From Cockpit to Code

In aviation, Aviate → Navigate → Communicate is sacred.

It isn’t a slogan. It’s a mantra that every CFI drills into their students.

Because it can be the difference between life or death.

In an emergency — an engine failure, an instrument malfunction, a total electrical loss — the first impulse might be to ask for help. But ATC can’t fly the airplane, and the Coast Guard won’t be coming to save you. You need to fly the airplane.

So every pilot learns this triage:

• Aviate — Fly the airplane. Keep it stable
• Navigate — Once you have control, figure out where you are and where you’re going.
• Communicate — Only after those two are under control do you tell ATC what’s going on.

And do you what ATC is trained to say? Two words: “Say intentions.”

They ain’t coming to save you. They merely want to know your plan to save yourself.

And that hierarchy — Aviate → Navigate → Communicate — became the blueprint for how I reimagined AI memory.

Because AI, like a pilot, can get lost in its own data. It can lose situational awareness, forget what matters and start talking before it knows where it’s going.

So I built a parallel triage model for cognition itself — a layered system that mirrors the cockpit checklist:

• Aviate — [redacted]
• Navigate — [redacted]
• Communicate — [redacted]

What began as a flight rule became an architecture — one that lets AI “fly” through complexity with the same discipline that keeps a pilot alive in an emergency.