Ashlee Vance complained that U.S. aviation startups now have to beg for permission to fly. Piplica said Hermeus has found congressional authorities "sitting there on somebody's desk," read the law, and made safety cases the FAA accepted.
…completely shuts the door on private industry from being like, I got an idea. I'm willing to take risks. I'm going to build something and fly it, but I need you to help me get in the air. And this is where the ranges are just sort of like, I don't know how to, and it's business as usual. I mean,
…I mean, where you guys will be in El Segundo is like 100 years history of us of the U.S. being ahead on all this and doing the most interesting stuff. So it's kind of sad to get to a point where you really have to beg to be able to do this. I mean, that's why I'm talking about it. Well, you
either beg or you break the rules that don't actually matter. And we've done that many times. And I think that has helped push the government forward in a lot of different ways. I mean, you know, talk about the FAA. They've actually made some strides over the past couple of years as we've been working with them to move some of these things a lot faster. Yeah. With congressional authorities that are granted and they're just kind of sitting there on somebody's desk that nobody kind of picked up and figured out what to do with. Well, we just kind of read the law. We're like, you don't actually need to do that. And made a safety case that they believed in, again, leveraging these kinds of things. And yeah, now we've got a paper that can move a lot faster, but there's so much more work to do.
So you guys, you'll stay unmanned for a while. For a while. Okay. And even though today, so it'll fly out and it'll, yeah, like walk us through today a little bit. So around noon, we'll be sitting out on the pad. You go through the pre-flight checks, and then somebody in this trailer over here is…
Yeah, so we'll take off heading south, head out over the White Sands part of the range, do some in-flight checks on the way out. If everything looks good and we're ready to go, we'll go for a supersonic dash, hit our top speed, slow down, turn around, come back down south, hit our other test points…
And how long would that take, roughly?