aviation-technology
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Jaz Banga Drew a New Fence in the Sky
Before drones became ordinary, Jaz Banga saw the awkward question hiding above every fence: who belongs in the sky, and what happens when they do not? His answer has taken a decade, a hundred prototypes, and a career-long habit of connecting machines to identity.
Doug Kreuzkamp Went From Conducting Music to Orchestrating Airports
He studied music, practiced law, pushed wheelchairs and cleaned 747s. Then Doug Kreuzkamp built Springshot around a deceptively practical idea: the best operations software should feel less like an order and more like a well-conducted ensemble.
Javier Vidal
Javier Vidal is the Madrid-born founder and CEO of Moonware, a Los Angeles startup building HALO, the world's first AI-powered Ground Traffic Control platform for airfields. A mechanical engineer trained at Duke who filed his first patent at 15 and became one of Tesla's youngest employees at 19, Vidal cut his teeth on autonomy at Tesla, Uber ATG, and Uber Elevate before setting out to replace the walkie-talkies and whiteboards that still run airport ramps. Moonware has raised roughly $9.3M and deployed HALO with carriers and handlers including British Airways, dnata, Aerocharter, Japan Airlines, and PrimeFlight.
David Benjamin
David Benjamin is the co-founder and CEO of JetInsight, the San Mateo software company building what it calls the modern operating system for business aviation. A Princeton-trained electrical engineer with a Stanford MBA, he moved from writing code at Microsoft and crunching numbers as a quantitative analyst to advising airlines at the Boston Consulting Group, then turned that aviation obsession into a product: cloud quoting and fleet-management tools that aircraft charter operators use to run safer, leaner, more profitable businesses. He built the company alongside CTO Lou Montulli, the engineer who invented the web cookie at Netscape.