Regulation: The Overlooked Enabler of Aviation Innovation
Craig Fuller has spent decades thinking about the relationship between technological ambition and regulatory reality, first as a general aviation pilot, later from inside the Reagan White House during the period GPS was opened to civilian use, and since then as Chairman of RTCA and a member of the FAA's Management Advisory Council. In this piece, he uses Joby Aviation's recent 3,199-mile autonomous transcontinental flight as a starting point for a broader argument: the pace of aviation innovation has rarely been limited by the technology itself. It has been shaped by how well innovators and regulators work together.
Fuller traces that argument back to the early 1980s, when Reagan's decision to open GPS to civilian use led two engineers, Min and Gary, to found Garmin, and forward through decades in which aviation absorbed new navigation technology far more slowly than the rest of the world absorbed the personal computer and the smartphone. His explanation is not that regulators are slow for no reason. Aviation's regulators operate with, in his words, "zero tolerance for bugs," and changing a regulation carries its own risk, not just the risk of moving too slowly.
His conclusion is not that regulation should get out of the way. It's that innovators and regulators have to work from the same side of the table from the beginning, with shared safety goals, if the distance between a milestone and a dependable, scalable capability is ever going to close.