We often associate 5G with the general understanding of how it affects telecommunications — faster internet speed, widespread coverage, and the internet of things. We get to learn more about the important role 5G plays in the world of aviation in today’s episode, as Carrie Charles sits down with Vance Hilderman, principal founder, CEO, and CTO of AFuzion. Listen along as the world-renowned safety-critical expert, speaker, author, and trainer share his journey in finding his passion for STEM and bringing diversity to technology, and the possible future of AFuzion.
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Aviation Safety in the 5G World with Vance Hilderman of AFuzion
I have an exciting episode planned for you. I have with me, Vance Hilderman. He is the CEO of AFuzion. Vance, I’m excited to talk to you. I’ve already spent a few minutes with you and I could learn so much from you. I could talk to you forever. Thank you for coming to the show.
Thanks so much for inviting me. I’ve been excited as well. I’m very much looking forward to this. You have a good following, a good group of people, and a lot of smart people. This is a smart topic. I hope everyone’s had some coffee or caffeine of some kind. Let it roll.
I’m going to do my best because it is a smart topic. First, let’s talk about you and how you got to where you are. You’re accomplished. You also have a book and your accolades. I could go on forever.
I’m an old guy in a young man’s world. Except when I go to certain meetings, I’m the young guy in the room. It’s a fascinating perspective. I have a few decades in technology. I wanted to be a fighter pilot. My wife and I went and visited air museums all over the world. We loved that. We Saw Top Gun and no spoiler alert, it is better than the first.
I’ve got a couple of years on Tom Cruise. The reason I was bounced out of the Navy was that I didn’t look as good as Tom Cruise. I might’ve been born that. I passed the vision, the fiscal, everything, but not the depth perception. For some reason, I can’t imagine they want good depth perception to land on an aircraft carrier.
I couldn’t do that dream. They said, “You could be the navigator.” That’s no fun. Sorry, folks. I want it to be the guy in the front seat. Now I’m in the front seat of AFuzion and of a few other companies. I’ve started seven companies. There’s a reason you’ve never heard of three of them because they failed. You’ll learn more from those failures than the successes.
The companies that I succeeded with are really popular. They’re mainstays. Probably anyone who’s flown in a fighter jet, cargo jet, or passenger aircraft, communicated by 5G, has used my or my company’s software or my employees. They’re all smarter than me in some fashion. It’s a small world getting smaller by the minute with the technology we’re all bringing to it. That’s my story in a quick nutshell.
Tell me the AFuzion story.
AFuzion is an interesting boutique company. We turned down about 2/3 of our work. In the old days, that was not the case. In technology, the old days meant many years ago. Years ago, we had a company that I was the Co-Founder of called TekSci. It’s a mainstay in the aviation world. We sold that for many millions of dollars after a decade.
We can’t make mechanical systems perfect, but we can make them 10 to 20 times safer than any mode of transportation.
That was a consulting company whose a couple of hundred engineers worked on projects for all the big companies, Boeing, Airbus, Rockwell, and Honeywell. Aviation is a $150 billion business per year in America. The entire Hollywood, not just Top Gun, is less than $20 billion. Aviation is almost ten times larger, yet Hollywood gets the Top Gun.
AFuzion evolved from that to satisfy a need for real boutique high-end consulting on aviation safety development processes, new companies that are rolling out new helicopters, and new missiles. We do everything and eVTOL, Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing. One of our clients, Pipistrel, got the world’s first all-electric aircraft certification. They’re flying and selling. We’re just working with Heart Aerospace in Sweden, another great company. They’re going to fly 40 to 50 people on pure batteries.
We’ve got this whole climate change going on. Some of our audiences are in places that are a little warmer than maybe they were in the past. We’ve got to solve that. Instead of pointing fingers or looking left and right, let’s look ahead towards the center and that’s technology. That’s what AFuzion is doing. We’ve got at any time twenty clients. In a year, we work on maybe 30 projects. We take the cool ones or occasionally, the great paying ones, but usually the cool ones. We turned down the others.
What is the role of AFuzion in the 5G ecosystem?
