This is our Kitty Hawk Moment

It will be the first proof of a new mode of transportation since 1903 when the Wright Brothers flew the first motorised aero plane on Kitty Hawk beach in North Carolina. Dr. Alan James, VP, Worldwide Business Development, Hyperloop One, talks about a futuristic mode of travel. Only thing, the future maybe upon us sooner than we expect…

What is Hyperloop One all about? I believe there are others too, exploring the concept of the Hyperloop?
There are multiple companies that have been formed around the concept of Hyperloop. We are Hyperloop One. We've raised $160 million dollars so far and we will raise a few hundred million dollars more this year. We are the only company actually building the Hyperloop and we are not a research company. We are an engineering company. That's actually one of the main reasons that we are here in India because for the next generation transportation system to be able to be implemented and be effective, somebody has to be able to build one and prove that it works before we ask the country to commit to one. We have some very significant partners and and Josh Giegel, our President of Engineering is the one, you may have heard of, who led the team that created the rocket at Space X that landed vertically. We have some world class engineers. We've got some world class financing and we've started to set out to prove to the world that Hyperloop is possible.

Tell us a little more about the concept of Hyperloop.
It's an Elon Musk original idea. What Elon did is publish a white paper and he left it at that. So, we looked at the principles. You start with a pod, which is the fundamental vehicle. It's not a train and you don't have to wait for a thousand people to show up to be economically viable. The pod can shift a maritime container or passengers. That's the size of the vehicle. The second principle is that you put the pod in a tube that creates a controlled environment and it enables us to take the air out of the tube which overcomes aerodynamic resistance. This third thing is we propel it with a linear motor which enables it to accelerate to its design speed. People or containers go into the pod. Then, you levitate the pod using passive magnetic levitation (maglev), so no friction, no drag. That enables us to go really fast. By fast, I mean 1,080 km/h, that's our design speed. It offers aviation like speed, train like capacity and metro like convenience.
To answer your question; what is Hyperloop One? Well, Elon had the original idea and so loads of people are building power points out there about Hyperloop. However, we are the only company that is actually building the Hyperloop. When I say Hyperloop, I mean we are building a great team of engineers because you only get a chance to change the world once in your life. We've opened the world's first Hyperloop factory in Nevada and it is currently the only R&D facility in the world for full-scale Hyperloop testing.

What about regulation, and costs?
At the European Union level, they have a single regulator who is working with us to develop regulations for a new mode of transport. It will combine bits of roadway regulation, bits of aviation regulation, and bits of autonomous driving regulations. Just like the technology, they have to be brought together so that there is a coherent regulatory mode. In Finland, for instance, we are talking to the government about a test between Turko and Salo; what we call a proof of operations facility, which is about 50 km, two-way Hyperloop, developed to use as the approvals lab precisely to get safety case approvals, to prove what happens if you need to evacuate people from the system, and all the rest of the stuff.

In the Middle East, we have freight and passenger programmes ongoing in Dubai at the moment where we are working with a commercial company for freight and with the regulator and transport authority for passenger systems. We have moved containers and key results are coming out of our studies. Over the whole lifecycle cost, which is the capital cost upfront and the cost of operating it over 30 0r 40 years, we are expecting the whole lifecycle cost to be 50 per cent of high speed rail largely because our operating costs are miniscule; and the benefits are 3.5-4 times to those of high speed rails because the speed brings everything together; it basically creates super cities.

The things that are happening with Hyperloop is that hours are becoming minutes, regions become super regions and cities become unified economies. We do radical networking and that delivers transformational economics. When most people think about transport, for instance, they think about going from point A to B and let's assume this distance is 300 km. That's a typical corridor on which you would normally use a high-speed train. London to Manchester is really a good example. The problem is most other modes are really slow. We can do it in 18 minutes; high-speed rail can do it in an hour and ten minutes and conventional rail can do it in two hours and ten minutes. If you are daft enough to try to drive, your average speed in northern Europe is now only 70 km/h on that kind of distance. I suspect with Indian city traffic, it is probably significantly worse than that here.

