The flying cars aren't waiting for us to be ready. That's essentially the message Josh Metz, Executive Director of DART (Drone Aviation Regional Technology Initiative), brought to the Doon Insights AAM Workshop on May 13 — and it's one that should resonate well beyond the advanced air mobility sector.

The invitation-only event gathered entrepreneurs, investors, legal strategists, and policy thinkers shaping the future of the low-altitude economy. Aircraft are being certified. Revenue operations are beginning. The technology is arriving faster than most predicted even two years ago. But alongside that progress comes a set of questions that battery chemistry and certification schedules can't answer.

Metz's argument was pointed: the most underpriced risk in advanced air mobility isn't technical. It's social. Community trust, workforce readiness, and local political alignment — not hardware — are the variables most likely to compress or extend timelines to scale.

These are risks that don't show up cleanly in a pro forma. They compound quietly. And unlike a technical failure, you can't iterate your way out of them in a lab.

The good news, according to DART, is that there's a working model right here in the Monterey Bay. Joby Aviation's sustained community engagement at Marina Municipal Airport — a public general aviation facility — demonstrates what transparency looks like in practice: regular community events, real engineers fielding hard questions about noise and safety, year after year. Not a PR program. A sustained practice that converts skeptics into stakeholders.

DART's own workforce programs reinforce the point. More than 100 Monterey Bay residents have been placed on pathways into the AAM sector through an advanced manufacturing apprenticeship, with a new aircraft maintenance technician program now underway. When local workers and local economies have a visible stake in your growth, they show up at hearings. That's how policy gets made — and holds.

Years of that slow, relational work have produced something larger: the Monterey Bay Tech Hub, a cross-sector regional tech ecosystem spanning AAM, agtech, and the blue economy, launched in 2024 in partnership with UC Santa Cruz, DART, and the Monterey Bay Economic Partnership. Josh Metz and Larry Samuels, both on the Monterey Bay Tech Hub Leadership Council, have been central to building the kind of institutional infrastructure that makes a region resilient — not just innovative.

The cautionary contrast Metz offered: Amazon's drone delivery launch in College Station, Texas. The technology worked. The economic case was real. But community engagement infrastructure wasn't built before operations launched, and the friction around noise, safety, and privacy persists years later. The lesson is simple — later is more expensive than early.

For investors and operators, DART's four-part framework is worth taking seriously: fund community engagement before you need it, build workforce pipelines ahead of the demand curve, design genuinely responsive feedback loops, and hire for local relationship fluency.

The slow work isn't a soft consideration. For the communities where the low-altitude economy will land, it is the competitive advantage.

Related Articles

DART at the Doon Insights AAM Workshop: Why Community Is the Sector's Most Underpriced Risk — DART Executive Director Josh Metz makes the case that social infrastructure, not engineering, is the variable most likely to determine how fast advanced air mobility scales.
Monterey Bay Tech Hub — A regional cross-sector initiative spanning AAM, agtech, and the blue economy, born from years of ecosystem-building work by DART and its partners.