Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and
Speaker 2: Tim Stenoveek on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 1: Well, you might recall last week's shares of the electric
Speaker 1: vertical takeoff in landing vehicle from Archer Aviation fell eight percent.
Speaker 1: That was on Friday. Actually had a pretty bad week,
Speaker 1: but they fell on Friday. After the company reported results,
Speaker 1: they said they were buying Hawthorne Airport in Los Angeles.
Speaker 2: Which is super interesting.
Speaker 3: Archer's saying would offer shares at eight dollars each to
Speaker 3: certain institutional investors to raise gross proceeds of six hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty million, part of which will be used to
Speaker 3: fund the acquisition. There's a lot going on in the
Speaker 3: EV tall space.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's why we have Lisa right in here. She's
Speaker 1: foundered in CEO of Landings. It's a company that says
Speaker 1: it's building a landing in ground operations network for inverted
Speaker 1: ports for these EV talls. She joins us here in
Speaker 1: our Bloomberg Interactive Brokers studio. Welcome. Have you ever been
Speaker 1: in an EV tall?
Speaker 4: I have sat in one, Actually I have sat in two.
Speaker 1: Well it was flying, No, it was in the ground.
Speaker 1: Has there anyone ever been in one while they're flying?
Speaker 4: There have been, There have been test flights with pilots.
Speaker 4: I believe Betam made a flight to JFK. It wasn't
Speaker 4: an EV tall, it was a C tall, but it's similar.
Speaker 4: So there have been passengers, although it's still all INtime.
Speaker 1: When do you think you will be a paying customer
Speaker 1: of one of these.
Speaker 4: Companies, whether I pay or not. I'd like to be
Speaker 4: a customer within a.
Speaker 1: Year, I believe you really believe that in the US
Speaker 1: within a year.
Speaker 4: I didn't say in the US.
Speaker 1: Okay, where where? In the Middle East?
Speaker 4: In the Middle East, most likely Dubai is ahead of US.
Speaker 4: I probably won't get to ride one in China, but
Speaker 4: they're flying in China. There's about I think sixty already
Speaker 4: in the air.
Speaker 3: Listen, I think about, you know, Lisa, what's gone on
Speaker 3: with the EV space just in terms of cars, right,
Speaker 3: and part of it is like the infrastructure needed to
Speaker 3: back it up, and there's been this you know kind
Speaker 3: of push pull, tug and back, you know, back and
Speaker 3: forth in terms of cars getting on the road but
Speaker 3: needing places to charge and so on and so forth.
Speaker 3: We need the infrastructure, and I feel a little tortuous
Speaker 3: that it's been what do you see in terms of
Speaker 3: the infrastructure that's needed, because this is where you guys
Speaker 3: play in what's needed for this industry to no pun
Speaker 3: intended take off?
Speaker 2: And then where are we in that process? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Absolutely, I mean exactly what you described is what we
Speaker 4: were seeing a few years ago when these aircraft were
Speaker 4: starting to get their flight worthy credit creditness, and we
Speaker 4: said the same like where are they going to land?
Speaker 4: Where are they going to charge? And as you know,
Speaker 4: EV's had a huge problem the bottleneck and getting EV's
Speaker 4: on the ground was actually not having enough charging for them.
Speaker 4: And you can charge your ev at home, you cannot
Speaker 4: charge your ev t all at home. So that was
Speaker 4: the basis of us saying we need to build not
Speaker 4: just one or two in order to make this real
Speaker 4: point to point travel, which is the promise, we have
Speaker 4: to have thousands.
Speaker 1: What do they look like and where can you build them?
Speaker 1: Especially in these places this this land is at a
Speaker 1: premium right.
Speaker 4: So well, most of the companies right now and the
Speaker 4: big money is all in cities. My company is focusing
Speaker 4: most first of all in rural and rural communities and
Speaker 4: so the land is less expensive there. But also because
Speaker 4: vertiports can be they're very similar to a helipad. They
Speaker 4: don't require thousands of acres of land. We can put
Speaker 4: them on manufacturing sites, we can put them on industrial sites,
Speaker 4: we can put them on retail locations, we can put
Speaker 4: them on logistics centers. They can go on just about
Speaker 4: any type of real estate that we want where helipad
Speaker 4: could go.
Speaker 1: Well, how do you envision the customers of these vehicles
Speaker 1: using them? Because if I think of high demand routes,
Speaker 1: they're not necessarily from rural area to rural area, correct.
