AWEIA
Airborne Wind Energy Industry Association

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In 2009, before AWEurope (prev. AWEC) ever existed, there was AWEIA (Airborne Wind Energy Industry Association), set up on "Open-AWE" principles. Founding President Pro-Tem, John Oyebanji served bravely, a favorite under Wubbo Ockel's cosmopolitan leadership, then snubbed by provincialist self-serving VC insiders, after Wubbo died. The VC insiders had formed AWEC in secret in 2010, as a California 501c4 (Industry Association), that passed into EU insider hands to rebrand as AWEurope, which also operates in secret.

Anticipating the temptations of AWE to seek profits over science and cut corners on safety, AWEIA's focus was on professional ethics and safety. A provisional AWEIA Ethics Code was adapted from Cristina Archer's Geological Society of America. Joe an I developed TACO in 2011 as an Aviation Safety ConOps for AWE. AWEIA worked most closely with the FAA to gain the freedom to self-police our domain. A Makani Founder wrote, "you are not the AWE Police". Effectively we all are.

AWE R&D has become massively corrupted on both business and safety fronts. The most dangerous architectures have advanced in ignorance as rounds of large investments have raised from public and private sources, even mislead "crowd-funding" small contributors. Safety data has been corrupted by the non-reporting or down-playing of serious crashes and mishaps. Some ventures even give up testing and just produce sterile promises. About a billion dollars has been spent this way.

AWE Academics direct major research toward their personal IP without diligent public disclosure, and against Optimal Experimental Design that would vet their early a-priori down-selects. Unqualified promoters raise huge sums from grant sources to predictably fail. AWE Militarization has emerged as easy money extending the run of ventures whose key milestones have long slipped and will never be met. A code of silence has taken hold, where top insiders peddle infomercial content without public debate. These outcomes did come from bad people, but from a dynamic of gradual decay under steady pressure for results.

The worst AWE ventures combine all these major flaws and control AWE conferences and most industry PR. New or poorly connected AWE workers are mostly unaware of the decade of backroom dealings that set up the status quo. They are fooled by AWEurope capture of IEA, Planair, and US DOE ARPA-E and NREL; as false official validations, while these Gov and quasi-gov entities have no AWE expertise to judge by, but play along flattered by unearned respect, pretending to represent US and Global AWE R&D Communities they did not even know existed. The broad Global AWE R&D gap is evident exclusion of India's AWE researchers, by the class-inequity and cultural provincialism of controlling insiders.