Hello, SPC followers. Welcome back to another episode. I've got a little explaining to do for this one, but I think you're going to like it. So bear with me a little bit. Once I bring you up to speed, we'll get onto the main attraction for episode 79 And that's a very fascinating discussion with Alex from flyshirley. com, an AI startup. That's all about aviation. So let's get into it. All right, so a bit of an explanation before we dive into it I'll be brief because this is gonna be a long episode anyway But I decided when I published episode 78 the last episode in late September that I needed a bit of a break So I decided to take my birthday month, October, off from the podcast while I recharged a little bit We had some changes happening with the almost launched fledgling flightline podcast that I'll get into in a little bit, but I just needed to take a little break. So I got some episodes partially ready and held off on publishing supposedly until November. As you know, At that same time, I've been trying to get my CFI checkride scheduled for ages, and I wasn't sure when it would happen. But then, last couple of days of October, I finally got the call. I got a checkride scheduled at an airport about 60 nauticals miles away from my home airport for a couple of weeks in the future. So now About the time I was going to be starting the pet podcast publishing again, my focus turned to relearning how to fly and how to pass a CFI check ride. As you can imagine, all my focus turned towards that. And once again, I had to forgo publishing for a little bit. I had a lot of cool stuff already in the can, but. Now didn't have time to finish the edits and do final publishing, et cetera. So I decided to wait another month. The good news is I passed my check. Right? So I'm a brand new CFI. The bad news is I ended up taking two months off from the publishing instead of the one that I had originally planned. That said, I'm now back and I've been wanting to get this one out for. Quite a while. It's really interesting. Now, there's one more thing. Tiffany and I originally recorded this for, like I said, the Fledgling Flightline podcast. So that's what you'll hear when we're talking to Alex. A couple of months ago, though, Tiffany and I decided to pause the launch of that podcast, at least for a while, as her situation was changing and we couldn't, you know, Put the focus on it that we had hoped we'd be able to. We want to do it at some point somehow, but the good news is I can focus on the student pilot cast even more. And since we already have a community of listeners here, I'm glad that this interview will get more eyeballs and more years on it anyway, by releasing it as a student pilot cast episode. As you'll see from the discussion, It does have a bit of a student and learning orientation anyway, so it fits right in. So you're basically up to speed at a very high level and we're back to publishing weekly for the student pilot cast. I certainly appreciate everyone's patience as I recharged and then super charged for my check ride and then relaxed a bit over the Thanksgiving holiday. So I hope everyone also had a good relaxing holiday. As always, please reach out with questions, suggestions, ideas, feedback, Everything. You can find me via email at bill at studentpilotcast. com or use the contact form on the website or even via X at, at billwill. That's Bravo, India, Lima, Lima, whiskey, India, Lima. So with that said, I hope you enjoy episode 79, and don't call me Shirley. right. Welcome back everybody to the flight line podcast. We've got a really special episode tonight. we're sitting here with Alex List, who's part of the team at FlyShirley. And Alex and I met. Uh, sort of in happenstance, uh, while we were looking at one of the other vendors at Oshkosh that had to do with large language models and, and what we sometimes refer to as AI. And so we got to talking and said, Hey, you know what, we should really get together and talk about this on the podcast. So Alex, welcome to the flight line podcast.

Thank you very much. It's good to see you and Tiffany.

Excellent. tell us a little bit about. Alex, and then we'll get to FlyShirley.

Sounds great. So my background is actually in apps and technology. So in high school, I taught myself how to program iPhones. I had some of the first iPhones in the app store and ended up winning an Apple design award. I got into MIT and I decided to study aerospace because I felt I already knew computer science somehow. And so I, uh, so I studied that for three years. I ended up dropping out and making a startup. Coming back and switching to computer science. And then I, then I got my private pilot's license, back, got my master's in kind of a combination between aerospace engineering and computer science. And I ended up having the opportunity to lead flight simulation at a company called Beta Technologies up in Vermont. an electric protocol takeoff and horizontal flight airplane company. They make some of the, I would say some of the coolest electric airplanes, but also have some of the best sims that you'd ever see on the planet. These amazing full dome, uh, half dome, you know, wrap around flight sims. Really, really sweet. I worked on enabling the simulated flight test and instructor operating stations. Helping with the avionics transition. I had the opportunity to bring some of my thesis work into the avionics. When you, when you're flying these new airplanes is a little bit different. And, and we ended up building about eight different VR sims and flights in flight domes throughout the country. I left when the airplane is entering production and worked at a leading aircraft autonomy company and had the opportunity to work with some really great folks over my career. Ended up starting by Shirley in March after, um, after some, and we can get into this a little bit more after there was a little bit of an accident that my friend had, and I wanted to be able to build something that could a difference for aviation safety. And so. and so we started, I started by building something that you could fly with in a cockpit, and so you could fly with Shirley while you're, while I was flying my DA42, I could ask questions and things like this, but there are some limitations. And so one of my friends actually, uh, I have a couple of friends at X Plane, and they said, Hey, you know, why don't you try launching for Sims first? You know, you wouldn't have the issue with hallucination. This wouldn't be a problem. You wouldn't have issues trying to keep things online versus offline. And you would be able to sort of deal with all these noise issues really easily. anyway, we, uh, we launched for flight sim starting at flight simulator expo. And then, um, and then ended up, uh, and then ended up here and I'm really happy to see you guys and, and talk to you a little bit about. this sort of journey and so

uh, some of that tech that you're talking about, but I'm going to hold off. Because I want to ask, why aviation? What got you into aviation in the first place? You, you said you started with aerospace at MIT, and then you became a private pilot. How did that happen, and why?

that's actually, that's actually a really good, that's a great question. So I always was interested in space as a kid, a huge sort of, you know, buff for all the sci fi movies runs in the family. You know, I wanted to be like a lot of folks, I wanted to be an astronaut, but you do the sort of the expected value calculation on that. And it kind of falls a little bit short. And so I thought to myself, what's the opportunity that you'd have to. Sort of the best shot that you could still kind of, you know, fly around and in air or space. And of course, the answer to that is being a private pilot or becoming a pilot in general. And so, you know, I, I decided to get my private pilot's license and, um, and it was probably one of the best decisions. You have the ability to, you know, you have the superpower, right? You could just show up somewhere, you know,

You have, you have a flying carpet,

do that. You have a

A real, honest to goodness flying carpet. It's amazing.

It's just the coolest thing you could possibly do. So there's like, you know, you know, we're blessed to be in the United States. And I think just. Having this many sort of GA airports around in this country is just such a phenomenal resource

Yeah,

you know, for, of course, all the municipalities that they're in, but also for the individuals who can end up being pilots and sort of embracing this love of flight that I had, you know, my teammates and at Shirley's that Shirley's share and that, you know, of course, all of us here on the podcast and listening to as well.

I was looking at your LinkedIn and I have to say that between you and the other two co founders, you guys look like a bunch of slackers and with this 5. 0 at MIT from Sam, so it looks like there's three of you guys who founded this.

You

Obviously incredibly intelligent.

Yep.

was this?

So, you know, I was fortunate to meet, uh, Seb. Seb, I actually met, he was an intern of mine while at Beta Technologies. He was a, sort of, he had just finished his freshman year at McGill, and he was sort of looking for something to do. He grew up in Vermont, Beta's up in Vermont. And Kyle, the CEO of Beta, said, Well, you should check out this guy, you know. You know, you might not, you know, have a ton of CS experience yet, but, you know, he's going to work really hard. He's trying, you should like give him a shot. And so, you know, gave Seb a shot and by three, four years later, I'm a co founder with him at my, at my current startup. so, you know, I, uh, I left my job at Merlin labs in March and worked on the first prototype of FlyShirley that you could fly with. ended up, you know. Getting some of my, some of my friends and family to help me sort of stretch this a little bit farther. You know, I was really lucky to meet Sam. There's a, you know, for people who like to start companies and are sort of interested in this sort of thing. There are these sort of like Tinder for co founder type of websites that are as much of a crapshoot as any sort of dating app you could possibly imagine. In this particular circumstance, you know, Sam wrote me the nicest message ever. He said, well, actually, we went to the same college, know, like all the same sort of things that you, yeah. So, you know, all right, we'll leave it, we'll leave it at that. But, you know, he just wrote out a very respectful, you know, very respectful message. Of course, his background, he interestingly was one of the first, he's actually, he's, Actually in the army for another couple of years, at least. And, and he was actually one of the first people to go through the VR training sort of program they had in the army, the initial one and for, for helicopter training. And so, you know, that's a really interesting experience. He flies the. Um, the uh, a plane as a, as a fixed wing operator there and, you know, his 1st, his 1st sort of attachment in the army, if you will, was to go to MIT and get a master's and so, you know, just a really. a really good group, initial group of people. And so that's, that's a little bit how, how we got together. I'm actually surprised that I didn't meet Sam while I was at MIT. By all rights, I should have,

were there at the same time?

things, things that, yeah, we were

Okay.

time.

