Charles Acknin remembers the sound. That 56k modem connecting to the internet in the 1990s. The whir and chirp of a world opening up. His father had dropped a personal computer in his bedroom when he was 11. Two passions emerged from that moment: computing and aviation. Twenty-five years later, he's built a company at the intersection of both.
"I was born around computers and technology," Charles explains. "I also have a passion for aviation. My father had a passion for flight, so he got me into building RC model planes at a very young age." Weekends meant flying foam aircraft at the RC club. Crashing them. Rebuilding them. Learning what didn't work. "A lot of what we do here at Skyways today is based on this iterative approach. You try something, you fail at doing it, but it doesn't matter. What matters is what you've learned and what you can apply to the next step after that."
That 10-year-old kid crashing model planes in southern France is now Founder & CEO of Skyways, building autonomous aircraft that resupply military destroyers at sea, deliver cargo to offshore wind turbines, and operate across three continents for defense and commercial customers. The first aircraft Skyways built had a 3-foot wingspan. The current platform spans 26 feet. The next will be even larger.
The progression isn't accidental. It's the same iterative methodology Charles learned flying, crashing, and rebuilding planes with his father.
Charles grew up half an hour from Toulouse, one of aviation's birthplaces. The first Concorde flew there in 1969. Airbus assembles aircraft there today. It's France's answer to Boeing and Everett. "People talked about planes all day long," Charles recalls. "I just fell in love with just this notion of being in the air and flying. There's a notion of freedom that I like, being able to move in three dimensions."
He studied computer science. Landed at Google. Spent seven years working on the search engine itself – those massive data centers where 400 hard drives per day had to be replaced due to usage. "I learned a lot about systems that break all the time," he says. "It gave me a good understanding of reliability and that hardware will fail at some point when it's used enough."
Then came the traffic. Hours on US 101 in Silicon Valley. Bumper to bumper. On weekends, Charles would fly out of Palo Alto to Napa Valley with friends. The contrast was stark: weekdays stuck on the ground, weekends free in three dimensions. "I couldn't help but see how aviation could be applied to address those issues," he says. "It was on a weekly basis – go to work, be stuck in traffic, and over the weekends, not be stuck in traffic using this form of transportation."
The problem was clear. General aviation couldn't scale. Not everybody wants to become a pilot. Not everybody wants to own an airplane. Airports require massive infrastructure investment. But something was changing. Small multicopter drones were appearing at Best Buy for under $1,000. Anyone could fly them. Charles saw the signs: "The number of pilots in the US had been really flat for decades. Then you looked at this new type of aircraft, drones, and you could see the number of pilots really rise. Clearly, something was happening."
Skyways was born in 2016. Charles had started one company before that taught him hard lessons about integrity and focus. When he started Skyways, although he did get the company accepted into YCombinator, he didn't have Larry Page as an investor ready to pour billions into flying cars. He had his savings from Google. He built V1 in California: foam wings, electric motors, computer vision for precision landing. Cost: about $1,000. It crashed. A lot.
"By failing, I really started to learn what really mattered and what to focus on," Charles explains. "I was not afraid of having this thing crash, it was so light and inexpensive. I actually very much looked forward to seeing it crash so I could take that learning, improve the system, and then try again the next day. It felt like a hack to learn very quickly."
That approach became Skyways' foundation.. "We started really small, and we showed it to people, we showed it to customers, and we asked, 'Is this useful? What can you do with it?' Because we got that feedback very early, we knew where to take the company next."
Most competitors went straight to large aircraft weighing hundreds or even thousands of pounds. The regulatory bar became so high they couldn't even test. Charles could fly his aircraft in a parking lot without asking permission. V1 led to the early all-electric version of V2. Skyways put it in customers' hands immediately. The feedback was clear: not enough range to be useful.
That constraint forced a pivot that changed everything. Skyways added a fuel cruise engine to V2, creating a hybrid-VTOL architecture. Range jumped from 65 miles to 500 miles – nearly an order of magnitude. But the hybrid system unlocked capabilities beyond just distance. The cruise engine recharges the batteries in flight, which means the aircraft arrives at destination with batteries fully charged rather than depleted like pure-electric aircraft. It enables onboard engine pre-heating without external ground equipment. It powers better avionics – Starlink connectivity, a robust compute stack for autonomy processing. The hybrid contracts followed. Defense customers needed that range. Offshore energy operators needed that endurance. Island logistics required both.
