It really depresses me that in 2024 we have some of the smartest, most privileged people in the world deciding that this is what they’re going to dedicate their life to
Shouldn’t we be doing exactly the opposite? Getting people to stop flying
This is an excellent question to ask.
There are good reasons to fly. Some places in the US are only accessible through flight (I'm looking at you, Alaska.) Some places require insane amounts of time to commute/manage because of a lack of infrastructure. Some common low-flight hour jobs (eg: pipeline monitoring) are only feasible through flight.
There are currently good reasons that most people don't fly. They usually come down to time, money and training (which is time, money and ability.) There is also significant risk (think: along the risk level of riding a motorcycle)
I guarantee that flying will not get so safe and cheap that the average Joe will just start hopping in a plane for a hamburger every other day.
I personally think the things we should be focusing on are making much more efficient GA aircraft. Also, getting rid of 100LL and gasoline would be nice. It's really hard to do though.
As for the smartest and most-privileged people, there are much worse things to devote time to as an engineer. There are also a lot of engineers these days. Don't despair too much :)
And how is software going to handle the random side-of-the-river 'runway'?
The vastness of areas which could be studied, advanced, or challenged lends itself well to human curiosity. I feel it would be unwise and unreasonable to stop people from exploring their area of interest.
Consider all the academic papers written with 0 citations. Did they waste their time? Should they have picked from a centralised pool of "most important" issues? The breadth-first search approach benefits the scientific community long term, I'd imagine.
Do you work tirelessly to prevent climate change as your day job? If not, why?
Guilty as charged, we could all do more. But I don’t actively work to increase pollution, which is what this company seems to be doing
How is “we want to get more people to fly private planes” a separate issue from global warming? It’s literally pouring oil on the wildfire
Kidding aside, we’re really going to name the company using a homophone of the most famous missing pilot in history?
If you think there's a problem more worthwhile of their efforts, why don't you dedicate your life to it?
I would think enabling this behavior is much worse than anything advertisers can do to us in the medium to long term