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Item # 7 on the linked page Snip ...

Two reasons this belongs in a political brief.

First, this is an industry where the United States still has a genuine technological and regulatory lead, and that lead is fragile. China's eVTOL companies like AutoFlight, EHang, XPeng, are mass-producing at a pace Western investors find unnerving. The 2026 race for the next category of aircraft is one we can still win, and the U.S. policy response is uncharacteristically coherent.

Hold that thought against the rest of this brief, where the news is uniformly grim. The country is still capable of doing things right when the right people are left alone to do them.

Second, watch the certification fights coming. eVTOLs blur the line between aircraft, helicopters, and autonomous systems. As a pilot, I don't find them that compelling; they're short-ranged, mostly robotic, and slow in comparison to most GA aircraft, but as airplanes, they're a phase change in flight.

That is a politics story dressed in an engineering story.

Item # 7 on the linked page Snip ...

Underneath the political rubble, one of the most consequential technology transitions of our lifetimes is quietly happening, and it is happening in the air.

The civilian eVTOL race is finally leaving vaporware territory. Joby Aviation's S4 is grinding through the FAA's Type Inspection Authorization process. The company also wrapped a series of S-4T autonomous demonstration flights for the U.S. Army at the end of April using hybrid-electric power. Archer Aviation is licensing its electric powertrain to Anduril for the Omen autonomous platform and is pursuing TIA certification for its Midnight aircraft. BETA Technologies has logged more than 100,000 nautical miles on its ALIA conventional-takeoff variant and is targeting CTOL certification this year. Wisk, owned by Boeing, is running fully autonomous Gen 6 hover tests and aiming for transition flight inside six months. Four serious companies, four credible aircraft, all converging on real type certification within eighteen months.

On the military side, adjacent but worth noting, DARPA and Northrop Grumman confirmed this week that the XRQ-73 SHEPARD, a hybrid-electric uncrewed aircraft and the operational successor to the Great Horned Owl ISR program, is now in active flight testing at Edwards Air Force Base. The Pentagon is flying a class of aircraft that did not exist in a meaningful way five years ago.

The FAA's aviation policy here has been cooking for a while, and to give credit where it is due, it is not stupid. The "Unleashing Drone Dominance" executive order produced an FAA pilot program the eVTOL Integration Pilot Program that selected eight test sites earlier this year for live commercial operations beginning summer 2026. Florida, Louisiana, Utah, Pennsylvania, the Northeast, and Albuquerque made the list. Real eVTOLs will be carrying real passengers and real cargo in real American airspace within months.

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And before someone says anything, the above I posted in NO WAY DENIES THE WHITE BIGOTRY TOWARDS BLACKS IN ANY WAY WHATSOEVER.... Whites subjugated not just blacks, but American Indians as well...and we seem to forget about the Indians (I have yet to find one of my Indian friends, and I am part Indian myself--Powhatan tribe to be precise, who refer to themselves as "Native Americans.") So don't take my sh*t out of context please...well you will anyways so I really don't give a flying f*ck actually. I know what my experience is, and I know the experiences of hundreds and hundreds of blacks that I've worked with personally. Yes, white bigotry...but also black bigotry as well...they just don't talk about it with whitey...well, until that comedian in the post above did LOL.....

I guess the point is, bigotry comes in many forms. Hell, my very close friend who happens to be both gay and black, and raised in Louisiana said, "I really didn't experience many problems in high school...it wasn't until college...and holy fuck ...the in-fighting within the LGBTQ community is INSANE on college campuses..." Or even within the white community, the bigotry that the Irish experienced in America. Or go to Japan, and watch how they react to blacks IN CERTAIN REGIONS...

What I do NOT want is for everyone to end up with grey skin....despite the bigotry, there's also a sense of most of use get along .... just go to your local store or gas station...you'll see a white guy hold the door for a black guy and vice-versa...and personally I find BEAUTY in all races, cultures, etc. I mean, I'm a white Nerd...and I was prejudiced against in school...boys putting their crotch in my face and saying "SUCK IT FAGGOT GEEK" etc... entire school bus singing made up songs about me etc.... but hey, the very thing they made fun of is my strength... and they were just kids...they didn't understand..

JUST LIKE THE REPUBLICAN MENTIONED ABOVE DIDN'T UNDERSTAND ABOUT RACISM AT THE TIME....so why bash him??? Why not f*cking celebrate that HE UNDERSTANDS NOW!!! I swear, some of you folks will bitch about anything, even if the person you're bitching about finally comes to a better understanding about things....'

Time Doesn't Exist? Scientists Say Reality May Be Very Different

Depends.

Time is relative.

At the horizon of a black hole "Time" slows and stops.

Time Space and gravity are all related and part of the same "thing". Your clock on the wall run faster than a clock in the floor. Because of gravity.

Time is really just a way to measure entropy. Tho time is not simply entropy, but entropy defines the "arrow of time," distinguishing the past from the future. While time itself is a fundamental dimension of spacetime, entropy is a thermodynamic measure of disorder that generally increases, giving time its one-way direction.

I consider it a "flow". It's like a wave. We are riding the wave of our flow. We can slow it down by speeding up and speed it up by slowing down. But we cannot make it go backwards. Yet.

Time here on earth is not the same as time on a distant planet. Growing up I had assumed Time is the same everywhere in the Universe. Or basically block Time. It is not. It is relative. Time is relative it is not universal, but depends on an observer's speed and proximity to a gravitational mass, as explained by Einstein's theories of relativity.

"Now" only means something right here. There is no "now" light years from here. Asking what is happening right now in a distant planet is a nonsense question. You can cannot get to "now" light years from here because that is the past because of the distances between us.

Space (Nothing) Time and Matter are all part of the same thing.

And(as I have said before) Nothing Matters!

A lot.

(Without Nothing you could not have Something).

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