Ex-FAA chief joins IndiGo's board
NEW DELHI:
IndiGo
has announced the appointment of former Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief
Michael Whitaker
as an
independent director
, indicating the airline's plans to expand its global presence. This marks Whitaker's second tenure at
InterGlobe Enterprises
, the parent company of IndiGo.
Stay informed with the latest
business
news, updates on
bank holidays
and
public holidays
.
Master Value & Valuation with ET! Learn to invest smartly & decode financials. Limited seats at 33% off – Enroll now!
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
India Today
6 hours ago
- India Today
AI engineer Varun Gupta, an IIT grad, gets probation and $34,000 fine for leaking Intel secrets to Microsoft
An ex-Intel engineer who stole 'thousands of files' from his former employer has escaped prison but won't escape the headlines. Varun Gupta, who left the chip giant in early 2020 to join Microsoft, has been handed two years' probation and a fine of $34,472 (around Rs 30,21,510) for lifting confidential documents, data that prosecutors say helped him secure his new role and gave Microsoft an edge in high-stakes negotiations with to Oregon Live, Gupta spent his final days at Intel quietly copying sensitive information from company systems. Among the material he walked away with was a PowerPoint presentation that outlined Intel's pricing strategies for a major client, the kind of playbook most rivals could only dream of report highlighted that Gupta had worked at Intel for a decade, serving as a product marketing engineer, before leaving in January 2020. Just days later, he was in the ranks at Microsoft. Court documents revealed that the files he took were 'instrumental' both to landing his new post and in later discussions between the two tech titans. Assistant US Attorney William Narus, who prosecuted the case, argued that Gupta's behaviour was deliberate and repeated. He urged the judge to impose eight months in federal prison, stressing that Gupta had 'purposefully and repetitively accessed secret documents' in order to bolster his defence painted a different picture. Gupta's lawyer, David Angeli, admitted the theft was a 'serious error in judgment' but insisted his client had already paid a heavy price. Gupta has lost the kind of senior industry roles he once held, and he previously settled a civil lawsuit with Intel to the tune of $40, Angeli argued, was punishment the end, US District Judge Amy Baggio settled somewhere in the middle. While refusing to send Gupta to prison, she did not let him off lightly. The $34,472 fine wasn't plucked out of thin air, it was calculated to reflect the cost of the eight months of federal imprisonment that prosecutors had pushed explained that this unusual figure underscored the seriousness of Gupta's misconduct, signalling that the court did not see it as a 'one-off indiscretion.' But she also noted that Gupta's reputation had already been dragged through the mud, which she considered punishment in its own the case now behind him, Gupta is turning his back on the world of semiconductors. Having paid his fine in full, he has relocated with his family to France, where life looks very different. Instead of battling over chips and contracts, he's swapping servers for say Gupta is currently studying vineyard management and plans to reinvent himself in the wine industry. His ambition? To become a technical director in viticulture.- EndsMust Watch
Mint
6 hours ago
- Mint
The Palantir mafia behind Silicon Valley's hottest startups
Some of the buzziest startups in Silicon Valley share something in common: their founders once worked at Palantir. The founders lean on other ex-Palantir executives and engineers for support and financing, tapping the network for hiring and funding. Venture-capital firms have sprung up whose mission is to invest in companies founded by people with Palantir experience. Palantir, the data analysis firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, is best known as the rare Silicon Valley company that works with the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, including with the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. It also has many commercial clients. Its stock has quintupled in the last 12 months. In conversation, alumni will refer to themselves as the Palantir mafia. The invitation to a panel last October, hosted by venture fund South Park Commons in partnership with Palantir, advertised that 'several members of the 'Palantir Mafia'" would be speaking. There are WhatsApp groups and Signal chats for alumni to keep in touch—one is called 'Palantir Pals." Alumni have either started or are leading more than 350 tech companies, and at least a dozen have been valued at over $1 billion, says Luba Lesiva, who was head of investor relations at Palantir from 2014 to 2016. Lesiva runs a venture firm called Palumni VC, a play on the words Palantir alumni, which invests in startups founded or led by ex-Palantir employees. 