The U.S. National Airspace System is aging into a public emergency. In January 2025, a Black Hawk and an American Airlines regional jet collided near Reagan National. Sixty-seven people died. In the months that followed, Newark melted down, Philadelphia controllers lost radar contact with planes for thirty seconds, and the GAO confirmed that more than a hundred of the FAA’s 138 core systems were unsustainable or at risk.

When I first met Eric Button four years ago, he was building a neobank for American-made products and I walked away from that conversation impressed with his memorable intensity. When we re-connected a couple years later, I realized he had found the problem that he was uniquely positioned to solve with his company Enhanced Radar.

Before he became a founder, Eric was a professional pilot straight out of high school. He flew Gulfstream 280s for a high-net-worth family office — an aircraft he had taped to his childhood vision board and of which there are only around 200 such planes in the world. Similarly, his co-founder Kristian Gaylord first dreamed of flying when he was 9 and took his first lessons when he was so young that he had to be propped up on a stack of pillows. At the same time, he’s deeply technical, having built high frequency trading systems and worked on computer vision for edge computing.

The two of them decided to build the world’s most advanced voice models for understanding air traffic control communications. They have a network spanning 80 airports across North America that turns audio into a layer of situational awareness that did not previously exist. As a consumer, you can get a taste of what they’re building with their popular ATC app, which is a lightweight version of what they’re building for the enterprise. That app famously picked up the airspace shutdown around El Paso when the Pentagon was testing an anti-drone laser earlier this spring.

This is an urgent problem. The FAA runs 45,000 flights a day on thousands of radios that are more than thirty years old with a controller workforce that is 3,500 short of target. They are still in the process of literally replacing copper wires with fiber optic cables. 

The deep infrastructure of American life — the grid, the airspace, the ports — is finally entering a generational rebuild, at the same moment that AI has become capable enough to actually sit inside these systems and make them safer rather than merely faster. Enhanced Radar’s vision is to make air traffic safety more reliable, intelligent, aware, proactive and assistive.

If you are deeply technical and/or obsessed with aviation, they are currently hiring for software, hardware, sales and business development roles.