5G is not our main business, but it’s an important business. Our main business is ensuring aviation safety, not just aircraft but the infrastructure and that includes communication. When we put a 5G cell tower right next to an airport using US gigahertz factors that were not well-planned out, no one’s going to take responsibility for that. We’re all going to say, “It was his or her fault,” pointing the finger. Communication amongst satellites, navigation systems, air traffic managers, and CNS/ATM, 5G’s a big role. On aircraft, 5G is common. We already have it on some aircraft and we all want to work.
Remember when the television was first invented? We are going to beam university courses into every living room and what happened? We got some other things. We got South Park. I love South Park. That’s a lot of what’s going on the aircraft, but you got to have your South Park on the aircraft too, and all the important things as well. We could talk for hours about the technology that we’re using 5G aviation infrastructure, but it’s not just aviation or cellphones. It’s more than the internet of things. We use 5G for things that are on the internet, so that internet of things is already passe, to be honest.
What are some challenges to overcome when it comes to safety for every type of aircraft?
Everybody knows that they’re in some building. Maybe you’re lucky enough to be out on the golf course. You will want to look at Carrie’s show that broadcasts here in the office in full color, much better. If you are in a building and you probably are, that building was certified for occupancy. It had to have an assessment. Let’s say, Carrie’s in Florida. They occasionally have these things called hurricanes down there.
We don’t have those in California, but we do have earthquakes. It’s quite the opposite. Depending on the environment, you have a safety separate for your building. You all know there are lots of rules in how you build a building. I promise you if we printed out those rules we have to follow to build an aircraft, they would more than fill up a single 777. It’s a prolific amount of rules.
In fact, my book, The Aviation Development Ecosystem, tries to summarize those in less than 500 pages. I almost made it. It’s 520 pages. There are a huge amount of rules. AFuzion helps companies navigate, succeed in those rules, build safer aircraft, and try to avoid things that happen in our ecosystem with occasional plane crashes. There are always going to be plane crashes.
We can’t make mechanical systems perfect, but we can make them 10 to 20 times safer than any mode of transportation. We’ve done that already. We’re already 10 times safer than cars, 20 times safer than trains, and 40 times safer than walking. The only thing you could do safer is to never leave your house, but you wouldn’t be exciting enough to hang with Carrie and I if you did that, so don’t do that.
What are the worldwide regulations that must be followed to exploit 5G in the aerospace industry?
Everybody in America knows what a 401(k) is. It’s a saving. Nobody in Europe or Canada knows what that is. We all have our own little buzzwords. In aviation, we call it CFR, Code of Federal Regulations. CFR 14 says, “You must have a safety process and ARP 4754A is one system.” You may use a different system as you can show its equivalent. Don’t even bother. There’s nothing equivalent to 4754A. Every aviation engineer knows it is a 100-page bible.
Part of what AFuzion works is the ecosystem, templates, and processes out of the box for companies to do that. That lays the framework for environmental testing, the development of computer architectures that aren’t affected by 5G adversely, that can incorporate 5G in a safe way for cases where a single point failure on that avionics system.
We have to ensure that the probability of a single point of failure is less than 1 times 10 to the minus 9th. If you’re good at Math, what’s the number nine zeroes on it? Is that 1 billion? That means since aircraft of a fleet type don’t fly 1 billion hours in a year, a single point failure causing a crash never ever happens. That framework that we work with makes sure that 5G also satisfies that rule. 5G is not perfect. When we have an interrupt in the network or a bad packet set, we can mitigate it. We have to guarantee that our architecture will switch over. Carrie, do I have your permission to do an onsite science experiment for our audience?
Yes.
Everybody, don’t do this at home. This is my laptop’s power cord. I unplug this laptop. What happened? A lot happened. You didn’t see it. That’s what happens on the aircraft. We have failures and you’ll hear the pilot say, “Passengers, we lost our flight computer system. We’ll be dead in 90 seconds if I can mitigate, but don’t worry.” You’ll never hear that. It happens. We mitigate automatically like this laptop, detected loss of power, and switched over to the battery. You didn’t see it, but that’s what we’re doing millions of times per minute on that aircraft. That’s what we do with 5G and all those systems. It’s a little exciting.