All right. you're all pilots.

yeah. Hopefully. So, yes. So, you know, Sam flies helicopters and the global 6500. The, uh, said is a student pilot and I'm a commercial multi engine instrument pilot, know, I'm looking forward to getting my instructor pilots license and learning about some of those fundamental of instruction. Oh, yeah, we love flight. Yeah,

And did I hear you say you fly a DA42? Is that what you said?

that's what I fly. Yes, I fly

Nice.

out of Philadelphia northeast airport. That's where my, that's where my family lives is in sort of the Philadelphia area. So I end up going down there. I get to fly the 42. Actually, 1 of the coolest things that I've done in that airplane was the at the eclipse that kind of ripped through the

Yep. Yep. Right.

up there with, uh, My, my, my partner, me and her ended up flying up in there and seeing this amazing 360 degree sunset. And, you know, you know, I was still looking through these little glasses and I was, you know, looked down at the instruments and then I look back and see this amazing sort of white Corona. That's

Wow. Oh my

and most resplendent way you've ever seen in your life. So I would recommend it not to the point where you don't listen to, you know, your TCAS or anything like that, but you know, absolutely go, go check it out. There was, you know, you'd be in good

I, I wasn't in the air for that eclipse, but I did go to Totality in Texas and it was one of the most incredible things I've ever experienced. So I can imagine it, it must've been incredible in the air too.

You see this sort of wall of darkness kind of flying towards

Yes.

some, you

Yes.

You think it's just like just rain, like the thickest rain you've ever seen in your entire life. But

Yeah.

know, it passes you and then you start to see the sort of the light coming around the same way. And just sunset in all

Everybody made fun of me for my reaction to it because it made me feel so small and so at the same time. It was, it was incredible. Yes.

Like, like within

Oh, interesting.

the heat on.

Yeah.

Yeah, within moments.

Interesting.

yeah.

Well, I don't know that I'll be around for the next one that happens in North America. Um, cause I am kind of an old guy, but, um,

ha

here we go again.

and I still have a medical, I might have to try it from the cockpit next time. that's a great idea.

Let's go. I'll brave you.

There we go.

what. Yeah.

Excellent.

In any form.

Well, thanks for all that background. So, um, one of the things you mentioned, and you've sent us information about Fly Shirley. It's clear that, like you said, you started with, with Sims. Tell us, tell us what your approach was with Sims and then where you're at, uh, with the product as it pertains to, uh, flying in, um, actual airplanes.

Yeah. No, thanks for that. So, Shirley is designed to be your AI co pilot from Sim to Sky. It's set up so that pilots can just talk to Shirley naturally, just like a co pilot friend sitting next to them in the cockpit. So surely provides training in the SIM to help people prepare for lessons and check rides and proficiency. so our goal has always also been to bridge people from SIM And so in the long term, we're working towards being able to have surely apply back in the cockpit. so, you know, our approach starting with the SIM has been to sort of home SIM flight users, people who actually just. You know, Flight Simulator released a metric, 15 million users Microsoft, uh, at Flight Sim Expo, they made this new metric book at 15 million users, Microsoft Flight Simulator, of this amazing sort of trend of getting more and more people involved, interested in flight through this sort of sim community. And so, you know, we've started with a co pilot that just. Really easily connects to We're starting with explain because we're friends with the explain guys. all you need to do is you open a web browser and then you go to flyshirley. com and then you hit start call and. Immediately, Shirley's talking to you and sort of says, sort of airplane teammates up, mic check when ready, and then you get connect to explain. You don't have to install any plugin or anything like that. As long as you just explain 12 and then it just immediately connects and has a window seat into your sin. so we just start with this sort of, you know, this a I kind of copilot. Shirley's your copilot. You talk. It's really immediately replies. You end up having this kind of nice conversation, no matter where you're at. Surely. an idea of where you are and give you info about where you're flying to. So we sort of have three different sort of modes. We're starting here with this sort of. Home flights in. And so folks there, some people just want us, you know, try out different airplanes, cruise around different areas. There's all sorts of reasons I'd be able to sort of home flight sitting. And then there's sort of a, we've introduced a sort of challenge feature as well, that, you know, we can make challenges. Other people can build challenges as well. So the first one is this Aaliyah 250 flight training type of challenge where. You know, explain ships with the model of the alia to 15 beetle mode. And so with that challenge, essentially, surely is stepping you through, you know, the controls check is stepping you through this sort of initial. How do you hover? How do you have control in that sort of mode and then how do you transition out and sort of transition back in and so surely kind of walks you through this and that sort of automated fashion challenges are really set up for other people to be able to kind of build fun, little interactive capabilities. And we have the sort of for people who use chat or whatever we have already sort of. You know, example, example, prompts that you would just follow and be able to create these things and things like skull challenges that possible, sort of this, you know, you can have landing challenges, different sorts and explore different areas that you're interested in. also just launched on Friday. We just launched a sort of the first version of our private pilot curriculum. so that's really the sort of the first step into training. And private pilot, uh, curriculum is really interesting that we end up being able to teach people about some level of, know, taxiing, you know, from the fundamentals of, you know, what do you do? What does it feel like to actually take a lesson? But to also let people be prepared for their lessons. So let's say you just went out and did sort of in terms of at a point with your instructor, and now, you know, you're going to go make sure you got it by next week and you're going to go either your instructor is either going to test you at the beginning of the lesson and then have you do something else or they'll test you at the lesson. And if you don't do it, they're going to make you do it again. And so maybe you'll go and prepare for that lesson and be able to make sure you really nail it when you get back. And one of the things that. We provide with surely is sort of feedback while you're doing the maneuver, but we also keep the sort of a data log of you doing that are able to sort of chart it out. Surely is able to talk to you about sort of the, you know, the sort of the flight data and sort of your results. You have sort of a indication of what would be to the ACS standards. So some people would really like to be able to prepare for their, for their sort of check ride, because it's pretty expensive and it's pretty high stress, you don't want to, you know, mess up. And so, you know, to varying levels, depending on the fidelity of somebody's sim and their setup and all these different things, you know, we can provide value based on our private pilot curriculum. And so that's live right now. And then we're also sort of working to bridge our way into different levels of kind of commercial environments. have a sort of a pilot program with. With actually beta starting September, where we're going to be providing. That's sort of, you know, training, sort of familiarization to the employees of the company so that they can, you know, when they have VR seats throughout the company. And so when an employee comes by, they can just sort of sit down in the seat and be able to try it out, be able to like, how do I actually fly this airplane? I kind of forget I had it on my first day as a lesson in but I really just want to, like, see what it's like in order to fly again. I went, you know. And it's really fun and kind of like interactive and and can be pretty inspiring for the employees. looking at commercial opportunities at various levels. For instance, if somebody has a, a aviation advanced training device that. You know, the, one of the really interesting trends, I think, is that those are starting to be reduced in price. They're now also, you know, you know, there's also VR type AATDs, you know, loft dynamics is a company that is certified, uh, FAA now for one of their, for an Airbus. And so one of the cool things is that as instructors are really in high demand, just like pilots are really in high demand, surely can provide training that prepares people for their instruction. and one of the things that we're looking to do is be able to provide sort of both surely providing instruction, but also having the sort of channel to allow sort of remote instructors for people to check in. This is sort of especially interesting for commercial operators, like, you know, companies at the same scale as. JetBlue or American airlines, United, et cetera, where you have to spend multiple weeks on site when you're trying to get a new tech rating. And so if you were able to spend some time at home with your family, not have to, you know, from the eyes of the operators have to do the spend of being at a hotel per diem and all this other stuff running around the flights, et cetera, you know, displacing revenue fares, know, then, you know, you'd be able to prepare, show up prepared. Have check ins with instructors remotely as you're preparing at home and then sort of, you know, show up for the 1 week where you need to have the full flight simulator and be able to have your 20 hours. And then, you know, you're good to go. But, you know, this is sort of things that we're looking at and sort of, you know, on the track towards getting be able to bring Shirley back into the cockpit where actually you begin by sort of taking. Some of the learnings and, you know, working with some of, you know, the, the, the, um, some of the folks that are amenable to saying, yeah, like I support the mission. Like, I'd love to be able to make flight. Safer, you know, you know, I'm in for, uh, I'm in for sort of stuff like that. Then we're able to make some of these features that surely has in terms of interactability, conversationality available on, on an iPhone so that pilots can talk to Shirley while they're flying and that can provide. A lot of sort of overhead, especially in the GA context to begin with where, you know, task saturation, et cetera, is really hard. And sometimes like if you're flying in instrument conditions and then something breaks and now you need this number, you can't remember the thing. And it's just, it just ends up being a mess where you can just ask for the information. And this ends up being kind of a kind of thing, but we're kind of working our way back to there, which was where we started. And I think along the way, we're providing a really revolutionary training product that. a lot of value for people. Surely folks have tried out at flyshare. com, but it's, and there's a free trial for that, but it's, it's a really engaging sort of system and doesn't, think quite a good job at being able to provide a level of training that helps people prepare for check rides and help them with proficiency too.

