Airbound创始人Naman Pushp：用仿生设计实现1.67倍有效载荷

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Hi friends 👋,

Happy Monday! Today is a good day.

Today, I get to tell you the story of Naman Pushp and Airbound.

There are very few people with the combination of ambition and skill than I’ve seen in Naman in the year since I first invested and have gotten to know him. Just twenty-one, he taught himself physics, engineering, and manufacturing on YouTube during COVID, and turned that knowledge into real, flying aircraft and a company backed by Greenoaks, Lightspeed, and Lachy Groom. I suspect he is in the early days of what will be a decades-long pursuit.

He has chosen a worthy mission. There is no category that so physically reshapes the world as transportation technology. Where you live and work, what you can access, how much you pay for everything, and most importantly, who you spend time with, are all a function of the transportation technology at your disposal.

In my opinion, improving the way we move will have a more positive and noticeable impact on our lives than AI will, and Naman’s aim is to move all movement to the sky.

This is a Deep Dive on how he plans to do it.

Airbound: As We May Move

Every morning, or most, when I can, I wake up before my wife and kids, tip-toe downstairs, ease open the front door, and sit on the stoop as the sun comes up. Huberman says the morning sunlight is good for your circadian rhythm or cortisol or some shit.

I’ve been doing this for a little while now, since the winter at least, but some time in the spring I noticed the birds. There’s a honey locust tree on the sidewalk in front of the stoop, framed by Eric Adams’ legacy (new garbage cans) every Monday and Thursday, and as the sun rises, a quarrel of house sparrows flits back and forth between it and their little nooks at the top of each brownstone.

Since I started noticing these birds, I’ve started noticing other birds more consciously. I think, but I can’t be quite sure, that I can see their wings flapping in higher-resolution, or slower motion, or both? And I’ve been wondering why. Like are the birds a sign? Am I supposed to follow them? How can I follow them, when I can’t fly?

One morning, as I approached my office in Soho thinking about this very piece you’re reading right now, a great blue heron floated regally over the roofs of the block’s cast-iron buildings, and I was like, “Oh, I get it.”

Some time in the spring, I started talking to Naman Pushp about writing a deep dive on Airbound. Pretty much every week since, often more than once, we’ve hopped on a Zoom, me in Manhattan and him in Bangalore, to talk about what the world looks like when flight is the way everything and everyone moves, and what it would take to get there.

One of the things that happens when flight dominates, Naman said, is that buildings flip.

“You fly on to the roof and enter from there,” like a bird.

Birds have long been the envy of and inspiration for earthbound humans.

Leonardo da Vinci studied birds to understand flight at the turn of the 16th century.

da Vinci’s Codex on the Flight of Birds (l) and early flying machine (r)

Humans failed to turn those avian observations into flight for four centuries, but the Wright Brothers studied those failures. As bicycle makers, they understood that a machine didn’t have to balance itself if its rider had the right controls. They studied the birds, too. Watching birds twist their wingtips helped them develop “wing warping,” the control mechanism that helped make their 1903 flight possible.

The Wrights Fly At Kitty Hawk, North Carolina (1903)

“Learning the secret of flight from a bird was a good deal like learning the secret of magic from a magician,” Orville later said. “After you once know the trick and what to look for, you see things that you did not notice when you did not know exactly what to look for.”

Flying progressed quickly from the Wrights to October 1958 when Pan Am flew the first Boeing 707 from New York to Paris and ushered in the Jet Age, an age that we, 68 years later, still inhabit.

That we can fly through the air, across the globe, while watching movies and munching on snacks, is a technological miracle. It has shrunk the globe, made roses cut in Kenya available in Brooklyn flower shops, and allowed Naman to fundraise in New York and San Francisco without permanently leaving Bangalore.

“Like seriously what in the ever-loving fuck are planes,” Naman marveled in an old blog post. “I’m an aerospace engineer and I still refuse to believe that shit is anything short of magic. Like there’s genuinely no other way to put the accomplishments of humanity other than just… sheer magic.”

And yet… humans still do not flit about in the air as birds do. Planes are much too big for that, for one thing, and too expensive to operate, for another. Daily, we are roadbound, grounded to the streets by feet and wheels, stuck in traffic on streets built for cars at the expense of humans.

Naman wants to change that, by sending all movement to the sky, with aircraft that borrow from birds not just in their wings, but in the shape of their whole bodies.

Airbound’s first drone, the TRT

To do so, Airbound must beat existing vehicles on speed, versatility, and cost. All three are required for victory.

How quickly can you get somewhere? Can you go from where you are to where you want to be, when you want to go? What does it cost?

“Our goal is to build vehicles that dominate1 across these axes,” Naman wrote in a recent technical memo. “If an aircraft can be more versatile than the car, faster than the train, and cheaper than the bus, then you can replace all of them. That is the universal vehicle we intend to create.”

An eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) naturally falls out of these requirements. It takes off and lands straight up and down like a helicopter, so it doesn’t need a runway (versatile), it flies over traffic in a straight line (fast), and it runs on electric motors, which are cheaper to power and maintain than engines (cheap). Every delivery drone you’ve seen is an eVTOL, as are the air taxis Joby and Archer are building. Others are making eVTOLs, too, so while they will all be fast and versatile, Airbound must beat them on cost.

That seems crazy, when the competition has so much scale. Amazon - Amazon! - the company that is the best in the Western Hemisphere at moving goods to people - Amazon is making eVTOL delivery drones.

Last week, The New York Times wrote a story on Amazon Prime Air’s nascent operations in Richardson, Texas: It’s Raining Boxes: Amazon Drones Overwhelm a Texas Suburb. Describing the logistics king’s flying machine, Juliet Macur wrote, “Within a minute or so, an 83-pound drone with six blue arms and whirring propellers appeared in a corner of the sky before zipping over nearby houses, looking like a cross between a mechanical dragonfly and an X-wing fighter, and buzzing like a battalion of bees. The drone’s mission: delivering an Amazon package. The single cardboard box of cargo held a maximum of five pounds...”

Six arms and 83 pounds to carry a maximum of five.

Before I met Naman, I would have read that and thought, “Woah, the sci-fi future has arrived,” but after meeting him and hearing what he’s building and why, those numbers sound absurd.

To be fair, Amazon’s 83 pounds is fully-loaded, so it’s really 78 plus the five pound payload, for a payload-to-empty-weight ratio of 0.06x. Zipline has a much stronger ratio; its P2 weighs 55 pounds and can carry eight, good for 0.15x.

Airbound’s is in a different league. Its first drone, the TRT, is so light (1.5kg) that Naman could hold it with three fingers, and carries 1kg, for a payload-to-empty-weight ratio of 0.67x.

Naman Carrying the TRT with Three Fingers

Its new V2 drone can carry five kilograms (11 pounds). Its payload-to-empty-weight ratio is 1.67x. It can carry more than it weighs.