> Where is the hacker culture in aviation that we've been amazed by in the AI space? Even people doing cool things as small groups, like the black arrow guys, a

> Where is the hacker culture in aviation that we've been amazed by in the AI space? Even people doing cool things as small groups, like the black arrow guys, are just building in the same local minima. Well, a basic body + wings shape, anyone with moderate skill can construct that with a kit in their garden shed and fly it. But all these exotic design ideas? These require immense amounts of compute power to design them so that they'll actually take off and substantial investment into manufacturing tooling to manufacture them, far surpassing the capabilities of all but a very few very rich hobbyists, and people with that kind of money generally don't subject themselves to the high operational risk of general aviation. Even in cars there's no one working on home-builds for carbon composite stuff, and the potential for failures and the risk of said failures to not just the pilot but everyone on the ground there is orders of magnitude lower than with planes. And on top of that come the regulatory issues associated with anything that flies. There are many MANY MANY orders of magnitude less people with pilot licenses in the first place, most of Europe doesn't allow flights from anything else than a licensed airstrip (although the US is different there IIRC), and new designs require an immense amount of certification paperwork, which is also the reason why it took until last year to get unleaded fuel certified (whose rollout will take at least 3-5 years).