A Modern Approach to Balancing Innovation and Safety in Autonomous Flights

How do you prove an autonomous flight system is safe, certifiable ready, and reliable – and do it faster – without the time and cost of designing a new aircraft from scratch? For Ribbit, a startup developing an autonomous autopilot for remotely piloted cargo aircraft, the answer was a proven-through-use strategy and retrofit approach. Fly real missions under remote supervision, produce evidence at every step, and build trust with regulators and customers. Allowing Ribbit to serve rural, remote, and coastal regions where traditional avionic options fall short. In this live fireside chat, Ribbit shares how they balanced rapid innovation with safety-critical rigor, resulting in over $1M in government contracts and approval for unmanned test flights. Their engineering team embedded compliance into the development workflow from day one and they are here to tell you all about it. They’ll discuss: • Balancing rapid prototyping with safety-critical rigor in aerospace development  • Embedding compliance into CI/CD workflows to accelerate certification readiness  • Gaining regulatory confidence and a competitive advantage through standardized coding practices  Hear how a proven-through-use strategy helped a small team outpace larger, better-funded competitors. And in the process lay the groundwork for a scalable, certifiable future in autonomous aviation.