know how he's still standing, let alone here talking on this podcast. So Richard, how are you doing?

Richard Kane:

Matt, it's an honor to be here and I always enjoy our conversations, but yes, it was the red-eye and I landed in Orlando, and I couldn't get the connection back to my part of the world, and was delayed. I ended up on a three-hour Uber ride. It just highlights that commercial aviation, particularly for short-haul, is just not functional. It's just easier to drive, even to leave an international airport and take an Uber than try and make a connection. It's just broken, and our company fixes that.

Matt Orloff:

So, this actually does make for the perfect segway into talking about the gap that Verijet fills. I swear this wasn't planned, but can you tell me a little bit more about that gap? The amount of mileage these Vision Jets are most compatible for? The turnaround of a booking process? Care to let everybody know about that process a bit more?

Richard Kane:

Absolutely. You can book these in real time online, book, pay, get a confirmed price up front. We're not varying the price based on winds or weather. It's sold as an airline seat is sold, as quickly as an airline seat is sold, but the difference is we take you to the close-in airport. So, even if my connections worked properly last night, I'd still be going to a larger airport, and then taking an hour drive in morning rush hour traffic as opposed to landing close to my destination, and that's where we have this utility. This is an item identified by NASA 30 years ago. The speed of travel door-to-door has dropped to 75 miles an hour. The big jets go 500 miles an hour, but when you have to get to the airport an hour early, clear TSA, drive to the big airport, make a connection, there's no more utility for short-haul.

Richard Kane:

Any trip less than 400 miles, you're going to think about driving. We have the technology. We have a beautiful framework of underutilized airports, but we have a hub-and-spoke system that's just flat out broken and has gotten worse with Covid where they abandon more local airports every week. You end up going to a big hub where you didn't really want to travel to and then driving, or waiting for connections that are then broken, and then you're stranded. So with Verijet, you're flying directly from the local airport to the destination local airport, saving hours of drive time, connection time, wait time, and your travel speed is more like 300 miles an hour door-to-door. Every time you double the speed of travel, you change out the underlying technology. It's exactly eight years from the first car to the last horse in Manhattan. That's the change that NASA wanted to see in the US aviation infrastructure. Verijet's the realization of that goal.

Matt Orloff:

Interesting.

Richard Kane:

I literally spent three hours in an Uber this morning because I couldn't get a connection on an airline.

Matt Orloff:

Can you tell me a little bit more about the Vision Jet specifically then, because there are a lot of operators out there who are setting their eyes on this very problem you mentioned. Why the Vision Jet? How many do you have, and what would be the time to dispatch one if I were to book one right now?

Richard Kane:

We have 20, and we routinely do two-hour call-outs. We prefer to know for the next morning, but we'll do a two-hour call-out. We've been doing recently organ transfer flights that are flat out emergencies, life and death, and we're very comfortable in that framework. The machine is built for short-haul. It's built for short runways. It can take off and land in 2,000 feet. FAA legal we're talking about 3,500 feet, but that's a place like Santa Monica where other jets cannot operate legally commercially. It's carbon fiber, so there's no metal fatigue, so the cycle costs and the safety aren't compromised by all the frequent short hops.

Richard Kane:

No one else wants to fly their metal planes on these short hops because every time you pressurize them you lose as much life as if you crossed an ocean or a continent, and with carbon fiber that doesn't happen. We have landing gear that are overbuilt. Trailing link beautiful landing gear, they're meant for frequent operations. Frankly, they're meant for owner-pilots who may not land as gracefully as airline pilots, and so we don't have the cycle cost problems that you'd normally have with bigger, heavier machines. Then our single engine is optimized to go low and slow and be hyper efficient. So, it's perfect for these short hops. We're burning between one fifth to one ninth the fuel burn.

Matt Orloff:

That leads me into the question I think everybody wants to know, or a couple questions I should say. How much does it cost, and how much fun is it to fly? Because I've been in a Vision Jet, but only on the ramp. Nothing was turned on, and I was very upset about that. Please tell us how much fun these things are to fly, and how much they cost to fly.

Richard Kane:

First off, we need to fix that and get you in a running, flying Vision Jet, so I'll take that as a personal mission. The machine is incredibly fun to fly. The visibility is unmatched. So, instead of trying to peer over a very high dashboard of instruments, sort of in the turbo prop world, you have something that's very low. You have tremendous forward visibility. It's the best office in the world to work from. You have a side stick, so the panel is not obscured by a big yoke, and you have a beautiful intuitive Garmin G3000 that's been customized for this machine. So, very few key presses, all smart keys.

