Making Autonomous Cargo Work at Real-World Scale: Charles Acknin, CEO Skyways

Charles Acknin is Co-Founder and CEO of Skyways.  Skyways is building unmanned aircraft systems designed to revolutionize autonomous cargo transportation. Unlike many competitors still in development, Skyways' aircraft are operational today — carrying meaningful payloads over significant distances for both military and commercial customers. Based in Austin, Skyways is now shifting toward mass production of its autonomous aircraft, building confidence through real-world cargo missions that could ultimately enable future passenger applications.

At Skyways, Charles leads the company's strategic vision and oversees operations, product development, and growth initiatives in autonomous aviation.

Prior to Skyways, Charles co-founded and served as CEO of Elixir Labs. Before that, he was a Senior Software Engineer at Google, where he worked on the company's search engine for nearly five years and spent a year advancing Google's mission of universal accessibility.

Earlier in his career, Charles held engineering roles at Oracle, Cosworld-Asia in Shanghai, and Amadeus. He also participated in Google Summer of Code, contributing to the open-source version control system Subversion.

Charles holds a Master of Science in Software Engineering from Oxford Brookes University and a Master of Science in Computer Science from SUPINFO.

In this episode of the Drone Radio Show, Charles shares how Skyways is turning autonomous cargo drones from experimental technology into dependable, scalable logistics systems.