An unexpected lesson at the San Francisco Planning Department

11 February 2026 – We spend the first semester of our last year of bachelor’s degree doing what engineers and economists do: sizing things, optimising things, checking whether the numbers close or it is sustainable or not. So, when our International Innovation Management team was assigned Avientus – a Zürich startup building an autonomous VTOL drones – we assumed the hard part of our US market entry research would be technical. Battery budgets, detect-and-avoid, FAA Part 108 and its five population-density categories, which I can now recite like a poem.

Then we sat down with the San Francisco Planning Department, and someone said a sentence that quietly dismantled our mental model: Regulations apply to the use, not the users.

Not “your drone”, not “your company, the use. Whether Avientus is a brilliant Swiss engineering team or a small team of passionate people, from a land-use standpoint, almost irrelevant. What matters is that an autonomous ground station is a piece of logistics infrastructure, and infrastructure gets judged by on question: what does it do to the people who live next to it and what is there to benefit for them?

That is a question no one asked us in most of our year in engineering.

What followed is an eye-opening experience and discussion of the trip. San Francisco, we learned, is culturally wide open to innovation and politically extremely careful about it – a city that genuinely excited by the new technology and has also been burned by often enough to read the fine print. The DoorDash backlash came up as a cautionary tale. Public scrutiny, we were told, is not a soft risk you manage with a press release; it sits at the same level of importance as technical feasibility.

The practical consequences arrived fast. Autonomous drone stations have no standardised approval framework in San Francisco yet – each case is evaluated on its own merits. No fast tracks exist. Industrial districts are more realistic entry point, and residential area would be discouraged. And the recommendation that stuck with the team: lead with the medical use case. Urgent hospital logistics is far easier to defend at a public image hearing the “faster parts delivery”, because the public benefit explains itself.

We left with a concrete suggestion: send a clear, formal proposal, possibly addressed directly to the Mayor’s office.

We came to San Francisco to find out whether Avientus’s drone could legally fly in California. We left understanding that the harder question is whether the people underneath it wants it there – and that answering that question well is engineering too, just with different units.

– Tra Mi Nguyen, Industrial Systems Engineering 🙂