Amazon UK drone business another casualty of the Silicon Valley Agile Holiday Inn Express Syndrome

Press article — The slow collapse of Amazon’s drone delivery dream — https://www.wired.co.uk/article/amazon-drone-delivery-prime-air

Here we go again. Yet another casualty of the Silicon Valley Agile Holiday Inn Express Syndrome. That is where folks with a background in making apps think that since they make cool stuff and are in or part of the Silicon Valley environment, they have been bequeathed all the experiences they need by God, no one else has innovated a thing before them and it is left for them to save the world. These folks have little systems engineering, exception handling or applicable domain or technology experience. They work from the bottom up, not top down, and stumble on things to figure them out. Or in their words, move fast and break things. That is just fine if the system doesn’t involve complexity or safety. Problem is they are picking areas that are and do. The ground and air autonomy and air mobility worlds are experiencing the same thing right now. The autonomy example will wind up being the biggest engineering debacle in history. 10 needless deaths so far needlessly with many more to come BY DESIGN. By the looks of what was going on at Amazon they were going to harm people as well.

“Another describes an employee pinning down the ‘approve’ button on their computer so that all the frames of footage were being approved irrelevant of whether there were hazards in them or not.”

More in my articles here

Silicon Valley and Agile are Ruining Engineering

· https://imispgh.medium.com/silicon-valley-and-agile-are-ruining-engineering-196099378028

The Autonomous Vehicle Industry can be Saved by doing the Opposite of what is being done now

· https://medium.com/@imispgh/the-autonomous-vehicle-industry-can-be-saved-by-doing-the-opposite-of-what-is-being-done-now-b4e5c6ae9237

Urban Air Mobility — Four Paths to Disaster

· https://imispgh.medium.com/urban-air-mobility-four-paths-to-disaster-9dd3966f85e2

Commercial IT Lack of Best Practice Use — Negligent?

· https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/commercial-lack-best-practice-use-negligent-michael-dekort/?trkInfo=VSRPsearchId%3A287319361463767223118%2CVSRPtargetId%3A9215729012578076316%2CVSRPcmpt%3Aprimary&trk=vsrp_influencer_content_res_name

My name is Michael DeKort — I am a former system engineer, engineering, and program manager for Lockheed Martin. I worked in Aerospace/DoD/FAA simulation, as a Sr PM and then the Software Engineering Manager for all of NORAD, as a PM on the Aegis Weapon System, as Lead C4ISR systems engineer for the DHS Deepwater program and the lead C4ISR engineer for the Counter-terrorism team at the US State Department. I am now CEO/CTO at Dactle.

Industry Participation — Air and Ground Autonomy and eVTOL

- Founder SAE On-Road Autonomous Driving Simulation Task Force

- Member SAE ORAD Verification and Validation Task Force

- Member UNECE WP.29 SG2 Virtual Testing

- Stakeholder USDOT VOICES (Virtual Open Innovation Collaborative Environment for Safety)

- Member SAE G-34 / EUROCAE WG-114 Artificial Intelligence in Aviation

- Member CIVATAglobal — Civic Air Transport Association

- Member Teleoperation Consortium

- Stakeholder for UL4600 — Creating AV Safety Guidelines

- Member of the IEEE Artificial Intelligence & Autonomous Systems Policy Committee

- Presented the IEEE Barus Ethics Award for Post 9/11 DoD/DHS Efforts