'These engineers are dropped either in the middle of the desert or an office park in the Midwest with a server rack and a screwdriver," says Lesiva. 'Wherever they're sent, no one really wants to be there, but it's the high capacity for work and pain. They can chew glass." Ross Fubini, founder of venture firm XYZ Capital, made an investor pitch deck in 2017 where he predicted that Palantir would become the next 'founder mafia." 'VC interest in the Palantir mafia has increased in the last few years but it's been frenetic this last year," said Fubini, who has invested in over a dozen startups founded by Palantir alumni. 'They're just starting exceptional companies in hard industries." Palantir is known for producing good operators. A big appeal of the Palantir alumni is their common strategy, developed at Palantir, called 'forward-deployed engineering," which is basically a glorified term for consulting. Palantir software engineers often travel to their clients and embed themselves. Engineers can find themselves in conflict zones or locales as varied as Omaha or Oman. Once there, they use technological acumen to help solve their clients' thorniest and most vexing problems. Barry McCardel was a forward-deployed engineer at Palantir from 2014 to 2018. During his last two years at the company, he helped build a real-time monitoring platform for oil and gas giant BP to help the company analyze its oil wells around the world. He traveled every other week to places like Anchorage and Houston, Scotland and Azerbaijan. 'The magic of Palantir was we took proper software engineers, the type who had offers from Google and Facebook, and put them on planes and sent them to where the customers were," he said. 'That's not for everyone, and that's ok." A year after leaving Palantir, McCardel started building Hex Technologies, a data-analysis startup in 2019. To staff up, he and his co-founders—also ex-Palantir—turned to the mafia. That year, he went to a Halloween party of Palantir alumni in San Francisco where he, dressed as a grizzly bear, reconnected with a former co-worker, dressed as a bumblebee. He hired him as Hex's founding designer. In a little over five years at Palantir between 2012 to 2017, Nick Noone led the company's military special-operations deployment projects and traveled to Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Germany as a Palantir engineer. When Noone left in 2017 to start what would become Peregrine Technologies, a data-intelligence platform that now sells primarily to local government and law enforcement agencies, he applied that forward-deployed engineering approach. In 2017, Noone and his co-founder embedded themselves with the police department of San Pablo, a city about a 40-minute drive from San Francisco. The initial scope of the work was to enhance the agency's data-analytics tools. But soon, they were pulled in to help investigators solve a homicide case. They pieced together information from cellphone towers, historical police records and license plate data to help detectives create a timeline of where the murder suspects had been during the time of the crime. During the resulting murder trial, Noone was called as an expert witness, and the suspects were found guilty. This experience in assisting investigators became the bedrock of Peregrine. Earlier this year, the company began landing federal contracts. Peregrine closed a round of financing in March led by Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $2.5 billion. Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz worked on agricultural, military and national-security projects for Palantir for over six years, deploying with the Marines in deserts in the Middle East and East Asia, before starting Chapter, a Medicare and retirement-technology company. Blumenfeld-Gantz co-founded Chapter with Vivek Ramaswamy, biotech entrepreneur and Ohio governor candidate. Thiel is an investor and served on its board of directors for just under two years. The company today is valued at around $1.5 billion. 'I'm proud of the work I did for the government while at Palantir," Blumenfeld-Gantz says. 