Can you do a, could you set up.

into it. Yeah.

Right. So one of the things that we're working towards, so we, then there's two parts of that. One of them is sort of the, the. Oral examination part of that. And no, that part is actually pretty, pretty straightforward and pretty easy to do because, you know, there's some aspect of a question bank, surely has been, you've been talking to Shirley, Shirley has some ideas of things that you're, are your weak points over, over time. And so you can kind of have a conversation and be sort of grilled in the service, similar way that you'd be grilled in person. And, and then there are those maneuvers aspects of it. And the maneuvers aspects of it is what's really neat about the ACS is that it really lays out like the precise parameters, you know, plus or minus 50 feet, you know, of course, they say things in the ACS, like you can temporarily exceed that, you know, these thresholds. But if you consistently exceed them, and that's a, that's a fail. So there's like, there's some soft barriers, and that's actually to be totally, totally. On this, one of the really cool things about using this sort of new AI technology is that it has a lot more of a holistic view on how things are working. And so when you provide this sort of graph that shows how tolerances are exceeded temporarily, et cetera, then you really do get kind of like hear the whole story about, yeah, this is if you're going to focus and you had time to focus on something. This is what you should focus on. But overall, you might like depending on the examiner, then you probably would speak by. And so, you know, there's stuff like that. And, you know, there's so absolutely. That's 1 of the things that we're looking to provide. I think 1 of the major sources of value on top of helping people to prepare. For their particular lessons and and aspects like that. Of course, there's different depending on the equipment that they have. And I think,

Yeah.

maybe we'll get into this a little bit more. There's different things that are probably best suited to help their training at home. You know, a lot of people who are pilots have iPads, probably the majority of them by now or or iPhones. And so there's sort of, you know, equipment amenable to that, you know, the intersection of people who have amazing flight sims that have monitors like wrapping around or VR headsets with like world edge leading kind of gaming computers. That's a much smaller subset of folks, but, you know, there's, there's these sort of interesting opportunities where. You start to be able to expand and sort of the trends in the industry are such that you start to be able to see that really good representative Sims are sort of making it out in the customer's hands. Microsoft Flight Simulator gets better and better, know, as does sort of the number of computers that can run something like X Plane and, you know, There's sort of VR headsets get really a lot cheaper and a lot more accessible. You know, there's other aspects related to, of course, related to AI and also certified sims becoming more affordable and things like that. I think are really interesting trends right now. Yeah, thanks.

those are all sort of, those are all sort of on your, I guess your roadmap target list to investigate how Shirley specifically can enhance that experience. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

so you look at some, some folks, even some streamers, this person named Swiss001, who made a video about Shirley. It's pretty funny. could link it or something, but the, the, The thing that he says is that he got to start by, you know, learning with infinite flight. And so he got interested in being able to fly because he had this iPad app that showed him how to fly. you know, they're sort of, they have a, they have a data interface for sure. They could very easily have a window seat into that sort of experience. don't, you know, their planes, they don't have, they don't have sort of a very interactive sort of FMS or something like that. But they do have sort of like a navigation system and things like that. So there's different levels and it's sort of like also Microsoft lights. And they've been around the Xbox. You know, people can be able to fly using a remote, but or like a game pad. But, you know, they can also attach sort of yolks and things like that to it. you know, you can look at the folks that have sort of a sort of a single monitor or. MacBook Pros now can all run X Plane 12 like really well because they have these amazing processors on them. And, you know, even with this either on the, on the laptop or with the monitor, that makes it a really, really quite reasonable IFR platform for, for training. if you want to be able to do something where you have representative maneuvering, then you either need to get really fancy with the way you sort of map, you know, keys on your yoke for looking left or looking right, or you need to have multiple monitors. But then you can start to use something like explain, which has a really impressive flight model, even for slow flight in order to be able to see kind of realistically touchdowns, takeoffs and be able to some sort of stalls and things like that. And so, you know, there's just, there's just are a total variety of different platforms where, you know, uh, where the application of surely makes some sense where, you know, surely can provide helpless sort of instrument procedures, give you, give you the numbers, help you set up for the approaches, et cetera, sort of judge how you did, where did you break out, you know, where did you knock off? Like things like that. And, and, you know, um, and we're, and we're also looking at how to engage. With, you know, how to bring flight instructors, of course, to are such an important aspect. We really see surely as a, as a tool to help people prepare for those lessons, especially since there is such a pilot shortage, you know, 3000 just in the United States by 2032, given the current trends and

Yeah, huge.

that. They're only getting worse.

Okay, I have a quick layman question here. So if I had a flight simulator right now, which I do not, what kind of guidance does it come with already? Or is, all of a sudden, Fly Shirley like this holy cow moment? You know, my nephew, he's working on his private right now at Cal Baptist. So he takes his checkride in September. Um, but, like, let's say that he gets a flight simulator and he jumps on it and he's not a pilot. Is there any sort of, um, tutorial or information? Like, how do people learn how to fly on a flight simulator besides just game theory and trial and error?

you know, we don't, we don't exist within a vacuum for sure. You know, there's, there's actually a lot of precedent for both, both apps that people can add on for doing training on their, on their sims. And also, of course, the, there's a whole cohort of people who have been doing sort of training content for sims. There's just so many like amazing creators that do this sort of thing. So.

But those would live on YouTube or?

yeah. And so actually a lot of people to be interested in doing Sims things because they were somehow kind of cross marketed on YouTube and had sort of a video that shows up and it's like, Oh, here's this really cool person doing like, you know, beetle VR, which is this amazingly accessible sort of You know, the fighter sort of like but it's really easy to get going. Or somebody sees an X Plane demo where somebody is like, you know, really being super concentrated, flipping switches on, you know, seven, three, seven, or something like that. And people want to get involved with that. And so, you know, what's interesting is that for sure we don't exist within a vacuum, so. There are, you know, there have been historically companies that can provide a sort of standards based, very specific kind of add on that sets you up in a particular maneuver and then looks to see your altitude and sort of like really specifically has these triggers and is just very, very precise and gives you sort of. Like a percentage like score based on whether like how much and how long you were within tolerances. And if you're exactly at 100 percent the entire time, then, you know, then the best, but, you know, so, you know, there was a whole generation prior of people who have been trying to build sort of, you know, tools to help people with training. I think it's been hard to call those sort of teammates because they're not really. You know, interactive or copilots because, you know, there are, there have been sort of historically there's a, a tool called Linda for the explain explain 11 and 12, which is sort of like a copilot that's sort of for the zebo mod, which is the popular kind of mod for a 737 that adds a lot more interactivity and a lot of really cool things and explain, but, you know, what Linda does is be able to sort of You know, you can use basic voice recognition that sort of matches commands like Alexa would in 2024, at least, and be able to basically, you know, flip switches for you and things like that. You know, the, the previous company I was talking about was sort of the. Sort of, sort of kind of laid out sort of, um, parameters is something called, um, take play interactive. Even like Sporty's sells that sort of thing. You know, there are really kind of innovative companies that also sell You know, Sporty's is a good example of that. For instance, they. You know, they are working with infinite flight to try to provide lessons to certain degrees in infinite flight, like they have their own sort of explained scenarios sort of bundle. They, of course, have all their training. I did my instrument sort of ground school with them, and they also sell Microsoft Flight Simulator apparel for what it's worth. But the, the, the interesting thing about some of these opportunities, I would say, in these companies. Is that, you know, they are not as interactive. I mean, fundamentally what's, what's been the new kind of breakthrough with all this AI is that now you can just have natural language. Be able to map into the whole space of possibilities for what you're going to do. And so right now, surely, for instance, you could just, know, for the home flights and market, you can ask Shirley to put down the flats to like bring up the gear to turn off the lights and things like that. Like, you know, all these sort of, sort of, you know, fundamental things. And just by using natural language and you can sort of describe things, you can say, do this and that, and that, and all those things happen. Yeah. Versus, you know, the issue with sort of speech recognition up until this point is that you just literally are translating speech into words,

Right,

not sort of like an understanding layer, whereas as people, we just sort of like hear a bunch of stuff, and then we have like an idea of what already they wanted and sort of like, you know, we walk into a coffee shop, and you could probably mumble some things and get a coffee, and, you know, that's maybe not the sort of deal, just sort of a basic sort of speech recognition. So it's sort of the new, sort of like the new. Um, kind of, uh, standard is to kind of combine speech recognition plus some sort of intelligence.

right.

