Overview
It's all about drones, baby
Flight related projects at SudoRoom and beyond. This may include drones but also ways to hack planes. There's some excitement over flying car start-ups in the bay area lately as well, although that stuff up until now has been very costly. I'm sure there are lots of amateur plane makers all over, and I know that gliders bought used are as much as very cheap used cars.
I've met people who worked at big airplane companies, but to be honest, I've never seen much on open sourced flight information. Does anyone get the opportunity to hack on that stuff? It always seems to be interesting rich people. In the ultimate MFA senior thesis in college, a rich classmate bought an entire plane for a sculpture, and what can I say, that stuff looks pretty cool.
Learning from your Elders
On Past Hippie Attempts to Democratize Flying
I know that the crazy hippies in the Cal Sailing Club had attempted to create a low cost, cooperative non profit flying club version so that low income folks like us could fly planes ("Planes aren't just for rich people"), but there's something about the Bay Area topography that makes this sort of expensive. I don't know the details - something about tight flight paths in the mountains, and one of the local tech billionaires pissed people off so much flying his jet loudly in the south bay that private flights are banned in Silicon Valley. But hey! It's always good to know.
Exploits
Wow, so ... I bet nobody has hacked an airplane have they? (Ducking)