How did Athena get customers like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon?
Hustle, hustle, hustle. I developed this theory that I really wanted to develop. The value is in a very structured way to make auto pilots for airplanes. Instead of doing it by debate and consensus, it’s done by mathematics. I got my hands on whatever I could in terms of activities and projects with various organizations as diverse as Raytheon and Aurora Flight Sciences and even in the medical community. For Ingersoll Rand I did projects of various control systems that proved the capability of the theory. By the time the company was formed there was already a decade of demonstrations of the value of the technology and a small core team that the company is centered around. If you build subpar solutions, you’re pretty quickly out of the game. Airplanes, when they have problems, they fall out of the air. I understand the technology can be used to improve fuel efficiency. How? In the 90s, we took engine control work we had done and applied it to general aviation airplanes and demonstrated
