This issue, written from the Farnborough International Airshow alongside partners including the University of Central Florida (UCF) and the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority (GOAA), focuses on defense, health, and mobility.

I am writing from the Farnborough International Airshow alongside partners including the University of Central Florida (UCF) and the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority (GOAA), where the loudest conversation is Collaborative Combat Aircraft, the drone wingmen meant to fly alongside fighter jets. All of it is the top of the stack: airframes, engines, jamming pods. Not enough people on this floor are talking about the layer underneath, the optics that let a sensor see a target, the range that trains the operator, the lab that hardens the link between them.

That layer is Orlando.

UCF’s CREOL, the College of Optics and Photonics, works on the lasers and imaging systems that sit behind payloads and directed-energy counter-drone work. NAWCTSD has been the Navy’s principal training and simulation command since 1941 and has run it out of Central Florida since the 60s. Red 6, headquartered here, made Fast Company’s 2026 defense tech list earlier this year for an augmented reality system that puts an enemy jet in a pilot’s visor while he flies a real aircraft. Every drone wingman on this floor eventually has to be seen by a sensor, flown against by a pilot in training, and trusted across a datalink. Those three problems have addresses within thirty minutes of each other in Central Florida.

Let’s talk about five stories from this month show that the region’s working that layer while Farnborough talks about the airframes: a live missile shot that turns autonomy into a training problem, an Army general rewriting how the Pentagon buys simulation, an 85-year-old Navy command with a very specific number attached to it, two universities converging on the same question about radiation and aging, and an air taxi buildout that airport researchers war-gamed before the ribbon-cutting.

A note on this issue’s mix. This one leans into defense, health, and mobility because that is what the calendar produced. If you build games, media tech, or entertainment platforms, sections one and two still speak to you. The simulation infrastructure that trains Navy pilots is the direct ancestor of Orlando’s game and VR industry, and Full Sail’s presence in the cyber and training conversation follows the same logic. There is no strong creative-tech story this cycle, and we would rather say so than manufacture one.

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Defense, Autonomy and Training

The region where pilots train against synthetic threats in real aircraft is the same region where military commands, research parks, and defense accelerators share a zip code with the companies building those systems.

Picture a fighter pilot flying a real aircraft, seeing an enemy jet that exists only in his headset. That is Tuesday in Orlando. Red 6 built the augmented reality system that makes it possible, and Fast Company named the company to its 2026 most innovative defense tech list in March, alongside Astranis, Merlin, and Slingshot. Red 6 is headquartered here and carries a real Air Force contract, awarded through Air Combat Command and the Air Force Research Laboratory, to integrate its ATARS system into the F-16. In April the company announced it will also integrate ATARS into Leonardo’s M-346 advanced jet trainer, which puts an Orlando product inside a European trainer during the week Leonardo is exhibiting at this show.

An aircraft that can run a beyond-line-of-sight engagement inside pilot-defined parameters is a training problem before it is a hardware problem. Somebody has to build the synthetic adversary, the range it flies in, and the assessment data that tells a commander whether the crew and the machine are ready together. That is Orlando’s business.

The buyers said as much in Orlando last month, and Team Orlando published the write-ups in July.

At the Training and Simulation Industry Symposium on June 17, Brig. Gen. Christine Beeler, capability program executive of CPE ST3, the Army organization formerly known as PEO STRI, told industry the service is moving toward a multi-vendor marketplace. “We are moving toward a model where no single provider has to solve everything,” she said. “Different vendors bring different strengths, and we need to be able to integrate those capabilities in a more flexible way.” Her other themes were data provenance and trust across mission command and training platforms, cybersecurity and interoperability, and SBIR as an on-ramp.

The Air Force session at the same symposium produced the number worth writing down. Rodney Stevens, program executive officer for the Training Directorate at the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, said roughly half the service’s simulators are out of step with the aircraft they are meant to represent. “Today, about 50 percent of our simulators are not concurrent with the aircraft they’re supporting,” Stevens said. “We have to change the way we build and modernize those systems.” He laid out a Training 2035 vision built on open architectures, digital materiel management, and virtualizing aircraft hardware inside simulators so software updates can be fielded without touching the box.

That is a procurement gap with a dollar figure attached, stated on the record by the person who owns it, in Orlando, to a room full of companies that can close it.

Across town from where Beeler spoke, NAWCTSD marked its 85th anniversary this year. The command traces to April 1941, when Commander Luis de Florez was appointed head of the newly created Special Devices Desk inside the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics. That organization moved from Long Island to Orlando across a three-year stretch in the mid-1960s and settled into Central Florida Research Park in 1988. Today it is the reason Navy and Marine Corps aviators rehearse carrier operations on the T-45 Goshawk training system before they transition to the F/A-18 or F-35.