Let’s talk about some more exciting projects that you’re working on. If you can, share a few projects for the future. I want to get out the crystal ball and see what your working is on.
STEM doesn’t know the boundaries of race, religion, or gender. So it’s this wonderful world of opportunity for everyone.
We’re working on some new communication systems. The FAA, Federal Aviation Administration, has a new project to upgrade communications. We all know or think we know what happened to MH370, that aircraft went out of the sky. It was abducted by space aliens, hijacked, or vanished. If you want to know what happened, read the French report. The French are not fast. My mother was French. They are thorough. We’re building technologies that will guarantee that we know where every aircraft is within 3 feet or slightly less than 1 meter for our non-American friends reading.
That’s the distance between Road 12 and 13 on the aircraft. We know exactly where that aircraft is within 3 feet continuously. We’re working on projects that automatically eject the digital flight recorder, so we don’t have to spend two years under the sea with hundreds of millions of dollars from the submarine time trying to find these flight reports. It will automatically eject on impact. We also are building a lot of eVTOL aircraft.
There was a time when some caveman somewhere made a wheel and was trying to describe it to somebody else. They didn’t get it until they saw that wheel. Until you see the wheels of the future of aviation, they’re flying out. Several of our clients are flying their prototypes. These are small helicopter and quad-copter aircraft. What are they? They’re all those things. Carrie lived in Los Angeles for a while. It’s only ten miles from the airport. We don’t talk in miles. We’ve talked in time. Carrie, what is ten miles to LA and how much time is that?
One hour and a half, it was a lot for me. That’s why I left. I’m in Tampa.
In a few years, we’re going to be able to go from a nearby rooftop, 100 meters from my house in downtown LA to the airport. It is probably going to cost about $200. I’m not going to pay that all the time, but I’ll certainly pay that a lot. The price will come down. The first Texas instrument calculator I got was $700 when I was making $85 an hour, minimum wage. You could get a gallon of gas for $0.60. The eVTOLs are flying and they’re cool. Not everyone’s going to win. There are over 200 companies working on those. We’re working with half a dozen companies.
We think our clients are in the winning position. Those are neat technologies in addition to all the other electric aircraft that we’re working on to try to get a handle on this climate thing and be a little more friendly with hydrocarbons. Aircraft are a little bit polluting but that’s only 2.5% of all hydrocarbons out there. We can get that down to 1% pretty easily in 10 to 15 years with sustainable fuels and other things that we’re doing. There’s a lot of cool stuff.
I want to switch gears a bit and talk about our new world of work because things have changed. Leaders are trying to navigate this new landscape. What do you think? Do you think the changes that we’ve seen are going to stick? Do you see anything in the future that might be coming in this thing that we call work nowadays and what it looks like?
To be honest with COVID in the last years, there has been a greater change in the way we work and technology. In fact, human interaction than in any other two-and-a-half-year period of the existence of humanity. We’re pretty sure we go back 400, 500, or 1,000 years. We could be looking at 2 million years. The computer took fifteen years. Think about it. In the late 1950s, it took years to make the PC useful. In a year, it changed. All of a sudden, the AFuzion model of working remotely and enabling people to have a better lifestyle without commuting every day, we did aircraft travel, but now we’re doing everything, our teaching or auditing.
We’re doing engineering inspections all remote like you’re reading this remotely. I could come to your house, but it would be the same guy. It would be the same, Carrie. It helped our business, Afuzion, because we always did that. All of a sudden, many of our clients weren’t set up for that. What we saw was an increase in divergence between companies that could mitigate the landscape of remote work. Some companies did well. Amazon, for example. Microsoft, kind of. Google, words out. Facebook. It’s an interesting one.
In technology, the general rule that is a little more conservative is, “You have to be in the office.” That’s gone. Companies that can work remotely will excel. What’s going to change is this whole idea of a 40-hour week. That went away years ago. Our parents would come home and have a beverage of their choice after work because they didn’t have pagers. What is the work boundary? How do you turn off the off switch? That’s your responsibility.