And that's absolutely what we're doing with Shirley and have sort of a, uh, a leg up on that. Yeah.

Cool.

That's, this is awesome. I'm loving it. I, sorry Bill, I, I ended up getting A complete sinus infection for two weeks after my instrument, which I passed, but I was just terrified of that one. And, you know, as you're talking, it's like, man, something like this would have been so helpful. Just to sit with somebody else by yourself that you know is not a real person that you have to face is going to go. God, that chick's an idiot. So, uh,

Yeah. The

thing

the instrument that can be brutal because

else.

have any random symbol on anything and it's just like, Oh God, I don't, never

Yeah,

the DME arc and all, okay. Yeah. Totally agree.

I don't know if we want to transition to this, but I am so curious. Uh, you had made a comment as to why you started this. What really brought that idea on? Um, I'd love to hear that story.

Yeah. So. Yeah, it was actually a kind of a, a tragic, it was a tragic event, really. I mean, I, a friend of mine crashed his cozy and ended up passing away through that. And you know, when you, when something like that happened, you just sort of get kind of shaken out of whatever you're doing currently. For me, it was sort of, I was running a flight sim team at, at, Um, and Merlin was a great aviation autonomy company in Boston, I sort of saw that there could be an opportunity to make aviation even somewhat safer. And, you know, I don't know, sometimes when you feel really powerless, you just try to figure out something you can

Right.

to help in some way. Right. And so I thought, like, maybe there's some sort of a way to apply this new technology and and be able to see if. Get it make safer and while still appreciating aspects of flight being really worthwhile and fun and sort of, you know, kind of kind of wondrous in a lot of ways. And I think that's 1 of the things that that flying through the eclipse made me remember was was that, you know, you know, Yeah, flying is just incredibly beautiful. We notice it every a lot of a lot of afternoons and evenings when you find in the sunset or something. And so, you know, starting by trying to see, even just from a very direct way, does this actually improve fine? Is there an opportunity to actually make? safer and so things that I noticed immediately for this from a GA context were when there were issues that required digging through a POH could be, you know, 1000 pages long in the case of a DA 42, you know, things that were like, related to numbers that you had to keep on recalling that, you know. You know, might not be able to do if your hands are actually on the controls, or if you're on a pilot, it's maybe unreliable, or if you're in the soup and you don't want to like move your head into weird directions, of opportunities where folks in particular don't necessarily have a teammate a copilot, right? If you're flying up a buddy, or you got a friend, or you can do a lot of this stuff, and that's like, that's pretty great, but, you know, having an opportunity to have. You know, something you talk to about that the flight help you kind of think things through ended up being a pretty useful thing, at least from my perspective, and it'd be pretty be pretty helpful. But you have to make sure that it's safe. There's no exceptions. Like, you have to make sure that. It's not making stuff up. It's not acting wild that it can hear you, that it runs on your phone without melting your phone or making it like immediately drain and die from battery or something like that. And so, you know, starting with sims. And working your way back to flight seemed like the most responsible way to doing that, because, you know, you'd be able to have the advantage of having a huge, a huge cadre of people in the sort of sim land to be able to try out the things that you're building in service of being able to make something work in flight. you know, you'd be able to see whether those you'd be able to see really quickly. People ask, you know, I've learned that people sort of celebrate that surely can talk about sports and things like that. And

Yeah.

know, I see lots of fun stuff, you know. So I learned from Shirley about football formations that like are,

that's funny.

and it's true, you know, Shirley knows about all sorts of stuff because, know, there's a enormous sort of intelligence model behind it and, and so, of course, like, you know, even Shirley can tell you about the best restaurants near the particular airport that you're flying over. Don't expect necessarily that Shirley off the bat would be able to do that on your phone. But, you know, because it has to run offline in your pocket, um, on your dashboard. But, you know, we're kind of building up towards being able to provide things that are safe and also still conversational

Yeah.

it's when, when you're able to have that context, it's able to hear hopefully, or, you know, ideally also be connected into some message to the panel. So there's a lot of things to be figured out. Along along that way. However, I think the sort of the value of having something or certain or surely or something that you talk to while you're flying is is absolutely there, but it takes a lot of work. You got to get it right.

Yeah. Right.

to

takes.

way up.

Um, not only practice um, learning on the model and the, um, intelligence models part, but it's going to take learning and practice from the pilots as well. So if you don't mind, um, I'm going to branch off into a couple of different areas and I'm going to start with the product itself and the, the vast opportunity tonight for me to geek out with you is there, I want to do it on the, on the Aviator and educator side, but I'm going to hold off on that for a second. I want to geek out on the actual product a little bit, if you don't mind. So I'm going to ask you a series of questions that take us down that road. Um, first of all, um, I know this is an overloaded term. You're using a large language model. You're using, uh, you're using an intelligence model. Um, do you call it AI or do you stay away from that overloaded term?

That's a good that's a that's a reasonable question. I think it is, okay, so I think AI has become the suitcase

Yep.

defines the category of things that use large language models, you know, there's a whole kind of, there's a whole cadre of people that go into all sorts of rabbit holes about artificial intelligence, and then they're starting to worry about, you know, plotting robots and things like that, that don't make a lot of sense to me. But. Okay. You know, starting and I think, you know what I'm talking

Yeah.

there's, but there's absolutely something that makes surely a, I mean, you can talk to Shirley about anything that you want and, you know, there's totally the. you know, surely we'll try to bring you back into the light. That's that's really, truly just kind of wants to fly with you and maybe not that you can see some of the videos that creators make and they try to push Charlotte in a different direction. The trouble is like, maybe you want to fly because that could make you feel better and, and trying to kind of get away from like something. But, um, so, know, um, that's kind of my philosophical point on that, you know, And we're not, you know,

You're not against it. You're not against using the term, but you're also not defining the product as just AI. Is that fair?

Right. It surely is your, yeah. I mean, we say it's on our poster. I mean, surely it's your AI co pilot from Sim to

Okay. All right.

so, you know, You know, we're providing a service where surely it can be your co

Perfect. Well,

say something like it's, you know, it's Shirley.

this is the definitive test on if it's AI. Do you use Lisp anywhere in your, in your product?

So,

I couldn't resist. Like I said, I'm an old guy. So,

written, I have written programming languages and compilers and I programmed in a language called Haskell

yes. Yeah. Yeah.

nope, we're not, we're not using

That, that was a joke. I did program in list points, but it was, but it was in college. So that was a long time ago.

We're trying to be a successful

Yeah. Right. Right.

So

All right. I couldn't resist. So a serious question though, how much, how much of your model is running on the edge and how much is, um, bound to the cloud? And how are you, how are you navigating that? I mean, it's a, it's a tough balance.

Yeah. So some of the things that are really interesting about that. So right now, you know, the quickest way to start a company is to, is to use all cloud services in this space for sure. Right now, you know, what we're, what we're doing is we are sort of setting ourselves up to be able to progressively run things more. Offline and sort of what we're beginning with that is to build a system that, know, kind of encourages surely to be a little bit more judicious about replying. You know, 1 of the interesting things about these sort of large models, you look at either, you know, if you go to tattoo, you go to claw or something like that. you ask a question, it's always going to reply to something. And if you say, let's simulate a conversation and you say, okay, thanks. And it says, you know, see ya. And you say bye. And then it says And then you say, okay. And it says, all right, let me know if you have a state. And so like, you know, that can be sort of a mess. And

It's like saying goodbye to your significant other in high school.

You hang up.

Takes all night. No, you hang up. No, you hang up.