Beeler wants the Army to move at commercial speed. NAWCTSD has spent six decades in this zip code demonstrating what a defense buyer and a defense builder produce when neither one leaves the room.

If your product needs to survive contact with a government buyer, you already know where to test it. Last month the government buyer showed up and said so out loud.

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Talent, Research and Ecosystem

Two universities forty minutes apart spent early July asking the same question: why does space make you old?

UCF’s Michal Masternak and his team put animal models through 14 days of simulated microgravity, then exposed them to galactic cosmic radiation and solar particle events at NASA’s Space Radiation Laboratory, calibrated to the dose an astronaut would absorb en route to Mars. Within 24 hours of that radiation exposure, the liver showed genetic changes that closely resemble aging, along with cellular senescence, inflammation, and fibrosis. “What we found was that just 24 hours after radiation exposure, there are many genetic changes in the liver that are remarkably similar to what happens during aging,” Masternak said. The team compared its results against astronaut blood samples from the NASA Twins Study and Inspiration4 and found matching signatures. The work is published in GeroScience.

Embry-Riddle’s Cassandra Juran built something stranger and reported it the following day. Her team, working out of the university’s SPACE Lab, grew brain, liver, and gut tissue from human pluripotent stem cells, wired the organoids together on a tissue chip about the size of a thumb drive, and hit the whole assembly with space-relevant radiation.

Both teams used the same facility. NASA’s Space Radiation Laboratory sits at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and neither group needed to coordinate with the other to end up there in the same month, asking complementary halves of one question. One is modeling the aging pathway inside a single organ. The other is modeling how organs pass damage between each other.

That kind of convergence does not happen by accident in a region with more than thirty-five space-related degree programs and a workforce pipeline anchored by UCF, which Aviation Week Network has repeatedly ranked the nation’s top supplier of graduates to the aerospace and defense industries.

It also does not stay academic for long. Full Sail opened the Full Sail University IBM Cyber Defense Range powered by AWS and Cloud Range on its Winter Park campus on April 16, built to NICE and NIST standards, giving the region a fourth pipeline feeding cyber talent into the same defense and health ecosystem that funds the space medicine work. And at Central Florida Tech Grove, small businesses spent an Industry Education Day in early July learning to treat SBIR the way Beeler wants industry to treat the Army, as strategic capital rather than operating revenue.

The lab-to-contract distance here is measured in miles. This month two universities measured the same mile from opposite ends.

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Experience, Mobility and Smart Places

Orlando International approved its air taxi pad this month. Embry-Riddle researchers had already run the math, and the airport is the one who paid for it.

The Greater Orlando Aviation Authority board approved development of a vertistop at MCO, a temporary takeoff and landing area for electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, sited at Surface Lot Atlantis beside the Terminal C train station and designed to FAA Engineering Brief 105A. Construction begins once the FAA signs off, with a target of finishing by the end of October and demonstration flights possible before the end of the year. Officials expect Orlando International to become the first commercial airport in the country to sponsor a vertistop. The long-term goal is a full vertiport by 2030.

The detail that did not make most coverage is the one that matters most here: Orlando International is one of only two U.S. airports participating in a NASA and FAA-supported airspace simulation program designed to validate procedures for advanced air mobility operations. The region is not just hosting the aircraft. It is hosting the model that decides whether the aircraft can fly.

That is consistent with how MCO has handled this from the start. GOAA commissioned Embry-Riddle to model the scenario before committing to it. Using historical traffic from one of the airport’s busiest days and Total Airspace and Airport Modeler software, the researchers found that up to 22 advanced air mobility vehicles could operate at MCO with zero air traffic or wake turbulence conflicts, and identified preferred corridors inside the airport’s airspace. The study was published in the MDPI journal Aerospace in April 2025.

Kissimmee Gateway Airport is moving on a parallel timeline and had its own week. At a July 14 event in the Signature Aviation hangar, local and state leaders showcased a newly installed BETA Charge Cube capable of fully charging an electric air taxi in about fifteen minutes, paid for after a change in state law, pushed by Central Florida legislators, opened FDOT funding to advanced air mobility infrastructure. BETA Technologies is already flight-testing its ALIA electric aircraft at the field. Bell Dancy Industries is deploying its ALTA autonomous airspace management platform there, a system developed with NASA and UCLA and already installed at Miami Executive Airport.

FDOT is the connective tissue. The agency is working toward commercial air taxi service along the I-4 corridor as early as the end of 2026, and frames advanced air mobility alongside truck parking and evacuation route planning, treating it as one layer in a corridor strategy rather than an isolated pilot.

GOAA is in the Florida Pavilion this week, days after that board vote. Here at Farnborough, two electric air mobility aircraft are flying in the same day’s display for the first time in the show’s history. The aircraft are arriving. Orlando spent the last two years working out where they land.