Richard Kane:

Even Garmin, they started with the G1000 and the design philosophy seemed to be wherever we can cram in an extra button, we're going to add an extra button. When they got to the G3000, the human factors people took over, and so it's intelligent keys. It prefills things. You're not dialing frequencies. It auto-loads them updates your flight plan. We have an auto throttle that manages your descents. Basically the automation is spectacular. Keeps us safe, but it also makes it easy to fly and wonderful to fly. The direct operating cost of this machine is about $800 an hour. Now we need to be a profitable airline, so we'll charge four times direct operating cost, or five times for retail clients, but there's ways to buy jet cards or become an investor and lower those rates for people.

Matt Orloff:

$800 an hour for something with a jet on it. To me, that just doesn't seem like anything that's ever happened in business aviation before.

Richard Kane:

Extremely unusual to be even able to charge two or three times DOCs, and we have the most efficient jet ever built.

Matt Orloff:

So, why isn't everybody doing it?

Richard Kane:

Well, this is the only one, and we're acquiring them as they come off the assembly line. People didn't see this as a threat. I had to read The Innovator's Dilemma to finally understand when something is this much more efficient, this much cheaper to operate, something that just looks different, looks like a plastic single-engine machine, the people who operate twin metal jets don't see this as competition. They feel that everyone wants two engines, two pilots, and something metal. When people actually experience this plane, they see it's better, and they don't want to go back to the other. No one understood what this was, and they may just be waking up to that now.

Matt Orloff:

I was going to say, when do you think they will?

Richard Kane:

Probably about the time the next two versions of this machine come out. Cirrus always has a history of making these things a little bit faster, a little bit more capable. If you look at the SR22, they've done a wonderful job of improving that product, and this jet will be no different.

Matt Orloff:

You know what I really appreciate about you, Richard, given the time we've known each other, it seems like you have a way around just about everything. You have a way around traditional business models and business aviation. You have a way around sustainability. You have a way around pilot training. What else am I missing here?

Richard Kane:

I have access to people in technologies sometimes a decade before everybody else. I've been an active supporter of XPRIZE from the beginning, so when I wanted to find some carbon zero fuel, the folks at XPRIZE introduced me to Dimensional Energy. No one had really heard of them before. They take carbon dioxide, crack it to carbon monoxide, combine it with hydrogen under pressure, out comes long-chain hydrocarbons, and you can refine that easily to jet fuel. That's something new in the world, and I got an advanced look at it. United and Verijet will be the launch customers. They can't move the needle on United. It's less than 1% of United's daily burn, but they can give me three quarter million gallons a month, enough to power 120 of these jets, and we're carbon zero. So, you'll see an LOI about that, and these are things that they don't even know they exist, let alone try to adopt them. So, we have a first mover advantage on a lot of the technologies.

Matt Orloff:

Amazing.

Richard Kane:

We have the world's most efficient jet. I hold the world efficiency record in jets, the world closed course distance record in jets, and I was burning 39 gallons an hour during those record attempts. That's more like an SUV than a jet, but that's only part of the story. We have a world class AI, decades in the making, battle proven with many of the light jet operators in the US that gives us more efficiency. So, we get 30% more efficiency by using our fleet with an AI optimizer. That's also how we can dispatch in two hours, and then we get another 40% for the jet.

Richard Kane:

This is the first combination that's cost effective enough to take people out of an airline cabin when there's no direct service so that they're not Ubering three hours to try and get to their destination like I did this morning. They can fly directly there, and we're at that price point. We're the only combination that ever has come this close to right now being able to empty the first class cabin, and then later the coach cabin. So that that's the trajectory of this project to change the hub-and-spoke infrastructure of the US when there's no direct service and fix that.

Matt Orloff:

But it's not just limited to short-haul. If I'm not mistaken, there was a particularly interesting story where someone's flight got canceled during the holidays, and you were able to stretch the limits of the Vision Jet.

Richard Kane:

14,000 flights get canceled, and there's a snowmageddon airline meltdown and two major airlines were involved, and they stranded a family that was in Charleston that had a long sought after family vacation to Puerto Rico. That's an unusual flight for a Vision Jet. So, we took a fully loaded plane with baggage and went nonstop from Miami to Puerto Rico using long-range cruise. So, that's the 39-40 gallon an hour fuel burn setting that I talked about. When they landed, they still had 70 gallons on board, more than an hour of time, so completely FAA legal. They were able to do this trip nonstop.