Shirley. No, you hang up, Shirley. Enjoy your flight. I am. Yeah. Great. And so, you know, that's, that's something that, you know, you watch them, some videos, you know, there's a. Wonderful channel, virtual aviation aviator, uh, Frank's providing a ton of sort of feedback to us and just, you know, watching his videos. Of course, you learn that things that can be a little bit challenging, like surely being over ambitious about replying. And so, you know, the 1st, kind of the 1st sort of. Segment for building things that go more towards the edge are sort of models that sort of tell us whether or not she needs to reply or not, and things like that. And so, and when and things like that. And so, you know, start with that. And then, you know, of course, the model, which is going to run on on the iPhone is going to run entirely offline. So so that's really good. But I think what's What's neat is the, the amount of progress that these sort of sort of hosted cloud models have been making is just phenomenal. I mean, right now you can almost, uh, you know, right now, surely can totally comprehend these sort of data graphs that we're, that we're providing and there's sort of charts and things like that. And, you know, all sorts of things you find in the AFD that. Just by looking at them, you know, there could be some sort of evidence. So, you know, there's lots of real benefits to using things that exist on, on the cloud, as well as they have really well defined sort of, you know, they are respecting the rights of, you know, users, et cetera, related to privacy and not, not necessarily training on their data. So we could kind of do it in a very judicious way where, you know, um, you know, where we're, where we are, of course, we're collecting some of the text of the conversations, but before we. Do anything with it, you know, we're we're, yeah. Anonymizing it

Yeah.

and you know, sort of hitting it with the past to make sure there's nothing, wild in there. If we kind of encourage users not to share social security numbers and things like that, Shirley, but you know, just 'cause it did then sort of hit it, hit it with that and we'll, we'll also, we're still early. They both figure, figure out a way of letting people sort of opt out. But I think

Right.

is something that people will hopefully opt, to opt into. 'cause we're looking to be able to provide. Sort of training, they were training, but also surely in flight

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

to do that is by being able to use some of these conversations and make something that's really small behave a lot

Right. I mean, these are all kind of typical challenges that you have around AI and, and large language model learning, right? Um, so has latency proven to be somewhat of a, uh, an issue that you're dealing with in your product? Or are you finding that it's not a, it's as big a challenge as maybe it would seem?

latency has been so it's a little bit longer when an image is in the conversation. You know, then it can start to feel like, you know, you're waiting for a second or something

Mm hmm.

but our current latency is something along the line of is less than a second. It's like, you know, 600, 800 milliseconds. it ends up being pretty fast. In fact, you know, one of the, one of the issues and the reason why we're focusing on building something that tells Shirley when to not reply

hmm.

is, is that latency is so low. And so, you know, it ends up being a

Yeah,

very conversational sort of interaction. In fact, the videos that I sent her,

yeah.

on, on doctor, there was no time warping in them and, and, or anything like that. And so. You know, I think people are very, you know, very pleased with the latency. But, you know, there are, there are issues where it's a little too low and so, you know, so, you know, interjecting at the wrong times, you know, things interrupting or things that shouldn't be happening like that. And so we're, we're focusing on, you know, fixing those issues without. Making latency too much, although those might increase the latency temporarily while we sort of figure out how to do that better. So this sort of thing is kind of bread and butter, but you know, it's, it's an important aspect of making a copilot that actually feels like a copilot as opposed to somebody who's the high school, as you say, the high school kind of lover saying goodbye at every time you're having an exchange.

When you're planning On making the version for, uh, actually being in flight. We'll, we'll surely be listening to the radio as well. Will that be the helper that says, Hey, I think they called your, called you and you didn't reply. How's that working?

So, you know, you could see it with some of the existing companies. In fact, that's, you know, there are some very good examples of companies that are providing that you can talk to via bluetooth you're while you're flying and they can listen to you while you're flying. The challenge is if you also want to listen to the intercom, so you have to start to have adapters and things like that. And as a software company, you don't want to get into really the business of building adapters or things like that. You want to use sort of off the shelf adapters and And so, you know, there are some sort of hiccups to doing that. However, you know, I've talked to some avionics makers. very interested in being able to provide high quality transcriptions of things that are happening, you know, over the radio. And so one of the hopes that we have is also through our process of. to develop surely that we can provide something maybe to some avionics makers that would allow them to better do the 2 stage sort of process of 1st speech to text and then sort of like a kind of a rough, like an overview pass and editorial pass of, you know, turning that don't make sense in certain places and the things that make sense. so, you know, if we could sort of provide that along the sort of along the way, I'll provide a lot of value to people being able to just sort of see whether or not something was for you or maybe being able to incorporate a, a directive into your FMS directly or something like that. So there could be a lot of value there

Yeah, that first step is to digitize it, um, and then you can start analyzing it, but I guess taking that first step is where you're at right now.

right.

so how, how does the, uh, intelligence model, uh, behind Shirley specifics about the POH for your airplane, for, for example? how does it, how do you teach Shirley? or how will you in the future, um, so that it's getting the right version of the POH. You can't just get this generically off the internet. It has to be for your serial number, right? It has to be for any number of things. And I've got a follow up question on other data as well that it needs. So go ahead.

absolutely. No, that's that's great. So if we're talking about the version. Of so if you're working with like a flight school and you're trying to give representative training to you know, the students at the flight school, or if you're working with providing a version of an app that then pilots fly with, you have to get the right numbers just sort of, you know, make something up that, you know, I heard on the

It can't be a chat GPT type answer, right? That's, that's what I'm getting at.

right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right. Even though those sorts of answers end up being quite good at sort of a generic case,

Yes.

down like we do, and surely we're just like, oh, you're flying a 172, you're like, okay, 172. Okay, well, it'll be about this, right? So the process that we'll do is to have a place where people can ingest their own checklist,

Perfect.

sort of the POH. We'll have a system that allows somebody just to drop the PDF, of, you know, do a first pass, sort of digitizing that. something, clean it up for them. You're like, here's the sort of information that will appear. If you ask questions, it'll be from here. there's a lot of processes that you can follow in order to make sure that you're getting the right of data. So one of those is, you know, tell the system to not actually give them, give a number because it can just make up a number instead, it'll give sort of the. Sort of index the place inside, like the section number where that number is found. And you sort of like, you know, label that number inside of the POH somewhere. And so you just, it outputs the index and then you, before you speak anything, you go and you grab that information from the actual book. And then, so you can kind of make sure that things are, you know, working appropriately. And so this is the absolute stuff that needs to be done prior to shipping in the

Yep. Yep.

precisely, but also very important to flight schools. Before that ends up, you know, know, shipping out for them, but for sure, it's very important, you know, before getting into the cockpit, one of the things that will also be implementing is, you know, feedback. So somebody has a problem with the number, they're surprised by something is important to be able to capture that and be able to be able to essentially. Incorporate that and say, okay, maybe we should take a look at how this performed. you know, feedback in sort of human

Yeah. And maybe

good,

a safe word, um, when she's leading you astray, right? Like, okay, leave me alone for a while.

The safe word in flyshirley. com right now is by all means, definitely mute.

Oh, okay. Perfect.

is the safe word here.

Excellent. Okay. So my related question then is what about, What about future integration? Maybe you have it now, but I'm guessing future integration with other real time data that might prove handy to assimilate into answers and so on, like ADS B data, GPS data, um, data that's coming from ForeFlight or, you know, things like that. Kind of, how are you taking that into account?

Right. And so we're starting by using this really convenient interface that explained just launched called the web socket

Mm hmm. Mm

not have to install a plugin in order to be able to have data go to Shirley. And so that's been really very convenient. We're looking at releasing an app version of Shirley. You know, there are other, there are other sort of platforms that provide these sort of data streams. So ADS B is a good example, but you can have a data stream from infinite flight, which is the iPad

hmm.

in. Sort of one of the leaders there, you know, you can incorporate surely that way. Of course, in the cockpit, you can have a have the GPS from the sky onto your phone. But of course, you and the altimeter actually. Now there's also altimeters built into into phones. Believe it or not, there's barometric sensors. But yes, the ADS B that comes in has a lot more reliable data. You should use that. One of the things that we've been focusing on as well, and one of the reasons why we are sort of doing this sort of data process is that, so that surely will pay more attention to the particular aviation context. And so one of the things that we've noticed is that existing really big sort of language models are not very good at paying attention to the state of flight. And so even though you might have information related to, of your altitude and your descent rate and, you know, your bank angle and things like this, you know, the system might not fully be appreciating the fact that you're about to land or you already have landed and instead relying more on the story to think about.

Mm hmm.

you've landed or not. And so part of that is that these sort of models like to reason, sometimes you reason best by doing this kind of chain of thought thing. It's like, you know, you could tell it this, you could say something like, okay, surely using the information, the information that you see related to altitude and rate of descent, what would you say? We're in the herd phase of flight. And then it could say something along the lines of. Descent rate is 500 feet per minute. You know, altitude is 500 feet AGL. We're about to land. And, you know, what is really important is to be able to skip those steps and just for sure, to be able to understand that

Yeah.

about to land.

Just

And so bigger and better and badder models

Yeah, right.

able to appreciate those factors, but also by tuning the models using that sort of information, you're able to skip those steps and how

Yeah.

attention to the particulars.

we've, we've got,

opportunities to do this.

sorry, go ahead. Yeah.

Well, there's other opportunities also to do things called multimodal models for, you know, essentially 1 channel is the flight data,

Mm hmm.

then the other channels are the speech. And, you know, you could have two different channels feeding the model so that it all points. It has some concept of, you know, your state of flight that it's generating and also some concept of the story and

Right. And that's kind of what I had in my mind.

it into text land too.

Right. And that's sort of what I had in my mind, because we have the, we have access to these relatively inexpensive adhars and things like that, like in the century, right? So it, that's kind of, is that kind of part of your roadmap is to have that multimodal approach.

and that's 1 of the cool reasons for starting with Sims 2 is because they have all that same

Got it.