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Enterprise AI, Governance and Cyber-Adjacent Work

The EU AI Act takes effect next month. The question it forces on every enterprise is no longer whether an AI agent can be built. It is whether anyone can prove the thing is governed, explainable, secure, and under control.

On July 8, Kore.ai announced a partnership with Atos UK&I to deliver governed, production-ready AI agents to regulated UK organizations. The structure of the deal is worth reading closely. Kore.ai supplies its Artemis agent platform, launched in May, with its Agent Blueprint Language, its Arch AI architect, and a Dual Brain design pairing agentic reasoning with deterministic control. Atos supplies the sovereign infrastructure, the governance frameworks, and the UK industry expertise, deploying the agents out of its UK-based Sovereign Agentic Studio for public sector, financial services, healthcare, defence, and critical national infrastructure customers. The stated goal is moving enterprises past AI pilots and into production at scale.

Kore.ai was founded in Orlando in 2013 and its official headquarters remains here, though the company opened a Bay Area hub in San Mateo in May and now runs plenty of its announcements out of California. That is the shape of a company outgrowing a market without leaving it, and it is worth watching which way the center of gravity drifts.

The company has been circling the accountability question all quarter. Its June 17 survey found that 72 percent of enterprises say their AI agents operate with unmanaged risk. Announcing a UK sovereignty partnership three weeks later is a company selling the answer to a problem it just finished measuring.

The regional response to that same question shows up in training. APPNA held its 49th Annual Convention at Rosen Shingle Creek from July 1 to 5, putting AI in front of thousands of physicians as clinical decision support rather than novelty. UCF’s College of Nursing runs a fully online AI in Health graduate certificate aimed at clinicians already working inside those systems, open to any healthcare professional holding a bachelor’s degree. Governance is written into the outcomes: learners are expected to critically evaluate the ethical, legal, and regulatory implications of AI in health, including bias, fairness, privacy, and data governance. One of the three electives covers augmented, virtual, and mixed realities in healthcare, which is this newsletter’s simulation thesis turning up inside a nursing curriculum. Full Sail’s cyber range is running students through live attack-and-defense simulations built to federal standards. Florida High Tech Corridor roundups show UF and USF extending the same pattern into applied AI research and cyber institutes elsewhere in the state.

Everyone else is racing to add agents. Orlando is building the people and the proof that keep them under control.

Connecting the Dots

Red 6, NAWCTSD, CPE ST3, UCF, Embry-Riddle, Full Sail, and Kore.ai are working the same underlying problem from different buildings: how to make a complex system trustworthy at scale, whether that system is a synthetic enemy jet, a carrier landing, an aging liver, an air taxi corridor, or a swarm of agents inside a hospital’s IT stack.

An Air Force PEO says half his simulators no longer match the aircraft they represent. An Army general says no single vendor should have to solve everything. A drone at Edwards fires a live missile at a target it found itself. Those three facts describe one gap, and the gap is measured in trust, not hardware.

UCF and Embry-Riddle did not coordinate their radiation research and still ended up at the same national laboratory in the same month, answering the same question from opposite directions. GOAA commissioned a peer-reviewed airspace model before it approved a landing pad. Kore.ai measured a governance failure in June and shipped a governance product in July.

From Farnborough, where the conversation is dominated by weapons, engines, and CCA wingmen, Orlando’s contribution reads differently. Every major market chasing this work, London, the Bay Area, Seattle, is assembling optics teams, simulation partners, and governance frameworks from three vendors across three time zones. Orlando has all of it inside a forty-five-minute drive and has for decades.

That is a structural advantage, not a hometown talking point. The next fighter jet, the next hospital AI system, the next air taxi corridor, whatever it turns out to be, will need someone who has already solved trust at scale. This region has been doing that work since before most of today’s primes existed.

Forward this to one person who still thinks Orlando is only a theme park city, and point them to the Orlando Economic Partnership to see where this work actually happens.

About the Author

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By Sheena Fowler SVP, Innovation & Economic Development
Sheena Fowler transforms creative visions into scalable experiences through storytelling, strategic convening, and a relentless bias for action. As senior vice president of innovation & economic development for the Orlando Economic Partnership (OEP), she leads the OEP’s efforts to drive business growth, attract investment, and elevate Orlando’s standing as a top 10 innovation hub in the United States. A proven leader with more than 15 years of experience, Sheena brings deep expertise across high-growth industries including defense, aerospace, modeling and simulation, semiconductors, digitalmedia, fintech, and advanced technologies. Her 15-year career bridges film production (12 years as Orlando Film Commissioner), technology commercialization (VP at Red 6, leading the Disney Accelerator team to create the world’s first outdoor AR rollercoaster demo), and regional innovation strategy (5,500+ tech jobs recruited,AmazonHQ2 proposal lead).
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