Chris Yip  0:06  
Welcome to Tell Me More: Coffee with Chris Yip, the official podcast of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering at the University of Toronto. Each month, I sit down with someone from our vibrant global community to talk about what places them at the heart of designing bold solutions for a better world. You'll meet alumni, students and professors who are making a difference across a range of fields, including some where you may not expect to find them.

So my guest today is Kristina Menton, immediately, actually, literally, immediately, after graduating from our mechanical engineering program she was recruited by what would become Pivotal, a company that is changing the face of aviation. Today she is the company's chief operating officer and head of flight, leading the development of new kinds of personal aircraft, such as the Black Fly and the Helix. She has also stayed involved with U of T Engineering and most recently as a guest lecturer. Kristina, welcome to the podcast.

Kristina Menton  1:02  
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Chris Yip  1:05  
So we always start this conversation kind of with a classic, right? You know, where did you grow up? And all kinds of, so how did you get into engineering? So, so maybe we'll start there.

Kristina Menton  1:14  
Yeah, so I always like math and science. I really excelled at math and science and found an interest in them. There's no engineers in my family, and I didn't know what engineering was. When I was in the 11th grade, I thought that a mechanical engineer worked at the the auto shop and fixed cars, but it was only through talking to high school teachers, guidance counselors and some of my parents friends to kind of understand the difference between what would taking a degree in physics look like, and what would a degree in engineering look like, and which one is more aligned with opportunities for the future, as well as my interest and skillset. So it was pretty difficult for me to select what degree to actually take and I actually started at the University of Toronto in engineering science, switching into Track One general engineering, and then finally switching into mechanical engineering. So really narrowing down choices has been a struggle of mine, and something that I've worked to become skillful at, but I'm abundantly happy with the mechanical engineering degree that I gotfrom the University of Toronto and the experiences that I had, and it turned out to be the really best choice for myself.

Chris Yip  2:24  
So undergrad is a fun time. Give me a sense of like what was some of the experiences you did during undergrad? PEY, design teams, things like that.

Speaker 1  2:34  
A lot of the classes that had either labs or large open-ended group projects were the ones that stood out to me. So whether that was solid mechanics or thefourth year capstone project, really being able to dive into not just the theoretical physics, but also the practical applications. So University of Toronto has some of the best labs in the whole world, and being able to have access to those experiments was a huge highlight for me. Sometimes it resulted in writing, you know, 12 to 20 page lab reports, which was less of a highlight, but the actual involved and getting your hands in there is something that really led me to what I'm doing right now. And of course, you mentioned the PEY program, going to Switzerland for a job at Alstom Power to be able to be in the laboratory doing research on gas turbines for a year in between my third and fourth year was absolutely a highlight.

Chris Yip  3:28  
Yeah, so tell me a little bit more about that. I mean, usually people think about puis or internships they sort of stay in Canada as opposed to going abroad. How did well, how did you find the company? What were the drivers and how was that experience?

Speaker 1  3:43  
I worked for Alstom Power in Switzerland, and it was due to a positive externality that I had not considered when joining U of T was really how wide the alumni network is. So there is an alumni from the University of Toronto who works at Alstom Power in Switzerland. And so because of that connection, they had a connection back to the University of Toronto, and they had hired students for this PEY program year after year. So I knew that this job existed, and I knew that there was a high likelihood that they would be hiring a new student for the next PEY year. And so I really worked hard to get my resume and interview skills and waited, because it's actually one of the later interviews. So I waited for them to come along with this job posting, and was lucky enough to be selected and went to Switzerland for a year to do that research.

Chris Yip  4:32  
That's cool. This is something we really love to leverage, right? Is our alumni network. So you leveraged, or you knew about this alum who had this opportunity at Alstom, but that's not how you ended up at Pivotal. Can you tell us a little bit about how that worked?

