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