Somewhere in the next few years, an electric aircraft will go AOG at a downtown vertiport with passengers watching and phones recording. Nobody will be hurt. The aircraft will be fully certified. And in that neighborhood, the acceptance conversation will reset to zero.
That scenario, and how the industry prepares for it, is why we are heading to Los Angeles this week.
The invitation
Kquika's Victor Oribamise will join the Panel Discussion on Public Acceptance and Community Engagement for Electric Aircraft at Electric Aircraft USA 2026, the premier forum for electric aircraft and net-zero aviation, taking place June 10 to 11, 2026 at the Hotel Fera Anaheim in Los Angeles, California.
The session runs 15:20 to 15:50 and brings together a deliberately mixed bench:
- Robert Rowland, Joby Aviation (moderator)
- Katja Roesler, Hochschule Ruhr West University of Applied Sciences
- Victor Oribamise, Kquika
- Bjoern Stoll, Digatron Power Electronics
- Phil Derner, National Business Aviation Association
- Barbara Pareglio, GSMA
An eVTOL manufacturer, an acceptance researcher, a battery testing specialist, an operator advocate, a connectivity leader, and a predictive maintenance company on one stage. That mix exists because public acceptance is where every discipline in this industry collides.
The questions on the table
The panel will work through five questions the organizers have published, and each one cuts close to the bone:
- Is a technical certification for AAM enough to build public trust?
- How are operational reliability and maintenance transparency key to public trust in electric aviation?
- Can battery infrastructure scale without compromising quality as electric aviation grows?
- Politically and environmentally, is the AAM industry at a disadvantage in 2026?
- Are there regional biases in public acceptance of AAM between the US and Europe?
Where Kquika stands
Our position going into this panel is simple to state and demanding to live up to: certification moves faster than trust. A type certificate tells the public an aircraft was safe on the day it was approved. A community wants to know the fleet flying over their homes is safe this morning. Communities accept track records before they accept aircraft, and the gap between approval day and a believable track record is exactly where commercial AAM deployment stalls.
Noise gets most of the attention in acceptance research, and it has earned that attention. We think the quieter half of the equation deserves equal billing: operational reliability. Annoyance writes complaint letters. Fear kills routes. A single viral grounding event can outweigh ten thousand uneventful flights in public memory, which makes prevention the only trust strategy that scales.
This is the world our platform, Trakt, was built for. Trakt watches aircraft health continuously, predicts component failures weeks before they happen across a rolling 90-day horizon, and explains every prediction in plain language a mechanic, an auditor, or a city council can follow.
On stage, Victor will be making the case that this kind of demonstrable, auditable reliability belongs inside community engagement frameworks, sitting right next to noise contours and visual impact studies. He will also take a clear position on one of the panel's sharpest questions: why US and European acceptance gaps force operators to run two different community strategies, which region's resistance is harder to close, and what that answer means for global fleet planning.
Why you should be in the room
If you are an operator preparing for early commercial service, an OEM thinking about what data you expose to your customers, an infrastructure or battery company wondering how quality scales, or a regulator watching how condition-based maintenance fits into community conversations, this 30-minute session will give you arguments you can use the following Monday.
And if you want to go deeper than 30 minutes allows, find us in the hallway. We will be at the conference both days, and the conversations we most want to have are about reliability reporting as community strategy: what a quarterly community reliability report could look like, what metrics communities actually respond to, and how predictive maintenance data becomes public evidence rather than internal record-keeping.
Details at a glance
Event: Electric Aircraft USA 2026 (4th Annual)
Dates: June 10 to 11, 2026
Venue: Hotel Fera Anaheim, a DoubleTree by Hilton, Los Angeles, California
Panel: Public Acceptance and Community Engagement for Electric Aircraft, 15:20 to 15:50
Register: electric-aircraft-conference.com
Learn about Trakt: Trakt System
Connect with Victor: LinkedIn
The certificate gets an aircraft into the sky. The track record keeps it welcome there. Come watch us make that case in Los Angeles.
