Who Can Still Design a Plane?

From the Travel Tech Podcast newsletter for episode 38, Who Can Still Design a Plane?.

Subject: 🎧 Podcast: Who Can Still Design a Plane?

Airbus's last clean sheet design was the A350. Boeing's was the 787, over 20 years ago. This week's guest thinks the skill of designing an aircraft from scratch is quietly retiring with the engineers who last did it, and he is building a new one anyway: a hydrogen electric trainer for pilot schools. Many of the 30,000+ of you reading this work somewhere that know-how lives in people's heads, so I wanted his view on what happens to it, and whether AI helps.

Eric Bidinger trained as an engineer and spent years in large buyout private equity. Now he runs two companies at opposite ends of the speed scale: Blue Spirit Aero in Toulouse, where every rivet has to be justified to a regulator, and Luca, an AI platform for small businesses that ships new features every week. Listen on Apple Podcasts, also streaming on Spotify and YouTube.

The fault line through our conversation: JP Morgan and the baker down the street now have access to the same intelligence, but the hard work of ordering data and capturing what people know hasn't gotten any easier.

The model is free. The foundation isn't.

That tension has a structural cause. Most of what an organization knows lives in people's heads and in scattered PDFs, emails, and spreadsheets, and it leaves when they retire. Eric points to aviation's biggest OEMs as a warning: when years pass between clean sheet programs, the people who know how to start from scratch retire before the next one begins.

AI makes the foundation matter more. Put a model on unreconciled data and it hallucinates, sending you faster in the wrong direction. When the data, memory, and judgment layers are in place, Eric describes strategy work that once took a two month consulting engagement coming back in about 10 minutes. He is less sure about hardware design and certified systems. My take: code can be checked with a test suite, and a certified aircraft design can't.

In this episode, Eric Bidinger, founder of Luca and Blue Spirit Aero, covers design process traceability in aircraft certification, the four layer AI stack, why human taste matters more as agents multiply, building a moat against global competition, and one click access to business capital.

Key Takeaways

• Certification covers the process, not just the product: Regulators certify how an aircraft was designed, so traceability has to be built into the organization from the first decision.
• Know-how has a shelf life: Long gaps between clean sheet programs can erase design capability that no document fully preserves.
• Implementation is the differentiator: With frontier models converging, data ontology and memory management decide whether an AI deployment works.
• Judgment compounds: One strong engineer with a fleet of agents now outproduces a team, which raises the value of good hiring.
• Live data rewrites underwriting: A credit assessment built from live ERP, accounting, and storefront data can price risk that a stale balance sheet hides, without the lender ever seeing the raw data.

I hope you enjoy this one. If you have a story to tell across travel, aviation or AI, please reach out (LinkedIn is best).

Alex Brooker, Host of the Travel Tech Podcast, Founder of Airside Labs