Heather’s interview on the ‘founders & friends’ podcast…

Most people don't believe flying cars exist yet. Heather Chirtea owns one - and she's been flying it across America. In this episode of Founders and Friends, Riley sits down with Heather Chirtea, billed as the world's first female flying car pilot, who spent six years chasing the inventor of the Pivotal BlackFly around Oshkosh until they finally sold her one of the first in the country. We get into what it's actually like to fly a 20-mile, 20-minute personal aircraft (landing in cornfields, recharging off a Cybertruck, getting reported as a UFO by half of small-town Facebook), and then the real conversation underneath the spectacle: why the aircraft was never the bottleneck. The limiter is where you land and who's keeping you safe - vertiports, roads in the sky, and an air-traffic system that has to hand the controls to AI before any of this goes to scale. We also get into the FAA's new eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, the absurd infrastructure proposals that fall apart the second a real pilot looks at them, a flying-car video game quietly becoming a training simulator, and why "you are the point of the needle" is the best description of a first-mover we've heard. This is what "river, not eddy" sounds like: technology that moves people and mass forward.