'I think most people who join Palantir can handle the nuances of the company." One of the highest-profile companies tapping into the Palantir alumni network is Anduril Industries, one of the few privately held tech companies to land contracts with the Defense Department. It includes three former Palantir employees on its founding team: Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm and Brian Schimpf. The company, which makes software and hardware products and systems for national-security operations, was last valued in June at $30.5 billion. Stephens said in a TV interview with Bloomberg Technology the round was eight to 10 times oversubscribed. Last summer, Stephens, in his role as an investor in Thiel's venture firm Founders Fund, hosted a luxury camping trip in Sonoma, Calif., for Palantir alumni. Stephens kicked off the two-day trip with brief opening remarks that touched on nostalgia from his days at Palantir, according to people familiar with the matter. Among the couple dozen attendees who floated down the Russian River and went paintballing that weekend were founders, investors and operators in tech, including Ryan Beiermeister, vice president of public policy at OpenAI. Other names that frequently come up when alumni talk about the network include 8VC venture capitalist and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale; Garry Tan, venture capitalist and chief executive of Y Combinator; and Melody Hildebrandt, chief technology officer at Fox Association with Palantir is delicate in some spheres. Shreya Murthy, founder of the event platform Partiful which is popular among Gen Z users, was recently criticized on social media for working at Palantir due to its government contracts after an article about her appeared in The Cut. 'I joined Palantir when I was 23 and met a lot of smart people that helped me learn what to do (and not do) when running a company," Murthy said in an email statement. 'I left and chose to build something different, aligned with my values and passions." 'We do recognize that it can come with baggage," said Pratap Ranade, an engineer who joined Palantir when it acquired his first startup in 2016. He says he's proud of his work there and doesn't hide his experience. Ranade stayed at Palantir for nearly two years as a forward-deployed engineer and after leaving founded his second startup, Arena. The company makes AI-driven software to assist hardware engineers to test and fix machines, akin to J.A.R.V.I.S.—the fictional AI software that Tony Stark from Marvel Comics makes to power the Iron Man suit, among other hardware products. Write to Angel Au-Yeung at
Time of India
9 hours ago
- Time of India
IndiGo flight suffers tail strike at Mumbai airport
Advt IndiGo flight in Mumbai suffers tail strike while aborting landing in rain Advt Join the community of 2M+ industry professionals. Subscribe to Newsletter to get latest insights & analysis in your inbox. Get updates on your preferred social platform Follow us for the latest news, insider access to events and more. An IndiGo flight coming from Bangkok suffered a tail strike while landing at Mumbai airport on Saturday amid heavy rain. Before touching down, the plane descended below 550 feet before the pilots decided to abort landing. The tail strike occurred during the go-around. This is IndiGo's seventh tail strike in about two years on its A321 fleet, an issue the DGCA has IndiGo Airbus suffered a tail strike during landing in Mumbai Saturday morning amid heavy rain. The aircraft was flying from touching down, at around 3 AM, Airbus A321 descended below 550 feet before the pilots decided to abort the landing and attempt a second approach. The tail strike occurred during the go-around. The plane landed safely in the second is IndiGo's seventh tail strike in two years on its A321 fleet, an issue the DGCA has raised with the IndiGo spokesperson said: "On August 16, 2025, an IndiGo Airbus A321 aircraft tail touched the runway while executing a low-altitude go-around due to unfavourable weather conditions in Mumbai. Thereafter, the aircraft carried out another approach and landed safely. Following the standard protocol, the aircraft will go through necessary checks/repairs and regulatory clearance before resuming operations."In July 2023, DGCA had penalised IndiGo ₹30 lakh for four tail strikes within six months. It found "systemic deficiencies pertaining to operations, training procedures and engineering procedures".As per aviation website Skybrary: "A tail strike occurs when the aft fuselage (tail) of an aeroplane comes in contact with runway during take-off or landing. Statistically, the majority of tail strikes occur on landing. Tail strikes most often occur as a result of human error although environmental factors, such as strong gusty winds, can increase the potential for an event."Sources indicated IndiGo did not inform Mumbai ATC about the tail strike. "A tail strike could take out runway centre line lights or leave foreign objects on the runway. Airlines inform ATC about a tail strike because a runway inspection should be carried out after such an incident to ensure the safety of all aircraft operating from that runway," said an aviation source.
