Planet Flight is a Los Angeles-based 501(c)(3) environmental justice nonprofit advancing drone technology, aerospace education, and community empowerment across the United States and East Africa. Founded 2026.
Drones have a story problem. They entered the public imagination as instruments of war and surveillance — tools of institutions, not people. But the history of flight has always been a history of transformation. The airplane began as a weapon and became the most powerful symbol of human connection the world has ever seen. Drones are at that same inflection point, and I believe communities — not governments, not corporations — should be the ones who define where they go next.
I founded Planet Flight because the communities most threatened by environmental harm, infrastructure failure, and ecological loss deserve to be on the right side of that transformation — not watching it happen to them, but leading it. As a Somali-American aeronautics major with minors in uncrewed systems, security and intelligence, and airport management, I have spent my academic and professional life at the intersection of aerospace technology and the communities it has historically left behind.
I know what it means to exist at the margins of an industry that was never designed with you in mind — and I know what it looks like when someone decides to build a new one from the inside out. Planet Flight is that organization. The technology is real. The pipeline is real. The work in East Africa is real. And the story we are rewriting — of who drones belong to and what they are for — is the most important thing we do.
Planet Flight exists to change the aerospace era — permanently.