The anti-safety culture is kind of surprising. When they made previous announcements I thought that safety was what they were bringing to the table. Autonomous drones, even large scale ones, are pretty ubiquitous at this point. People are building human-scale drones using off the shelf equipment in their back gardens. The thing they're all lacking is properly safety certified electronics. I would have thought the thing a project with deep pockets like kitty hawk would bring would be the huge effort required to build a certifiably safe done.

Having worked in other hardware startups though, I'm guessing what actually happened was a few years of reinventing the wheel and learning on the job. Safe systems don't look any different to non safe systems to an outsider, so unless there's a real buy in from management it's very hard to build them.