Dear Fellow Historical Number Crunchers,

To understand our industry’s future, set the Wayback Machine to 1967. It was a year of weird dynamics, with booming demand, but paradoxical economics. The military market’s strength effectively crowded out the civil side of the industry. This resulted in McDonnell Aircraft taking over Douglas Aircraft. There are big lessons for today.

Dear Fellow Bubble Watchers (Part 2, the Sequel),

It’s déjà vu all over again. I have distant memories of Very Light Jet/Air Taxi arguments from the 2000s, and now, as Advanced (or Urban) Air Mobility emerges, with similar business cases, aspirational goals, and utopian greed, all that air taxi nonsense is flooding back (albeit with much shorter aircraft ranges). Thanks to vast pools of cash sloshing around in the economy, AAM concepts are now proliferating. I feel like that Greek guy who got a job killing monsters. Chop one head off, and three, or 20, will grow in its place. A series of SPACs will then offer these monster heads $5 billion (on paper), enabling, and encouraging, even more monsters to sprout.

I’ve been getting lots of calls lately from reporters who are covering the adventures of Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and their companies. But let’s not forget that the legacy companies remain in the picture. They are concerned that they may be getting eclipsed by the new guys on the block, but I wouldn’t count them out just yet. Boeing, for example.

The new European regulation established three categories, which are based on risk.  In the easiest ‘open’ category UAS operators with less operational risk can carry out an operation without authorization. The second ‘specific’ category is a category of UAS operation that, considering the risks involved, requires an authorization by the authority before the operation occurs that considers the mitigation measures identified in an operational risk assessment.