You're just getting it streamed from the flight

Exactly.

could absolutely trade to pay attention to this thing, especially for a smaller model, which would have a lot more trouble paying attention to the correct things without tons of prompting, et cetera. And so being able to provide that sort of these sort of pairs and being able to train these certain models to pay attention to their phase of life. That's a, that's a huge

It's very interesting. And you mentioned,

question.

you mentioned these massive models that, you know, they're going to get supermodels and things like that. not the way I thought about those supermodels in high school. It's different. But, um, so I thought you'd like that, Tiffany. Okay. Um, so, so my question then is, I think you're iOS only, right? Today?

So right now we're X Plane

Uh, explain only. Okay.

and so we're, so we're

Running in the browser. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. so you're probably thinking about how this will, um, run in the cockpit and so on. And so I'm wondering how important the, the differences that you're seeing between, you know, the A chips in, in a, in an iPhone versus now, you know, most of the iPads are getting M chips. How important is that to you to be able to do this edge processing? as you go forward, is that going to be a big deal for you like you're you'll be able to fork your or or change your application based on the power that it has. If it's running on an iPad that has an M four in it, it's going to be able to do different things than if it's running on a phone with an alpha chip with an H up, right?

Right. No, I think that's, I think it's massively, I think it's massively important. In fact, this is only the first year where you might have a mobile phone, which is powerful enough in order to be able to run an AI model on it at

Right.

And so, you know, the iPhone pros that exist right now can run AI models that, you know, my iPad here. Can can run, you know, the, the, there's two aspects. One of them has been just sort of making models a lot more efficient

Mm hmm.

packing more punch into these models. So a really good one is one of the smaller sort of these Facebook created a medic rated as models called the llama series of models that are open source. And so you can essentially, you know, start to think about bringing some of those things to mobile and. You know, the, the opportunity there is, is massive. So you can run some of these models already on iPads. The of historical ones are really not that smart. It kind of and confabulate is really the kind of the term of art related to that. And then the ones that you can now run on the iPhone will have to be sort of tuned by us and with the sort of data that we have. That we collect in order to be smart for the task, be able to be relevant for the task. And, you know, the idea is to be able to upgrade when somebody has internet connection,

Right, right.

is really the fundamental. And there's different ways of looking at how to get internet connection. And

And presumably it.

around,

send learning data as well, once they have a connection. Um, I'm guessing, so it's not only going to enhance the

to, it's important.

Go ahead. Sorry, we got a little lag.

It's important to have feedback. It's important to have. No, that's all right. It's important to have feedback on whether or not what somebody experienced was was good or not. And so, you know, of course, you don't want to be exfiltrating all sorts of data while you're in

Right.

know, in fact, that's a lot of what the SIM community is for, is to be able to Yeah. Be able to, to be able to try out some of these things and, you know, be able to ensure that these things are safe. And so I think when I think about flight data, I'm a lot more kind of, know, a little bit more hesitant to think about kind of like kind of sucking that data off the phone, especially if it's all running on somebody's phone and without having to use anything on

Yeah.

on the cloud at all. And, you know, but it is important to have some sort of feedback mechanism. So that really has to be tread very kind of lightly, you know. You know, I ultimately think about how to provide these sort of technologies to, you know, airlines, you know, pilots unions, nobody wants to be able to have that, like, listening to them and their livelihood is on the line. It just, you know, it's

Yeah, you guys, you guys have a lot of

So,

CS questions ahead of you to answer, don't you? Heh heh heh heh.

really fun

Yeah.

like. A combination somehow now, as a, as a grown up now, I get to say that I'm combining a lot of interest for the aviation with computer science you know, if there's other people out there that are see this as an interesting opportunity, they should reach out,

We're,

if they're on these

we're really in front of that hockey stick curve, aren't we? I mean, we're just in the infancy of all of this.

I think that's what makes it such a fun time to be building things. And, you know, our favorite thing is to be able to work with customers directly. And so, No, we have our discord channel where it's really exciting to see people chime in. It's airplane dot team slash discord if you want to get on

All right.

but the, the people who join, you know, we end up interacting and, and, and, you know, sometimes they're willing to hop on a phone call and give us some feedback. Sometimes they're posting YouTube videos about things and, you know, that they experienced a Shirley, you know, flights through New York or, you know, Different experiences were surely or kind of funny videos for, you know, sinfluencers, which I think is an awesome subcategory of the internet influencers. It's amazing. And so, so we learned so much from that. And I think there's just the enthusiasm in this space to see people really enjoying using their sins and seeing what's possible in sense. I mean, there's a lot of really interesting companies that are, that are shipping things for For, for Sims now, you know, you have like the ATC land and you have sort of, you know, same tensions and beyond ATC, P2ATC, which are using all this AI stuff to be able to enable really good ATC. You know, it's, it's. amazing time to be kind of building and also being a flight simmer. And, and so, yeah, it just couldn't be, couldn't be any more fun if I could think about it.

All right. Well, I, I've, um, exhausted the, the geek out portion on the product. So I'm going to, um, I'm going to give Tiffany a chance to ask some of her pent up questions that I know she's got. And then I want to really kind of geek out on the, uh, aviation learning side of this. I've got some questions about that too. So go ahead,

I think all my questions were answered.

Oh, good. All right. All right. Well, um, got a few then. Um, we've talked a little bit about how, uh, Shirley could be used in the training environment. I would love to hear your thoughts go a little bit deeper into how Shirley would integrate, uh, and I mean this in a non technical way, but integrate with a human CFI to augment the training environment. Uh, and enhance what they're doing with a, with a student or with a, a client who's doing some advanced training,

Yeah, that's a great question. so we see, just to be clear again and reiterate, like, we see Shirley as being a supplement to professional instruction. You know, there's a portion of, uh, practice that surely can provide a lot of value and it's actually pretty good, but, you know, there are so many conceptual things that only a really a human can

Yeah.

can see. And plus, there'll be things that surely does miss and, and, and. There'll be opportunities to to enhance sort of, you know, some of the some of the style. And if the, you know, are also unknown unknowns related to some aspects of this of this training, but, you know, what is really valuable about it is being able to show up prepared for your lesson and to be able to do fine. You know, you're. You know, you might have missed a week with your instructor due to weather or somebody got And now you're like looking at potentially needing to repeat a lesson or you just went out and did some training with an instructor and you had these deficiencies. You need sort of this retraining or, you know, in a, you know, you started with your PPL, you had these maneuvers, you know, you were a little bit, you're kind of bad at terms about a point. And now you're going to go, you know, you got your IFR, you're really like book smart, you got your IFR real easy. And now you're back in commercial land. You got, it's on pylons and you're just like, Oh, goodness gracious. And you're struggling. And so, you know, maybe for somebody who is having an integrated sort of training program that includes Shirley, then they could have some sort of knowledge that. Yes, actually, in PPL time, you were pretty deficient these sort of areas. In fact, you might want to actually put some extra, extra energy into them before you go out and start working on these eights on pylons or between your instrument or,

Mm.

know, after you get your instrument, make out an airplane or do it or do it in the sim. And so some level of integration that you would want to have, you know, maybe between your, your four flight pilot sort of logbook. You know, there's. Some people who take the logs real seriously inside of the electronic log books. Some people don't take them quite as seriously as, as the opportunity with the actual paper log book, because there's a, there's a flight track and things like that associated with it. Electronic logbook. Sometimes you feel like it might maybe not be, uh, might not be as but for, uh, if that data is there, then it would be really good to be able to grab

hmm.

able to provide that to Shirley as part of your sort of private pilot sort of preparation and have, you know, your pilot notes related to, you know, what did you feel like you did right and did wrong and what areas that surely believe that you might need a little bit of more practice on. Include those in sort of a logbook that's integrated between your real flying and your virtual flying and be able to help people become a lot more prepared and then to have, you know, instructors be able to kind of be able to try this stuff out. Maybe they already used it themselves, or maybe they have heard about it and just think it's maybe worthwhile just to have, you know, if you're tired at the end of the day, or like, and you and what your setup is, if you have like a yoke and You know, you're a laptop and now you have to like go to your desk in order to like plug, plug it in. It's like, you're kind of tired. It'd be nice to have somebody like provide or

Mm hmm.

a little bit of extra to get you, to get you over that sort of line. And so you sort of show up and Shirley's like, like, let's go, you're ready to do blah, blah, blah. And you're like, all right, like, I'm, I'm just there enough to be able to practice

Yeah. Mm hmm.

like at 125 percent as usual. And so with that in mind, there are different sort of styles of training and different styles of learning and teaching. And I think one of the one of the interesting things with Shirley is that what people don't know is that they can. You know, if they're not enjoying, or if it's not working for them in a particular way, you can actually just tell Shirley to do it differently. And Shirley will actually do something differently. You can just ask for a different sort of approach to working with you. So, you know, there is some opportunity of Shirley's is getting that last word in too much to be like, Hey, can you just like not do

Just

or mute so that, Oh, we're not doing this.

from the old Saturday Night Live days. You could, you could have her respond appropriately to Simodana. Simodana.