"Every single one of those iterations needed to be monetized," Charles emphasizes. "We're not just building a little research project and then moving on to the next one. We want to generate revenue with the current iteration and use that money and that traction to go to the next iteration." V2's hybrid architecture funded V3.
Charles is emphatic about one thing: Skyways is a software company that happens to build aircraft. "My background is in computers. I got a degree in Computer Science and another in Software Engineering. I've always had a passion for this technology," he explains. "When I started Skyways, I figured if we want scale, we need full autonomy, and software is the only solution. We have to be very serious about software. We have to build the aircraft essentially around software. From day 1."
The autonomy stack is one of the areas where competitors stumble. Flying an aircraft from A to B autonomously for a demo flight on land isn't the hard part. Nearly all off the shelf flight controllers can easily follow waypoints and work in benign weather conditions. The challenge is everything else. How to make a full stack autonomy work all the time, reliably, in all weather conditions, in dynamic environments. We learned this the hard way in 2019 when the US Navy, one of our first customers, put our aircraft on a ship. The telemetry from the aircraft was lit up like a Christmas tree. The environment when on a ship is so unforgiving, sensors started failing in new ways, the hardware was getting corroded, the wind was always blowing above 15 knots with gusts pushing the limits of our flight controls, the software was getting confused at the aircraft moving "on the ground" during preflight checks. And then there was Computer Vision, a big part of our autonomy stack.
"You need for the aircraft to basically be able to see around," Charles explains. "Think about the aircraft coming in and landing on the back of a destroyer. There's only one spot where you can land. You need for the aircraft to be able to see. That is called computer vision." Multiple cameras on each aircraft record constantly. When it sees a ship a mile or two away, the system picks it up on the horizon, calculates heading offset, estimates distance, estimates ship heading, and builds an approach path. All autonomous. All happening in real time. We got to the point of making this work all in Computer Vision, without any hardware or beacon installed on the ship.
The moat isn't the software itself, it's the data feeding it. Skyways aircraft operate across three continents, flying real missions for real customers. Every flight generates video data automatically offloaded through the cloud. Engineers use it to train the next iteration. A false positive on a landing marker becomes training data to improve detection. An unexpected wind pattern becomes data to refine approach algorithms.
"Being able to have aircraft out there flying with customers in the real world to collect real-world data and re-inject that data back into the pipeline to build the next generation of computer vision is what's giving us an edge today," Charles says. Competitors can't buy this data. They'd have to fly the missions themselves. But if you started with a large aircraft in the first place, you just can't do that, you have to start small. "This feedback loop in our machine learning pipeline is what sets us apart from the rest of the industry."
And now, AI accelerates everything. Charles remembers learning to program in the 90s: one key at a time, one line at a time, debugging syntax errors. "Now you can give a high-level statement and have an LLM write an entire piece of code for you within seconds. You can take a step back. You can be this higher-level orchestrator." Skyways employs about a quarter of its team as software and machine learning engineers. "We're able to build tools today in minutes that would take weeks before," he says. The goal: level-five autonomy. One operator supervising 5, 10, 50, 100 aircraft. "Think of a self-driving car going from level three, which is basically lane keeping, all the way to level five, which is the robo-taxi. That's exactly what we're doing in the world of aviation now."
Charles is frank about the industry's biggest challenge: "There have been a lot of companies that over-promised and under-delivered to customers. There's distrust in this industry, and we're trying to fix this by putting an aircraft in their hands and saying that it does X, and having it do exactly X when they use the aircraft."
Skyways is rebuilding trust in the industry by doing what it said it would do. The aircraft operates globally. Real contracts. Real missions. "What we're hearing from our customers is that they finally have something that does what we said it was going to do," Charles says. "That gives them a solid foundation to build on top of."
And the customers see the difference. One customer in Europe told Skyways recently that the aircraft is like nothing they've seen before. They'd tried other OEMs. Over-promised, under-delivered, trust lost. "That would probably be the biggest moat," Charles says. "Unfortunately it's a boring moat. It’s just doing what we said we would do, consistently every time."
The mission is clear: create a new form of transportation to advance civilization. The path is deliberate. "Right now, Skyways is entirely focused on building the largest unmanned aircraft fleet with a focus on B2B transportation and logistics," Charles says. "That's a stepping stone to get to building the largest manned aircraft fleet in the future."
