It’s been almost exactly one year since Trevor Milton, the founder of now-bankrupt electric truck startup Nikola, was pardoned by President Trump. Now the Wall Street Journal has published one of the first deep dives into Milton’s new effort: trying to build autonomous planes.
Milton and an “investment group” purchased a downtrodden aviation company called SyberJet Aircraft late last year and he has spent the time since trying to turn the company around. That involves bringing in “dozens” of former Nikola staff, soliciting possible investors from Saudi Arabia, and spending a few hundred thousand dollars on lobbying, according to the report.
Oh this sounds perfectly safe. What could possibly go wrong?
Why don’t plane companies already put computers in their planes, are they stupid??
Oh wait, they do. And they still have expensive pilots, because the billions from Boeing, Airbus, Garmin, Lockheed, BAE etc. couldn’t get it to be perfectly reliable [1] in all edge cases.
[1]: actually, not reliable enough. Risk assessment and management in planes is a super fascinating topic, the only risk-free plane would never move and cost 50 quadrillion dollars
I wonder if they’ll have engines…
It’ll be like the flintstones, where they hang their feet, and power the plane by running fast enough to take off. The pilot will be Usain Bolt.
The pilot can’t be an engine.
Well not with that attitude!
A scammer scams?
Yeah, that follows
Just another tech loser who wants to keep the US at war for profit.
He reportedly wants to design an entirely new avionics system from the ground up that will help the company create the “first light jet to focus on artificial-intelligence flight,” which could open the door for defense contracts.
What was the crime he was pardoned for? Ah yes. Fraud.
Trump has a soft spot for those types.
God this administration is so fucked up…
Autonomous planes or stochastic cruise missiles. You be the judge.
But at least everyone on the plane will look photorealistic.
Gonna take a lot more than one billion, son
Also so funny to me that he got out of prison and went ‘i need to get on that AI fad which was blowing up!!’ But he’s going to find that nobody has the confidence to invest in it. I’m picturing a montage of him driving up to billionaire chums’ houses and pitching to them and having the door shut in his face.
I’m not always of this opinion, but in this case a willing investor in this scheme deserves to lose their money.
Even just from a practical point of view, this sounds like a horrible idea. The pilot is about the one thing you should not skimp on.
There’s plenty of other stuff not to skimp on on an aircraft. The body, wings and engines all come to mind.
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