So we are with Tony Excoffon, and Tony, thanks for spending some time with us.
You are a friend, first of all, and you work in aeronautics
tell us a little bit about your background, what you studied and how you came into aeronautics.
Background: mechanical engineering, initially. Ended up doing aeronautics just by the circumstances. It was not a plan, but that's an interesting field.
I enjoy it.
We have this discussion today because
you work in a field that cares about reliability a lot.
You put planes everywhere on the planet. There are thousands of planes now flying, and they don't go down.
When a plane goes down it has hundreds of people in it, and it's a big catastrophe.
So you guys, in your domain, have spent a lot of time thinking how you avoid catastrophic failures and losses of human life.
What do you see in your industry that is unique to aeronautics that you don't see in other fields?
You're right when you say that a plane crash can kill  a lot people. So that's a concern for us obviously, but that's also a regulation:
because you cannot do what you want with a plane.
The FAA will control everything you do, they're going to check safety, and it's not a choice.It's mandatory and that's for the good.
On the opposite, on the road you can do whatever you want, nobody cares, and it doesn't make sense.
So in aeronautics there are regulations to do a safe product, like for the drugs the FDA does the same thing.
They control and impose some regulations so that the people, everybody is safe.
For the plane that's the same thing: we have to demonstrate that the airplane is safe.
So, it's not unique, aeronautics and pharmaceutical businesses are the same in that sense,
but there are so many other applications where nobody really cares and there are a lot of casualties.
Yeah, and the road is an example. You were saying there are 1.2 Million people every year die from car accidents.
Worldwide.That's the number I got from the internet. It's available.
That's a lot of people, and it's a number that could be brought down dramatically, potentially with technology.
You are on the vanguard of technology adoption right now because you've got this car, next to us, which is the first self driving car.
The self driving car is perhaps one of the biggest inventions of the last few decades
that can change that number of 1.2 million if we assume that the car, at some point, reduces the error from human lack of attention
I think most of the problems from car accidents are coming from human errors
because we drive, we don't pay attention, we are not focused on driving at all times, we are drunk or whatever, and there are many causes.
The car most of the time is safe by itself, if you operate it properly, but the driver is not safe.
That's the one that makes most, not all, most of the accidents.
And it's the same thing for the planes now, basically.
A lot of the plane accidents come from human errors, it's not the fault of the plane. But we still have pilots.
But in the car, definitely, the driver is the cause of most accidents. If you can replace that by another system you will save a lot of lives.
You were explaining, and we'll do another video in the car, that this technology is so brand new
that you still need to have at some point the driver taking back the steering wheel
in places where it's very twisty, and that in some cases there's still a lot of responsibility on the driver to realize the car is not quite there, self driving.
Sure, for now it's basically just an assistance. Like cruise control helps us control speed, it's an assistance to the steering wheel.
That's it. They [Tesla] tell you are still responsible for the driving. But that helps a lot, and in some situations like highways it's straightforward, easy driving.
It's very relaxing to rely on the system. You just have to supervise but you don't actually control.
That helps a lot.
There are lots  of philosophers in the old times and even now who say you should be skeptical about everything
the past is always better, and to some extent that's wrong, because when you look at these casualties and the state of progress, some of it has some use.
and that's one them.
Absolutely. In the past there were fewer cars, no airbags, no seat belts, all the kind of stuff that we didn't want at some point,
but they saved lives. Now we can go one step further with potential to save 1.2 million / year. That's pretty big.
For sure. Great. Thank you Tony.