Why cargo first? Public adoption. "If I had a flying car here in the parking lot magically, and I asked everybody around here, 'Do you want to take this flying car to go to Enchanted Rock for the weekend?' I bet that most people would say, 'I'm a little worried about where I'm going to end up.'" New technology like this takes time to spread – Technology Adoption Lifecycle.
The strategy: start with unmanned transportation, prove the value by moving cargo everyone can relate to, let the public accept the technology through daily visibility. "Then we can come back in five years from now after having built thousands of airplanes that are seen in the sky every day and say, now it's the same fundamental platform, now it's just a bit bigger, it can transport people."
V3 is three times more capable than V2 – 100 pounds of useful load, 1,500 miles max range – but costs almost the same to operate. "I tell this to investors or customers: V3 could take off from Mexico and fly all the way to Canada without touching US soil," Charles explains. The aircraft delivers parts to offshore wind turbines. Resupplies Navy destroyers. Flies island-to-island routes in Japan. All fully autonomous. Vertical takeoff and landing. No runways required.
Each generation teaches lessons the next applies. When a V3 engine quit mid-flight over North Dakota during a beyond visual line of sight flight in controlled airspace, the aircraft detected the failure, slowed, switched to VTOL propulsion and just waited there, hovering still at nearly 700 ft above the ground "Being exposed to situations like this continues to widen our moat," Charles says. The lesson wasn't just redundancy. It was operator workload. For one person to supervise 50 or 100 aircraft, emergency procedures must execute autonomously. "You need for the aircraft to actually take the autonomy all the way to being able to safely execute an emergency procedure and land."
Charles sees tailwinds converging. Part 108 regulations will democratize airspace for drones in the United States, likely by 2027. "It's a more than 700-page document. There's a lot in there. It's basically a way for unmanned aerial systems to have access to the national airspace at scale and beyond visual line of sight." Skyways is already flying beyond visual line of sight internationally. "This is giving us an edge in the sense that we are flying real-world missions for our customers, getting paid and generating revenue and learning what does it take to fly 1,000 flights per day beyond visual line of sight."
Technology accelerates. Starlink provides orders of magnitude more bandwidth at lower latency and cost. Edge computing puts GPUs on aircraft. AI generates code from prompts.
Geopolitics creates urgency. Indo-Pacific deployments accelerate. Defense tech investors who rejected Skyways in 2017 now focus exclusively on the sector. "It's not a coincidence that we keep having those projects in the Indo-Pacific region," Charles notes. The opportunity in Japan alone could require hundreds of aircraft by 2027.
The endgame isn't subtle. "There’s a world in the near future where unmanned airlines become bigger than manned airlines," Charles says. He's not talking about robot pilots. He means aircraft that transport people autonomously. Today's largest airlines operate about 1,000 crewed aircraft carrying passengers. Skyways is building toward something different: thousands of autonomous aircraft, starting with cargo, progressing to larger airframes carrying people.
The path is deliberate. Build small cargo aircraft. Fly millions of missions. Collect operational data. Clear regulatory hurdles at each weight class. Scale to larger airframes. Prove reliability through flight hours. Then, and only then, put people inside. "Building the largest unmanned aircraft fleet for cargo is a stepping stone to get to building the largest ‘manned’ aircraft fleet in the future." Manned meaning transporting people, not requiring pilots.
It's the opposite thesis from competitors jumping straight to air taxis. They're trying to certify people-carrying aircraft without operational data. Skyways is accumulating millions of autonomous flight hours with cargo first. "There will be that key moment that I think is pretty special," Charles explains. "If we can get to the point of showing the FAA, hey, we've got a million flight hours on this airframe, now we want to put people in it. That's a much better prospect than to say, we've just finished building this aircraft that's never flown. Let's start flying it with people."
V4 might be that inflection point. Large enough to carry passengers. Flown autonomously for years. Proven reliable through operational data. Then convert it. "There's going to be some work involved in putting people in the aircraft," Charles acknowledges. "It's not just drop some seats and seat belts in there. But the aircraft will be at the size that allows carrying people." Build the platform. Prove it works. Scale it. Build the business at scale. Then offer rides. Different model. Different timeline. Same iterative approach learned at age 10.
Charles keeps a photo from childhood: climbing Castor in the Mont Rose massif with his brother and mother. Four-thousand-meter peak. Knife-edge ridge. Wind in his face. Summit in sight. "Every year my mom would take my brother and I to go and climb. This really built a sense of adventure in me. I just love those moments to be on that knife edge ridge with the wind blowing through your face and to see the summit in sight – it's just one of those key moments that always bring tears to my eyes."