Kristina Menton  4:46  
Absolutely. So actually, rolling back a little bit before I did a PEY, I worked at Pratt & Whitney, and that was first entry into aviation. It was the most exciting job opportunity. I knew that aviation is a small industry, it's extremely competitive. A lot of the jobs are in the US but nevertheless, I love airplanes, and I just love the aerospace, the fluid dynamics and the idea and excitement associated with putting something safely up into the sky. And so when I was in my fourth year, I was considering what to do next, and happened to actually come across a classmate of mine who had been part of the solar race car team, and I was part of the solar race car team for my capstone project. I did some composites with them, and she had been reached out to the founder of what is now named Pivotal, Marcus Lang. So he graduated from the University of Toronto decades ago, and had this secret stealth project that he started to design in Cobourg, Ontario, in his basement, starting with electric propulsion, working on IMU technology, battery technology, and ultimately building the world's first electric vertical takeoff and landing airplane in his basement. It was not safe and not redundant, but it really proved that the technology was possible. And so after doing that first design, he then started to build a team in stealth. So he actually reached out to the University of Toronto, to different professors and to specifically the solar race car team, to get references to people who had graduated, had hands on work experience and could solve really tough challenges. So he hired Eleanor and myself as Eleanor was joined the team to lead manufacturing, and I joined to lead all of mechanical design and propulsion. So really took a leap of faith at that point. I thought I would enter into the kind of typical path of going to a large company like Bombardier, starting as an engineer in training and working my way up the ladder. Startup companies were not on my radar, and something that some of my classmates were interested in, but I wasn't at the time. But this company sounded like an enormous challenge in the aerospace environment that had to do with future types of technology that were more sustainable than typical combustion where I had worked before, so it seemed like an opportunity that I shouldn't give up, that maybe it'll last six months, maybe it'll last a year. I did not think it would last 10. It's been incredibly humbling to work on such a challenging project and a challenging team, but also I've grown in ways that I couldn't have ever imagined.

Chris Yip  7:25  
When you and Eleanor were hired at that point, how big was what is now pivotal?

Speaker 1  7:30  
It was about 10 engineers. So we had Marcus. Marcus was an incredible designer and inventor, and really it was about 10 of us. So it was very close knit. There was not a technical expert in every field. We really had to solve problems independently and get advice and advisors outside in the field where necessary. And it was we were in the phase of, you know, build things, break things, and, you know, take on all of the hard challenges first to see if this technology was even possible. There were so many things we had to invent, so many technical problems that we had to solve to prove that this was actually a business case and that there was a technology that was viable to be built in this area. I was in Ontario. It had moved to California about six months before I joined and I moved into California and naively thought that the whole state was like Los Angeles, so I immediately had to have my parents and friends ship blankets and sweaters and more cold weather clothes, because I did not know that San Francisco was quite a bit more temperate than Los Angeles. 

Chris Yip  8:37  
What I love about that story was, I think the fact that it was, it was the design team, right? That was kind of the nuclear for this. And companies, you know, they're reaching to those design teams, right? Because they realize the skill sets that they're developing are actually residing within the teams themselves.

Speaker 1  8:56  
Exactly, I found that can be consistently true when I'm hiring. So looking at engineering students who have recently graduated, whether it's from an undergraduate degree or a master's degree, the ones who have done something like a PEY or multiple different internships and have actually had to build something, gives you more of an appreciation of the difficulty of design for manufacturing and also, kind of the bravery and the courage to get in there and actually try and to kind of fail once or twice, go back to the drawing board and iterate. Because if you're just working on the theoretical side, or you just do the initial design concept, you don't really necessarily see the depth of the flaws that could be there and how much better it could be when you design it, build it, get your hands dirty, and then try again. So people who have experience from whether it's a rocket team or solar race car team or FSAE, I think that really builds a lot of courage in...courage, as well as humility in graduates.

Chris Yip  9:57  
All right. So as you said, you moved to the company, which was originally called Opener and has now changed to Pivotal. What is, what is its product? What are you guys working on?