Yeah.

All right.

Yeah, you

so do you see,

And

do you, resist. You might be a little too young for that, Alex, but you might not remember that. Um, but do you, do you see,

No,

what's that?

said me. Not too

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, do you see maybe a future where there could be a, almost a three way collaboration between a professional CFI?

Yes.

the learner and surely where there's feedback going both ways, um, kind of from what the learner may have done on their own in solo practice, kind of some of that feedback, making it to the CFI to help the CFI understand where to put emphasis and things like that. Do you see that kind of in the future as well?

Right. So in fact, I at Oshkosh this year, I met a company called Noble Flights, and they make these really cool sort of SR 22 SR sort of home flight sins that are advanced aviation training devices. So if you own

Really?

you could actually have it in your house and be able to have sort of instrument proficiency. You know, you have a, they have like a, it's like a 20 to 40 to 50, 000 piece of kit.

Yeah.

you know, it's, it's an

Well, they're also flying a million dollar airplane. So,

Yeah.

yeah, yeah. Those are pretty expensive too. But, you know, one of the interesting things that they are thinking about is how to provide some level of remote instruction.

Oh yeah.

so there is a really big, big opportunity. In fact, there are some companies right now that already provide. You know, there's one flight sim coach that provides remote instruction between that I don't endorse. I don't, I'm not personally familiar with them, but you know, it's, it is a company that where you, uh, and I don't not endorse it for the record. It

Yeah, yeah, right.

company. That's out there that provides

You don't know enough about it. So yes, I got it.

know enough about it, but like the, um, but it's really, it's a really cool concept where you have an instructor who's able to join you in a simulation session. Now if you combine that, a few things you combine in here, you combine a, a A AI sort of, uh, you provide, surely provide some level of instruction and then you have the ability to kind of connect in an instructor to be able to provide sort of the verification of how somebody is actually doing in their progress. And you sort of have a really neat combination, the sort of thing that we were talking about in the kind of commercial spectrum, which would be really useful for them, but also something that could provide sort of a combination, you know. You don't necessarily get home and you don't necessarily have something scheduled with somebody. We want to practice. And so surely is really good because you don't really, you can just sort of show up and truly is ready. And then, you know, there's a opportunity, of course, to be able to provide that sort of connection. And so a lot of our technology that is able a lot of our technology that provides the sort of connection with Shirley and the individualist technology that could be able to provide that sort of session between. An individual and another individual. And that's something we're really excited to be able to do, because, you know, not and not just in, you know, and to varying degrees as well. So you'd be able to have theoretically at at its extreme. You think about to a logical conclusion, you have a VR headset that somebody you're sitting inside the airplane. You're able to interact with all the controls. You have an instructor to actually sit next to you in sort of this virtual space inside of. Your airplane and be able to sort of see you as you're doing these sort of things. I think this would be this is sort of the logical conclusion where things can go. You send the VR headset to somebody. Surely you can help get them prepared to be familiar with this airplane. You have an instructor join them next to them inside of the cockpit. And be able to verify that they know how to operate this vehicle. And so this is absolutely where this sort of our kind of our part of our ground game vision of how we bring sort of advanced training and make it a lot more accessible and representative to all sorts of flight between maneuvers to sort of flight training device style, sort of instrument training and et cetera, et cetera. And. And looking, and looking to do that as part of supply, surely, So that's a, that's a great and relevant question.

Cool. Um, so, um, as it pertains to teaching, uh, one of the, one of the things that keeps coming up in my mind is that, um, this is super ambitious, right? So where we met, Um, there's a, there's another company, you know, doing a co pilot, um, sort of approach and we're actually going to be,

yeah,

Goose, we're going to actually be talking to them in a couple of weeks, um, for, for the same reasons, this is all very interesting, um, what they're doing is, is much more, um, would say focused on a very specific use case of your co pilot in the cockpit, whereas you're taking the approach of being sort of, you know, A lot of different things to a pilot, to a simmer, to a pilot, to a learner, to somebody who's flying. It's very, very ambitious. Um, how do you, do you balance what you're doing with what you can deliver right now? How, how's that going? And, and how are you walking that line?

I think that's an insightful question for two reasons. One of them is that a, it's realistic to be able to only, it's, it's realistic to say, Hey, you're looking at doing this entire scope of things, what can you actually cut off? But I think there's another sort of conceptual reason why that's an insightful question is that it's actually challenging if you're a. Individual hearing about what we're doing. It could be challenging to think, okay, how does this fit into my life in particular?

Um, yeah.

you know, I think, yeah, and so I think there's, there's, there's a few different ways. And I'll try to get back to the question. Also, of, you know, how are we balancing it long term as well? And so the to the former question, the, the thing that we provide right now is a copilot that connects into your flights in. Okay. And can, you can either fly with and sort of an open sort of setting. It's not just a deadhead. It flips switches. It interacts with the SIM for you. It can be sort of a. Kind of a co pilot, it's your buddy,

co pilot. Yeah.

pretty

Right. Yeah.

And the other aspect that we're working on right now is through our challenges system. And so we have this sort of concept that we're building off of, which is challenges. Challenges have enabled us to build sort of fun experiences from the Aaliyah sort of training challenge to also our entire kind of training curriculum. And so what we're providing and what we're hoping to get feedback on in part through conversations like this is to have pilots try out this sort of private pilot curriculum and see if it's meeting their needs and be able to get feedback. And so, you know, it, it, it would be fair to say right now that surely is, In early adopters product, so it is absolutely fair to say that, you know, you try. Surely it works. The product works, but there are that you can provide feedback on. And then within a day or two, we go and we build it you provide that sort of feedback. And you have this sort of iteration process, you know, we're talking August 20th 2024. Hopefully in a few months will be through that sort of process with the private pilot curriculum. Just like we're starting to get through that process related to some of the co pilot stuff

Yeah.

right now. And, you know, we'll continue to do that. You know, we're working with a company that has a few hundred And so we'll be getting feedback with them using our product to see how they fly with Shirley. A lot of those people are becoming pilots as well. we're working to develop this product as a startup company. There are your major prerogative is to grow.

Yes.

so you kind of are like this little silkworm, you're like trying to find light and you're like

Yeah.

kind of put energy into what works and like, maybe don't worry too much about what's, you know, about things that are not really working and it's kind of like you water the

Or the,

growing as opposed to the

yeah, you got to figure out a way to make revenue, right?

garden. That

That's not always that clear. It's not always that clear when you're doing something conceptual like this. It's like, okay, well, where does the revenue come from? It's, it's not that easy of a question to answer.

And so what we ended up doing is we, we really closely with the customers that we have. And so we ended up having these really close customer relationships where we find out things that are important. We watched the videos that they're posting, if they're streamers. know, and then we end up figuring out how to make their lives better. Fundamentally trying to build something that people want. I think it is still very insightful to be able to say that there are, there are a huge number of things that this, that this could be, and there are a huge number of things that we're building towards. I think we're in an excellent position to be able to start with these really of large group of enthusiastic home flight sim users, help them bridge from sim to sky. And. Be able to provide training and integrate with other sort of training platforms and curriculum to help them be kind of having a one stop shop that could help them get into the cockpit. And with the idea that people who trained with Shirley would want to fly with Shirley and the actual, an actual airplane because they would have had this experience. And so I think, I think there is a path from sin to sky that makes sense for a company. It was sort of the data pipelines and things like this that. It's set up really nicely to make this all sort of possible. Yeah, but if you're a customer today, the question is, you know, if you have, if you have explained August 20th, 2024, if you have explained and. You are interested in flying with Shirley, and you're interested in training, and it's a great time to get involved. You know, it's a great time to join the discord and interact. And as we sort of build this out, and we're excited to have more people to to work with and learn what to learn more about what, you know, what customers want and sort of build something directly on that. Yeah.

Okay. So I'm going to ask a really, um, selfish, selfish question, but maybe this will extrapolate to, um, uh, to many of your future customers. Um, I think it will. I'm kind of an everyman. So when, when you and I first started talking about how Fly with Shirley could be used in a training environment, my, my brain started going to all sorts of places that would help me specifically and maybe to other people. Like I said, um, when I'm studying, for a rating for, test for, you know, for a check ride, an oral, whatever, or maybe I'm just, you know, doing some instrument, um, you know, some approaches and I start to ask myself some questions. I'll spend the next hour to two hours diving into the aim and into the, the FARs and trying to find answers to my questions. So the first thing that popped into my mind is I would love to have a resource that's so aviation specific like this that I could ask questions or have a conversation. Is something like, um, off the top of my head, um, what, what does a, uh, what does a vertical descent point look like on a chart? And it can show me, or it might be, you know, you explain the differences between these two approaches? Or, um, remind me what the three different types, maybe it's four, I don't know, the three different types of night, uh, are, I, I'm trying, I'm trying to think of examples, that's probably not the best example, because that's pretty easy to look up, but I'm trying to think of examples where you would want to get specific with Shirley on things that you're not going to get from an internet, internet search, because what you're going to get from an internet, internet. An internet search is a bunch of different opinions, maybe a podcast, maybe a YouTube video that's on the subject, you know, that sort of thing. But I might want Shirley to help guide me in the research I would have done anyway and help me do it faster. So in other words, it, it pulls together the answer, but then points to the resources so that I can quickly go the FAR. you know, that specific section and see in the AIM, the chart that they have, you know, that sort of thing. I hope I'm getting across what I'm asking. Is, is that something you're thinking about?