“My boss calls me.” You own the off switch. You got to use it. Do you have to have just one job? No. Why don’t you have 2 or 3 jobs? Are you efficient working eight hours a day from 9:00 to 5:00? Some of us have to if that’s our job. Let’s say, we’re a fire person, policewoman, or policeman. You got a shift. 80% of Americans do not have a shift. I’m not talking about politicians. That’s not a real job. That’s a hobby.
There are those Olympic sports where you sweat and get cardio. Curling is not a sport. Anything you can do with a broom in your hand and a beverage in your other hand is not a sport. It’s a hobby. There are real jobs where there aren’t hobbies. You don’t have to have just one. Why don’t you have three jobs and you work each one 2 to 3 hours a day and get paid not by the hour, but on the unit of work? There are many jobs that we can do.
You’ll make more money. Your employer will be happy. They’re not paying for your downtime. You’re going to gain a lot more experience. We’re seeing it now. Some people are, unfortunately, claiming they’re working for you full-time and you have no idea. They’re going to laugh at you in many years and think, “Full-time. What does that mean? They work 24 hours a day.” That’s a big one. We’re seeing all of it in the software development world and everywhere.
I was reading the average worker only works X amount of hours per day is productive. I don’t remember what that number was, but it sure wasn’t eight.
I’m reading numbers like 2 or 3 hours a day. I’d love to shout out the most productive person we ever have and give her name. It’s a lady who had two kids. She wanted to cut back to four hours a day. I said, “Pam, you can’t do that. You’re our most productive person.” Folks, it worked out. Pam eventually went to halftime. She did more in 4 hours than our guys did in 8 hours.
Our other full-time ladies did an eight-hour. Let’s be honest here. It’s not a gender thing. Pam focuses on getting 8 hours of work done in 4 hours, and it boots all our productivity. Everybody boosts it up. The other couple of hundred engineers put up 10% or 15% more. It’s like Pam brought us twenty more engineers. It is amazing. You can do it. Be efficient.
You have a passion for STEM and bringing diversity to tech. This is a big conversation. We’ve been talking about this for years and years. How can we move the needle here?
We have to get over this idea that STEM is boring. Since I have three daughters, I won’t mention which one it is, but they’ll know. One of them got the highest score ever on a Math test in grade school, aged 10 or 11 ever recorded in the state. Do you think she wants anything to do with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math? No. She went into Marketing and now she works in Hollywood. That’s exciting. Building missiles, weapon systems, electric aircraft, and rockets are exciting. We don’t even have to do social media. They’re all jealous of us. I’m joking here.
Nothing you can learn in school will teach you to engineer what you’re going to be asked to, because if it already existed, why would they be asking you to create another.
We have to get over this idea that STEM is boring and it’s not. STEM doesn’t know the boundaries of race, religion, and gender. I have employees I’ve never met. I don’t care where they’re from. If they’re purple from Pluto, it doesn’t matter. It’s this wonderful world of opportunity for everyone, but White, Brown, Black, any religion, or any gender, we have so much demand. I’ve been working for many years. For the first time in my career, there are zero unemployed engineers that are able to move their brains. I was going to say, “With two legs,” but that’s not fair to our paraplegic friends of which I know a couple of great engineers.
Talking about opportunity, there’s no unemployment. We can’t find engineers. We’ve got 10 or 11 openings. We’re picky. It’s got to be in the top 5% of people because we’re that boutique consultant thing. If we dropped our standards to the top 30%, we still can’t find the top 99%. There’s nobody available. The only way you’re going to find someone is to take them from someone else or, “I got a great idea. Come work 3 or 4 hours for me every day.”
I’ve been working with my team on productivity and being more productive in hours. They’re working. Let’s talk about the culture of AFuzion. What makes it different? What makes it unique? Describe it a bit.
We’ve got a little bit of dirty laundry. It’s easy to say, “Look at me. I’m great.” I’m not. Everybody thinks they’re the only ones with dirty laundry. Congratulations. You’re all doing laundry on Sunday or someone else is doing your laundry for you. AFuzion’s culture is senior. Our average age is a little bit too old. We were trying to get to lower that significantly. We’re having some good success, but it takes a lot of work to do that from a consulting standpoint.
