Post by Daniel Fuller

“We probably crashed like 15 of these aircrafts.” Timon Wehmann from Dufour Aerospace shared while walking me through their facility in Zurich. And honestly, that single sentence probably told me more about the company than any polished presentation could have. I’ve known Timon for a few years now. We usually catch up at trade shows and talk about where this industry is actually heading once you strip away the hype. When I mentioned I was coming to Switzerland, he and CEO Sascha Hardegger invited me to come visit their hangar and offices. Really glad I did. They’ve got aircraft in production, flight access right outside the doors, and teams moving between software, avionics, testing, manufacturing, and operations. As we were talking, something really interesting came up Timon was explaining how they de-risk new systems before they ever touch the larger aircraft. “You first have the software-in-the-loop sim, which runs on every engineer's laptop.” “Then you have a hardware-in-the-loop sim…” “Then it goes on these…” And pointing to the smaller prototypes sitting nearby, he casually added: “We crashed like 15 of them probably.” Every reliable autonomous aircraft has a graveyard behind it.  “And then once it's through that whole training, it kind of goes on the big ones.” That’s aerospace engineering in one conversation. The public sees the polished demo flight. They don’t see the process underneath it: The failed transitions The unstable edge cases The broken prototypes The endless flight reviews The software iterations The brutal testing loops I bet the safest aircraft usually come from teams that crashed the most prototypes. One thing I appreciated about Dufour’s approach is their focus on the behind-the-scenes infrastructure like operational tooling, certifiable architectures, backend systems, reliability pipelines, standards vs proprietary tradeoffs, and scalable operational workflows. The stuff that actually determines whether an aviation company survives long enough to matter. People celebrate successful flight tests. Engineers celebrate surviving the ugly ones. That’s usually where the real progress happens. Thanks for the tour and discussion, Timon and Sascha!  Really appreciate it.