What does it take to build an autonomous, high-tech aircraft designed for emergency response? Try a three-year global challenge backed by Boeing, NASA, and others centered on one bold goal: reaching people in crisis faster—and saving more lives. One year in, we’ll see what they’ve accomplished and what lies ahead over the next two years.   Gwen Lighter, Founder and CEO, GoAero

Gwen Lighter
Chief Executive Officer, GoAERO 

First Response in Flight

Conferences

Our next presenter is on a mission to reshape emergency response capabilities across the globe. With the support from Boeing and NASA, Go Go Arrow is hosting a competition to build the first compact autonomous rescue aircraft that a mouthful, but yes, I heard a woo. That is very impressive. Yes. One year in, the first group of winners have been chosen, and to share the latest on the race to build high-tech autonomous responders, please welcome Gwen Wier, founder and CEO of Goaero. Hello everybody. I'm so pleased to be speaking with all of you today. But before I start, I wanted to say a very special thank you to the Fortune Brainstorm team, as we all know, it takes a tremendous amount to put something like this together. So, um, just, uh, thank you to everybody who hear this stuff. Thank you. So at Go Arrow, we are focused on a singular mission, which is saving lives. We are catalyzing the creation of emergency response flyers. They are aircraft that would bring a first responder into someone in need, rescue someone who needs help, or bring in needed goods, supplies and services in natural disasters, whether they are floods in Texas, wildfires in LA, or regular general everyday emergencies that we have. This all started several years ago when I was at my parents' home and my father started having chest palpitations. We called 911 and the ambulance came on time and I followed behind in my own car. And it was a beautiful day and the sun was shining, but there was tons of traffic. And I remember being in my car behind the ambulance saying over and over again, please move, please move, please move. And then in that moment I realized that I was not alone, that in fact there were hundreds, possibly thousands of people around the globe wanting their loved ones to get the help that they needed at that moment. And also at that moment I realized I already had an aviation company and we should be doing something about this. And so with the technology that we had, we started Go Aero, which is all about aerial emergency response. Our partners are Boeing and NASA and RTX and Honeywell and 30 different aerospace and first response organizations around the world. What we are doing is catalyzing creation of what we're calling emergency response flyers and you're seeing some of the early work behind me. So, When we spoke with hundreds of first responders, we said, what do you need that you do not have? Everyone knows of helicopters, right? Helicopters are great emergency response tools, but helicopters are expensive to procure. They are more expensive to operate over the course of their lifetimes. They have difficulty in and out of tight spaces, and they require a pilot. At the other end of the spectrum you have drones and some of you may play with them, some of your family members may play with them. They are great at delivering a cheeseburger, but they generally have payload limits of 5 to 8 pounds. So in a search and rescue operation, they're great at the search part. They're not so great at the rescue part. So what we are doing at Goao is we are taking the helicopters at one end, the drones at the other, and we are creating a new emergency response flyer. Because we realize that no one company can do this on its own, with our partners, we also launched a global competition where we invited teams of engineers around the world to build their emergency response flyers along with us, and we mentor the teams and we have a phenomenal. Benefits to all of these teams and we have set up this multi-million dollar competition which will culminate in a huge fly off at NASA Ames, which is one of the 13 NASA centers around the country that will occur in 2027, and we will have all the teams gather at NASA Ames, which is in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we will be showcasing all of these different flyers to the world. When we talk about what they look like and how they work in conjunction with all of our emergency response experts, we really settled on three different missions. One of them is productivity. It is the back and forth and the back and forth. You can imagine in a flooding situation you need to go back and forth to pick up people. In a wildfire situation, you need to go back and forth to deliver fire retardant. That's the first mission. The second mission, maneuverability in and out, up and down. When you are in an urban environment, you need that fine mobility. When you are in Deer Valley and there's a fire, you sometimes need to go in and out of trees. So that maneuverability mission is incredibly important. And then the third mission of course is adversity, high winds, bad weather, smoke conditions, right? All of the temperatures ranging from hot to cold. And so we now have teams working with us from 85 different countries creating their emergency response aircraft. We also have the regulators working with us. The FAA helped us write our technical rules and guidelines for how these will operate. We also work with EASO, which is the FAA of Europe, and together we have put together basically a consortium of engineers and universities and first responders and entrepreneurs. And the biggest aerospace companies in the entire world to bring this technology so that no one has to say, please move. When they're traveling behind their loved one going to the hospital. So, As you can imagine, EOAo, we face several hurdles. The first is technology, right? We have some of the best engineers in the entire world around the globe, working on making their emergency response aircraft. We always need more fabulous help and greater engineering skills. We're also in a highly regulated industry. The great thing about first response and certainly disaster situations is that the airspace is generally shut down so that emergency response can can respond as quickly as possible. But I'm sure many of you have heard um about flying taxis and all of those companies that are coming to the fore. Um, we share similar technology and the wonderful thing about what we're doing is that we are a phenomenal. case and first mover case for all of this technology. Um, and then, of course, there are issues of community acceptance and community adoption anytime you bring a new technology to the fore. What we have discovered is that whomever we speak to, whether it is a big corporation or a small team of engineers, they want to join us, but I will end my talk with a plea to all of you. What we are building is not only the technology and the flyers, but the ecosystems needed to deploy them. FEMA is being eviscerated. Most emergency response though is done on a local level, and so that means embedding with local fire stations, local police stations. That means being both a technology top down and bottom up integration effort. So we are building the technology and we are building the ecosystem needed to deploy this around the world, not just in one location because of that we need multiple partners, right? We've got the biggest names in the aerospace behind us we've got amazing technology behind us. But to all of you, if you work in healthcare, if you work in mobility, if you work in technology, Please, if you're interested in what we're doing, come up to me. I will be here today. We are looking for additional partners on the road to be able to deploy these so that we all have the emergency response aircraft and tools that we need, whether it is another natural disaster or whether someone we love just needs the help and they need it quickly. And so I ask you to join me, and I ask you to join Goero, and I thank fortune very much for the opportunity to bring us all together. What we have found is that um when we come together, We do amazing things, so thank you.