In this episode we speak with Andrew Clare, CEO of Elroy Air, which builds the Chaparral, an autonomous hybrid-electric VTOL that hauls cargo in detachable pods for middle-mile commercial and defense logistics. Elroy is a 10-year-old company built on three then-unpopular bets: cargo over passengers, hybrid-electric over pure battery, and autonomous over piloted. Andrew, formerly CTO of Nuro, joined to turn that foundation into a scaled business, and the company has since demonstrated its transition flight, signed a US manufacturing deal with Kratos and a $200 million JV with Barq in the UAE, won a slot in the White House eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, and announced plans to go public near a billion-dollar valuation.

Most of the conversation was about what it takes to get from a working aircraft to a deployed logistics system, and why Andrew believes autonomous cargo scales well before passenger aviation. He argues one pod-based platform can serve a FedEx milk run, an Army resupply, and an ISR mission, that hybrid-electric is the only way to get useful payload and range without field charging infrastructure, and that defense demand is surging because contested logistics has become a requirement. We pushed on why a clean-sheet VTOL beats autonomy bolted onto a proven Caravan, how the automotive data-flywheel intuition transfers to a domain with far fewer cycles, and where the moat sits once hybrid-electric and autonomy are no longer contrarian. Andrew was most candid about the road ahead, from scaling production to hardening the aircraft for contested, GPS-denied operations alongside the Army.

In this episode we speak with Lauren Flanagan, CEO of Sesame Solar, which builds mobile nanogrids. The product is a self-contained unit that generates its own power from solar, batteries, and stored hydrogen, set up by one person in fifteen minutes. The company started in emergency response and extreme weather, and has moved increasingly into defense. The newer focus, and the one we spent most of the episode on, is using these nanogrids to refuel hydrogen drones in the field.

Most of the conversation was about whether that case holds up. Lauren's argument is that contested logistics have changed the math: fuel at the edge can run a thousand dollars a gallon all-in, the resupply convoy is a target, and the real cost is the lives spent guarding it, so making power where you stand becomes a strategic question rather than an efficiency one. We pushed on the parts that are harder to defend, the energy losses on the hydrogen path versus batteries, how thick the market for long-endurance hydrogen-powered flight actually is, and how you get from a fifty-day reserve to a six-month operational promise that's still backed by simulation rather than field data. Lauren was candid about what's proven and what isn't, and about which problems are physics and which are just adoption friction.

Libby Bahat returns to The Vertical Space. Last time we talked to him about building an airspace for drones in peacetime. This time he's the regulator who decides whether a 777 full of people lands in a country under missile fire. As Head of the Aerial Infrastructure Department at the Israel Civil Aviation Authority, Libby is one of a small number of people anywhere who has had to build a quantitative framework, debris models, interception zones, penetration probabilities, that lets a civil aviation authority make its own war risk call. Most regulators don't have to do this. Israel does, and Libby is the guy.

We spent most of the conversation not on the war but on the judgment underneath it: where the numbers actually come from, how wide the error bars really are, the levers a CAA actually controls, the friendly-fire failure mode etc. Libby was honest about what he wishes he had ("I wish I had a criteria, like an engineer, very specific numbers") and about what he doesn't get to have. It's a rare look at how a serious regulator reasons when the only data point that would prove him wrong is the one he's organized his entire career to never see.