Trevor Milton pitches Cyberjet, but code cannot roll downhill
By Nikhil Raghavan · Reporting from San Francisco ·
After Trevor Milton pitched Cyberjet on TBPN with autonomous cockpits, John Coogan and Jordi Hays exposed the reality: buying a 2005 FAA certificate cannot bypass modern software certification.
The Seventy-Ton Grandfather Clause
The most brazen regulatory gambit in American business did not happen in crypto or artificial intelligence this week. It happened in a hangar. On the tech talk show TBPN, hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays broke down the return of Trevor Milton. The Nikola founder was convicted of federal securities fraud and later pardoned by Donald Trump. Milton has resurfaced as chief executive of Cyberjet. He is pitching a light aircraft called the SJ36 that supposedly flies coast-to-coast faster than competitors. To skip the decade-long slog of building an airframe from scratch, Milton acquired the remains of the Swearingen SJ30. That aircraft program consumed over $700 million before securing Federal Aviation Administration certification in October 2005.
As Coogan detailed, Milton is attempting an engineering sleight of hand. He treats an inherited type certificate as a shortcut, then loads the airframe with proprietary, autonomous avionics. Hays immediately spotted the operational absurdity. Milton is famous for filming an engineless semi rolling down a hill to deceive investors. Asking the most discerning, risk-averse buyers on earth to trust a bespoke, unproven cockpit is an impossible sell. But the problem runs deeper than Milton’s tarnished reputation. The real issue is that Silicon Valley software arrogance has collided with the physics of aerospace compliance.
Autonomy Does Not Inherit Paper
The strongest defense of Milton’s venture, as Coogan suggested on the show, rests on cold supply constraints. Private flight demand remains intense, and delivery backlogs at legacy manufacturers stretch for years. Furthermore, the underlying SJ30 airframe already pairs with Williams engines. For an operator staring at exorbitant pre-owned jet prices, this airframe represents an enormous cost advantage. It already survived FAA stress testing.
That case collapses the moment you examine the specification. In aviation, an FAA type certificate is not an open-ended license to innovate. It is a rigid legal boundary. Swearingen’s team spent two decades certifying an analog flight deck and specific control linkages. Milton wants to strip out standard systems from Honeywell or Garmin to build an in-house autonomous flight deck. If he does, he does not inherit the Swearingen approval. He invalidates it. Every line of flight-control code must pass DO-178C software validation. Every sensor, harness, and redundant processor requires individual structural testing.
That process is not an agile sprint where you push updates over the air and apologize to customers later. It requires hundreds of specialized systems engineers, millions of dollars per instrument loop, and years of forensic telemetry. You cannot rollback a kernel panic at 41,000 feet.
Who Holds the Pager at Mach 0.8
The historical record for this specific airframe is brutally clear. Through Gulfstream backing, Dubai ownership under Emivest Aerospace, and Metalcraft manufacturing, the program built only about 10 production aircraft. It then slid into bankruptcy. Those prior owners had aerospace pedigree and hundreds of millions in capital. They failed not because the aerodynamics were flawed. Scaling precision manufacturing and retrofitting complex avionics simply burns cash faster than jet fuel.
This is the distinction citizens and regulators must keep in sharp focus. A presidential pardon can clear a court docket, but it cannot bend Title 14 of the Code of Federal Regulations. When platforms break down, corporate contracts simply push the loss onto the customer's checkout insurance. Coogan and Hays noted this when discussing an unattended FedEx truck losing $963,000 in PSA graded cards in Santa Ana. In the skies, there is no check-the-box indemnity. Aviation safety exists precisely because federal inspectors demand provable redundancy before metal leaves the runway.
Milton is attempting to sell a software fantasy on the back of a twenty-year-old paper filing. The FAA’s certification office will not be dazzled by launch lasers or promises of autonomy. No pilot will take the controls of an uncertified hack. The SJ36 will never deliver its non-stop cross-country promise. An airframe can glide downhill on momentum, but software only flies when the code actually holds.