Right. And so, cool. I think there are absolutely aspects of that that we're thinking about, you know, when you start to think about how Shirley can provide a virtual check ride.

Mm hmm.

there are questions you'd want to be able to ask related to that.

Yes.

And then if the D. P. says, well, I actually don't really know the answer. You tell me that that doesn't really sort of scratch the itch that you're

Right.

about here. What I what I will say is that, you know, plan to back up and surely with all all the references from, you know, the. You know, the, the far, of course, the firing and all these sort of

Yeah.

the handbooks, all the flying handbooks, the P. O. H. is, et cetera. There are, there are sort of like. where you have sort of like FAA legal department decision papers

Yes.

you know, what

The legal opinions and stuff. Yeah.

who's, just like you get into that absolute wild land of, you know, questions that I think are really good questions or the sort of questions that I used to, Get crickets to and I'd

Yep.

on our sort of discussion forum be like, ah, who cares? Like, why are you like, you know, or this is like such a specific IFR question related to, you know, philosophers does not, you know, these are the sort of like very. Kind of insightful questions that need to be kind of built through,

I've got some logging questions

the,

right now. Here I am, um, I've been a private pilot for 15 years or something like that. And here I am at the commercial level and about to finish my CFI. I was looking at my logbook the other day, about ready to enter some stuff. And I'm hitting situations where I'm going, I don't actually know the proper way to log this. Like, it's not your typical, like, I've got a safety pilot situation or, uh, I, I won't go into details, but my point is I would love to have a resource because I even know that most of my instructors that I know are probably going to go, yeah, I don't know. it would be amazing to have a resource that would help you. discover the answer for yourself by walking you along a path. Well, I don't know. Good question. Let's look at this. Well, what about this? And you know, it's, it would just be incredible to have a resource like that. You know?

I think that there are, I think that this could be in the good wheelhouse for companies that are providing sort of ground

Yeah, that's true.

materials,

point. Yeah.

able to give some sort of insights related to some of these questions, you know, I think with the thing with the format of Shirley currently, you know, And as much as we were just talking about how we were intending surely to be everything to

Right. Right. You've got to, you've got to put a limit somewhere, right?

Yeah.

we're, we're bridging from SIM to sky, but we're looking to basically be the co pilot sort of setting. So surely is your co pilot friend sitting next to you in the cockpit who can also provide some level of training and instruction, not necessarily going to like write up that has references to things, although like I will say that, you know, We'll come back to you and be able to get and get your feedback on that. And, and, and. In some time, let's say, you

Yeah. Yeah.

let's say you are, you're, you're, you're saying probably resonates with what a lot of other students experience, which is, you know, really stumper questions that are super hard. You

Yeah.

fact, I've met some people who are working on these sort of written based sort of like, you type it out, your question, and then it's like providing.

Oh yeah.

of feedback. I met somebody like that at, actually at, at Oshkosh. I wish I had his card at the top of my mind. again, another person that I haven't tried there. I mean, I barely tried their stuff and, you know, it seems cool. We should check it out type of deal, but the. The, the, the solution there, I think, is, um, is a kind of thing that spits out text that's permanent, that has references, and is a very bulk

Interesting. Yeah.

do

Yeah.

be part of a one stop, and that's a, and that is an event, that is a place where AI can take a lot of advantage. You know, what we'd like to be able to do is be able to talk to you about those sort of things, pull in the relevant information so that while you're kind of having this discourse, that could be an important thing or take a note for you to be able to look that sort of thing up because you might be flying an approach and you're like, my goodness, what the heck is

Yep.

And,

Yep.

you know, you want to remember that later. And so you'll be able to have that as sort of a flight note that then ends up in your, you know, inside of your

Yeah. Yeah. Great idea.

items

Great idea. Yeah.

think it's really cool to be able to think about Shirley as being part of a one stop shop related to some level of ground, like ground instruction. You have a ground instruction integrated with. A, um, you know, you have ground destruction, really integrated with private pilot maneuvers, integrated with private pilot sort of checks your check ride preparation. And so, you know, I think it is conceivable that we could get into building a whole learning management system that provides a

Yeah.

This sort of text based thing, but we're not doing

Right. Right. Right. Right.

you know, I think, that needs to be seen. So I will be the exception to say that we're not saying that we're everything to everybody,

Awesome.

that's my

Look, we came full, we came full circle on that. Look at that.

That's right. Yeah.

Did you say when, what year you started this? Was it? I see March 24 on your LinkedIn.

Yes. March, 2024.

It's brand new. They're, they're at their first MVP basically. Well, a little past it now, but.

So flights in Mexico was our was our MVP. That was in July. so at the beginning of July, um, and so, yeah, we've just been

Wow.

a couple months now. And so, yeah, anyway,

Excellent. Well,

exciting.

it is very

it's

and it's, it's, It's hard to comprehend sometimes where all of this can go, uh, but we certainly appreciate your time helping bend our brains a little bit around, around the possibilities. And because I know you've been thinking about this a lot more than we have. So we do

well, and I

been my

time.

I could be wrong. I know we at least used to hang out with the, the ForeFlight guys or they were kind of in that circle and it was this tiny little startup and like no one's ever going to let you use your phone in the closet and look at it now.

And look at

this is, it's really exciting to see this.

Well, and they're, and they're starting to use, I mean, it's a totally different thing, but they're starting to use big data as well. Um, you know, they're, they're pulling data from those adhars in the centuries to be able to do automatic pyreps on turbulence. You know, and so they're using, they're using models to filter out, operations so that they can see where, um, turbulence is happening. They know the airplane, you know, they know the type, they know the weight of the airplane. They know exactly where it's at. They know what altitude it's at. They know what direction it's heading. they're filtering out normal movement, normal airplane movement. And what they're left with is That was turbulence, and that, this is the level of that turbulence. That's, that's pretty incredible stuff. I mean, it's totally different than what you're doing, but the idea of being able to take, um, large amounts of data from a lot of different places and, and give real time insights to users of the application, it's really amazing what, what we're going to be able to do over the next, you know, 10, 15 years.

I'm going to say that there are so many. You know, the, these companies that started in the last generation of product, whereas essentially, you know, we have these new iPhones and iPads, how can we bring charts to them and then also make pilots lives a lot better? Those things have gotten so good. I

Yep.

look at ForeFlight, it's just an amazing piece of technology. It has all the data possible on an entire world. And now what's really neat about this sort of technological transition is that there are all these really cool companies that exist. let's sort of look about this next generation. So you have, you know, if you have goose is a

Mm hmm.

of that. You have sort of the same intentions. be on to see, you know, you have, you know, you have surely in this sort of category of being able to provide training and eventually be able to get back into a cockpit. Something that's pretty conversational. You have companies like. You know, loft dynamics, which are making sort of, you know, VR certified Sims or maybe 30, like divide by 20, the

A

right.

Sims. And, you know, it's just an incredible time. I would say to be a, a pilot, a simmer, a flight school, just so many things are gonna be a

startup?

and,

A startup

and a

let let's face it though. It's always a great time to be a pilot.

It's true.

It's always a good time to be a pilot. Yeah,

couldn't resist. Excellent. Oh, this is, this

good to have.

has been really fun and really, really enlightening. So Alex, wonderful time. We appreciate it. We've held you long enough. Um, so we'll let you go. Anything that we forgot to ask or didn't ask that we should have. You want to make sure we cover

it just, well, it just encouraged folks that they can, you know, follow along with what we're up to over at airplane. team slash discord or slash blog. If they're curious, you know, we, we love pilots. We love Simmers. talking to our customers, you know, it's, it's, It's real important to us that pilots and aviators and instructors continue to We want to see more people becoming pilots. We really care about this entire industry. I love flying and, you know, just want to wish everybody to fly safe. It's been really good talking to you, Bill and Tiffany.

beautiful.

awesome. Thank you so much, Alex. This was great. We look forward to seeing you at Oshkosh next year. Are you going to have a booth?

Likewise. I think we'd like to probably figure out something like that the next

Yeah. Excellent.

it's probably going to be a good time.

I think so.

Well, thanks again.