Speaker 4: So we're looking at it as a first a logistics
Speaker 4: and freight issue. So already we can handle say heavy
Speaker 4: drones which can carry freight. We can also there's smaller
Speaker 4: aircraft that can be flown today that are called light sportcraft,
Speaker 4: where you can carry emergency service personnel to an accident.
Speaker 1: So there's already they can land anywhere a helicopter could land.
Speaker 1: These ports are really just for charging and taking off.
Speaker 4: Exactly, so they can land in a helipad. But if
Speaker 4: the helipad doesn't have the charging equipment, you wouldn't be
Speaker 4: able to charge there. What's the cost the cost so
Speaker 4: ours are fairly small. They range from two acres to
Speaker 4: twelve acres, which is relatively small. The cost for the
Speaker 4: smallest one is about three hundred and fifty thousand dollars
Speaker 4: and that has slow charge. It doesn't have fast charge.
Speaker 4: The vertiplexes, the larger ones, which will have you know,
Speaker 4: pilot centers and training and storage, parking, et cetera. Those
Speaker 4: will cost closer to three million dollars.
Speaker 2: So how do you build out responsibly? Exactly?
Speaker 3: Because it sounds exciting, but as we keep talking to
Speaker 3: people in the industry, you know, we're yet to really
Speaker 3: see it take off in a big way, and we've
Speaker 3: all just kind of been watching this closely for I
Speaker 3: feel like a few years now. So what is the
Speaker 3: role at that you envision?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so we're approaching this in the way that American
Speaker 4: Tower approached it approach cell service essentially.
Speaker 1: Because the reate that looks at that owns a lot
Speaker 1: of the cell towers exactly.
Speaker 4: Okay, a ninety billion market cap. I believe what they
Speaker 4: did was while everybody was focusing on the cities and
Speaker 4: getting cell service in the cities, as they went out
Speaker 4: and went across the nation essentially and got options on
Speaker 4: the land. I know you just were talking about land
Speaker 4: man earlier. I like to call myself a land woman.
Speaker 4: We're essentially getting options on different pieces of property. We're
Speaker 4: asset light because we're not purchasing them right now, we're
Speaker 4: not paying any leases on them. Essentially, we will get
Speaker 4: the capital to build the vertiports and the energy network,
Speaker 4: and then we're going to share the revenue with the landowner.
Speaker 1: So we just spoke to John gittleson of our Blueberg
Speaker 1: News and he talked about two data centers that are
Speaker 1: in Santa Clara, California that are empty because they're awaiting power.
Speaker 1: How are you able to get power to these verta ports.
Speaker 4: Yeah, power is going to be the biggest difficulty, similar
Speaker 4: to data centers. However, we don't require as much energy
Speaker 4: as a data center. We can use five acres of
Speaker 4: solar to power one of our verteports.
Speaker 1: Will there be those acres of solar in this administration?
Speaker 2: Absolutely? Absolutely.
Speaker 4: Solar may not be the priority and there may not
Speaker 4: be see the public funding for it in the way,
Speaker 4: but there are still a lot of private money going
Speaker 4: towards these networks.
Speaker 3: So, Lisa, we're talking with Lisa Right, founder and CEO
Speaker 3: of Landing. Lisa, so, is solar your power of choice? Like,
Speaker 3: are you guys already thinking in terms of how you
Speaker 3: build this out? That there will be asolar farmers part
Speaker 3: of it.
Speaker 4: Indeed, many of them will be co located. We are
Speaker 4: trying to connect to the grid and some of the
Speaker 4: smaller regional airports we can do that we can connect
Speaker 4: to the grid. It may not be a lot of
Speaker 4: excess energy. So we're working as well with communities to
Speaker 4: provide basically a battery backup system that will use peak
Speaker 4: demand and becomes resiliency for the community.
Speaker 1: Just thirty ten seconds. Are you working with any ev
Speaker 1: tall companies right now?
Speaker 4: I'm working with all ev tall companies, so Archer, Beta
Speaker 4: and Joby. I'm also working with a short takeoff and
Speaker 4: landing company called Electra, and the sportcraft companies are Pivotal
Speaker 4: and Jetson.
Speaker 3: Yes or no, you've got your funding already or you're
Speaker 3: working on I'm working on it all right, Let us know,
Speaker 3: stay in touch.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Lisa Right, founder and CEO of Landings, joining us in
Speaker 3: our Bloomberg Interactive Broker Studio