UP.Partners’ Ben Marcus on investing in transportation tech—and why Boeing is disruptable

I saw Los Angeles upside down.

In Ben Marcus’ two-seater GameBird airplane, we were offshore of Palos Verdes, negatively weighted, where the Earth’s gravity falls on your head rather than your spine. Marcus, UP.Partners cofounder and managing partner, had agreed to take me up in the aerobatic plane. (Yes, aerobatics means precisely what you think it means.)

We did a bunch of rolls and loops in the air, which Marcus told me amounted to 4.3 Gs. I feel like I now understand phrases like “centrifugal force” and “weightlessness” not just intellectually but physically—you know that feeling, where a jugular physical rush pops the world into technicolor like in The Wizard of Oz? It’s like that.

“It’s like a roller coaster, where you’re building the track yourself,” Marcus tells me once we’re back on the ground. This all connects together—Marcus’ UP.Partners invests in transportation tech, with a portfolio that includes Axiom Space, Skydio, Loft Dynamics, and Beyond Math. And aviation is part, though not all, of UP’s thesis.

“Investing in aviation is very hard,” said Marcus. “Why? It's hard because it's a highly regulated industry, so entrepreneurs can't really control their destiny. It’s capital-intensive, it requires a lot of human labor, a lot of materials, and so on…So, our strategy isn’t to invest in aviation companies per se, but we invest in transportation technology companies, making transportation for people and goods cleaner, faster, safer, better, on land, air, sea, and space.”

There’s a workaround—UP also has UP.Labs. Each year, the incubator launches two companies per corporate partner, and with three corporate partners right now (including Porsche and Alaska Airlines) it’s launching six companies a year. The idea is this: to bypass a lot of the regulatory and B2B challenges that come with founding a company in the transportation space.

“I imagine a corporation with this big bucket of problems,” said UP.Labs president Katelyn Foley. “Some of them are going to get solved by R&D internal innovation activities—and some of them do get solved by a startup that's out there."

And at UP.Labs, the idea is that the company starts close to its customer.

"We cut the first five years of a startup’s life off,” said John Kuolt, UP.Labs founder and CEO. “[Outside of UP.Labs] you won't find one startup that started a year ago, working with Porsche, with a multi-million dollar contract.” The goal, Kuolt says, is to make these “humongous billion-dollar companies operate more efficiently today.”

The firm’s thesis applies to land, sea, and air, but after my experience in Marcus’ two-seater aerobatics plane left me floored, I was pretty stuck on aviation—especially given the turbulence currently rocking the sector as a result of Boeing's scandals and harrowing safety concerns. Marcus thinks that, as impossible as it may seem, Boeing is disruptable.

“It’s not just because of Boeing’s missteps,” he said. “I think there’s actually a lot of technology now that’s available that wasn't there before, allowing smart, ambitious entrepreneurs to actually create a new aircraft. Airlines are demanding more fuel efficiency, less carbon emissions, and better passenger experiences. And the Boeing Airbus duopoly can only make small iterative changes, so I think there’s an opportunity for a startup to do that.”

Marcus says that the startup with the best shot at that is Long Beach, Calif.-based JetZero, which is revamping how plane bodies are built, focusing on a “blended wing.” The aircraft can “cut fuel burn and emissions by up to 50% compared to the tube and wing everybody flies today,” JetZero CEO Thomas O’Leary explained via email.

And a watershed moment is actually upon us—right now, we’re less than a year from electric planes, Marcus says.

"If you think back on the last 100 years, what's marked the biggest shift for humanity––was it the semiconductor? Was it the Internet? Was it the airplane?” Marcus said. “It's really hard to choose, but airplanes started connecting human beings with one another in important ways.”

It’s a good point—though I don’t know if I need to see the world upside down again from 3,500 feet to appreciate that perspective. But I kind of want to.

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com