British Airways' In-Flight Hackathon Spawns Solutions To The Engineering Crunch

An 11-hour flight, 150 techies, and one problem: How do we educate more engineers? This was the premise for the British Airways UnGrounded “Innovation Lab In The Sky.” While heavy on ideas with few to execute them, the flight forced Silicon Valley elite to stop and think about education. How? It took away their Wi-Fi. Something crazy happens when you cram brainy people in a flying fuselage with no Internet. They actually talk to each other. No work could be done and there was nowhere to hide. Andreessen Horowitz partner Todd Lutwak, Google(x) VP Megan Smith, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, and an army of startup founders didn’t have a choice. They had to brainstorm, productize, and pitch their solutions to the world’s shortage of great programmers. Shaky Takeoff From March when British Airways announced the flight, a marketing stunt appealing to entrepreneurs but with a social good angle, it came off a bit half-baked. What would we do up there? No one seemed to know. An open discussion would surely devolve into chaos, especially when you factor in the open bar. Luckily BA brought on renown design firm IDEO to turn the problem into a process for improving education in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). The itinerary started yesterday in San Francisco with an intro session at the Clift hotel. British Airways announced it would launch APIs to surface their cheapest tickets and offer access to their seat-selection system with hopes that partners could build better apps in exchange for a small revenue cut. BA then piled the passengers into shuttles and shipped us to SFO. There, we did what any self-respecting adults would do at 3 p.m. with the rest of the day off work. We drank. Champagne and scotch flowed in the BA departure lounge, which made the prospect of spending the night at 30,000 feet with a bunch of nerds a lot less daunting. We boarded the double-decker plane, lifted the wheels, and the IDEO ice breakers started. A geeky crossword with clues like “A gem of a programming language” was distributed, and we were asked to sketch portraits of each other. So far, so bubbly. Grab Your Magic Markers When we finally got down to business, it started to feel like less of a wank and more like a mission. The issues at hand? STEM seems geeky to kids, there aren’t enough women involved, the

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