Making Autonomous Cargo Work at Real-World Scale: Charles Acknin, CEO Skyways

About this episode

Charles Acknin discusses how Skyways is transforming autonomous cargo drones into reliable logistics solutions.

Charles Acknin is Co-Founder and CEO of Skyways. Skyways is building unmanned aircraft systems designed to revolutionize autonomous cargo transportation. Unlike many competitors still in development, Skyways' aircraft are operational today — carrying meaningful payloads over significant distances for both military and commercial customers. Based in Austin, Skyways is now shifting toward mass production of its autonomous aircraft, building confidence through real-world cargo missions that could ultimately enable future passenger applications. At Skyways, Charles leads the company's strategic vision and oversees operations, product development, and growth initiatives in autonomous aviation. Prior to Skyways, Charles co-founded and served as CEO of Elixir Labs. Before that, he was a Senior Software Engineer at Google, where he worked on the company's search engine for nearly five years and spent a year advancing Google's mission of universal accessibility. Earlier in his career, Charles held engineering roles at Oracle, Cosworld-Asia in Shanghai, and Amadeus. He also participated in Google Summer of Code, contributing to the open-source version control system Subversion. Charles…

People in this episode

Host: Randy Goers

Guest: Charles Acknin

Topics covered

• autonomous cargo
• drone technology
• logistics
• aviation
• mass production
• military applications

Keywords

• autonomous drones
• cargo transportation
• Skyways
• aviation technology
• logistics solutions

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Skyways, Elixir Labs, Google, Oracle

Places: Austin, Oxford Brookes University, SUPINFO

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