While we have the speed advantage, the problem is it is not just about speed; it's also that corridors are never linear; they are never just about A and B. A typical corridor might have commuter areas, regional areas; you may want to do some new city development to take some of the load off A and B. A Hyperloop network has to do this so it is not linear and it connects everywhere to everywhere else. This is the bit where I wake up in the middle of the night and I think yes, this is it; this is the killer app!

What our transponics system does, transport electronics - a word we have registered - is it does this; it enables every journey from everywhere to everywhere else to be nonstop. Let's say you are at a certain point and there is a Hyperloop terminal a couple of km away. A single tap on your phone and a vehicle would come and pick you up, take you to your terminal, the doors open, you sit down and the next time the doors open, you are at your destination. You do not need to know what the network looks like; you do not need to know what the time table is because there isn't one. It is on-demand transport linking everywhere to everywhere else. We can do it in a manner that gives us massive flexibility. Let's say you are going from A to B and then from another terminal in a metropolitan area another person is just doing his commute. His pod can join in behind the one in front and then branch off. This can go on throughout the system, so that we offer train like capacity on trunk routes but the pods branch off and branch back in again to offer metro like convenience, and it is all happening at airline-like speed!

When do you move from the test phase to an operational one?
Our aim is to get a full scale, not a model, a full scale operational prototype, and we are aiming for that within weeks from now. This is not a story that's five or ten years away. It's now. This will happen within a month, by the end of March this year. And the reason why we're calling it our Kitty Hawk moment is because this is a new system of new motor transportation. So far, in human history, there have been four modes of automated transportation. There are boats with engines, trains, cars, and then in 1903, the Wright Brothers flew the first motorised aeroplane, not a glider, on Kitty Hawk beach in North Carolina. Since then, there has been no new mode of transportation. There have only been incremental improvements to the existing modes. High-speed trains or magnetic levitation trains are just incremental improvements on trains which were invented in 1830. This is a brand new mode of transportation and when we prove it, it will be the first proof of a new mode of transportation since 1903. Within a month from now, we will demonstrate the world's first new mode of transportation and that will be our Kitty Hawk moment.

Have you got any customers yet, even at this early stage?
It's not just about technology of course because having all the best technology in the world is no good unless you have got a customer for it. We are planning projects right now and those projects are all around the world. In the Nordics, for instance, we have already published the world's first business case for Hyperloop between Sweden and Finland. If you go from Stockholm to Helsinki now, although the flight is only one hour, it takes you three and a half hours by the time you have got out to the airport, checked in, taken the flight and then caught the train to the other end and got back into the city. Or you take 17.5 hours on a boat. We have taken that down to 28 minutes. In India, it is probably worse because of the traffic at each end. Therefore, what happens now is really important; it doesn't really matter whether you live in Helsinki and work in Stockholm or vice versa, it's just one metropolitan economy today.

What about India?
We have run a competition called the Hyperloop Global One Challenge. Basically, we announced to the world that is anyone felt Hyperloop can make a difference to your country and your community, we asked them to submit a business-case on the website. We got 2,800 entries of which dozens were from India. We narrowed them down to 30 semifinalists. We want to take the best ideas in the world and turn them into real projects. The Largest number of semifinalists anywhere were from India and this distills those interests. On February 28, we will run the competition to find the best project in India. It will be an event in New Delhi spread out over two days, on February 27 and 28. The important distinction here is that these are not just students or the common people saying they wanted to go from Mumbai to Delhi. The criteria we used to select the semifinalists is did they have local government support? From the semi-finalists, we have now, I think there are about six teams working with transportation experts in their region to actually say they have a business case for what Hyperloop can do for a particular route in India. We will pick the best single example with the best government support. That will be a pretty major event and we hope to take that winning entry and turn it into the first route in India to Hyperloop because around that
time we will have proven that technology with our Kitty Hawk moment. We can say at that point in time that we now know; we have proven that it works and we have got a route which has got the best support; it's the winning entry, so let's now go and build the first Hyperloop.