A Modern Approach to Balancing Innovation and Safety in Autonomous Flights

How do you prove an autonomous flight system is safe, certifiable ready, and reliable – and do it faster – without the time and cost of designing a new aircraft from scratch?

For Ribbit, a startup developing an autonomous autopilot for remotely piloted cargo aircraft, the answer was a proven-through-use strategy and retrofit approach. Fly real missions under remote supervision, produce evidence at every step, and build trust with regulators and customers. Allowing Ribbit to serve rural, remote, and coastal regions where traditional avionic options fall short.

Accelerating Safe Autonomous Flight With Parasoft and Ribbit

Ribbit is transforming aviation by developing safe, certifiable, and reliable autonomous flight systems, powered by modern software practices and Parasoft’s testing solutions. From the start, Ribbit has embedded Parasoft’s static analysis into their CI/CD pipelines, ensuring that every line of code is automatically checked against safety-critical standards like MISRA, JSF C++, and AUTOSAR C++14. This automation not only satisfies DO-178C verification requirements, but it blocks unsafe code from merging and gives their small engineering team the ability to move quickly while maintaining quality, and regulatory confidence.

Tackling a Critical Challenge in Aviation

With this strong foundation, Ribbit has taken a bold approach to solving the high costs and logistical challenges of connecting remote communities. Instead of building new aircraft, they retrofit existing small planes with an autonomous “digital pilot.” This lets them prove safety and reliability incrementally, flying real missions under remote supervision and gathering the operational data needed for certification.

CEO Carl Pigeon describes how this approach emerged from recognizing the limits of traditional drones and the urgent transportation needs of remote Northern and maritime Canadian communities, where infrequent deliveries make goods prohibitively expensive.

Key Insights From the Discussion

• Strategic retrofitting. Ribbit avoids the complexity and delays of new aircraft development by focusing solely on their autopilot system, choosing existing aircraft that are reliable, maintainable, and well-suited to their mission profiles.
• Safety built in. COO Jeremy Wang explains how they scale safety requirements to match operational risk, starting in low-density areas with safety pilots onboard before transitioning to fully autonomous operations.
• Culture of testing and automation. Ribbit’s development culture is rooted in continuous testing, automation, and compliance, enabled by Parasoft. This ensures that high-velocity development never comes at the expense of safety or certification.

AI and the Future of Autonomous Flight

Panelist Gareth Noyes highlighted how Ribbit is part of a broader shift toward “software-defined aviation,” where AI enhances the development toolchain rather than flight-critical functions. AI helps reduce static analysis noise, guide developers, and prevent defects, making automation and tools like Parasoft critical enablers of safe, rapid innovation.

Looking Ahead

The fireside chat closed with a look at Ribbit’s roadmap: expanding from remote cargo to defense and humanitarian missions, and eventually to point-to-point passenger transport. This staged approach, combining retrofitted aircraft, strong automation, and Parasoft’s quality enforcement solutions, demonstrates how small, focused teams can outpace larger competitors and accelerate the future of safe, certifiable autonomous aviation.