Speaker 1  10:08  
So I joined the company in 2015 and at the time we had one carbon fiber strutted vehicle. It had eight propulsion systems and 200 pounds of steel with the flight controllers right there in the middle, couldn't carry a person and could kind of hover. It was very difficult to control but the ultimate mission, which is still the mission today, is, can we build strong, mighty, safe, small, electric, vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that could be used for everyday people to access the skies, improve their transportation, and really save time and money. At the time Pivotal, had this idea that we think this is possible. Marcus made one in his basement, and then he flew in it. All we need is a team to figure out, how do we make this safer, more reliable, scalable, and something that we can really sell to the the industry. So we can sell it within the part 103, category in the US, within the ultralight category in Canada, which is a category that exists within the regulatory framework today, without any changes for us to build, sell and operate this type of aircraft. So that's one of the reasons why we kept the aircraft so small. I think everyone asks, why not a two seater? Why not a bigger airplane? And the real reason is because, 10 years ago, the FAA had no way and Transport Canada had no way to sell, certify or operate an aircraft like that. At the time, the regulators were saying it would be three to five years that was 10 years ago, and we still don't have a category that exists today. There have been steps that have been taken. So I do see a future where there are categories for larger aircraft, but right now, we're in this incredible position where we've delivered aircraft. We there are 10s of people across the US who have a black fly or helix at home, who are sending me text messages and emails about how much they love the product and how much they just want to be part of the company and advocate for us, so more people can understand what this technology can really do for them and how it can change the world. So in that early stage, it was a lot of design, a lot of challenging iteration and a lot of pivots, of is this the type of propeller we're going to use? Can we build it within the weight limit? How would we map that fuselage so that it's a lifting body and doesn't have too much drag? Because ultimately, the product has to fly a distance, and the longer that distance is, the better the product is. So there was a lot of constraints that we had to figure out, as well as how to make it triple, modular, redundant. So if one system failed, you had two backup systems. That's a philosophy within crude aviation that we wanted to bring part one of three to make sure that anybody that we're putting in, it's not like they're taking an extremely risky chance. It's like we're putting them in something that is safe and we feel comfortable putting our friends and family in because we've designed it so that it has this redundancy in place. So a huge amount of challenges in the design. My particular role was to design the electric propulsion system, so the motors, and when talking about pivoting, my his history and experience had been in combustion. So I had done propulsion, I'd done thermodynamics, but it had been in combustion at Pratt & Whitney and at Alstom power. And now electric motors are quite different. Their fuel is batteries. They have two moving parts, but the whole electromagnetics was not something that I had taken in university. And I had to teach myself that to be able to iterate and design on the motors to make them more efficient and reliable, to be able to operate and be produced and be ultimately sold. And that was an incredibly fun challenge. I loved being able to get in the lab and blow up these motors and then do the [noise] why did they blow up? We thought that they would pass, or they did better than we thought. How come? And really get into the details of that.

Chris Yip  13:58  
I've seen videos, right? I've seen some of the test flight videos of the Black Fly and, and, and I've heard you talk about this, and you said I knew you were selling systems. I didn't realize how many of them there actually are out there now, and that you have these very, very early adopters who have picked up on the technology and have had their personal Black Flies, I guess, in their, in their backyards, on their rooftops. If you can share. I mean, where are they? Are there any...first off, are there any in Canada? And second, is it rural, or is it urban? I don't know if you can share where your, where your current owners are.

Speaker 1  14:32  
So the...the our current owners are spread across the US. There are none outside of the US today, but we are working on that actively right now. We started with the US because we wanted them to be relatively close to where our home base was and how we able to service and support those aircraft. So we have a few of them that are in California, Washington, Delaware, Kentucky and a few other states. They aren't in downtown urban centers but some of them are close. They're on the outskirts of town. You know, one of them lives up in the mountains and is able to fly through the Cascade Mountains. One actually lives on an airpark. So he has two different airplanes that need a runway to be able to take off, and then he's got this aircraft that can just take off right from his backyard. He uses the black fly aircraft to be able to fly in a different way than his traditional fixed wing aircraft. You know, what are they doing with them? So some of them are using them for recreation, just flying. Other ones are using them as a mode of transportation to be able to get from one place to another. We have a number of our early adopters who use it for STEM outreach. So they'll contact a high school or an elementary school, and they'll organize an event where they actually go and demonstrate the aircraft technology, taking off from the soccer field, and then talking about science and engineering and technology with the students. So there's a couple of different applications that are being used right now within the public market, but we also have eight that have been leased to the Air Force who are using them for mission planning, to see how can we get people and things around more efficiently, as well as consider future automation capabilities that could be involved in the aircraft design we're looking at first responders. So we actually just did a technology demonstration where we had an aircraft outfitted with EMS vinyl on the outside, taking a paramedic from a fire department over to a cul de sac, and being able to provide first responder service to someone in need within three minutes or less. So that's an area where we actually think there's a huge market, because there's a lot of people who have distanced ambulance that is actually greater than 10 minutes, where their likelihood of surviving from something like a cardiac arrest or a couple different severe injuries is quite low and if they were able to have a point to point vertical takeoff and landing aircraft disposable at the air, at the fire department, that would be able to hopefully save lives in the future.

Chris Yip  14:46  
I don't know if you even know, because this was literally announced, like, I think a couple of days ago, really, that the province just put, I think, $150 million to Toronto to for police helicopters. So you're, I mean, that whole area of sort of security, first responder use, I think, is actually a really intriguing application. 

