Alex Rossie
I build companies and I fly aircraft. I write here about AI, markets, and history.
- The FAA would let a booster take the lightning strike if nobody is in reach
An October 5 FAA proposal would let a rocket on the way down skip lightning avoidance and hardening if physics keeps any debris inside a cleared area. It widens a practice the FAA granted reentries case by case, and its safety case rests on two legs: an engineered physics bound and a clearing the operator only has to describe.
- Landing is the default
A 767 freighter overran Runway 30 in Miami on September 6 and killed five people on the ground. On the NTSB's preliminary record, the first officer cautioned about speed about seventy seconds before touchdown and the go-around call came sixteen seconds after it. The go-around rule is sixteen years old, and it keeps losing to a default.
- The files that make a coding agent smart are the files that can take it over
A University of Illinois preprint reports end-to-end attacks on twelve agent harnesses, Claude Code, Codex and Gemini CLI among them. Each one assigned trust by where text sat. The fix the authors ask for, a context manifest, would tell you where a harness loads from and nothing about who wrote what is there.
- Fifteen AI trading agent designs were graded on their brakes. Zero earned a full mark.
A Texas A&M audit read fifteen academic designs for LLM trading agents against a checklist of crash brakes and found no full marks in sixty grades. The returns those designs report come from short windows that never asked a brake to do anything.
- The FAA wants the software to admit its own limits
The FAA's newest condition for Skyryse's fly-by-wire R66 asks the aircraft to tell the pilot when the controls are running out of authority. The sentence is copied word for word from a 2018 Bell 525 rule, its key clause dates to the A320 in 1988, and it contains no number.