Richard Kane:

The complication is that they didn't have passports. So yes, you can go to Puerto Rico without a passport, but you can't stop in The Bahamas or Provo for fuel. So, this was a last minute wrinkle and they recalculated it using long-range cruise and went direct. We can directly connect thousands more city pairs now using long-range cruise. We have the approvals and the training to do it. Cirrus engineering worked with me on the record setting and we've adopted it for our commercial use. So, we are extending the capabilities of this machine in a way that's very environmentally friendly because we're burning less fuel.

Matt Orloff:

It can actually be done at levels as low as 40 gallons an hour on something with a jet engine.

Richard Kane:

The insane thing, I'm in my 25 hours of field training, this is my first jet type rating, and an airport closes for a hail storm. We back this thing down and it's less than 20 gallons an hour, and the computer tells us we have seven hours and 40 minutes of endurance and the guy next to me is an F-16 fighter pilot. He's there training me to use this single engine jet, and he and I both couldn't believe it. We toured Mount Rushmore, and Crazy Horse, and the Crystal Caverns, and we still had seven hours of fuel on board. Everyone else on the radio is scrambling to find a place they can go to. They all need long runways. They don't know where to go. Bulldozers were needed to clear the hail off this runway. I've never seen anything like it. Dealt with this in perfect safety.

Richard Kane:

We still had seven hours of fuel left. We're watching the storms on our radar. We have beautiful radar on this machine, all digital, that can show you the columns of hail. We're actually storm chasing. That's what I'm doing here. I'm learning to use the radar systems, and it was all in perfect safety, but you have eight hours of endurance, so we can use this machine to vector in fire attack bombers for CAL FIRE, use it for patrols like LightHawk for environmental surveys, and on top of all that, it's a 14.71 glider, so we have a glider jet that can stay aloft for eight hours. The thing is, nothing like this has ever existed before, and we're learning to use all of its capabilities.

Matt Orloff:

I cannot wait to see the capabilities unfold. I can't wait to talk to you at some point in the future, and you say, "We didn't just go from Orlando to Miami." The next time we spoke it was Miami to Puerto Rico, and then the next time we spoke or we speak in the future, it's going to be, "Yeah, we were fighting fires over California with a Vision Jet." I can't wait to have you on that episode of the podcast. Before we go, I have a feeling you can't really top that Mount Rushmore story, but is there any other insane entertaining stories that revolve around this Vision Jet that we missed, because that's just amazing. If you have any photos from that day, oh man, please send them so we can share with everybody.

Richard Kane:

Will do. I engineered this company to specialize in short-haul where we have this amazing advantage on fuel burn, and the first thing that happens is a 96-year-old flies us from East Hampton to South Florida. The first thing she said when she got off the plane on our first revenue flight was, "I can't wait to do this again." She's flown with us four more times. Then more recently, someone just took us from Key West to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, because even though some other machines might be a bit faster on that trip, they're loving the Vision Jet so much they want to spend the extra time in it.

Richard Kane:

So, as much as I designed it to be the short-haul, Uber for jets, we're turning into a long-haul, use long-range cruise and connect city pairs that I never dreamed of connecting directly. I personally brought a golden retriever to the actress Diane Keaton in Santa Monica, and I stopped once for fuel in Austin, Texas and then came back to Florida. So it can cross the country in one fuel stop, but I just never expected people to love it so much that that's what they want to do with it, but that's what's happening. We've done transcon flights on this machine already for revenue.

Matt Orloff:

Sounds like a blast. Was the only revenue-paying customer that golden retriever?

Richard Kane:

Actually, I'm on the board of New Horizon Service Animals, and one of our dogs failed the program. Diane lost her dog of 17 years, and she's an animal rights champion, so we donated this dog to her. It's name is Reggie. She blogs about it. It's her new best friend. I would advise looking it up. It's really cute.

Matt Orloff:

That's great. Never cease to be entertaining with these stories. Well, thanks again, Richard. That's all we have time for today, unfortunately, but don't miss the next episode by subscribing to us in your podcast app of choice, and one last request. If you're listening to the BCA Podcast on Apple Podcasts and want to support this podcast, please leave us a star rating, or write a review. Thanks again, and bye for now.