Kristina Menton  17:17  
Yeah, the operating cost of a helicopter is enormous. Not only does it cost $10,000 to maintain the aircraft every year, the fuel cost is very high, the pilots have to be trained. It cost 20-30,000 dollars to train someone to have a helicopter license. And that's not something you can just do to, you know, the every like every fire department in the in Canada, we can't just train them all and be helicopter pilots, but actually, with the Black Fly and Helix technology, you can learn how to be a Black Fly or Helix pilot, and be able to operate really safely within the course of only a few days. So right now, it's taking five to 10 days, depending on who's going through the program, to be able to learn to take one home, not even to just fly around. You can fly around with 15 minutes of training, but to take one home and be able to operate in a wide variety of different areas in all different environments, only takes five to 10 days. So that's something that could be considered a secondary skill of a fire firefighter, or you train the whole firefighting fleet to be able to operate this aircraft and not have to pay the annual fees, maintenance and training costs of something like a helicopter.

Chris Yip  18:23  
So here's another question. So you started out when you and Eleanor first brought in as one of the members of the 10 person crew, Pivotal is obviously much larger now, and you've now become the COO and the head of flight. What's that career transition been like? Like, you're now in, like, this is a big role. 

Kristina Menton  18:41  
I was reflecting on my career at Pivotal as a number of different pivots, but I started as a mechanical design engineer, working individual contributor on these motors. So day in and day out, building motors, designing motors, testing motors, failing probably 100 times every week, and having to kind of pick myself up and think of new things to try the next week, really getting the design locked in. But then it kind of moved to manufacturing. Now we need to build 25 aircraft of these propulsion systems, and be able to show a manufacturing line where we could have a small number of people having high quality product coming off the line consistently every day. So I found that I was working a lot in manufacturing, but that wasn't my core interest and my my kind of core skill set, but it was what the company needed at the time. So I spent probably three years working leading the design, but also the manufacturing of a lot of the different components on the black fly aircraft. And I think it was difficult for me at the time to say, can I tell my boss that I don't love this part of my job like I don't want to get fired, but is this the only opportunity that's available for me today? And so I did stick around, and I did continue to work hard, but also find, as we get bigger, there's also more opportunities for growth. So. As we get bigger, I can take on these different types, I can take on quality, I can take on facilities, I can take on purchasing, but maybe someone else takes on more of this manufacturing area. So it really was kind of figuring out, what are my skill sets, what does the company need, and where am I going to be most effective within the team? You know, I being part of that small team, I had a bit of the Finder mindset that we all did of, how do we build a team founder mindset? How do we build a team that is going to rally around this and make sure that every single component is built with the highest quality, and build bring the experts in around us to lead these different areas. Because, you know, of the 10 people who started the company we're not the experts in every area, and so we're going to have to hire people who are smarter than us in different places. And I found it really fun and exciting figuring out the efficiency and the optimization of how to help build the company and and so it's been an incredible journey, kind of figuring out, yeah, what's the next challenge for me, where is my skill set most beneficial to the company? And how to build a really strong and engaged team around this product,

Chris Yip  21:09  
you have to keep attracting funders, essentially, to keep this going right? Supporters are providing you with funding for that. That being, how's that dialog been going?

Kristina Menton  21:18  
So the dialog to continue to keep our current funders engaged as well as excite others. Has been both fun and challenging. In the early days, we actually had to do a demo, we didn't have to, but we decided that we were going to do a demonstration of something novel and exciting and largely advancing technology innovative every Thursday. You know, every couple of weeks, you were going to have to demonstrate a huge leap in innovation and how do we make sure that our funders and our investors are are really seeing that we are pushing the technology every week. That was something that Marcus really put as a challenge for us. You know, we take a stator stack, which is the inside core of an electric motor. We were buying them for about $115 each, pre assembled, and then we decided that we would buy just the individual laminations for about 10 cents each and we would design our own way, which was completely different from how industry manufactured these stators, to be able to have them coming off the line at five per 30 minutes for only about $10 each. So to be able to show advancements like that every week really showed that we were pushing the technology, saving money and doing things in a more innovative way. Nowadays, it's more about the market and showing that we are fitting into a market our customers are happy and safe, and we have the ability to grow and scale with an aircraft at a reasonable price range. Some of the other eVTOLs in the space have million dollar aircraft. So the business case for a million dollar aircraft, or a million plus dollar aircraft, has to be a huge market. Now our aircraft is much smaller and much simpler, which allows us to be much more cost effective. So you can buy a helix for only $190,000 and our early adopters love that price. They think it's under $200,000 this is going to get me from here over to that island in a way that no other person in the world really has access to today. And we're finding that there's more and more applications out there that people haven't even thought of yet. So this public service one, working with fire departments and finding that actually they're really interested in this technology, and then showing that to our investors and future investors really shows that there's a really good business case here, that like 100 people building, we've built about 70 aircraft so far are able to accomplish this and show that the market is so big without significant competitors in that space right now.

Chris Yip  23:48  
I know you came back a couple of years ago right to guest lecture for engineering. How was that experience? What was it like to be on the other side of the podium?