That sense of adventure powers Skyways. The willingness to fail, learn, rebuild. The patience to start with foam and progress to carbon fiber. The confidence to beat Boeing on its first defense contract 2 years after starting the company. The vision to see autonomous cargo operations as the path to transporting people.
"We're on a really exciting adventure of building this future in air transportation," Charles says. It's less vision statement than operating principle.
The largest unmanned fleet in the world. Hundreds of thousands of autonomous cargo flights. Regulatory approvals at each weight class. Then the largest autonomous passenger fleet. Millions of flights carrying people. Transportation transformed through iteration, not revolution. It sounds ambitious until you remember: the first aircraft Skyways built was 3 feet wide. This one is 26 feet. The next will be larger. The progression works. The thesis is different. Start with cargo. Prove the autonomy. Scale the operations. Then carry people. Not the other way around.
Who is Charles Acknin?
Charles Acknin is the founder and CEO of Skyways, an autonomous aviation company building the world's largest unmanned aircraft fleet. A software engineer who spent seven years at Google working on search infrastructure, Charles combines a background in computer science with a lifelong passion for aviation. He grew up in southern France near Toulouse – one of aviation's birthplaces – building RC aircraft with his father from age 10. He started working on the idea of Skyways in 2016 to address ground transportation congestion using vertical takeoff and landing autonomous aircraft.
What is Skyways' strategy for building autonomous aircraft?
Skyways uses an iterative approach: start with small, inexpensive aircraft that can be tested quickly, put them in customers' hands on real missions, learn from operational data, then build the next larger iteration. The company's first aircraft had a 3-foot wingspan and cost $1,000. Each generation generates revenue that funds the next development cycle. This contrasts with competitors who start with large, expensive aircraft that face high regulatory barriers before they can even test fly. Skyways has progressed from 3-foot to 26-foot aircraft over eight years, with nearly each platform deployed on paying contracts.
Why does Skyways focus on cargo instead of passengers?
Skyways is building toward transporting people, but starts with cargo to solve aviation's hardest challenge: public trust. New technology takes time for public adoption. By flying hundreds of thousands of autonomous cargo missions visibly and safely, Skyways proves reliability and builds regulatory approvals at each weight class. The strategy allows the company to accumulate operational data and flight hours, eventually presenting regulators with proven aircraft that have flown millions of autonomous miles, rather than untested prototypes. Charles Acknin explains: "We can come back in five years after having built thousands of airplanes that are seen in the sky every day and say, now it's the same fundamental platform, just bigger, and it can transport people."
How is Skyways different from flying car companies?
Skyways takes the opposite approach from air taxi startups. Rather than jumping straight to large passenger aircraft requiring type certification (typically at least 10 years and at least $1 billion), Skyways is building smaller cargo aircraft, operating them commercially, and progressively scaling to larger platforms. This generates revenue and operational data while clearing regulatory hurdles incrementally. The company flies real missions today on three continents for defense and commercial customers. Most air taxi companies have spent billions and decades without achieving operational status. Skyways' thesis: prove autonomous flight with cargo, accumulate flight hours, scale to larger aircraft, then carry people, not the reverse.
What gives Skyways a competitive advantage in autonomous aviation?
Skyways' primary moat is operational data from real-world flights. Aircraft operating across three continents collect video and flight data on every mission: ship landings, offshore wind turbine deliveries, island-to-island logistics, military resupply. This data trains computer vision and autonomy systems in scenarios competitors can't replicate without aircraft, regulatory approvals, and customer relationships. The feedback loop compounds: better autonomy enables more complex missions, which generates better data, which improves autonomy further. Additionally, Skyways' software-first architecture – building aircraft around autonomy rather than adding autonomy to existing designs – enables capabilities like one operator supervising 5, 10, 50, or 100 aircraft that conventional approaches can't match.
When will Skyways transport passengers?
Skyways is building toward passenger transportation through a multi-stage approach. Current focus is scaling V2 and V3 cargo aircraft globally and accumulating operational flight hours. V4, planned for future development, may be large enough to carry passengers after proving reliability through extensive cargo operations. Charles Acknin describes a potential inflection point: "If we can get to the point of showing the FAA we've got a million flight hours on this airframe, now we want to put people in it – that's a much better prospect than saying we've just finished building an aircraft that's never flown, let's start flying it with people." Timeline depends on regulatory developments (Part 108 expected ~2027), operational scale, and achieving target autonomy levels.
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