Our culture is one of the senior people with 10 to 20 years of experience that are in the top 1% or 2% of their peer group by some recognized standards, something they’ve accomplished and their peers recognize. These are people that can work well independently, love exciting projects, and are good communicators and problem solvers. Engineers aren’t buying things out of the box. We’re creating things that did not exist.
There’s nothing you can learn in school that will teach you to engineer what you’re going to be asked to, because if it already existed. Why would they be asking you to create another wheel? We’re going to use that knowledge in making a wheel to make gear, transmission, or a set of wheels. It’s how you learn that influences. We’re looking for people that learn a broad spectrum of knowledge, not in a 5G sense, but in a life sense. Our dirty laundry is that we don’t do enough training for our young people.
Our new people and young people are a little lost. We need to do a better job of assigning mentors. We’re working on that, having a little extra interaction factoring that in. Frankly, young people, we’re paying you less. We can afford to help you out more and we have to do that. People think Americans are focused on the quarterly results. Most people I know in technology, 5G, and aviation are in it for the sexy accomplishments. Money is something that keeps you there and enables you to be successful in the future. It’s a badge. We wear it as a badge and then we give it away. That’s the truth.
I love your authenticity. I want to know more about you as a leader, what’s important to you in leadership. Do you have specific values that you live by?
I got a couple of them. It extends from child racing. My wife and I had a sign in the kitchen. We joked that Mark Twain was the early aviation pioneer. Mark Twain passed his pride. He died a couple of years after the Wright brothers. He was not an aviation engineer or a technologist, but he was a futurist and a humanist. Mark Twain said, “Always tell the truth, then you must remember nothing.” That’s brilliant.
My wife calls me lazy. I told her, “I’m efficient.” There’s a difference between lazy and efficient. Leadership-wise, we need to be efficient. Every one of our employees could say, “Why don’t I get enough time with the boss?” If you’ve ever been to a big wedding, you want to spend ten minutes with the bride and groom, unless that wedding is from the wonderful country of India, where they have three-day weddings. Not everyone’s going to get ten minutes with a bride and groom.
You don’t get ten minutes with the CEO per week. How do we make that efficient? Take that lazy factor. It’s by being open, being very transparent, always telling the truth, and being efficient that way. Mark Twain said something else, “The first sentence to a ten-page letter said, ‘I’m sorry, this letter is so long. I don’t have time to make it short.’” There’s a lot of blah, blah, blah. If the boss calls you in the office or you want a shoulder to talk on, get a dog. That dog will be more than happy to listen to you. It’s going to give you a much better response and therapy.
Are you hiring at AFuzion? If so, what types of skillsets? Where can we find out more? What’s your website?
We are hiring. We’ve got 10 or 12 open positions. We are picky for people in the top 1% of their aviation, software engineering, hardware engineering, technology, or anything that could be involved with 5G communications, ground systems, air systems, flight control, navigation, radar, and all of that stuff. Our website is www.AFuzion.com. There’s a lot of information out there. We’ve got 25 technical white papers you can read and download. It is quite a library. They’re all free. You can go to YouTube and listen to a dozen webinars that we’ve done.
This has been so much fun. I cannot wait to see what AFuzion does in the future and all the cool stuff, the flying planes, flying cars, and flying around from like LAX to home in ten minutes in the air. I can’t wrap my brain around that. I cannot wait for this technology to get here. Vance, thank you for coming to the show. I truly appreciate it. We will talk soon.
I’ll look forward to it.
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About Vance Hilderman
Vance Hilderman is the principal founder/CTO of three of the world’s most significant aviation development/certification companies including TekSci, HighRely, and AFuzion. Hilderman has trained over 31,000 engineers in over 700 aviation companies and 30+ countries. His intellectual property is in use by 70% of the world’s top 300 aviation and systems developers worldwide, and he has employed and personally presided over 500 of the world’s foremost aviation engineers on 300+ projects the past thirty-five years. AFuzion’s solutions are on 90% of the aircraft developed over the past three decades. His latest book, Aviation Development Ecosystem, debuted at #1 on the Aviation category best-seller list.
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