Kristina Menton  23:57  
So to be on the other side of the podium was incredibly both humbling and inspiring for me. I came into the MIE191 class and gave a guest lecture on basically what I'm doing and what different types of opportunities are out there for engineering students. So we have software engineering at my company, we have mechanical we have propulsion, we have manufacturing, so all different types of engineering, systems engineering as well, and how I was in their shoes, and I had no idea what I wanted to do when I graduated, and I put so much pressure on every single decision that I was making, thinking that it would affect me, you know, 40 years from then, and the answer is that it will affect you, but figuring out what direction you want to go in is much more important than necessarily each individual step. So it was very fun to share my story, because I never thought that this would be my story. And so it's really fun to kind of share, hey, you might think that you want to do something, but just keep your eyes open, keep yourself broad, keep a growth mindset to be open to different types of challenges and opportunities. And the questions that they had were excellent. They were just as good as the questions that I got from investors or customers or different people who are experts in the space, whether it was from battery technology to applications in future types of industries. The students were incredibly engaged, and it was really fun to be back. 

Chris Yip  25:25  
All right, so what's on the horizon? You've got you got Black Fly, you got Helix. What's next for Kristina? And what's next for Pivotal?

Speaker 1  25:32  
So what's next for Kristina? As I'm currently getting my pilot's license, I have been flying the Black Fly aircraft since 2018 and I'm now getting my private pilot's license of a fixed wing so it's been very interesting seeing, okay, what's it like to fly this mechanical system that was built eight, like, 60 years ago. This is what a lot of our customers are used to flying. And then looking at the black fly and helix technology and the simplified flight controls of what the human machine interface with an electric vehicle can be for many more people in the future. Then what's next for Pivotal? Pivotal is building the Helix aircraft right now. So we're building, designing and bringing in all of the lessons learned from the Black Fly aircraft to make the product and the actual production version Helix, something that customers are going to love and enjoy. So there's, there was quite a number of takeaways from black fly that, you know customers need to have a landing camera. It's similar to every type of car that sold today that has a 360 view when you're going into Park. People are used to that, and it means that you can park on the spot every time you can even have an auto Park function, and a lot of our customers really want that. So we're building landing cameras into helix. We're also building a much more cozy interior. So we're making all these changes in Helix, as well as improving the range, improving the pilot weight, and a lot of different sensor technologies to really make it a more stronger aircraft. So really excited about that. It's a huge test campaign. We're really excited to deliver it to customers and start servicing a large array of different types of customers across the US and Canada and different places, and using the aircraft for different types of applications, whether that's in the DoD space, Air Force, or in public service. So before the end of this year, we will be doing our second public service demonstration where we're actually using black fly aircraft, not to not just show that we can bring a paramedic to a site to be able to service someone, but to actually start to use it at a fire department. So train a real paramedic, have that real paramedic able to go in an aircraft to go and help people. We'd probably send an ambulance as well, just to make sure that the the abundance of aid is going to the person. But really show that this is a technology that is viable and that works, and what the whole operation around it is, because you need to have that aircraft ready to go within, you know, 10 to 20 seconds throughout the whole day. So figuring out what that's going to look like at fire departments.

Chris Yip  28:04  
Well, huge opportunities ahead. It's certainly exciting times for both Pivotal and yourself. Last thing, advice for current and actually, I'm going to say current and incoming students.

Speaker 1  28:16  
So my advice for current and incoming students is to really consider a growth mindset. Whether that is that you just failed on something, or, you know, there's this kind of scary opportunity that you don't think you're actually qualified for. If you fail, you know, you just learnt something. You're not a failure, but you just failed, and that's actually going to build resilience in you, which is something that took a long time for me to learn and become comfortable with and then, yeah, don't sell yourself short. You know, if there's a job that you're not qualified for, apply for it and try to make yourself the most qualified person for it. Talk to alumni, talk to someone who's been there before, to prepare yourself and let it be, you know, the hiring manager who decides that you're not qualified. Like, don't disqualify yourself. Keep going out there and trying things that make you excited.

Chris Yip  29:04  
That's awesome. That's great advice. I love it. Thanks Kristina. This has been a wonderful chat. It's been awesome to catch up with you and hear what you're up to, and hear how pivotal is doing. Looking forward to seeing the first Pivotal flying in Toronto or in the region. We'd love to see that. So anyway, so thank you so much for taking the time today. 

Kristina Menton  29:23  
Yeah, thanks for having me, and I'll keep you posted. Hopefully that's in the near future. We actually operate really well in the winter.

Chris Yip  29:28  
Oh even better.

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